BLACK RACISM, ANTI-SEMITISM, ANTI-ASIAN, HOMOPHOBIC, VIOLENCE
AND IGNORANCE AS DISPLAYED BY THIS CLOWN CHAPPELLE
Comedian Dave Chappelle’s The Closer: A racist
tirade disguised as stand-up comedy
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2021/10/dave-chappelle-one-more-racist-black.html
Chappelle Netflix special is 'hate speech disguised as jokes,' advocate says
Comedian Dave Chappelle’s The Closer: A racist tirade disguised as stand-up comedy
On October 5, veteran US comedian David Chappelle premiered his latest stand-up comedy special The Closer on Netflix.
Chapelle’s 72-minute special, however, is not comedy so much as it is a racist rant. No other major American entertainment figure in recent memory has openly advocated anti-Semitism and gloated over racist violence directed against Asians, whom he foully chooses to identify with the COVID-19 pandemic, in this manner.
He recalls being ill with COVID-19 and watching videos of black people assaulting Asian Americans, asserting, “I couldn’t help but feel like, when I saw these brothers beating these Asians up, that’s probably what’s happening inside of my body.”
Amid a ferocious campaign by the fascist right to demonize China, anti-Asian hate crimes have surged in the United States. In many instances, those engaging in violence against Asian Americans invoked the libel that China was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Immediately following his anti-Asian comments, Chappelle likened Jewish people to an invasive alien species: “So they come back to Earth, and they decide they want to claim the Earth for their very own. Pretty good plot line, huh? I call it ‘Space Jews.’”
Chapelle roots these remarks in his advocacy of racial identity politics. As he says, “Gay people are minorities, until they need to be White again.” Chapelle holds a view of the world in which racial and sexual identities are locked in a zero-sum game, so that an advance in gay rights or women’s rights is a defeat for black rights.
The New York Times’s columnist Roxane Gay, a race and gender zealot, condemns Chapelle’s special as a “joyless tirade of incoherent and seething rage, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia.” However, she goes on to claim that Chappelle “delivers five or six lucid moments of brilliance.” She praises his “interesting and accurate observation about the white gay community conveniently being able to claim whiteness at will. There’s a compelling observation about the relatively significant progress the L.G.B.T.Q. community has made, while progress toward racial equity has been much slower.” That is, Gay agrees with Chapelle’s premises but perhaps not all his conclusions. It is worth noting that she says nothing about Chapelle’s anti-Asian and anti-Semitic observations.
In 2017, Gay gave proof of her anti-democratic outlook when, in the face of criticisms about the destruction of careers and lives in the #MeToo witch-hunt on the basis of unnamed, unsubstantiated accusations, she complained about “a lot of hand-wringing about libel and the ethics of anonymous disclosure.”
It is not an accident that Chappelle finds himself squarely in the anti-Semitic camp. Practitioners of black nationalist ideology have frequently made common cause with white supremacists and other political filth, as have proponents of Zionism and Jewish nationalism, for that matter. The Nation of Islam, which notoriously conducted meetings with the Ku Klux Klan in the Jim Crow South and praised American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is also known for its violent anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and anti-gay rhetoric.
In an earlier day, Chappelle established himself as a commentator with an acerbic wit who could choose deserving targets and developed a youth following in particular as a result. He is best known for his hit three-season run of Chappelle’sShow (2003-2006) on Comedy Central. Chappelle famously abandoned the series and a lucrative contract with the television station due to his criticism of the show. While many of the show’s segments were vulgar and backward, his skits lampooning former-President George W. Bush’s efforts to sell the war in Iraq did capture an element of the criminality and gangsterism of the administration.
Chappelle’s personal and political background is worth a comment. Born on August 24, 1973 in Washington D.C. to parents William David Chappelle III and Yvonne Seon, David Khari Webber Chappelle has lived firmly ensconced within an upper middle class African and African American milieu. His father, William, attended Ivy League colleges and taught music while serving as dean of students at Antioch College in the town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Chappelle himself owns large amounts of property.
