Tom MacDonald is a young Canadian rapper fearlessly coming to dominate that musical genre.  His recent single titled "Fake Woke" reached #1 on the All-Genre U.S. iTunes sales chart.  His accompanying video has been viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube.  The song is a four-minute-long rollercoaster ride of politically incorrect common sense, delivered rapid-fire with lines like "Facts don't care about your feelings" and "There's a difference between hate speech and speech that you hate."  Who can argue with such truths?

White liberals, that's who.

To be brutally honest, discovering that a white sixty-year-old grandfather can actually enjoy listening to rap music was a bit of a culture shock.  Ever since the genre first became popular, I've held the same low opinion of rap music as Bruce Willis in the otherwise forgettable movie The Last Boy Scout — it made me want to scream in pain.  It was never the music as much as the messages being conveyed, which glamorized prostitution, gang violence, demeaning attitudes toward women, and drug use.  It seemed to be a rule to include gratuitous use of the "N"-word, presumably to make the bars (what lyrics are called in rap music) as offensive as possible and potentially get white fans of the music into trouble with the cancel culture if they make the mistake of singing along with the song.

It's okay if Snoop Dogg says it, and it's even okay if a blue-checked white liberal like Eminem or Quentin Tarantino says the "N"-word, but if a fifteen-year-old white girl makes the mistake of simply repeating what Snoop said, she can easily have her future destroyed by the cancel culture if someone happens to record her in the act and post the video on the internet. If liberals didn't have double-standards, they wouldn't have any standards at all.

It turns out that "Fake Woke" wasn't a fluke. Tom's ability to communicate logic and wisdom compatible with conservative values proved to be equally powerful and entertaining in songs with titles like "No Lives Matter" and "People Are Stupid" that have unforgettable lines about controversial topics like abortion — "They say that bacteria is proof of life on Mars, but a heartbeat isn't proof of life on Earth? Weird."  These are powerful messages that resonate with his fans.

When I heard those lyrics, I had to stop the song and backtrack so I could listen more carefully to those words of wisdom a second time.  Tom MacDonald is clearly not afraid to speak out in defense of Christianity or criticize the cancel culture mob.  His song "Cancelled" explains why he can't be cancelled: he is a fully independent artist.  He cannot be dropped by a record label or sponsors and doesn't even have an agent or publicist, yet his music is topping the charts for all genres.  Tom owns the master recordings, and he writes and performs the music, and his lovely and talented girlfriend directs and produces all his videos.  They don't need anybody else.  They have one other employee or assistant or friend who also contributes to the overall effort, but with three people, Tom MacDonald is doing better financially with total artistic freedom than artists creating music under a record label, and he's delivering the highest quality content in his industry.

In another song called "Clown World," The very first words in the song are, "We keep talking about leaving a better planet for our children.  How about leaving better children for our planet?"  One minute later, MacDonald adds, "When I was a child, the only races that we hated were the ones that we ran but didn't win."  This is absolutely brilliant, old-fashioned common sense that only a devoted liberal might find offensive.

Most open-minded people tend to look shocked and stunned when they first hear the lyrical wisdom of Tom MacDonald.  They don't expect that kind of intelligent thinking from people even at the highest levels of government, and Tom MacDonald looks like the last guy you'd suspect was also the smartest guy in the room.

Tom might dress up like a scary clown, but don't let the tattoos and body piercings fool you.  His prolific songwriting ability and full control of his career (and his cash flow) tell only part of the story of what an astute businessman this young rapper happens to be.  He knows how to cultivate a relationship with his fans.  As someone who has recently been accused of being a racist for merely expressing my opinion that Black Lives Matter is a domestic terrorist organization relatively unconcerned about innocent black lives, my own immediate concern became whether listening to and appreciating Tom MacDonald's music meant the accusation was true, and I might be a racist in spite of not thinking of myself as one.

After all, one of my favorite Tom MacDonald songs is called "Whiteboy."  Tom frequently raps about Black Lives Matter and even said the name is a stupid one for a socialist organization.  He isn't afraid to say all lives matter, either.  So, after giving that ironic dilemma some consideration, I decided that if black people hated Tom's music, that concern might be legitimate.

Then I watched dozens of "reaction" videos from YouTube podcasters that included Gothix, Half and Jai, SimbaTV, D-Gibby, Justin and Staci, No Life Shaq, RDiss or McReaction, The Officer Tatum, Too LIT Mafia, and the Conversation (to name but a few) and discovered that there is a reason Tom MacDonald is topping music charts across all genres — people don't just like his music.  They love him and his positive messages and his courageous middle finger to the cancel culture.

Not every reaction to Tom's music from these reviewers was equally enthusiastic.  A few critics didn't care for Tom's singing of the chorus, but everyone seemed to agree that the messages in his rap lyrics were right on target.  After breathing a sigh of relief, I felt reassured that black people and I were on common ground when it comes to appreciating the music of Tom MacDonald.  As if reinforcing my impression of this young man as an astute entrepreneur, I noticed that many of these YouTube channels have given credit to MacDonald for helping grow their audience, and a number of them had pinned messages from MacDonald himself thanking them for their honest opinions of his work.  The more videos they produce critiquing the work of Tom MacDonald, the larger their audience grows, and the more these podcasters promote the music of Tom MacDonald, the larger his audience becomes.

I spent four years in business school to learn that this is called "synergy", where the whole system becomes greater than the sum of its individual parts.  This is good, old-fashioned, commonsense capitalism at its best.

God bless Tom MacDonald.  He's even begun to catch the attention of conservative voices like Glenn Beck, and he appeared on Fox News with Martha McCallum.  His positive cultural messages are resonating with fans of rap music.

They even got the attention of one sixty-year-old white grandfather.

John Leonard is a freelance writer and author of Always a Next One, a collection of short stories about animal rescue, as well as the paranormal suspense thriller Secondhand Sight.  He may be contacted via his website at southernprose.com.

Image: Tom MacDonald via YouTube.