“Black people don’t have to be democrats.” —Chance the Rapper

In the mind of modern-day progressives, the above statement is tantamount to racial treason. Yet it wasn’t Chance who ignited a firestorm in the progressive fever swamps. It was fellow rapper Kanye West. A blizzard of Tweets that began with expressing support for black conservative commentator Candace Owens — who infuriates leftists with her talk about the “ideological civil war” occurring in the black American community, which she refers to as the “victim mentality versus victor mentality” — soon evolved into something far “worse.” West began tweeting support for President Donald Trump, including one with a picture of himself wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, accompanied by the caption “we got love.”

Love is the last thing Kanye got in return. “It’s nice to see black people and white people coming together to be complete freaking lunatics,” tweeted “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn. “That’s mighty white of u Kanye !Nigga if u don’t snap out of it Get out part 2,” offered rapper Snoop Dogg. “So, they’re streaming music in The Sunken Place?? That’s got Be where the audience @kanyewest is courting is gonna buy that new release!…,” added actor Samuel Jackson. “*Gets inspired *Starts writing ‘Get Out 2’,” director Jordan Peele tweeted.

“Get Out” and “Sunken Place” refer to the 2017 horror film “Get Out,” directed by Peele. In it, a racist white family uses mind-controlling hypnotism to steal the bodies of black people. That mind control is illustrated by lead actor Daniel Kaluuya, shown helplessly falling through all-encompassing darkness, unable to resist.

In other words, West can’t be free thinker, because a free thinker — especially a black American one — would never challenge the progressive worldview. A worldview that presently requires unquestioning hatred of Trump. Those who resist must be ostracized — and humiliated — because humiliation serves as warning to other potential “apostates.”

If this seems familiar it’s because what progressives are doing to West comes straight out of Saul Alinsky’s list of 13 “Rules for Radicals” playbook. Rule number 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.”

And how are progressives trying to hurt West? By emulating the worst excesses of communist tyranny personified by Soviet psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky. Snezhnevsky invented the term “sluggish schizophrenia” to describe those who opposed Communism as people who suffered from an “incoherent relationship to their objective social world.”

In other words, one was either communist or mentally ill. Thus, two New York Post stories respectively refer to West suffering from an alleged nervous breakdown and a self-admitted addiction to opioids that precipitated the cancellation of tour dates in 2016. The Twitter-sphere is alive with speculation that West is bipolar, and Hollywood gossip rag RadarOnline insists it has “exclusively learned that wife Kim Kardashian and her famous family believe that drugs may be behind the rapper’s latest meltdown!”

Thus, the Left and its media allies — the same bunch that has advocated for removing a “mentally unfit” Trump via the 25th Amendment — have already begun laying the same groundwork for West’s delegitimization. That delegitimization included a plethora of fake news stories declaring West had lost nine million of his 27.8 million followers.

Celebrities went after West as well. On last Wednesday’s episode of “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert insisted that “Kanye has lost his mind.” Talk-show host Wendy Williams was a bit more creative, declaring that West has “really lost his mind.” “Westworld” actor Jeffrey Wright was even blunter, tweeting, “If you think Donald Trump is a good alternative to anything, you’re out of your phucking tree.”

These celebrities epitomize the reflexive hatred for dissonant voices that has always been a progressive staple. Yet that reality was unbeknownst to millions of Americans because it simmered beneath the surface — until Trump was elected president. Since then the dam has burst, and those who loudly and often proclaimed their commitment to tolerance and diversity have been revealed as utter frauds. Moreover, that exposure has acted like a feedback loop, amplifying the hatred in a manner best described by columnist Victor Davis Hanson. “Everything from the NFL to late-night comedy shows have become Trump-hating venues,” he writes.

West can expect the same treatment.

Is West crazy? As New York Post columnist Ed Krayewski explains, the rapper is “dominating the news cycle” at a time when he is involved with five albums “due for release in the next six weeks.”

Yet West’s state of mind is largely beside the point. He was undoubtedly a leftist hero when he insisted “Bush doesn’t care about black people” during an appearance on NBC at a live benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina relief in 2005. Now that he has shown support for Candace Owens, along with pro-Trump “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, he is not.

Moreover, despite what some conservatives are naive enough to believe, his sudden “conversion” to the other side of the political divide might be nothing more than another self-serving effort to advance his own agenda, much of which depends on a steady diet of notoriety.

Regardless, West has done the nation a huge favor by exposing the American Left’s state of mind. Yet if so many leftists truly believe he is crazy, why are they so outraged?

PJ Media’s Roger Simon offers some insight in that regard, explaining that demagogues like Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters are “still tilting agains [sic] racist and sexist windmills, even if they’re not there. And if they are not there, then they will manufacture them, so they are able to fight them.” He adds, “And so, over the years, developing and evolving from them are now several generations of ‘mini-me’s,’ spouting the same rhetoric, sometimes exactly, sometimes finding new variations of the same tunes, as Social Justice Warriors, etc. It’s now the very air we breathe.”

West just “polluted” the air. He refuses to abide progressive dogma that insists millions of black Americans can either vote Democrat, or remain in a state of perpetual race-based victimization — and that anyone who says otherwise is perpetuating a “white supremacist” worldview.

Yet perhaps what infuriates leftists the most is that, barring recantation, West resembles Trump: a highly flawed agent of change with a hysterical, hate-filled status quo aligned against him.

And like Trump, recantation seems unlikely. His latest song, “Ye vs. The People” debuted Friday on a Los Angeles radio station. It includes the lyrics, “That’s the problem with this damn nation / All blacks gotta be Democrats/ Man, we ain’t made it off the plantation.”

For the last half-century, an overwhelming majority of black Americans have been unquestioning supporters of the Democrat Party. Even a modest change in that status quo would wreak havoc among those whose financial livelihood and/or political aspirations depend on preserving the narrative that America is an endemically racist nation — with no end to the division in sight.

Thus, West’s greatest “sin” comes down to a simple and contemptible reality: In terms of the racial grievance industry, he is bad for business.