The elder Chappelle was involved in civil rights and protest groups, including Help Us Make a Nation (H.U.M.A.N.), which sought to “address institutional racism and discrimination,” according to the 365 Project. Chappelle’s mother, Yvonne, worked for a time in the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s bourgeois nationalist government of Patrice Lumumba. Notably, she later worked in the United States Department of State. She then founded a Black Studies Center at Wright State University.
Chappelle (net worth $50 million) introduces The Closer by declaring, “I’m rich and famous,” followed by the explanation that the “last 17 months were hell and I cannot imagine what everyone went through.” While this elementary acknowledgement of the socially disparate impact of coronavirus may be honest, the pandemic has had an accelerating impact on society, sharpening class conflict.
Whereas the working population has responded to the pandemic with a still-growing strike wave against the profits-before-lives policy of the capitalist leaders, the ruling class and its well-to-do hangers-on have responded by whipping up fascistic and racist demagogy to divide and confuse the working class. This has gone hand in hand with the homicidal drive to force teachers, students, workers and parents into unsafe workplaces and schools to resume production amid record COVID-19 infections and deaths.
The movement of the working class, which has revolutionary implications, is attracting the most thoughtful and progressive layers of the middle classes to its side and repelling the more selfish and degenerate affluent elements. It is the responsibility of the former to reject the racist garbage that bourgeois society is secreting from its pores and to fight for the international unity of the working class of all nations and backgrounds.
One does not know which is more disgusting, Chapelle’s gloating about violence against Asian Americans or the declaration by the New York Times, which claims to be America’s “newspaper of record” that such a tirade contains moments of “brilliance.”
Netflix Defends Comedian Dave Chappelle Against the Cancel Culture Bullies
Lenny Bruce would be proud.
Stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce stood up for his right under the First Amendment to deliver cutting-edge comedy to audiences, irrespective of its offensive content. He was working against impossible odds at the time. After being convicted of obscenity charges in New York in November 1964, stemming from his performance at a Greenwich Village café, Bruce was blacklisted by nightclubs across the country for fear that they would be caught up in his legal troubles. Bruce died a broken man at the age of 40.
In 2003, 37 years after his death, Bruce received New York State’s first posthumous pardon, which former Governor George Pataki granted as “a declaration of New York’s commitment to upholding the First Amendment.”
Lenny Bruce did not live long enough to see the path he forged for comedians of future generations, who wanted to make audiences laugh at themselves and society with controversial routines. However, not all is copacetic in today’s toxic cancel culture world.
For example, while no longer facing arrest and conviction for saying what is on his mind, one of today’s most controversial comedians is in the crosshairs of cancel culture’s self-proclaimed enforcers of politically correct speech. He is the Emmy-winning black comedian David Chappelle.
Thankfully, however, this time the bullies are not getting their way. Chappelle is pushing back against them in his comic routines. Netflix, which has been presenting his specials under a multiyear package deal, is standing by him. Lenny Bruce would be cheering Chappelle and Netflix on.
The latest flashpoint is Chappelle’s special entitled The Closer, which first aired on October 5th. This program has infuriated transgender activists and their supporters, inside and outside of Netflix. They accuse Netflix of providing Chappelle a platform for alleged transphobic hate speech.
Chappelle aligned himself with another target of cancel culture because of her transgender comments, the best-selling author of the Harry Potter series J.K. Rowling. Rowling was lambasted for objecting to the use of the politically correct phrase, “people who menstruate,” rather than using the normal word “women” when talking about menstruation.
Rowling expressed what should be an obvious and non-controversial point: there are two biological sexes, male and female. As a matter of course, biological men don’t menstruate. But you can’t say that anymore without coming under fire from the cancel culture bullies.
"They canceled J.K. Rowling – my God," Chappelle said in defense of Rowling during The Closer comedy special. "Effectively, she said gender was a fact, the trans community got mad as [expletive], they started calling her a TERF [trans-exclusionary radical feminist]." Chappelle added that he identifies as a "TERF" himself.
“Gender is a fact,” Chappelle said in reference to the biological differences between men and women. "Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. That is a fact," Chappelle observed.
Some Netflix employees were enraged and demanded that their employer sever its ties with Chappelle and remove The Closer from its lineup.
