His white shirt and the appearance of Tucker Carlson prove it: Kanye West does not want to go back

Tucker Carlson went to great lengths to remix Kanye West for his large conservative audience Thursday night, calling him "an artist", describing his erratic tweetstorms as "social media posts free-form", and presenting him as a "Christian evangelist". If you hadn't watched Fox News in the past 20 years, you would never have suspected it was the same network and time slot on which Bill O'Reilly once called West " the dumb little rapper".

< p class="dcr-4iq4cq">But the network's view of West, who now goes by the name Ye, has changed markedly in the six years since the rapper -fashionista made a right turn to conservative libertarianism. Carlson was prepping his viewers for West as an introduction to an exclusive two-part interview, shot at West's fashion brand Yeezy headquarters in Los Angeles.

During a well into an hour, West was unsmiling and verbose; among many other things, he compared his choice to debut a "White Lives Matter shirt" at Paris Fashion Week to Tonya Harding attempting a triple axel ("It's using an instinct"), has attributed the fashion industry's backlash against the shirt to a campaign orchestrated by Anna Wintour ("All his dolls had something to say"), and compared Donald Trump to Ralph Lauren ("He has his own buildings. He has does Ivanka"). In part two on Friday night, West took offense to public speculation about his sanity ("It hurts me") while suggesting that Gap knew about the Uvalde shooting before it happened ( "Have I reached Alex Jones territory yet?").

And as he unrolled those dark twisted errors with a lanyard showing an ultrasound draped around his neck, a visibly puzzled Carlson nonetheless nodded and smiled as he tried to assure his viewers that the man he was hosting was definitely worth listening to. "You can judge for yourself," Carlson told the camera.

The one-on-one reminded me of another defining moment in West's career . In 2...