Did comedian Dave Chappelle crack the LGBT edifice?

Citing fundamental facts of biology is one of the greatest offenses that can be committed against LGBT ideology, but perhaps the most dangerous statement made by Chappelle was left almost completely unreported.

Dave Chappelle with Jon Stewart performing at Royal Albert Hall in 2018. (Image: Raph_PH/Wikipedia)

A recent Netflix special starring the comedian Dave Chappelle has sent the biggest names in the American corporate media into a fit of histrionic indignation. The evident reason for this frenzied backlash, which has taken on the tone of panic, is that the reign of “woke” orthodoxy may be under threat. With nothing more than a series of rather tame (if tawdry) jokes and undeniable factual observations, a black comedian has opened up a crack in the edifice of what has appeared until now to be an unstoppable movement: the “intersectional” LGBT juggernaut, or, as Chappelle flippantly calls it, “the alphabet people.”

Crude but true

To merit this outburst Chappelle merely had to cite facts of biology, while simultaneously defending J.K. Rowling, a very liberal and “gay-friendly” author who, nonetheless, has been ostracized by woke elites for having the temerity to denounce the intrusion into women’s bathrooms and changing rooms of men who “identify” as women.

In his comedy special, dubbed, “The Closer,” Chappelle notes with amazement that a figure as famous and influential as Rowling has been “canceled” by the woke mob, merely for noting that gender is an objective reality, rather than a social construct.

“They canceled J.K. Rowling — my God,” said Chappelle. “Effectually she said gender was a fact. The trans community got mad as s**t, they started calling her a TERF,” he added, explaining that “TERF” stands for “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist,” a term of opprobrium invented by transgender activists.

“I’m team TERF,” said Chappelle. “I agree. I agree, man. Gender is a fact . . .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.” The comedian also made an earthy and ironic comment on the unreality of “transgender” sexual organs.

Citing fundamental facts of biology is one of the greatest offenses that can be committed against LGBT ideology, but perhaps the most dangerous statement made by Chappelle was left almost completely unreported in the mainstream media, and that was his comparison of men dressed as women to white people who wear blackface in insulting parodies of black people.

Women “look at transgender women the way we blacks look at blackface,” Chappelle told his audience. “They go ‘oh, this (expletive) is doing an impression of me!’”

Media hysteria

Mainstream media sources, including the New York Times, Esquire, Vanity Fair, the New York Daily News, Entertainment Tonight, and a host of other outlets, immediately launched a sustained campaign of unflattering headlines whose clear purpose was to intimidate Netflix into canceling Chappelle’s comedy special. The impression sought was that Chappelle and Netflix are under siege by an outraged public, and that they are in danger of being tar-brushed with the dread, career-killing epithet of “transphobic.” The media solemnly informed the public that Chappelle was using “hateful language” and that Netflix was suffering a “PR crisis,” facing an “internal uproar,” was caught up in an “ever-widening firestorm.”

In reality, the “firestorm” cited by the mainstream media was little more than a dramatic invention of the media, which has been frantically dishing out quotes from LGBT press releases and Twitter accounts and citing the case of a handful of “transgender” individuals within Netflix who had expressed outrage at the special. The rest of the material, per custom, was bland “woke” rhetoric framed as news commentary. Similar outbursts had worked to silence dissenters and damage their careers a thousand times in the past, and it appears that the media were counting on it to work again.

However, after two weeks of this barrage, Netflix’s executives appear to be unimpressed, and even contemptuously dismissive of a campaign that would have driven a corporate entity to its knees only a year ago.

Although Netflix has allowed employees to express their opposition to the Chappelle special, it has strongly rejected their arguments, particularly those that claim that “violence” will be done to “transgender people” as a result. To add insult to injury to LGBT wokeism, the company has suspended three activist employees who interrupted a meeting of Netflix directors to make a protest against the special, and fired another for leaking private information about it to the press. A threatened “walkout” of “transgenders” and their “allies” at the company scheduled for October 20 has also elicited little concern from Netflix.

Chappelle himself has mockingly dismissed the “firestorm,” telling an audience at a recent, well-attended event at the Hollywood Bowl, “If this is what being canceled is like, I love it,” and unleashing a string of expletives against Twitter, NBC News, ABC News, and “all these stupid (expletive) networks.”

