Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, appears to have confirmed reports that he's set to launch an adult entertainment site.
In a post on his X profile earlier this week that has since been deleted, Ye shared a short video announcing the new venture.
The six-second clip featured a voice directing followers to “go to yeezy.com,” while the screen read: “Yeezy Porn Is Cumming,” Rolling Stone reported.
The post came after TMZ reported that a representative for Ye said that the controversial star had been ramping up plans to set up a “Yeezy Porn” studio.
Ye is said to be “dead set” on getting the business off the ground and has contacted Stormy Daniels’ ex-husband, industry veteran Mike Moz, about working together, per TMZ.
“I’ve been having discussions with Ye about a potential collab between Yeezy brand and my team at Vixen Media Group. While it’s too early to give any details I’m excited about where Ye's vision takes this,” Moz told TMZ.
He added that the project would be “like nothing we've ever seen before.”
The move may come as somewhat of a surprise considering Ye’s previous comments about his struggles with porn “addiction,” which he said had “destroyed” his family.
“Hollywood is a giant brothel Pornography destroyed my family I deal with the addiction instagram promotes it Not gonna let it happen to Northy and Chicago,” he wrote on Instagram, per Page Six.
Representatives for Ye did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, which was sent outside regular working hours.
The artist formerly known as Kanye West says he has “issues with Jesus.”
During a recent interview with Big Boy, Ye was asked about the ongoing Vultures era in comparison to other chapters from her career, namely the preceding Jesus Is King and Donda rollouts that saw him leaning fully into a profanity-censoring Christian aesthetic. In fact, according to Ye, he at one point considered also removing sentence enhancers from Vultures 1 but was convinced to reconsider by Ty Dolla Sign.
“You know, I have my issues with Jesus,” Ye said around 10 minutes into the extended interview, released Friday. “There’s a lot of stuff I went through that I prayed and I ain’t see Jesus show up. So I had to put my experience in this world, my experience with my children, my experience with other people, my experience with my account, my experience with my brand and my experience with the level of music that I was dealing with in my own hands.”
As Ye further detailed, his biggest grievance when it comes to the topic of prayer, generally speaking, is that it can be used as a way of not actually doing anything. Ye also gave multiple examples of how he sees prayer alone not leading to desired results.
“The main thing that really that I don’t rock with is it’s just always like, ‘I’mma pray for you.’ And it’s just like, you can actually physically do something yourself too, more than just pray,” Ye said. “We’re so in this mentality that that’s all that needs to happen but we ain’t praying our way out of prison. We ain’t praying our way out the abortion clinics. We ain’t praying our way to get our land back that was always ours after gentrification, after the Harlem Renaissance and Black Wall Street was burned to the ground. Them prayers ain’t working.”
Elsewhere, Ye pointed to a recent moment in his life during which he “had so much to do” that he “ain’t had time to pray.” As previously reported, the interview also sees the 24-time Grammy winner discussing the continued impact of his 808s & Heartbreak album at length while also naming multiple artists as direct examples of his influence.
Why oh why is the impulse to slobber all over celebrities who vaguely agree with us so strong? I get it: psychologically, conservatives are sick of being uncool and cringe and completely devoid of any cultural cachet, so when anyone who is cool and seemingly based and has cultural cachet in spades makes mouth-noises indicating that they might not be a doctrinaire Democrat, you go bananas. You suddenly declare you’ve always loved rap. You’re modern. You’re hip. You’re with the times. And if said celebrity even calls himself a Christian? Oh, that’s the icing on the cake. They’re obviously on your side and you’d totally vote for them for president. We need a real constitutional Christian conservative businessman in the Oval Office, more leadership in times like this. Forget that this devout man of God had a big hit with a charming ditty around his “coming out” as a “conservative” (for real guys!) with a hook that went “You’re such a fuckin’ whore, I love it.” We’re taking back the country! It takes a celebrity to lead us!
