I have a — I have conversations that basically said that welfare is the reason why a lot of black people end up being democrat. They say, you know, first of all, it’s a limited amount of jobs. So, the fathers lose the jobs and they say we’ll give you more money for having more kids in your home and then we got rid of mental health institutions in the ’80s and ’90s and the prison rates just shot up. And now you have Chiraq, what people call “chi-raq.”. Actually, our murder rate is going down by 20%. just talked to the superintendent. Met with Michael (INAUDIBLE), that’s (INAUDIBLE) right-hand man.
WEST: So, I think it’s the bravery that helps you beat this game called life. You know they try to scare me to not wear this hat, my own friends. But this hat, it gives me, it gives me power in a way. You know, my dad and my mom separated so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home and also
WEST: And also, I’m married to a family that, you know — not a lot of male energy going on. It’s beautiful though. But there’s times where, you know, it’s something about, you know, I love Hillary. I love everyone, right? But the campaign “I’m with her” just didn’t make me feel as a guy, that didn’t get to see my dad all the time, like a guy that could play catch with his son.It was something about when I put this hat on, it made me feel like superman. You made a superman. That’s my favorite super hero. And you made a superman cape for me. Also, as a guy who looks up to you, looks up to Ralph Lauren, who looks up to American industry guys, not political, no bulls—, put the bleep on it, however you want to do it, five seconds delay, and just goes in and gets it done.
Right now, you gave me the heart to go to Adidas. Because at Adidas, when I went in in 2015, we were a $14 billion company losing $2 billion a year.Now, we have a $38 billion market cap. It’s called the yeezy effect. And I went to Casper. We had a meeting in Chicago. And I said you have to bring manufacturing on shore. Not even on shore, into the core. It’s not about the borders. The core of Adidas, and Chicago is the core of middle America. We have to make middle America strong. So, I have the balls. I have the balls to put on this hat.
I mean, this Adidas thing made me a billionaire. And I could have lost $200 million walking away from that deal. But even with that, I knew it was more important for me to take the chance of walking away from that deal than to have no fathers in Chicago with no homes and when we do have prison reformation – because it’s habilitation now it’s not rehabilitation. Because we didn’t have the abilities in the first place. We didn’t have anyone who taught us, to teach us. We had no one who taught us, right?
So it’s more important than any specific deal, anything that we bring jobs into America. And that we provide a transition with mental health and the American education curriculum that (INAUDIBLE) worked on. That Larry Hoover also has a curriculum that he worked on. We have Montessori curriculum. “Wework” has a beautiful curriculum. The Waldorf establishment has a curriculum. We have meditation.
There’s a lot of things affecting our mental health that make us do crazy things that put us back into that trap door called, the 13th amendment. I did say abolish with the hat on. Because why would you keep something around that’s a trap door? If you’re building a floor, the constitution is the base of our industry, right, of our country, of our company. Would you build a trap door that if you mess up and you accidentally something happens, you fall and you end up next to the Unabomber? You end up — you got to remove the trap door out of the relationship.
The four gentleman that broke the 13th amendment. And I think the universe works, it’s perfect. We don’t have 13 floors, do we? So the four gentlemen that wrote the 13th amendment didn’t look like the people they were amending. Also at that point, it was illegal for blacks to read or African Americans to read. And so that meant if you actually read the amendment, you get locked up! And turned into a slave again. So, what I think is we don’t need sentences, we need partners. We need to talk to people. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was connected with a neuro-psychologist that works with the athletes in the NBA and the NFL.
And he looked at my brain. It’s equal in three parts. — I’m going to go ahead, drop some bombs on you. 98 percentile IQ test. I had a 75 percentile of all human beings. Whether it was counting eight numbers backwards off — I’m going to work on that one. The other one, 98%. Tesla, Ford, you know. So, he said that I actually wasn’t bipolar. I had sleep deprivation, which can cause dementia 10 to 20 years from now, I wouldn’t even remember my son’s name. So, all this power I got and I’m taking my son to the Sox game and all that. I wouldn’t be able to remember his name from a misdiagnosis. What we need is, we can empower the pharmaceuticals and make more money. That’s one thing. I’ve never stepped into a situation where I didn’t make people more money. So we can empower pharmaceuticals. We can empower our industries. We can empower our factories. We can bring not only Adidas on shore. Foxconn set up a factory think in Minnesota.
TRUMP: Wisconsin, yeah, Wisconsin.
WEST: Yeah, Wisconsin. They have 4,000 jobs. People making $53,000 a year. And one of the things we got to set is Ford to have the highest design. The dopest cars. The most amazing. I don’t really say dope. I don’t say negative words. We try to flip them. We just say positive lovely divine universal words.
WEST: So, the flyest, freshest, most amazing car, and what we want to start with is, I brought a gif with me right here. This right here is the iPlane One, it’s a hydrogen powered airplane, and this is what our president should be flying in. Look at this, Jared.
TRUMP: We’d get rid of Air Force One. Can we get rid of Air Force One? No, you don’t like that?
WEST: Well, we’re gonna have Apple, an American company, work on this plane. But, you know what I don’t like about, it’s not that I don’t like, what I need Saturday Night Live to improve on, or what I need the liberals to improve on is, if he don’t look good, we don’t look good. This is our president.
TRUMP: It’s true.