“I’m not talking to them,” said Chappelle, “I’m talking to you. This is real life.”

“Intersectional” ideology

The media frenzy has taken on a particular sense of urgency in this case for two obvious reasons. First, Dave Chappelle’s attacks on LGBT ideology have the potential to undermine the most important seam in the metal of the movement, and that is the “intersectional” joining of black civil rights and gender ideology.

This unnatural union has always been the weakest point in “intersectionality,” which is an attempt to fuse together various and disparate ideological causes within the broad spectrum of neo-Marxist identity politics. It may be understood more simply as an attempt by LGBT ideologues to co-opt racial minorities and their political movements. Comparing black people and other racial minorities whose skin color is a biologically-determined fact, with people who deny their own biology and insist that the rest of the world do so as well, is obviously insulting and demeaning to the former but politically beneficial to the latter. Chappelle appears to be alluding to this with his devastating “blackface” comparison, and his popularity and minority status simultaneously provide him with a degree of protection from intersectional LGBT activists who claim to be “allies” of black civil rights.

Without the false analogy between racial minorities and “sexual minorities,” LGBT would quickly lose the appearance of occupying a moral high ground. However, the movement has even more to lose if its corporate sponsors cut and run, and this is the second reason Chappelle’s Netflix special is so dangerous. Netflix is a massively-influential part of the broad corporate media coalition that has collectively imposed the “woke” orthodoxy of LGBT on the public for the last eight years, with show after show dramatizing the cause. If Netflix bails out, other corporate LGBT “allies” might follow and the movement might lose its grip on power. This fear is being openly expressed by the corporate media entities such as CNN.

“Is this an example of Netflix resisting so-called cancel culture?” asked CNN’s Brian Stelter to Puck founder Matthew Belloni in a recent interview. “Absolutely,” Belloni answered, noting that “a big, Hollywood, institutional entity” is “standing by Dave Chappelle, even amid outrage of its own employees.”

“There’s going to be a walk-out of employees at Netflix who are so upset by the hateful language in its special, yet Neflix has decided that it is in the best interest of its business model to have a free and open platform for this kind of comedy special,” added Belloni.

USA Today is worrying out loud that “Netflix’s support of Dave Chappelle is setting a dangerous precedent,” according to one recent headline. “Netflix purports to be a beacon for inclusion in front of and behind the camera. But growing controversy over Dave Chappelle’s latest standup special, ‘The Closer,’ proves it has much further to go,” stated the article, written by two USA Today reporters.

What adds to the force of Chappelle’s jokes is the simple fact that the absurdity of LGBT ideology remains deeply vulnerable to mockery. The earnest ridiculousness of homosexualism and transgenderism is ultimately powerless in the face of a comedic critique, even a rather unimaginative one by a vulgarian like Chappelle. That’s another reason to seek to shut the comedian up and punish his sponsors once and for all – if gender ideology can’t withstand even the recitation of biological facts, much less can it win in the venue of stand-up comedy.

Europeans also jumping ship

Added to the Chappelle bruhaha is the beginning of an international backlash, led by the French, against American wokery, a phenomenon now being noted by the American media. Although LGBT ideology has swept the globe largely because of a broad support for it by a coalition of Anglophone and continental European countries, the ever-extending extremes of wokeism are beginning to be seen as a purely American phenomenon, one that is fundamentally hostile to France’s still-strong tradition of secular liberalism.

“The logic of intersectionality fractures everything,” French President Emmanuel Macron told Elle magazine in June, adding, “I don’t agree with a fight that reduces everyone to their identity or their particularity.” His sentiments are increasingly being expressed in French media and in academia.

Last week, Macron’s education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer announced the creation of a new institute, the “Laboratory of the Republic,” to combat the influence of wokeism and other ideas seen as anti-French. “The Republic is completely contrary to wokeism,” Blanquer told Le Monde. “In the United States, this ideology provoked a reaction and led to the rise of Donald Trump . . . France and its youth have to escape that.”

“We need a diverse society where we respect each other and don’t define ourselves by how victimized we are or our supposed identity but simply as a citizen. That’s the beauty of the French Republican project,” said Blanquer.

Macron’s delegate minister for gender equality and diversity, Elisabeth Moreno, who is black, has also expressed her concern that “woke culture” is “something very dangerous, and we shouldn’t bring it to France.”