One trans employee tweeted that Chappelle’s special “attacks the trans community, and the very validity of transness.” The employee attributed violence against transgenders to supposedly harmful speech without presenting any proof of a causal connection.
But Netflix’s senior management did not cave. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos wrote a memo to employees explaining Netflix’s position on freedom of expression and declaring that “we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.”
“Our goal is to entertain the world, which means programming for a diversity of tastes. This member-centric view has driven our growth over the last 20 years, despite all the competition, and remains Netflix’s north star today. We also support artistic freedom to help attract the best creators, and push back on government and other censorship request,” Sarandos explained. He added that “we’ll always have titles some members and employees dislike or believe are harmful.”
Sarandos’s defense of artistic freedom enraged the cancel culture bullies even more. Some employees have threatened to stage a walkout.
Reed Hastings, Netflix’s other co-chief executive, tried to engage in a dialogue with some upset company employees over the company’s internal message board. One employee asked rhetorically whether Netflix was “making the wrong historical choice around hate speech.” Hastings responded that he believed Netflix was making “the right long term choice” through its commitment to “artistic expression and pleasing our members.”
Hastings also wrote this in response to another employee’s claim that Chappelle’s words were harmful: “In stand-up comedy, comedians say lots of outrageous things for effect. Some people like the art form, or at least particular comedians, and others do not.”
When an employee accused Chappelle of displaying a history of homophobia and bigotry, Hastings replied: “We disagree with your characterization and we’ll continue to work with Dave Chappelle in the future. We see him as a unique voice, but can understand if you or others never want to watch his show.”
Netflix’s senior management refused to apologize to the woke crowd for its programming selections, while recognizing that they cannot please all the people all the time. The good thing about a free society is that people usually get to choose what they want to say and hear.
Those people who think Chappelle’s brand of comedy is offensive or harmful have plenty of other programming on television and online to choose from. Nobody is forcing anybody else to watch Chappelle, subscribe to Netflix, or work at Netflix.
A small number of vociferous people with hurt feelings, objecting on social media to this or that person’s expressions of opinion on controversial subjects, have no right to force the rest of us to submit to their code of politically correct speech.
Banishing Dave Chappelle from Netflix, where many enjoy watching this highly popular comedian perform, is censorship by mob rule.
At least one transgender comedian, Flame Monroe, is defending Chappelle’s Netflix special and understands what is at stake if cancel culture prevails. "As a comedian, I believe that I don't want to be censored," Monroe said on TMZ. "I think that nothing is off-limits.”
“The world has become too censored." Monroe added, "If you are in a room and you are uncomfortable, you are free to leave."
Trans activists and their supporters have cherry-picked certain of Chappelle’s jokes out of context to dramatize their portrayal of him as transphobic. But Chappelle’s humor in The Closer is not aimed at attacking transgender people in general or making fun of the suffering that some of them have endured. “I am not indifferent to the suffering of someone else,” Chappelle said.
Chappelle is mocking the lengths to which trans activists are willing to go in trying to make all of us accede, including in the language we use, to the notion that one’s gender is invariably nothing more than a personal preference.
How absurd extreme trans ideology can be is demonstrated in this “expert” statement submitted to a federal court by a Duke University School of Medicine professor, who has also served as the director of the Duke Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care:
“It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.”
We might as well edit or throw away all those biology textbooks that have reached a different conclusion, based on real science, for so many years if political correctness wins the day.
Chappelle is pushing back at such nonsense. He uses humor to reject the demand that one’s gender preference must rule in all societal settings, irrespective of the impact on the vast majority of people in terms of such matters as privacy rights and fair competition in sports.
Chappelle is also telling us not to divide ourselves into warring tribes, nor to take ourselves so seriously.
Towards the end of The Closer, Chappelle recounts a heartbreaking story of a trans woman comedian, Daphne Dorman, whom he had met in San Francisco. Chappelle grew to respect Dorman both professionally and as a friend. He used the trans comedian to open some of his own shows. After Dorman tragically committed suicide in 2019, Chappelle set up a trust fund for the trans comedian’s daughter.
Chappelle joked that he hoped to tell the daughter someday that he knew her “father,” who “was a hell of a woman.”
