On April 21st, Kanye West sent a tweet out to his 13.4 million followers that read: “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” A celebrity endorsing his favorite political pundit is hardly unusual, but one of the most famous rappers of all time endorsing a black, pro-Trump firebrand like Owens is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Owens has taken stances against Black Lives Matter, feminism, and various other causes championed by the Left and, although she doesn’t follow the Republican party line on every issue, she has advocated for tax cuts, personal responsibility, and many other traditionally right-wing values.

The core of her message is that there’s a stubborn refusal—among blacks and whites alike—to let go of the narrative that blacks are continually beleaguered by white racism. What we need, according to Owens, is a new story about what black America can be, which looks toward a bright future instead of clinging to an ugly past. It’s easy to see why West—a man with grandiose visions of his own future, who considers himself to be our generation’s Shakespeare—would prefer Owens’s message of black self-creation to the prevailing leftist view that modern systems of oppression recapitulate the overt injustices of the past and therefore constrain black potential.

Like his support for Trump (which he later withdrew), West’s support for Owens has been covered more favorably by the Right than by the Left. Conservative media seizes upon black conservatives as evidence that conservatism has nothing in principle to do with racism, even if the dwindling number of committed anti-black racists in this country tend to vote Republican. By contrast, liberal and leftist media do their best to ignore black conservatives and to pretend they don’t exist, lest they disrupt the narrative that the Left has a moral monopoly on race issues. The fact that Kanye West is a rapper and a black icon—credentials that ‘should’ place him on the Left—makes his fondness for conservatism more disruptive still.