F**king Mondays: Drake the "Colonizer", Trump's Nine Lives and Sinister Hamas Motives

Drake is apparently benefiting from "white supremacy"?

Welcome to another edition of “F**king Mondays!” In the roundup today:

Drake, left, and Kendrick Lamar, right. Image: Prince Williams/Samir Hussein/WireImage

Antisemitic rap beefs

Even as a fan of Hip Hop, I’ve never been particularly interested in rap beefs. They mostly seemed like planned marketing gimmicks modeled on the (very real) Tupac and Biggie drama in the mid 90’s. My knowledge of Hip Hop also ends around 2011/12, when I stopped going to clubs, so I’m hardly in the know about current dramas in the rap game. That was until I saw headlines in the New York Times, BBC and Washington Post on the beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

My knowledge of Drake and Lamar’s work is surface level - Drake makes catchy songs, while Lamar writes politically charged music. Both have obvious talent, but I’m not what you would call a fan of either.

I asked my brother in law, who is ten years younger than me, to explain the drama. While much of it seemed pretty sordid and uninteresting (Lamar called Drake a pedophile, Drake claimed Lamar beat up his partner etc.), there was an aspect of that caught my attention. “Lamar called Drake a colonizer,” my brother in law told me. “That’s what people think about Drake — he’s Jewish and half white, and he appropriates black American culture when he’s from Toronto.”

I was intrigued. Apparently far left identity politics isn’t just raging through college campuses, it is now a battleground in Hip Hop. Here are the offending lyrics from Lamar’s song, titled “Not Like Us”:

You called Future when you didn’t see the club (Ayy, what?)
Lil Baby helped you get your lingo up (What?)
21 gave you false street cred
Thug made you feel like you a slime in your head (Ayy, what?)
Quavo said you can be from Northside (What?)
2 Chainz say you good, but he lied
You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars
No, you not a colleague, you a fuckin' colonizer

The title of the track (“Not Like Us”) is an implication that Drake isn’t black enough, and it takes a not so subtle dig at his Jewish heritage and the popular racist slur amongst college protestors that Jews are “colonizers”.

Not feeling black enough is something Drake has been painfully honest about throughout his career, telling Rap Radar in 2019 that:

“Sometimes some of my Blackest friends can be just as cruel by making you feel excluded or making you feel like, ‘You can’t get in on this’”.

This is a classic example of the inverted racism that is so pervasive on the radical left — an inverted racism that has been given intellectual credibility in America’s academic institutions. NBC for example, interviewed AD Carson, a tenured professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia about the rap beef. His answer was emblematic of the far left’s unpleasant, highly racialized ideology:

Carson describes Drake’s alleged behavior in the music industry as “cultural tourism.”…

“Everything he is in proximity to, he appropriates and mimics it,” Carson said of Drake. “He’s able to genre-hop through identity theft, and it’s genre-bending in a way that we definitely critique white artists doing. He’s more insulated from it because of what folks call ‘biracial identity.’”

He added: “Kendrick is asking, ‘what is the cultural identity? What are those things that you possess outside of the means by which you’re going to sell your next product?’ Those are the questions.”

And:

“Drake’s ability to operationalize Blackness insulates him from critique. Somebody would say, ‘Well, you can’t appropriate Blackness if you are Black,’” Carson said. “Nobody is gatekeeping Drake out of Blackness. Folks are asking, ‘How does he benefit from white supremacy?’”

Firstly, the assertion that nobody is gatekeeping Drake “out of blackness” simply isn’t true — rapper Rick Ross for example, just released a social media post calling Drake a “white boy,” and “big nose” and referred to his entourage as “the pastrami posse.”

Secondly, if a Jew claimed Drake wasn’t Jewish enough because of his black heritage it would be labeled racist, and correctly so. But because far left activists don’t believe black people can be racist, Kendrick Lamar can insult Drake’s non-black heritage, and a tenured professor can accuse a black/Ashkenazi Jew of appropriating blackness and benefiting from “white supremacy”.

Can we just start calling this what it is?

Is Trump getting away with it?

Andrew Sullivan is convinced Trump is going to get away with it, again:

I really don’t want to be a Debbie Downer yet again, but it seems pretty clear to me at this point that the legal resistance to Donald Trump’s deep corruption, pathological recklessness, managerial incompetence, and outrageous attempts to steal an election and then prevent a peaceful transfer of power ... have, well, failed.

By “failed” I don’t mean, of course, that Trump will definitely not be convicted in his current trial, or that the other cases — from the January 6 insurrection to the classified documents to the Georgia pressure campaign — won’t proceed at some point. I mean something more salient: none of this is likely to happen or seriously dent Trump’s popularity before the looming election this November. His antagonists had four years to prosecute and delegitimize him, and it wasn’t enough time.

My fear is that Sullivan is right about this. Merrick Garland should have been fired long ago for dragging his feet on prosecuting all of Trump’s obvious crimes. The Democrats insane insistence on appearing balanced means we have a toothless Attorney General who might let a man who tried to overthrow an election become president again.

Garland first rose to prominence because President Obama nominated him to the Supreme Court. Obama picked him because he thought Garland’s centrist record would be inoffensive to Republicans — a pointless accommodation given Mitch McConnell torpedoed it anyway. It boggles the mind that the Biden team thought it was a good idea to choose Garland to run the DoJ. Republicans immediately went after him as radical liberal, so what exactly was the point? Will Democrats ever learn?

The Hamas trap

There’s a fascinating profile of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the NYTimes that is well worth reading. Key quote:

As an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, Mr. Sinwar masterminded a strategy that he knew would provoke a ferocious Israeli response. But in Hamas’s calculus, the deaths of many Palestinian civilians — who do not have access to Hamas’s subterranean tunnels — were the necessary cost of upending the status quo with Israel.

American and Israeli intelligence agencies have spent months assessing Mr. Sinwar’s motivations, according to people briefed on the intelligence. Analysts in both the United States and Israel believe that Mr. Sinwar is primarily motivated by a desire to take revenge on Israel and weaken it. The well-being of the Palestinian people or the establishment of a Palestinian state, the intelligence analysts say, appears to be secondary.

Contrary to the radical left’s belief that Hamas is an anti-colonialist liberation movement, the reality is that it is a fanatical Islamist cult run by a psychopath. Unfortunately, Sinwar also happens to be a very, very shrewd political operator.

There is a similar dynamic in Israel where the highly skilled Benjamin Netanyahu has almost no interest in the wellbeing of Israelis, or long term peace for the region. Netanyahu isn’t a psychopath like Sinwar, but he has sociopathic tendencies and is motivated primarily by his own political survival. He is deeply unpopular in Israel and could face jail time over corruption charges. Netanyahu has calculated that the longer this war goes on, the safer his job is. As Shalom Yerushalmi writes in the Times of Israel:

Although he [Netanyahu] hadn’t been definitive on this issue since the war in Gaza broke out, we’re now beginning to hear clear statements from him about the dramatic need for him to continue leading the country even after the next general elections, despite — and perhaps because of — the terrible national tragedy and disgraceful failures of October 7.

Netanyahu believes that Israel is in the midst of a war that will last for many years to come and that only he is fit to lead this challenge. More than that though, he is convinced that he will win an election — perhaps in the coming months — if a proposal for a hostage deal comes to a vote and wins the expected majority it needs to pass.

I do believe that some sort of peace will be achieved between Israel and the Palestinians, but it will be despite malevolent actors like Sinwar and Netanyahu, not because of them.

See you next week!

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