Yesterday Mark Harris tweeted a few statements about the Dave Chappelle trans thing, and his belief that this dust-up is “an important pivot point — not a pivot point about, as his defenders would have it, censorship or cancel culture or whatever false threat they’re imagining is central.”
Here’s the passage that got my attention: “But it doesn’t stop until a lot of people say ‘We’re sick of this, and that is what’s happening now. And all the angry response that we’re hearing is the whine of bullies having a weapon taken away from them. And all you can do is let them cry until they’re all cried out.”
Precisely! Except Harris has it ass-backwards. The people saying “we’re sick of this” are the normal, free-thinking, laid-back folks like Chappelle and Ted Sarandos and myself and Sasha Stone and the vast majority of Average Joes who loved watching The Closer, and the “bullies” are the Twitter shriekers…they’re crying and freaking out because they can sense their zeitgeist moment slipping away from them.
In other words: They’ve overplayed their hand and driven everyone crazy, and the normals are starting to wake up and say “nobody wants anything but love and agency and options for trans people but at the same time fuck the shriekers…they’re driving everyone nuts and we’re tired of attempts to destroy people over having the wrong opinions or standing with J.K. Rowling or whatever….we’re really fucking sick of mob Twitter justice.”
From Andrew Sullivan‘s 10.8 “Weekly Dish” column, “Dave Chappelle Is Right, Isn’t He?“: “Chappelle’s final Netflix special, The Closer, is a classic. Far from being outdated, it’s slightly ahead of its time, as the pushback against wokeness gains traction. It is extremely funny, a bit meta, monumentally mischievous, and I sat with another homo through the whole thing, stoned, laughing our asses off — especially when he made fun of us.
“The way the elite media portrays us, you’d think every member of the BLT community is so fragile we cannot laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t occur to them that, for many of us, Chappelle is a breath of honest air, doing what every comic should do: take aim at every suffocating piety of the powers that be — including the increasingly weird 2SLGBTQQIA+ mafia — and detonating them all.”