Nick Cannon unloaded a host of conservative political views while speaking to Amber Rose in an interview for his “Big Drive” online show this week. Among other things, the actor insisted Donald Trump is “cleaning house” and that the Democrats are “the party of the KKK.”
Rose kicked things off by explaining why she flipped from the Democratic to the Republican Party. “Democrats don’t care about Black people, and they don’t care about people of color. And the Republicans do,” she said.
“I agree with you 100 percent,” Cannon answered. “People don’t know that the Democrats are the party of the KKK. People don’t know that the Republicans are the party that freed the slaves.”
While Cannon’s statement is technically true, it also belies that the Republican Party of the 1860s bears little resemblance to the party that exists today, and the same can be said of the modern Democrat Party and its forebears; both parties underwent significant shifts during the Civil Rights Era.
Cannon also said that while he considers himself mostly on board with Trump’s Republican Party, he ultimately doesn’t completely believe in it, either.
“Both you and I have some conservative views. You’re just a little bit more outspoken than I am,” he told Rose. “And honestly, I don’t subscribe to either party. I rock with W. E. B. Du Bois, when he said there’s no such thing as two parties. It’s just one evil party with two different names.”
In an essay penned for The Nation in 1956 Du Bois explained why he didn’t plan to vote in the year’s presidential election between incumbent Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, and his Democrat challenger Adlai Stevenson II.
“In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I believe that democracy has, so far, disappeared in the United States, that no ‘two evils’ exist: There is but one evil party with two names which will be elected despite all I can do or say,” he wrote in part. “There is no third party. On the Presidential ballot in a few states, a ‘Socialist’ party will appear. If a voter advocates a real third party movement, he may be accused of seeking to overthrow this government by ‘force and violence.’”
Elsewhere in the essay, Du Bois took the Republican Party to task for not enforcing the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. the Board of Education decision, which was delivered in 1954. “Is the refusal to vote in this phony election a counsel of despair? No. It is dogged hope,” he also wrote. “It is hope that if 25 million voters refrain from voting in 1956 on their own accord, not based on a sly wink from Khrushchev, this might make the American people ask how much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest.”
Watch the conversation between Cannon and Rose in the video above.