And what of, say, Russell Brand, who hasn’t been in a movie in how long? A man who, let’s not forget, hated you and everything you stand for for decades. He just got baptized (in the Thames, no less—gross). Will he become your favorite movie actor? Was he your favorite all this time? Is Forgetting Sarah Marshall a totally underrated comedic masterpiece that you suddenly feel comfortable defending?
Now, in the case of Brand, his conversion and change seems genuine, Augustinian, even, as far as I can discern, albeit as someone who doesn’t really follow the guy. But I have seen him fight against the powers that be and question his assumptions in pretty big ways. And you know what? I pray he finds peace in the faith he used to mock and denigrate.
I pray for Kanye West too, but it looks to me that Kanye figured he liked money and rapping more than bucking the system and, uh, praising Adolph Hitler. He also probably, wisely, realized that hanging out with the seedier elements of the political right was a dead end. However, Kanye’s big mistake was picking on the people who pay him, and I’ll leave it at that. Brand, however, is taking the opposite route. He’ll never be in another movie again, and will have a really difficult time getting back into the system’s good graces, but maybe his life will be better for it.
This calls into question something very important: Why any of us care about celebrities in the first place. I’ll attempt to answer this:
In the absence of any meaningful or important high culture in America, pop culture is all we’ve got.
Therefore, celebrities in the entertainment world have outsize influence in our culture, a religious appeal which is even more profound given the diminished role of religion and tradition in America.
Celebrities espouse revolutionary ideals which keep in the grand American tradition of being revolutionary. Yes, this country has been revolutionary and anti-tradition since its inception. We love our mavericks. This also makes it hard to argue for tradition considering that the country was founded in large part on throwing off the ancien regime.
Politics is not “downstream from culture.” It’s the opposite. More accurately, culture is downstream from power. You don’t change the world by making movies or whatever. You change the world by seizing power and capturing the institutions that make culture. You acquire enough power that you can force your culture down everyone’s throats. I’ve seen families get torn apart by their kids’ choice in music which compels them to adopt destructive and deviant lifestyles because some celebrity made it seem so cool. And they say religion is mind control.
That’s why people care about celebrities. And that is why, understandably, the entire “not-left” movement is incredibly wary and distrustful of Hollywood and all other branches of entertainment. All movies and TV and music are predictive programming psyop MK Ultra, so I’m reliably informed. Every single one. Even the Beatles.
So given this, why do conservatives jump on every single vaguely politically aligned celebrity? Do they distrust celebrities or not? Is the Hollywood system the enemy, or something to envy? Is the true desire to indulge in it without feeling bad about it?
Most celebrities are wicked lame anyway. There are far cooler people to emulate than some nitwits on TV. If you want to enjoy some pop culture, enjoy it, but just keep it in perspective and don’t go all-in on the same sort of celebrity worship you decry when the other side does it the second some celeb says they kind of sort of like someone or something that aligns with your politics.
Any of us on this side of the political divide will never be taken seriously unless we start acting seriously and thinking seriously. And there is a whole lot of intellectual rigor out there away from the production centers of movies and TV shows and porn.
wrote a piece last month about the right’s human capital problem, which bears reading. has a more recent examination of this idea:A related issue, in a practical sense, is that the preponderance of smart people are on the left, and this is increasingly the case in an era of rising education polarization.
It’s not that there are no smart people on the right. Tucker Carlson, for example, is clearly a smart person. And at an earlier point in his career, he challenged a conservative audience to acknowledge that whatever the flaws of the New York Times, it is clearly the world’s premiere news-gathering institution and conservatives had simply failed to build anything comparable.
“Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions,” he told CPAC in 2009, “that’s the truth.”
For his trouble he got booed.
And the truth is, it would be extremely difficult to build a full-service news organization like the Times while having a conservative slant. That’s because the vast majority of the people who work at the Times don’t primarily, or even at all, cover politics. It just takes a large army of diligent, literate people to craft a comprehensive news organization. Is it impossible to find a person who can write good movie reviews or be a copy editor or pen a recipe column who is also a conservative? Of course not. But they are rarer on the ground. Building a whole institution full of those people would be expensive. And it’s not clear that there would be an audience for it since conservatives don’t really like to read anyway. Conservatives like to tell themselves that more rigorous academic disciplines are less left-wing than the softer humanities, which is true — but if you look at economists or chemistry professors, these fields are still all wildly to the left of the American average.