WEST: He has to be the freshest, the flyest, the flyest planes, the best factories, and we have to make our core be in power, we have to bring jobs into America, because our best export is entertainment and ideas, but when we make everything in China and not in America, then we’re cheating on our country. And we’re putting people in positions to have to do illegal things to end up in the cheapest factory ever, the prison system.
TRUMP: I’ll tell you what that was pretty impressive, folks. (LAUGHTER) You know, I hate to say this Jim, do you want to say something too? What do you do after that? You’re a– Please, Jim, please.
BROWN: If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.
TRUMP: Right. Great, right?
BROWN: That’s right.
TRUMP: Isn’t that a great statement?
BROWN: Yes it is.
TRUMP: And it’s so true, as a country, it’s so true. Very– I’ve never seen Jim Brown impressed before. He was impressed. That’s true, that statement is amazing, huh?
BROWN: Yeah, yeah. It makes a lot of sense.
TRUMP: Well, I want to tell you, it’s great to have you guys here. We’re going to go in, we’re going to have some lunch. That was quite something, that was quite something.
WEST: It was from the soul. I just channeled it.
TRUMP: Yeah, that’s really very interesting.
(TO PRESS) Sure, please.
REPORTER: So, you had said of President Bush that he doesn’t care about black people. And you’ve heard some people say that about this president. How do you respond to that, what do you make of that?
WEST: I think we need to care about all people. And I believe that when I went on to NBC, I was very emotional, and I was programmed to think from a victimized mentality of a welfare mentality.
I think with blacks and African Americans, we really get caught up in the idea of racism over the idea of industry. You see if people don’t have land, they settle for brands. We want a Polo-sporting Obama again. We want a brand, more than we want land, because we haven’t known how it feels to actually have our own land and have ownership of our own blocks. When we don’t have ownership, then it’s all about how something looks, it’s about the patina, it’s not about the soul, it’s not about the core. So we focus more on, ‘Is somebody wearing something, did someone disrespect me so I got to, I got to shoot them?’ Or the idea of someone being racist, you know, we talk about police murders, which we definitely have to discuss, and we have to bring nobility to the police officers and make them because police officers are just like us.
But there’s this whole hate building, right, and that’s a major thing about racial tension. But we also as black people have to take a responsibility for what we’re doing. We killed each other more than police officers. And that’s not saying that a police officer is not an issue because they are in a place, a position of power. But sometimes they’re in a place of law enforcement, they need to be law power. It’s force versus power. You shouldn’t have to force people to do that.
So, a lot of times a police officer is sitting there, they’re being forced to do this, forced to do that block, and then they force somebody into something, and force into something. We have to release the love throughout the entire country and give opportunities. A lot of times, it’s just the overall lack of reparations that we at any given point, we say, “Oh this is racist, this is racist, this is racist, this is racist.” So we don’t have the reparations but we have the thirteenth amendment. We got to open up the whole conversation.
So, and that’s a move, one of the moves that I love that liberals try to do. A liberal will try to control a black person through the concept of racism because they know that we are very proud, emotional people. So, when I said I liked Trump, to like someone that’s liberal, they’ll say, “Oh, but he’s racist.” You think racism can control me? Oh, that don’t stop me. That’s an invisible wall.
(CROSSTALK)
WEST: Your question – you, you have one question that opens to another question. I answered your question. I don’t answer questions that simple sound – soundbites. You — you are tasting a fine wine. It has multiple notes to it. You better play 4-D chess with me like it’s Minority Report, cause it ain’t that simple. It’s complex.
REPORTER: Mr. West, why would you let — Chicago Sun Times, so I would like to know what you would like to ask President Trump to do for Chicago. You’re here to talk about crime in Chicago.
WEST: The thing that — that — that the head of the police and Mike Sachs met with me last night at the Soho house about what we feel that stop and frisk does not help the relationships in the city, and everyone that knew I was coming here said ask about stop and frisk. That’s — that’s — that’s the number one thing that we’re having this conversation about. Another thing is opening up industries, and we’ve got to get some tax breaks too, because — you know we’re making — we got a Speed factory in Atlanta, but the shoes are costing us $300 so it’s costing us too — too much to make things. So, we need some prototypes here so we can get people back working so China can’t just beat us and Vietnam can’t beat us. You’ve got Levi’s, the greatest jeans company in the world, making their jeans in — in Vietnam. So, we’re going to need a few breaks to be able to have some places in my hometown of Chicago, and the 2.7 million to the nine million surrounding the suburbs where we can create some factories. I think it’d be cool for them to be Trump factories because he’s a master of industry, he’s a builder.
And I think it’d be cool to have Yeezy ideation centers, which would be a mix of education that empowers people and gives them modern information like — sometimes people say this kid has ADD, this kid has ADD. He don’t have ADD, school is boring, it was boring, it’s not as exciting as this. We have to make it more exciting. We have to mix curriculum, to play basketball while you’re doing math.
You — you — you learn about music while you meditate in the morning. We have to instate mental health and art programs back into the — back to the cities. So those are — and also, Larry Hoover is an example of a man that was turning his life around, and as soon as he tried to turn his life around, they hit him with six life sentences. So I believe he’s what — you say don’t tear down the statues? Larry Hoover is a living statue. He’s a beacon for us, that needs to see his family, that needs to go out and represent. When you have a block leader on every single block, they can own the block. That’s something I learned from Jim Brown, from Amer-I-Can . We need to put curriculums for people who really came from the streets, not people who are just trying to set us up to go into a work system or prison system that applies to what people are really going through, which Jim Brown has created.