“I don’t know what the trans community did for her,” Chapelle said during the conclusion of The Closer, “but I don’t care because I feel like she wasn’t their tribe. She was mine. She was a comedian in her soul.”
Dorman’s two sisters came to Chappelle’s defense, as Daphne Dorman herself had done. “Daphne was in awe of Dave’s graciousness,” Dorman’s sister Becky wrote in a text to the Daily Beast. “She did not find his jokes rude, crude, off-coloring, off-putting, anything. She thought his jokes were funny. Daphne understood humor and comedy—she was not offended. Why would her family be offended?”
Dorman’s younger sister Brandy wrote in a Facebook post about Chappelle and The Closer that “At this point I feel like he poured his heart out in that special and no one noticed. What he’s saying to the LGBTQ family is, ‘I see you. Do you see me? I’m mourning my friend in the best way I know how. Can you see me? Can you allow me that?’… This was a call to come together, that two oppressed factions of our nation put down their keyboards and make peace. How sad that this message was lost in translation.”
The cancel culture bullies are not listening. They want their pound of flesh. Kudos to Netflix for not giving it to them.
Netflix CEO Now Says He ‘Screwed Up’ Defending Dave Chappelle Calling Out the 2SLGBTQQIA+ Agenda
Caving to the mutiny people have pushed within his own company, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos now claims he “screwed up” when defending comedian Dave Chappelle against the 2SLGBTQQIA+ activists outraged over his explosive stand-up special The Closer.
According to Sarandos, his defense of Chappelle should have “led with more humanity” by acknowledging the “pain and hurt” his employees were feeling due to the company’s decision to host Chappelle’s special.
“I screwed up that internal communication. I did that, and I screwed it up in two ways,” Sarandos told Variety in an interview on Tuesday. “First and foremost, I should have led with a lot more humanity.”
“I had a group of employees who were definitely feeling pain and hurt from a decision we made,” he added. “And I think that needs to be acknowledged up front before you get into the nuts and bolts of anything. I didn’t do that.”
Chappelle’s special, which heavily mocked and called out the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lobby for its censorious assault on free speech.
Watch below:
Upon the initial backlash over , Ted Sarandos defended the comedian’s right to artistic expressing while dismissing concerns that his words could lead to “real-world harm.”
“We know that a number of you have been left angry, disappointed and hurt by our decision to put Dave Chappelle’s latest special on Netflix,” Sarandos wrote in a company-wide email. “With The Closer, we understand that the concern is not about offensive-to-some content but titles which could increase real-world harm.”
“While some employees disagree, we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm,” he added.
(Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)
Sarandos now believes that he misspoke and agreed with his critics that “storytelling has real impact in the real world.”
Of course storytelling has real impact in the real world. I reiterate that because it’s why I work here, it’s why we do what we do. That impact can be hugely positive, and it can be quite negative. So, I would have been better in that communication. They were joining a conversation already in progress, but out of context. But that happens, internal emails go out. In all my communications I should lean into the humanity up front and not make a blanket statement that could land very differently than it was intended.
What can only be characterized as a splitting of the baby moment, Ted Sarandos then reaffirmed his support for artistic freedom while acknowledging the “pain” of his employees.
We are trying to support creative freedom and artistic expression among the artists that work at Netflix. Sometimes, and we do make sure our employees understand this, because of that — because we’re trying to entertain the world, and the world is made up of folks with a lot of different sensibilities and beliefs and senses of humor and all those things — sometimes, there will be things on Netflix that you dislike.
When asked if The Closer could classify as “hate speech,” Sarandos said that he draws the line “on something that would intentionally call for physically harming other people or even remove protections.” On whether or not Netflix would remove the special, Sarandos said, “I don’t believe there have been many calls to remove it.”
As of this writing, a Change.org petition calling on Netflix to remove the special has over 10,000 signatures.
Going forward, Sarandos pledged that Netflix would “continue to invest enormous amounts of content dollars in LGBTQ+ stories for the world and giving them a global platform.”
Though Sarandos stood by Chappelle, his co-CEO Reed Hastings kept silent about the matter, leading to speculation that a rift had occurred in the company as employees organized a walkout scheduled for Wednesday, October 20.
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