As you can see in the arc of Carlson’s career, operating in an ecosystem that’s stupid leads smart people down the path of doing stupid work.
Meanwhile, though progressive epistemic institutions have a lot of flaws, they still fundamentally have larger numbers of competent people working at them. The output of the better conservative advocacy institutions tends to be kind of shockingly shallow, not because they are run by hacks (everyone has hacks), but because there literally are not enough people on the right who have the skills to do persuasive causal identification and conduct good studies across a broad range of topics. You can see the latent strength of progressive brainpower in the fact that when conservatives want to attack the left consensus on something, they normally rely on the work of other leftists. When the 1619 Project was all the rage, it was a Trotskyite website that led the charge to criticize the heavily racialized view of American history. Everyone learned the term “TERF” because, again, the right actually lacks the intellectual resources to combat the left without recruiting allies from among dissident left-wing intellectuals.
The right has fewer smart people, and a large share of them — like Carlson — end up primarily operating in an ecosystem of grifting. Some of that is rooted in the deep structure of conservative politics, which is fundamentally about economic elites getting people to vote against redistribution. That means you find yourself recruiting people willing to say that cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer or that tax cuts raise revenue. You end up with Donald Trump as your leader and no capacity to formulate a policy agenda.
My take: Ideology keeps people trapped in a false paradigm that’s more stultifying than any religion could ever hope to be.
Ideology gets good people, smart people, well-meaning people, bogged down in what is essentially “That’s not how we do things over here” thinking on a national scale. If you subscribe to American-style conservatism, you have to check every box—free markets, laissez faire economics, lionizing corporations, certain foreign policy objectives, small government (whatever that means, and however that is put into practice), just to name a few—and if you don’t, or if you think outside of these parameters, you run the risk of becoming a pariah. You’re not an “true conservative.” Even if some of these components aren’t working!
The flip side is that someone charismatic and famous who seems to check a few of these boxes is too often assumed to hold all of the other ideological signifiers, which is how we get, for example, libertarians claiming that people like Frank Zappa and George Carlin were fellow ideological travelers because they criticized this or that aspect of American politics.
No. It’s not all or nothing. It’s about solving problems. What works, and what doesn’t? Do what works, don’t do what doesn’t. If a system isn’t working, change it. What’s more important: conserving a system, or conserving a people? If you hesitate while answering that question, you’re probably the kind of person who falls for the celebrity grift every single time.
Donald Trump is a literal celebrity, though all politicians are celebrities in their own lame way. That’s what it takes to get elected in the winner-take-all, first across the finish line, universal suffrage popularity contest that is the American political system. But just because you get some celebrity elected, it doesn’t mean that the job is over and you can just sit back because America has been saved. Who is going to decide policy? Who is going to do the hard work of enacting it? Who is going to staff key positions and institutions? What does success look like?
Celebrity worship breeds laziness just as much as ideology does. You need to demand more, a lot more, of your leaders, and you need to demand a lot more of yourself. There is no grand decisive battle that will settle everything, and there is always work to be done.
- Alexander
I appreciate you making it to the end of the post. This was tough to write because I am sympathetic to the desire to fit in and be on the side of the beautiful people. Those of us who don’t play along with the system need to be more critical and smart about what we do and who we listen to and avoid distractions and false idols. I’m susceptible to it too. I’m old enough to remember Arnold Schwarzenegger running for governor of California. I fell into this trap myself.
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The American Right has no cool people because it's one big grift, as you quoted. It's outer party all the way 'round. The Right writ large, however, has had plenty of imposing titans in its history; metaphysical monocles, double-breasted Italian suits and all. We're figuring that out now, it seems.
'Kindly tell me where you think I’m wrong'
There is *no* sense in which any of this is wrong.