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Will.i.am has spoken out about Kanye West‘s bid to be president, calling it “a dangerous thing to be playing with.”
West announced last week (July 5) that he hopes to make a run for the White House in November, going up against President Donald Trump and the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Speaking in a new interview, Will.i.am has discussed West’s political aspirations and how he thinks you don’t have to run for office to do great things for the community.
“It’s a dangerous thing to be playing with,” Will told The Mirror. “If you’re not serious, you don’t play with that, especially now.”
He added: “Like what the fuck, seriously, I don’t even know what like community service you do.”
The Black Eyed Peas frontman went on to say that he himself doesn’t need to run for president in order to effect change in the world, saying that he is already making a massive difference to children’s lives.
“There’s so many ways to help our communities other than politics and you don’t have to run for office to change people’s lives for the better,” he said. “For the past 11 years I went back to the ghetto where I’m from and started a school. I started with 65 kids – now I have 720 kids and growing.”
He continued: “Our kids have gone off to colleges they probably never thought, or anyone thought, they’d go to – like Dartmouth, Brown, Stanford, UCLA – studying things you probably never thought they would study, like bioscience, engineering, autonomy, robotics and computer science.
“So you don’t have to be a politician to protect the youth…Politics, nah. I’d rather do what I do, and do as much as I can.” I couldn’t agree more.”
This isn’t the first time that Will.i.am has spoken out about the actions of West. Back in 2018, he responded to the ‘Yeezus’ rapper’s controversial comments about slavery, describing them as “hurtful.”
“When you’re a slave, you’re owned,” Will said. “You don’t choose if you’re owned. When you’re a slave you’re deprived of education. That’s not choice, that’s by force.”
Will.I.Am added: “I understand the need to have free thought, but if your thoughts aren’t researched, that is just going to hurt those that are still in conditions where it’s not choice.”
According to Ballotpedia, Kanye failed to register as an independent candidate in North Carolina by 3 March, May 11 in Texas and 26 May in New York.
He has also missed the deadline in Maine (1 June), New Mexico (25 June) and Indiana, which requires independent candidates to register by 30 June.
However, he is still eligible to register in states such as South Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Colorado and Michigan where the deadlines fall in July.
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