On July 4th, Kanye West took to Twitter to announce that he plans to run in the 2020 presidential election. Black Eyed Peas producer will.i.am has weighed in on West’s presidential bid, calling it “a dangerous thing to be playing with.”
In a recent interview with The Mirror, will.i.am has cast doubt on West’s political goals, musing that you don’t need to run for office to help your community.
“It’s a dangerous thing to be playing with,” he shared “If you’re not serious, you don’t play with that, especially now.”
He continued, “Like what the fuck, seriously, I don’t even know what like community service you do.”
The musician continued to delve into the importance of making tangible change through community activism.
“There’s so many ways to help our communities other than politics and you don’t have to run for office to change people’s lives for the better,” he said. “For the past 11 years I went back to the ghetto where I’m from and started a school. I started with 65 kids – now I have 720 kids and growing.
“Our kids have gone off to colleges they probably never thought, or anyone thought, they’d go to – like Dartmouth, Brown, Stanford, UCLA – studying things you probably never thought they would study, like bioscience, engineering, autonomy, robotics and computer science.
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“So you don’t have to be a politician to protect the youth…Politics, nah. I’d rather do what I do, and do as much as I can.” I couldn’t agree more.”
On the heels of Kanye’s presidential announcement, the music mogul took part in a bizarre and controversial four-hour Forbes interview saw West make a slew of outlandish claims, including that he had coronavirus — which he branded “the mark of the beast”— that American toothpaste and deodorant “affect our ability to be of service to God,” and his ideology on foreign policies, abortion, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, taxes, China and more.
A TMZ report has revealed that sources close to Kanye suggest that he is in the midst of a bipolar episode. The insiders claim that Kanye experiences a manic episode like this yearly.
Though the family of West are anxious about his current state of mind, they are positive that the aftermath of this episode will see the rapper gain stable mental health.