Watch: Rapper Ice Cube, a Cancel Culture Target for Working with Trump, Urges People to 'Fight for Your Rights'
Hollywood sensation and rapper Ice Cube discussed the dangers of “cancel culture” during an appearance on Piers Morgan’s show, urging Americans to fight against the practice.
Cancel culture refers to the mass shunning and silencing of public figures over opinions or actions deemed unacceptable.
“People are very polarized in all kind of ways. People are afraid to speak out because of the cancer culture — cancel; I said cancer — cancel culture that we have today. So I just think, you know, people are afraid, and they’re running to their corners,” he said last week on TalkTV’s “Piers Morgan Uncensored.”
“In a way, it is a cancer, cancel culture,” Morgan said. “It behaves like that.”
“It does, because it makes not only the person that’s getting canceled, they’re trying to shut them up, but anybody’s watching nowadays shut up, because they say if it can happen to this guy, it can happen to me,” Cube said.
“So by smashing somebody who says something that you might not like and canceling them, it actually reverberates throughout the whole community. And everybody now is watching what they say all the time,” he added.
Morgan said it “crazy” it is for cancel culture to be occurring in the United States.
Cube was asked how to fight it.
“Say what you want to say, and to hell with the consequences,” he said.
“You got to be willing to fight for your rights and fight for what you believe in,” the actor and entrepreneur said.
“And if you’re a person who believes in freedom of speech, you have to fight and say what you feel and let the chips fall where they may and stand on that,” Cube said.
“It may not be an easy road, but I think you feel better about yourself when you say what needs to be said at the time it needs to be said and not afterwards, where you go home and think, ‘I should have said this when that guy was there,’ or ‘when I was there, I should have said that and I didn’t.’ That haunts you more.”
Ice Cube has been the target of cancel culture himself for working with then-President Donald Trump in 2020.
The rapper’s efforts with the White House revolved around his “Contract with Black America,” a proposal to “address racial inequality” in the U.S.
It resulted in Trump’s “Platinum Plan” campaign pledge to provide nearly $500 billion in capital access to black communities.
Shoutout to @icecube for his willingness to step up and work with @realDonaldTrump Administration to help develop the #PlatinumPlan
ICYMI: https://t.co/V0qOAp0lwR
Leaders gonna lead, haters gonna hate. Thank you for leading! ✊🏾
— Katrina Pierson (@KatrinaPierson) October 13, 2020
For partnering with Trump, however, Cube was attacked on social media and accused of “working with the Darkside.”
Every side is the Darkside for us here in America. They’re all the same until something changes for us. They all lie and they all cheat but we can’t afford not to negotiate with whoever is in power or our condition in this country will never change. Our justice is bipartisan. https://t.co/xFIXXpOs8B
— Ice Cube (@icecube) October 14, 2020
Among his critics was Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor and writer known for his radical racial activism, who accused the rapper of “lying to himself.”
Before we talk truth to power, we must talk truth to ourselves. Cube is lying to himself that he can get Trump to deliver Black progress in exchange for Black votes when Trump hasn’t brought progress for his own supporters. The process starts brother by talking truth to yourself. https://t.co/iaECTgJhvr
— Ibram X. Kendi (@ibramxk) October 15, 2020
CNN published an Op-Ed by history professor Peniel E. Joseph with the headline “Why Ice Cube’s political logic is so dangerous.”
Joseph denounced the rapper for working with Trump and the GOP, which he called “a refuge for the architects of racial division, scapegoating, and hatred.”
The Daily Beast assailed “Ice Cube’s Foolish, Ego-Driven Collaboration With the Trump Campaign.”
“That Black male public figures like Ice Cube … think that their collaboration with an overtly racist administration will uplift Black Americans offers a living definition of hubris,” it said.
Cube was also slammed in 2020 over posts he made on Twitter that some said were anti-Semitic.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