In these sentiments, France is famously joined by two dissenters within the European Union: Hungary and Poland, both of which have been rather steadfast in their resistance to anti-family ideologies. There are also signs that Britain is becoming fed up with American wokery as well: the Economist, a highly-respected publication that has long sided with LGBT causes, has broken with the American media and is openly defending Chappelle for his “gender realism.”

“Besides torching the pieties of the identitarian left, [Chappelle] has also shown how marginal it is,” write the editors. “His gender-realist views are far more in step with public opinion than his critics. And if the unpopularity of their views is rarely off-putting to the Twitterati, good luck to them taking on an African-American superstar.”


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About Matthew Cullinan Hoffman 31 Articles
Matthew Cullinan Hoffman is a Catholic essayist and journalist, and the author and translator of The Book of Gomorrah and St. Peter Damian's Struggle Against Ecclesiastical Corruption (2015). His award-winning articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, London Sunday Times, Catholic World Report, LifeSite News, Crisis, the National Catholic Register, and many other publications. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy from Holy Apostles College and Seminary, with a focus on Thomism.

37 Comments

  1. I am not a fan of Dave Chappelle, but I say bravo to him for speaking reality to the crazies that some have lately let set the agenda for the rest of us. I do not use Facebook. I do not know the meanings of the weird and varied “alphabet” of nonsense being pushed by the left. Nor am I interested in learning. I dont know what “cis-gender” means, nor do I care. I will NEVER believe a man can become a woman by adding artificial parts and amputating others. Nor that a woman can do the same and become a man. (Adding a tail does not make me a horse.) The small, loud and crude group of people trying to foist their addled unreality on the rest of us need to be pushed back with firm language and a lack of approval. I advocate respecting all, but NOT allowing others to dictate what I say, what I think and what I believe.This is not Nazi Germany or the old Soviet Union, yet. Unless we let it become such. Some of these people are undoubtedly emotionally ill as their high suicide rate will testify.They are in no position to be social “leaders” nor dictate how others should live their lives. Stay with it Chappell!! And bravo to Netflix for telling this bunch to hit the road. Please do NOT cave!!!

    • Ditto to what LJ posted. Who would think that Dave Chappelle would be the one to set the record straight. And good for Netflix for having a brain.

      • And here i thought Netflix has been a strong supporter of the left and it’s ideology
        I will wait to see how far Netflix is willing to agree with Dave Chappell. !

    • Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has caved to a group of his employees who are, according to him, “hurting.” They are hurting from a sub-culture that assures them that they can change reality. Dave Chappelle is correct that there are two genders. If Sarandos wants to help his hurting employees, he should add mental health to his insurance coverage and allow Chappelle to voice his opinion, which reflects reality.

  2. “Citing fundamental FACTS (em) of biology is one of the greatest offenses that can be committed against LGBT ideology”.

    To me just that one statement is really all that need be said.

    Google – ‘Dave Chapelle – Jussie Smollet’

  3. They can’t alter chromosomes when they adopt a Halloween costume confected by a plastic surgeon. Aren’t these the Philistines who articulate “follow the science” while ignoring the science?

      • Indeed, the Catholic Church has always been pro-science and gave birth to universities in which the natural sciences were studied and promoted under the leadership of clergy. Half of Newton’s gravitational formula was contributed by a Catholic priest, as was the theory of the Big Bang (attacked by materialists and atheists all the way until the 1980s). The science of genetics was invented by Gregor Mendel, a Catholic monk. The Catholic faith is not opposed to true natural science — it is its best friend, in fact. LGBT ideology is utterly opposed to the basic facts of biology.

  4. The best weapon against these gender ideology zealots is ridicule, firstly because it’s the best means to expose the absurdity and incoherence of their beliefs, and because they completely lack a sense of humor.

  5. Satan get behind me. Mr. Chapelle is a Muslim who rejects Jesus Christ and encourages the most foul-mouth, divisive and pornographic comedy around. Like saying Charlie Manson was an excellent guitar player or Adolf Hitler was a model vegan.

    • I’m not claiming Chappelle is a virtuous man. I’m just saying that in this case, he is stating the obvious truth, and that, in and of itself, is dangerous to LGBT ideology.

