Even a cursory scroll through Kanye’s online fan circles attests to how deep his followers’ loyalty runs. Kanye has the almost unwavering support of a vast, endlessly forgiving community of fans spread across Twitter, Reddit, and in particular the website Kanye to The (KTT), one of the internet’s busiest and most influential rap message boards.

At any point of the day, it’s not unusual to find more than 6,000 active KTT users engaged in conversations spread across hundreds of unruly threads, some of which span hundreds of thousands of messages. To an outsider, the forum is practically impenetrable, an infinite scroll of emojis, memes, shit posts, and in-jokes. The forum’s mostly twentysomething, mostly male regulars communicate in short, hurried jabs of thought, writing as if they have better places to be even though, to judge from the frequency of their posts, many of them do not.



There is substantial conversation on KTT, but you have to dig to find it. Mostly the regulars just kill time, debating music and fashion, pouring over the most inconsequential leaked news and gossip, lusting after Kim Kardashian, or hazing each other. Somehow they never tire of ranking Kanye’s albums—it’s their default hot-stove debate, and it occurs daily—or rehashing old battles about Drake or J. Cole. But on a Thursday last month, ahead of a flood of new Kanye projects and with the forum’s namesake in the news constantly, there were more pertinent issues to discuss. Users debated the veracity of a supposedly leaked album cover making the rounds on Twitter. “The cover is fake,” a user with the handle Banana Lero wrote. “Kanye is too passionate about fonts to use Helvetica on two straight albums.”



Like many forum regulars, 24-year-old Mikey Vercetti of Danville, Virginia, believes Kanye gets a bad rap and sees the backlash to his Trump comments as part of a pattern. “People weren’t trying to see it from his point of view or learn where he was coming from when he said it,” Vercetti tells me. “A lot of people have to have something to be mad about. They see things and they go, ‘OK, we gotta cancel Kanye.’ But they didn’t think beyond that.”

Vercetti discovered the Kanye to The forum about four years ago while searching for fashion inspiration and gradually got sucked into its culture. “KTT is how I learned to troll people,” he says. “I’ll say something, and if you get mad about it it’s not my fault. You’re the one mad about it. That’s how a lot of people on the forum post.” He’s gotten so used to trolling, he says, that he’s started doing it offline, too. “You know how Kanye said the slavery thing with no context? A lot of times I say things now in real life with no context just to get a rise.”



Given their shared knack for provocation, Kanye’s fans say it was almost inevitable that their hero, a producer who was told he could never rap, would see some of himself in Trump, a businessman who nobody believed could be president. The parallels between the two are lost on no one: Both are high achieving narcissists, cults of personality whose biggest believers will always be themselves. And no matter how much they accomplish, both will always be seen on some level as underdogs by their most loyal supporters. But while there are elements of both Trump and Kanye’s bases that clearly relish in watching their idols ruffle feathers, the Kanye internet isn’t nearly as venomous as the darker corners of the alt-right internet.



Despite its rampant trolling, KTT is a community, and not an entirely unloving one. In a thread from this spring, a 20-year-old board regular named Spanky announced that he had stage four cancer and vowed to fight it. Within mere weeks, though, the severity of his condition became clear, and he broke the news the board had been fearing: “I’m going to pretty much get morphine tomorrow and pass out and never wake up.”



He spent his final hours posting from the ICU. “I love everyone here,” he wrote in his farewell post. “This site isn’t only about music but it’s about bringing together a group of people to discuss anything that’s on their minds.”



The ensuing wake played out in a deluge of sad Don Draper and crying Michael Jordan memes, but was no less heartbreaking for it. The regulars grieved for Spanky like family. Some kept refreshing the thread, hoping against hope that he would return for one last post. Others shared farewell messages he may not have been alive to read: “I love you man,” a user named HFM wrote. “My Cole hate was never personal.”