Why is Drake getting hounded by the cancel mob?
The following is a guest article from a member of the PCMA community. While one Mu committee member previously had an official role within PCMA, there are currently no formal ties between the two groups. Mu is always looking for content from MAPs with a wide range of views to host as guest blogs. Hosting does not imply endorsement, and the opinions expressed here are not necessarily agreed upon by all members of Mu.
Ordinarily, a rap beef would hardly merit comment in terms of its relevance to us, regardless of how high-profile it is, but given the nature and popularity of the Kendrick Lamar's anti-Drake diss-track Not Like Us, it is more than justified. On Not Like Us, Kendrick Lamar slanderously claims Drake “...like em young”, while going so far as to hop-scotch on a playground in the music video while crowing "trying to strike a chord and its probably A minor" and rapping later on in the song "Certified Lover Boy? Certified Pedophiles" –– a reference to the title of Drake's sixth studio album. While PCMA would not condemn Drake even if he was a pedophile – a term thoughtlessly applied to anyone who expresses any interest in a minor in the degraded discourse that pervades social media – we can tell the claim rests on pure slander. The origin of the claim that 'Drake is a pedophile' originates from an interview where actress Millie Bobbie Brown claims that Drake had taken her out to dinner and maintained a platonic friendship with her starting at 11 years old, with Drake even advising a teenage Brown on relationship topics regarding peer-age boys. Brown has consistently denied any misbehavior by Drake. Of course, in our present era of anger, witch-hunting and disconnection, the very existence of a friendship between a minor female and an adult man is seen as ipso facto morally suspect; one might even say “queer” in the original less degraded sense of the term. We maintain that individuals accused of sex-crimes must be granted the standard presumption of “innocent until proven guilty”, rather than accepting the upside-down world of hateful social media outrage mobs and vile rumor-mongers who invert this very principle until “guilty until proven innocent”, readily accepting all evidence of sexual impropriety no matter how innocuous or even fraudulent the “evidence” in question is. We insist on this right to due process and trial by jury (or judge if the defendant elects), regardless of whether we agree that the sex crime in question should be a sex crime. These are matters that should be decided by actual courts rather than the court of public opinion.
The claims against Drake are slanderous and cruel but that has not stopped the vigilantes from combing through Drake's every utterance and public appearance for "proof" of his alleged pedophilia. However, nothing substantial has been found in spite of thousands of people obsessively looking for evidence. This in itself is the best proof that Drake is not a pedophile, as Drake himself alludes in his rebuttal track, The Heart Part 6. In this song, he argues, "If I was fucking young /girls, I promise I'd have been arrested/I'm way too famous for this shit you just suggested." Is Drake's reasoning flawed? Sure, Michael Jackson got off, and no less a luminary of first generation pedophile rights activism then Tom O'Carroll argued that Jackson was a practicing (and loving) pederast rather than the innocent victim of a slanderous legal and reputational witch-hunt as his fans claimed. But is this meaningful?[1] R. Kelly was recently handed down a sentence of thirty years in prison for illegal sex with underage teenage girls. Kevin Spacey was driven out of Hollywood for claims of sexual abuse for which he has been exonerated. Trailblazing filmmaker and holocaust/Manson survivor Roman Polanski was driven from the United States after he alleged that the judge in the case intended to keep sending him to psychological evaluation. He considered this an attempt to avoid sentencing him in order to sate public bloodlust, which would have found the normative sentencing guidelines too light – a fact now proved beyond the shadow of doubt thanks to the publication of transcripts from the judge in the case, proving judicial misconduct. Beloved That ‘70s Show actor Blake Masterson received 30 years to life over rape allegations that were 20 years old, and whose evidentiary basis was considered so weak that his defense lawyers advised him not to mount a defense because they did not think it necessary. In spite of her wealth and intelligence connections, Ghislaine Maxwell did receive the maximum sentence as an accomplice to Epstein's sex crimes at over 20 years in prison.
So in spite of the fantasy that wealth and fame provide a security blanket that allows powerful and famous individuals to wantonly get away with sex crimes at will, we see that it in many cases status and wealth is a lightning rod that attracts the punitive impulse of society and which allows a combination of bad actors and mobs of angry people a free hand to vent their ferocious impulses regarding violations of sexual impropriety, and to "take down a few pegs" those who appear to reign above them and enjoy lives they can only envy. Drake's contention in The Heart Part 6 is vindicated; to wit it is difficult to imagine him reputationally surviving a legal relationship with a minor teen (16-17) either in the United States or his homeland of Canada. As he alludes, "Only fuckin' with Whitneys, not Millie Bobby Browns, I'd never/ look twice at no teenager." Drake even slyly argues that Kendrick would only be a match for him if he were a pedophile: "You would be a worthy competitor if I was really a predator" and even going so far as to address the underlying psychology he feels is at the root of Kendrick's "pedophile obsession". As he notes:
My mom came over today, and I was like, "Mother, I— Mother, I—, mother—," ahh, wait a second That's that one record where you say you got molested Aw, fuck me, I just made the whole connection This about to get so depressin' This is trauma from your own confessions This when your father leave you home alone with no protection, so neglected That's why these pedophile raps and shit you so obsessed with, it's so excessive They actin' like it's so aggressive, but you just never known affection I don't wanna diss you anymore, this really got me second-guessin'
Kendrick's own alleged molestation aside, we cannot deny that there is truth in Drake's observations regarding individuals displaying a preoccupation towards allegations of child sexual assault. When read closely, they often imbibe a toxic combination of feelings and experiences unrelated to the sex act and relationship in question, and so it is often like a Rorschach test that reflects underlying feelings about how people feel about the world. For those who were (or feel) unloved or unprotected as children from the travails of the world and familial dysfunction, childhood sexual abuse has often been a "safe" and socially-approved avenue to vent how they feel. The Christian roots of much of the official do-gooder organizations aligned against "child sexual assault" still appear in victim testimonies that resemble Christian testimonials far more than a dry, level, and factual documentation of the events in question. The structure of "survivor" narratives are structured in such a way that little is learned outside of off-hand comments that seem at odds with the narrative structure and coherence of the whole. We typically see:
A state of asserted or presumed childhood innocence (Purity) -> temptation/coercion, corruption, and decline (Sin) -> feelings of regret and shame followed by ascendance and resilience (Grace/Providence).
