Nick Cannon, the celebrity known best for his roles in television comedy shows, has released a deeply profound video about this year’s election cycle.
In the video embedded below, Cannon performs a spoken word rap poem outside of a polling station, where he rejects every major candidate and the electoral process as a whole. The poem is titled “Too Broke To Vote” and discusses how voting for any of the major candidates will not change poverty, war, or the system of corruption currently in place.
In the first few lines of his poem, Cannon seems to express the desire to have no “president” or “ruler” at all.
“Nobody for President. That’s my campaign slogan. We got money for wars but can’t feed our homeless. The government is hopeless. It’s like a reality show. The Real lives of the House Liars,” Cannon says.
He continues: “Voting for office is like picking out which gun you wanna get shot with.”
He makes it clear that all of the options are untrustworthy, despite their different marketing schemes. Cannon isn’t even “feeling the Bern.”
“But I ain’t feeling the Bern. And hell naw I’ll never get Trumped. The Clintons had they chance with me, they the reason my cousin still locked up,” he says. It is unclear whether this is in reference to the Clinton’s role in proliferating mass incarceration, but nevertheless expresses a clear sentiment: presidents are not the solution to America’s problems.
He also makes it clear he does not support the Democrats or the Republicans, rejecting the two-party duopoly.
“They got y’all confused with these views from Republicans and Democrats, liberal or conservative, man I ain’t none of that,” Cannon declares.
The end of the poem is extremely powerful, revealing Cannon knows far more about global events than he has ever let on:
“Go for the gold cuz that’s who makes the rules. And all this pageantry is just designed for fools. They gonna give you the one they choose. Too big to fail, too rich to lose. And I’m still too broke to vote. So how do we fix it then? Give her away. In the End is where it begins. So I vote we return the country back to its original owners: the Native Americans.”
Hopefully, this is a new era in the work of Nick Cannon. More celebrities and others in the public eye must speak out with radical positions; for better or worse, their opinions carry an immense amount of weight with the average person. Instead of just endorsing a candidate, Cannon has made a bolder and more principled statement.
Unfortunately, Cannon’s groundbreaking poem was completely ignored by the mainstream media, who seemed more concerned with stirring up drama between him and his ex-wife Mariah Carey. Cannon shot back at the media, pointing out he is on great terms with his ex, and that news outlets were more concerned with a nonexistent fluff story than the political statement he made earlier in the week with “Too Broke To Vote.”