Bullies Aren't Victims
Your TV came with a remote. If you dislike Dave Chappelle’s final Netflix special, change the channel.
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When you become the bully, you can’t also claim to be the victim.
Militant LGBTQ activists are in another season of rage following Dave Chappelle’s sixth and final Netflix special. Most of the people complaining didn’t even watch the final show — or any of the six specials Netflix aired.
NPR @NPR
In his new Netflix special, Dave Chappelle tries — and often fails — to justify button-pushing jokes about gay people, trans people, and feminists, writes NPR critic Eric Deggans. https://t.co/gG1zFMv2eMBeing offended isn’t news. America is tired of racing from one mic huddle to the next as disgruntled person after person steps forward and declares their feelings are hurt. No one cares. No one is forcing any of these people to watch a special they clearly didn’t watch — I can tell this because I thought Chappelle bent over backwards and, in my opinion, was too accommodating when separating the person from the bullying behavior.
But who cares?
It was a comedy show. It’s comedy. There are no sacred cows in comedy.
The people who demand that certain things are off limits in comedy ruin comedy. Some of Chappelle’s jokes were directed towards Republicans, some at white women. I’m there to laugh. If you’re going to come at me with a joke you best make me laugh. He did. He joked at the expense of black people, Asian people, Democrats, Republicans, no one was spared. South Park is similar.
Half of the fun was the audience’s reaction. It was entertaining to watch Chappelle jump over their socially-conditioned barriers and provoke them to laughter with purposefully-designed absurdity.
Self-appointed bouncers of humor who place velvet ropes around topics kill discourse. It’s the same with being told you can only enjoy the works of those who agree with you. I can’t stand the annoying, Marxist, militant left’s policing of culture and I roll my eyes when any self-appointed bouncer on our political side of the aisle tells me or others that we can’t enjoy this music or that special because the creator doesn’t 100% share our views. Tribalism promotes authoritarianism and I don’t buy the snake oil that embracing even more tribalism is the way to end cancel culture. If we only ever watched or listened to music, films, or TV made by people who thought like us, life would be horrible.
The point Chappelle makes in his final Netflix special is summed up by his joke about DaBaby:
"Part of the LGBTQ+ community doesn't know DaBaby's history," Chappelle said. "He once shot [19-year-old Jaylin Craig] and killed him, in Walmart. This is true."
"DaBaby shot and killed a [man] in Walmart in North Carolina. Nothing bad happened to his career," the Emmy Award-winner continued. "Do you see where I'm going with this? In our country, you can shoot and kill a [man], but you better not hurt a gay person's feelings."
Hurting someone’s feelings is a bigger transgression in our modern society than ending another’s life because people have conflated protected class with sainthood and offending someone is a capital offense — you’ll either be driven to economic death, social death, or actual death, as Chappelle notes when discussing his friend that Twitter dragged for the crime of defending him.
For some time Chappelle’s shows have been less about comedy and more about reflecting on culture and cancel culture with story-telling. I don’t think any conservative, myself included, believes that he is some potential, politically conservative ally in the cause of policy promotion. There’s a simpler way to look at this: common sense becomes obvious when things become so partisan and ridiculous.
Love or hate how he did it, but throughout this entire fight, Dave Chappelle is one of very few people to ask everyone involved if they’ve stopped to consider how women feel in all of this and his example, refreshingly stripped of all political correctness, resonates. Transcript of his remarks below (clearly, if you’re familiar, NSFW):
“They canceled J.K. Rowling, my God. J.K. Rowling wrote all the Harry Potter books by herself. She sold so many books, the Bible worries about her. And they canceled her because, she said in an interview and this is not exactly what she said, but effectually she said that gender was a fact. And then the trans community got mad as shit, they started calling her a TERF. I didn’t even know what the fuck that was, but I know that trans people make up words to win arguments.
So I looked it up. TERF is an acronym. It stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. This is a real thing, this is a group of women that hate transgender. They don’t hate transgender women but they look at trans women the way we Blacks might look at Black face. It offends them like, ‘Oh, this bitch is doing an impression of me.’
Now I shouldn’t speak on this because I’m not a woman nor am I a trans. But as we’ve established … I am a feminist. That’s right.I’m team TERF. I agree. I agree, man. Gender is a fact. You have to look at it from a woman’s perspective. Look at it like this, Caitlyn Jenner whom I have met, wonderful person. Caitlyn Jenner … was voted woman of the year. Her first year as a woman. Ain’t that something? Beat every bitch in Detroit. She’s better than all of you. Never even had a period, ain’t that something? I’d be mad as shit if I was a woman. I’d be mad if it was me.”
As the joke goes, I felt this.
It reminded me of this point from Kira Davis:
Trans women can only be women if women aren’t women.
Womanhood is slowly being erased by men looking to be accepted as women. The irony would be hilarious if it weren’t so dire. When women wanted to play and enjoy sports the same way men do, we created our own leagues, clubs and events. Just because we can’t generally physically compete with men didn’t mean we should be pushed out of enjoying athletics. We set up our own spaces and now it is an accepted part of society. Except now transgender athletes who are physically and biologically men are pushing female athletes out of their own space in the name of equality. Teenage girls are forced to compete against boys their own age who will almost always be stronger and faster (it feels ridiculous to even have to say that out loud, but here we are). When they speak up about the injustice and unfairness they are silenced, threatened and sometimes even suspended from their teams. Instead of women being heard, they are being told to shut up. The men are talking.
[…]
The trans movement is moving to declare womanhood an abnormality. It is quite ironic that they’ve aligned themselves with the sexism and gender discrimination of old. They don’t even realize it. The trans movement is constantly shaming women for having voices and for disagreeing; they look at us as simply biological entities designed to affirm or deny their value as people; they look at our bodies as grotesque and abnormal, something that needs to be wielded into submission rather than being celebrated for all of its uniqueness.
You can love people while treating them kindly and yet refuse to be bullied into denying one’s biological existence as a sacrifice for cultural acceptance. Chappelle makes this point in his show. Oppressed people don’t have the power to get people “canceled” from society, their jobs, or cancel women from their choice of sport — oppressors do. He notes this, too.
Chappelle bent over backwards to carefully separate the person from the inconsistency of their actions to the point where he seemed on the brink of an apology several times, but it doesn’t matter if it wasn’t total submission. The Marxist left is angry him not because they’re concerned for others, but because their bullying and inconsistency were laid bare on an international stage.
Activists can try to get him canceled, but considering that every television and viewing device comes with a remote, it seems like a more sensible and easier solution for them to just change the channel.
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