C&B Review the Chappelle Netflix Special

BUCK: The Dave Chappelle Netflix special is out. Clay mentioned it yesterday, and I finished my work in time last night. I was a good boy who got my homework done.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: So I felt like I had time to watch a little Dave Chappelle. It was only about an hour and 10, hour and 15, I think. So I watched the special. The central issue that the left is upset about has to do with his comments about the trans community, or trans individuals within the LGBTQ+ community. And just to give you a sense of the dichotomy that he discusses about public anger at people things, here’s a moment where — I think this got a lot of attention — he laid that out.

CHAPPELLE: A lot of the LGBT community doesn’t know DaBaby’s history. He’s a wild guy. He once shot a (bleep) and killed him in Walmart. Oh, this is true. Google it. DaBaby shot and killed a (bleep) in Walmart in North Carolina. Nothing bad happened to his career. Do you see where I’m going with this? In our country, you can shoot and kill a (bleep), but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.

BUCK: Apparently, DaBaby, who I you know a little more about than I do, was at a concert in Florida. I’ve never even heard of this guy before; was a rapper at a concert in Florida and said a bunch of antigay things. I don’t even know what he said, but he said a bunch of anti-gay things and was like his career was in serious jeopardy. He had shot and killed somebody previously and he had a career in rap, and it was fine. This is what Dave Chappelle is saying.

CLAY: Yeah, I didn’t know that full story. My kids, especially my 11-year-old, listened to a lot of rap music, and so he’s familiar with this performer. But that really kind of crystallizes the insane hypocrisy out here. You are better off behaving in a violent fashion against each other than you are saying something negative about the gay community.

They almost canceled the rapper over his comments about the gay community, not over his actual shooting and killing of someone, which is perfect for the modern social justice era. I think we got a couple more clips. By the way, they are demanding that Dave Chappelle, the comedian who we just played that clip from — it’s up on Netflix. They are demanding that his entire comedic performance be pulled off of Netflix, want to cancel him because they say that conversations like these are disrespectful.

BUCK: Oh, no, no, way beyond disrespectful. It’s violence, Clay.

CLAY: Words are violence.

BUCK: They say that it’s actual violence because his comments making fun of people will lead to other people doing violence. Think about the chain of transition, the chain of responsibility will lead to other people doing violence. Therefore, your words that I don’t like are violence.

This is a construct the left uses to shut down speakers on college campuses they don’t like. It’s not the first time they’ve tried this. But here he is. He pointed out a J. K. Rowling, who is a liberal, borderline socialist. She’s one of these billionaire socialists, but she is a person of the left, the Harry Potter author.

But she does think that erasing women as a real thing that is biological and grounded in physical reality is a strange place to go, and she doesn’t agree with it, and Dave Chappelle stands in solidarity in this special with J. K. Rowling.

CHAPPELLE: They’ve canceled people that are more powerful than me. They canceled J. K. Rowling. My God! J. K. Rowling wrote all the Harry Potter books by herself, and they canceled her because effectually she said, “Gender is a fact,” and the trans community got mad and (bleep) and started calling her a TERF. I don’t even know what the (bleep) that was.

So I looked it up. TERF is an acronym stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. It’s a real thing. This is a group of women that hate trans, and they don’t hate transgender women, but they look at trans women the way we blacks might look at blackface. It offends them. Now, I shouldn’t speak on this ’cause I am not a woman, nor am I a trans. But as we’ve established, I am a feminist.

CLAY: It is amazing.

CHAPPELLE: That’s right. I’m Team TERF. I agree. I agree, man. Gender is a fact.

BUCK: See, that’s the sin that he cannot get away with — or, rather they try to not let him get away with. He is getting away with it, by the way. He’s got this Netflix special. Whatever your… First of all, how many people just learned what a TERF is?

CLAY: I have no idea.

BUCK: I gotta say, I’m pretty good on the leftist lexicon. TERF for me I think I had heard it once before and I could figure it out based on the letters, but that’s really an advanced seminar-level leftist word.

CLAY: Well, to me the ultimate hypocrisy here which you could easily drive through — and I support comedians trying to push the envelope regardless of what their political background is. But think about this for a minute, and this is where the ultimate hypocrisy lies. If you decide that you are going to change your gender, you are considered a hero by the modern American left.

If you decide that you are going to change your race, that is horribly racist and unacceptable. Yet my argument for a long time, Buck, has been, I have way more in common with other men than I do with other white men. In other words, if I had to say, “What’s more significant, your race or your gender?” I would say the gender is far more significant. Yet you can choose your gender, and if you question that, you are horribly transphobic. But if you choose your own race, you are horribly racist.

BUCK: And there’s also obviously so much more constant crossover. What do we call somebody who has parents from Mumbai and another parent from Venezuela? What race is this person? There’s actually a tremendous amount of crossover and malleability. Race as a concept is much more malliable. Gender is actually a scientific and demonstrable reality. Race is actually much more… Race is more fluid in many cases.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: One thing I think is fascinating is that they’ll also talk about how you can effectively “appropriate” gender, to borrow a leftist term, but you cannot appropriate a culture, even though in fact all culture constantly appropriates from other cultures. All cultures are constantly borrowing, stealing.

CLAY: Yes, of course. Actually, it’s the highest compliment. For example, ’cause it came out of Ethiopia originally, coffee has been appropriated. That’s what assimilation is. We take the best things from around the world, and everybody uses them.

BUCK: And yet if you do that, now you’ll see if there’s like a white girl who has like braids or does certain hairstyles you see a white guy with dreadlocks, this is considered that’s awful. But if a guy is trans and says now wants to be called a woman, the boundaries there are obviously constantly change. I’d just say this too.

The only parts of this there were some funny moments. There were some cringe moments, too, obviously like watching the special but he said at the end of it all he kind of walked it all back, Clay, and said, “I’m really just talking about white people. I’m actually not criticizing anybody from the LGBTQ community.” That seemed weird to me.

CLAY: Yeah, and I think anytime you put your fealty in any one person, you’re going to disappointed ’cause it’s not your opinions, right? You can’t expect somebody else to perfectly elucidate your opinions. What I would say in general is this is one way I think conservatives can win because you start to get creative people attacking woke culture.

BUCK: You couldn’t do that stand-up that he did last night and get away with it.

CLAY: I could do it now because I’ve got enough money that it doesn’t matter if they try to cancel me.

BUCK: Culturally speaking, you wouldn’t get away with saying the things that Dave Chappelle is saying. That’s another part of it.

CLAY: That’s the problem with identity politics in general that it creates different speech codes for different people based on immutable characteristics we don’t get to choose.