This is not to deny that there are cases of genuine child sexual abuse or that the only reason a minor could have gripes within consensual adult-minor sexual relationship is due to societal brainwashing, but we do assert this is often a situation where "a cigar is not a cigar" and a reflection of deeper forces are at play. For individuals struggling with poverty, parental abuse, feeling unloved, feelings of often religiously induced sexual shame/guilt, alienation, substance abuse, or mental illness or any number of things, "molestation" is imbued with deep power as a trigger cause, that had it not occurred would have resulted in a timeline where the subject is psychologically or otherwise "normal" and without undue extreme suffering. A problem with defining genuine abuse or harm is the extent to which our lives and the lives of purported victims (and perpetrators) are deeply confounded. The effect (arguably point) of such narratives is to move people away from the critique of structural causes of social misery and towards individual misbehavior, particularly of the sexual variety. Drake deserves credit for untangling the deep confounded nature of Kendrick's preoccupation with pedophilia before an audience that would otherwise never think critically about the motivations of K-Dot and other vigilante "pedophile hunters."
A MAP-rights organization can unfortunately never be the equivalent of a communist party or social democratic party, a Christian Church, or an anarchist commune. We can hope and affirm the "angels of our better nature" to quote Lincoln, but we can never promise to take away all or most gratuitous social and individual suffering or its memory. Fixing the broken society that MAPs and youth inhabit involves structural changes stemming from the very society that has demonized, tortured, imprisoned, and exiled MAPs itself. We do not abide the suggestion that society be fixed before adults and minors be allowed to engage in sexual/romantic relationships; that is not our responsibility. Our responsibility is to demand that society at large take their knives out of our back and end the oppression of MAPs and their youth partners. MAPs themselves may disagree on what a liberated or just society looks like, or whether this is possible. This is fine; all coalitions of oppressed people have been imperfect and "problematic", yet that does not mean they were wrong to ask for rights and better treatment regardless.
Speaking of "freedom" and grand promises of reform and the amelioration of large-scale social/economic pain, the Harris-Walz campaign has taken to using Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us at multiple campaign events and at the California roll call of the DNC itself. The campaign apparently intends to capitalize on Kendrick's music (with the apparent willing cooperation of Kendrick) as a form of radical chic to signal to supporters of the party, as well as those that are suffering and are oppressed, that the presidential campaign of Vice President Harris gets it. The use of the song by the Harris campaign and the Democrats has led some to refer to the 2024 US election as the Not Like Us election, as the democrats intend to signal to supporters that Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the remaining hardcore among MAGA republicans/supporters are Not Like Us. The campaign's use of the word "weird", pioneered by Walz but more in keeping with Harris's overall aesthetic, is a classic in-group/out-group signifier, which in meangirl fashion signals the lesser status through performative labelling without elaborating the actual substance or reasoning in denigrating the person being labelled. In other words, if the reader will excuse a turn of phrase that could be viewed as ageist, it is a classic schoolyard insult. The use of "Not Like Us" presents a classic left-wing conundrum: the use/propagation of stigma and even the active persecution of an oppressed group under the guise of a cause that appears to be seeking the betterment of all people, or at least all oppressed people. The intention here is not to moralize this, but to draw a contrast with who is being left out of the campaign of the woman variously referred to as "California's Top Cop", "Killer Harris", and "Cop Mama."
It is no apology for Trump to be disturbed by the campaign's dehumanizing in-group/out-group rhetoric, or to draw a parallel to the way that the Harris campaign appears to be attacking pedophiles and other sex offenders who constitute vulnerable groups whose constitutional and human rights have already come under tremendous assault. Kendrick, an apparent friend of Barrack Obama, allowed his music to be used in an official Instagram ad for the (now defunct) Biden-Harris 2024 campaign, and by some accounts is deliberately removing pro-Palestine comments from his Instagram posts. The irony of this is that is that Kendrick is a follower of Black Hebrew Israelite ideology which holds that black people are the real Jews whereas Ashkenazi Jews, aka White Jews, are fake Jews. Drake, by contrast, has Jewish blood through his Ashkenazi mother and appears to be a practicing Jew, yet Drake signed a letter publicly calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Like Drake, PCMA also called for a ceasefire and identified Israeli conduct as one of war crimes, genocidal intent, and ethnic cleansing well before that argument made its way into the mainstream or the spring protests that swept America's colleges. We are pleased that Drake's instincts and ours are aligned here, and by the fact that Kendrick's or K-Dot, who is sometimes called "the people's champ", is apart from us and appears to be failing a major test of history that could damage his legacy. He is, indeed, Not Like Us.
Condemn Slander!
Stand For The Right of The Accused!
Condemn K-Dot and “Not Like Us”!
Defend Drake!
Please feel free to discuss this article in Mu's forum thread.
Footnote
- The authors take no stance on Michael Jackson's “real” guilt and do not treat O'Carroll's well-intentioned book as the final word on the matter. We merely insist that he be presumed innocent as he is no longer alive to defend himself and was found innocent in a court of law.