He’s got some good takes and some wacky ones. He also talks in a way that would suggest he’s very radical, like he calls people brother and sister, and he’s got a very powerful speaking voice. He’s got a good sense of oration and he’s not afraid to throw around words like imperialism, structural racism, stuff like that. I think if you wanna look into West’s ideology, I think he’s caught up in too much religious symbols and metaphysical stuff to ever reach what we’d call coherent leftism. He’s a 1990s style leftist, when the smell of Marxism had drifted away, when any radicalism had been defeated, when everyone was a kind of utopian.

But you’re right. He’s another ivy league professor. They’re always going to betray you, because they’re at their core just some academics who write papers. It’s the same with how people will occasionally get whiplash from something Zizek says.

So far the only ivy league professors who have never betrayed me have been Michael Parenti, Richard Wolff, Paul Buhle, and Jodi Dean. They’re very cool and know what they’re talking about. There’s also Vijay Prashad who is possibly one of the best Marxist academics right now, at least among English speaking academia. China probably has some kickass scholars I’ve never heard of. I have a gut feeling there are some good academics who write in Spanish too.