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You Know Who Really Hated the Kardashians? Anthony Bourdain

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | August 7, 2020 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | August 7, 2020 |


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The Kardashians are trending today on Twitter, the reason for which they’d probably rather not be trending. It’s become abundantly clear that people associated with Donald Trump and his campaign are taking advantage of Kanye West and trying to place him on the ballot in various states so that he can potentially play spoiler in the November election by siphoning off Biden votes in battleground states. Kanye West isn’t even denying it.


Twitter, meanwhile, is basically insisting that Kim Kardashian and her family take care of this problem, or Twitter will arrange a mass boycott of all of their products. It is unclear if Kim Kardashian is even in a position to “take care of this problem.” She has spoken publicly about Kanye’s bipolar disorder, and she disapproves of the Presidential bid. I’m not sure what else she can do.

I have some sympathy for Kim Kardashian’s position, but that sympathy is limited, because I don’t like Kim Kardashian and her family. Not exactly for the reasons Jon Hamm once expounded — “Being a f**king idiot is a valuable commodity in this culture because you’re rewarded significantly” — but for the same reasons I dislike Jeff Bezos or Steve Mnuchin or even Ellen Degeneres: They represent unchecked capitalism. They have accumulated an amount of wealth that I view as obscene. I’m not saying that they didn’t earn their wealth — they obviously worked hard — but I am saying that no one should be allowed to keep an amount of wealth over a certain number, the number being more than one can reasonably spend in a lifetime. It’s gross.

On the other hand, I don’t know why exactly the late Anthony Bourdain hated the Kardashians, but he really hated the Kardashians. I learned that this week when W. Kamau Bell appeared on Conan’s podcast, Conan Needs a Friend, and relayed an amusing story about a roundtable Bell was supposed to sit on for the The Hollywood Reporter with Anthony Bourdain. Bell decided to do the roundtable because Bourdain was on it, and he hadn’t yet met him.

“And then I got there,” Bell says, “and there were a bunch of other reality-television people, and Tony is standing there talking to the publicist of CNN,” who was basically browbeating Bourdain and saying, ‘I expected more of you.’ And then I walk up, like ‘Hey man!’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I gotta go.’ And he leaves. And he doesn’t do the event. And they’re like, ‘He had some previously scheduled business,’ and I’m like, I can tell a lie when I hear it.”

Bell then walked in and strolled by all the green rooms and saw that Kris Kardashians name was on one of the cards. “I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ Because I knew he hated the Kardashians. He left because Kris Kardashian was there! And he said, ‘I can’t sit at the table with a member of the Kardashians.’”

“I just thought it was one of the greatest things of all time,” Bell says. “I saw Anthony Bourdain leave a CNN publicist because he didn’t want to stomach a Kardashian, and I thought that dude knows who he is. I wish I had that much integrity.”

Bell adds that, at the end of the event, which also featured Leah Remini and RuPaul, Kris Kardashian gave everyone gift bags containing Kardashian products.

Source: Conan Needs a Friend



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