      • Mr. Hoffman, I apologize. I am not attacking you or your work but am calling out the sad irony of our times that we as faithful Catholics have to rally around a Woke-proof, joker as our leader because our Catholic leadership is either to timid to state the obvious or too busy bowing to the secular world to state the obvious: That the Emperor is not wearing any clothes

        • Thankfully some Catholic priests have been preaching the Truth about gender.
          Love the mention of the memorable folktale. I found background on it, pasting below bc old folktales were instructive, imaginative, entertaining and full of wisdom…in other words, missing and fondly missed!
          ***
          ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes’ comes from a short story by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, first published in Copenhagan in April 1837 in Anderson’s third and final installment of Fairy Tales Told for Children.

          Anderson’s version of the tale is based on a German translation of a story first published in 1335 by Spaniard Juan Manel, Prince of Villena: Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio). Manel attributed his collection of 51 cautionary tales to various sources including Aesop, other classical writers and Arabic folktales.

      • The “obvious truth” is that numerous Indigenous peoples around the planet—including almost every Native American people—have known for millennia that gender is not binary.

        • They also share their wives with visitors, kill deformed children, and think that spirits live inside of plants. So what? You can always find some society in which a false idea finds acceptance, but it’s not the rule. Moreover, biology teaches us otherwise: where there are sexes, there are two sexes, and two sexes only, in every species on the planet. “Gender” is simply an identification with a particular sex, nothing more. A man who “identifies” as a woman or vice versa has a false identity, period. He or she needs help, not enablers who encourage them in their self-destructive thinking.

        • A widely read book behind the Wilkins mythology was Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa” (1928), long used by social radicals to validate promiscuity. Mead claimed to have discovered unrestricted sexual license on Samoa. This popularized thesis was later disproved by another anthropologist, Derek Freeman, in his “Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth,” 1983.

          Likewise the equally fictional “Kinsey Report” (1948, 1953), a report that pretended to be a statistically valid survey of sexual practices in the West, and then promoted mainstream casualness and pornography under the cover of scientific respectability. The report was later revealed to be based on non-scientific research of a very non-random survey, including willing prison inmates with a disproportionate share of abnormal personalities.

          See Judith Reisman and Edward Eichel, “Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of People” (Huntington House Publishers, 1990). The Kinsey findings are based on eighteen thousand “sex histories,” all of whom were self-selected volunteers and a quarter to half of whom were prison inmates, and 1,400 of whom were sex offenders, apparently even including nine sex offenders who engaged in direct experimentation on children aged two months to fifteen years. Prostitutes and cohabiting females were classified as married, leading to the claim that a quarter of married women committed adultery.

          Janice Shaw Crouse adds further that Kinsey “was promiscuously bisexual, sado-masochistic, and a decadent voyeur who enjoyed filming his wife having sex with his staff” (see Janice Shaw Crouse, “Kinsey’s Kids,” at http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/crouse200311140923.asp).

          Social deconstructionists, like atheists, can’t be very careful about what they don’t read.

  6. You also forgot to mention when Chappelle notes a rapper who had no remorse for killing another human being is not canceled, yet qhen he makes a lbgt slur he is, something is wrong in society.

  7. Look, the issue isn’t Chappelle’s virtue or lack of it.

    It’s the diabolical effort on the part of the Democratic Party to
    undermine the family and further depress birth rates. In a phrase, to eliminate human life.

    Write this down: The most effective means of combating the left is ridicule.

    The leftism brand is based on coolness. Leftists view themselves as the shock troops of a bright, highly scientific, altogether rational, blindingly utopian future. In their minds they are the now-a-go-go progenitors of an advanced society in which all dreams are mandated to come true.

    And that future is so compelling, so promising, that it justifies even the elimination of hundreds of millions of people if they’re standing in its way.

    Virtue doesn’t begin to describe leftists’ view of themselves. They are like gods, able to determine right and wrong, good and evil, life and death — instantly, infallibly, without question. (Read Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules For Radicals’ if you doubt me.) Because they are serving a higher good than the rest of us.

    By contrast, they characterize their opponents — us — as rigid, unimaginative, ignorant, intolerant yokels.

    Which is why effectively mocking the left and exposing their comically irrational agenda robs them of all their carefully cultivated cachet. They are exposed as the delusional whackos they actually are.

