Kanye West — who is still running for president — sat down recently for a three-hour, freewheeling conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan.
During their wide-ranging discussion, the entertainment mogul talked about his far-fetched presidential campaign, what he believes God has called him to do, his views on abortion, and his favorite preaching style.
West revealed to Rogan he joined the presidential race so late because he was fighting a diagnosis with the novel coronavirus earlier this summer.
“Why did I register so late to run for president? COVID,” he said. “I had the virus and I was sitting in quarantine in my house and my cousin texts me about being prepared to run for president. And I just completely put it off to the side ’cause I was like shivering and having the shakes and taking hot showers and eating soup. … [Coronavirus] threw everyone off. It threw everybody’s plans off. And then it was just this calling on my heart.”
That, however, didn’t stop the now-Christian rapper from launching a bid for the White House — a position he believes God has called him to fill.
He told Rogan he is confident his “calling is to be the leader of the free world.”
“Even though I’m the pastor for however big my audience is in hip-hop, in music, or just as an influencer or celebrity, a dad and a husband in my house — there couldn’t be a better time to put a visionary in the captain’s chair,” he explained. “And that’s not to say we haven’t had visionaries before. I’m not here to down Trump, to down Biden; I’m just here to express why God has called me to take this position.”
Watch the interview
West also doubled down on his pro-life, anti-Planned Parenthood stance.
He told the host it is important for society to uncouple the nation’s largest abortion business from the idea of a “woman’s choice.” The entertainer went on to say there needs to be a shift in perspective on orphanages and the foster care system.
“You know, we have to decouple the conversation of Planned Parenthood and ‘woman’s choice,'” West said. “So, of course, I’m Christian, so I’m pro-life. And when I go into office, I’m not changing laws, because I realize we live in an imperfect world and in an imperfect society. What I will be presenting is a ‘Plan A.’ And we’ve already started to work on Plan A to change the connotation of orphanages, change the connotation of foster care.”
In August, West took to Twitter to share a vague brainstorming diagram of what his “Plan A” might entail.
The initiative’s ultimate goal is to provide funding and support for women facing unplanned pregnancies in order to keep them from having abortions.
West also repeated to Rogan his statements against Planned Parenthood, calling it a racist institution designed by Margaret Sanger to prop up population control and eugenics. He made similar comments in September to celebrity Nick Cannon.
“Let me talk about Planned Parenthood,” West told Rogan. “There’s the last figure I saw is there were 210,000 deaths that’s due to COVID in America. And everywhere you go, you see someone with a mask on … With abortion culture, there are 1,000 black children aborted a day.”
“We are in genocide,” he continued. “So, more black children have died in the past, since February, than people have died of COVID, and everyone wears a mask. So, it’s a matter of where are we turning a blind eye to? The media can control, a lot of times it has control what we care about.”
The two men didn’t only touch on heavy topics, though. The 43-year-old West also opened up to Rogan about his favorite style of preaching.
In most Christian circles, there are two types of preaching: topical and expository. West explained to Rogan why he prefers the latter.
“There’s some type of preachers, they get up, they have the Bible in their hands, and they close the Bible and they just talk for two hours,” West said. “Some do have anointing. But the expository preachers go line for line [through the Bible], and for me, it’s like, I come from entertainment. I got so much sauce. I don’t need to sauce on the Word. I need the Word to be solid food that I can understand exactly what God was saying to me.”
You can watch the full three-hour conversation in the video above.