    So then the issue becomes, is Chappelle effectively mocking the leftists and their eminently risible delusions?

    The answer, a resounding, glorious, devastating yes.

    Apologies to Mr. Olson, Mr. Weigel and Mr. Kalb, but if we are to vanquish this death-dealing philosophy of leftism, one monologue by Dave Chappelle is worth a thousand devastatingly well reasoned monographs posted on CWR.

  8. Dave Chappelle is crude, yes, but one can only imagine what an author like Rabelais would have written in reaction to this transgender lunacy. As both a renowned physician and satirist, Rabelais would have mocked transgenderism with a classic work of best-selling, utopian fiction. I would like to believe we are reaching a turning point in our “tolerance” of every sort of perversion, but unfortunately, the depths of insanity are difficult to plumb.

  9. The issue here is that we now have one brand of identity politics in opposition to another, which creates a no-win for those who promote identity politics in general. Do they risk alienating one identity group or the other?

  10. Monty Python said it all, many years ago. just go to Youtube and put in ‘Monty Python’s The life of Brian – I want to be a woman’.

    • The problem with getting rid of nonsense is: which part is truth and which part lies. The intersectional conflatuon of sexual orientation and gender identity is the first challenge to the public’s understanding of what is really important. Dont kid yourselves: homosexuality, bisexuality isn’t going away. Variation of sexual.orientation is a natural truth, one which the Church sometimes accepts as such.

      (Cue the Biblical quotes and the usual disgust, which do nothing but deny the baffling mystery of the human condition.)

    • Acknowledgement and embrace of non-binary people goes back millennia before “LGBT” was an acronym. Almost every Indigenous American people recognizes and celebrates their “two-spirit” members, and there are countless examples around the world.

      • Prove it. Give some hard facts. Your saying it doesn’t make it true – or convincing. I want some proof of Native Americans believing that a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man or there is a third biological sex. SEX is not a ‘spiritual’ reality; it is biological. So give me some PROOF of cultures that believe in BIOLOGICAL mixed or fluid sexuality. I’m not talking about choosing to act this way or that: heterosexual men in prison often commit homosexual acts for lack of female sexual partners. They choose this or that action, while their chromosomes still determine them to be male, they are not biologically female because of acts they perform. Nor is anyone biologically male or female because of some ‘spiritual’ notion. You sneered at a religious site referring to science (go google ‘catholic scientists’ and educate yourself), so now I throw down the gauntlet: give some hard PROOF about various cultures who believe that there is some biological third way of being neither male nor female or biologically both sexes. None of this ‘two-spirit’ rubbish. Two SEXES, based on biological reality, is what we’re talking about here.
        If the transgender people believed they had some kind of ‘spirit’ of the opposite sex, they wouldn’t be going to surgeons and taking drugs to create a physical illusion of having different chromosomal makeup and primary and secondary sexual characteristics than they factually have.

  11. The Media is so cool that they are absurd. The are like the emperor without clothes on. An old fable they surely they do not teach in schools anymore. The Media is looking quite ‘naked’ these days. What literary embarrassments when it comes to facing reality.

  12. Lest everyone forget, not that long ago Netflix was for all intents parading child pornography… so think twice before you start hailing their support of Chappelle!

    • It doesn’t MATTER here if Netflix has promoted all kinds of trash and evil. The article is clear that on this ONE point, Netflix has shown – perhaps uncharacteristic – realism and willingness not to be cowed by a particular interest group. Even if they cave a hundred times after this or caved a hundred times before: this time they did not cave. Good.
      Ditto the people saying that Chappelle has poor values or is vulgar, etc. It doesn’t MATTER. If Chappelle can tap into the fact that the majority of people know perfectly well that there are men and women and that a man pretending to be a woman is an offense to women – GOOD. Good for him for pointing out that being black is not an ‘orientation’ or some ‘identity’ that a person can just claim. Someone has to say it. Most of us are not as bullet-proof as an African-American comedian in the current social climate in the US.
      I want the truth to be spoken. I don’t care who speaks it. In the story, it was a CHILD who was clear-eyed enough to point out the truth that the emperor had no clothes. In European courts, it was the jester who pointed out the uncomfortable truth to the ruling elite. If modern America needs a comedian to point out the truth to the benighted ruling elites – so be it. Hand that man a microphone.

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