On Dave Chappelle and virtue-signaling

 Douglas Murray, the iconoclastic British writer, has been making the following observation.  There is at least one historically important and lionized racist whose vile racism will never lead to cancellation, removal from college course syllabi, nor anything of the sort.  Karl Marx.  Karl Marx was really, really, really racist.  Why will he never be canceled by the left?  Because the segment of the left that engages in cancellation is the Marxist and Marx-adjacent tradition rather than the classical liberal tradition of John Locke through John Stuart Mill.  You cannot align yourself with the founder of your school of thought, and then cancel him.  You can cancel the founder of your country if you declare your country fundamentally racist and evil, but it doesn't work that way if you cancel your intellectual founder.  Hence, Karl Marx will never be canceled.  Have you read  "On The Jewish Question?"  Worth reading.  Yet in the modern, American context, consider someone like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).  She is, of course, un-cancelable, despite the most virulent antisemitism around.  So what do those who refuse to cancel Omar have to say about Dave Chappelle?  Well.

To be sure, I am not an avid follower of stand-up.  My default entertainment is either music or a novel, but George Carlin is my hero, and I appreciate the tradition from Lenny Bruce through Bill Hicks, then to Chris Rock, and some modern subversives like Bill Burr and Doug Stanhope.  I claim no great knowledge of Chappelle's work, except for a few of the skits that became cultural knowledge because they were just brilliant.  And then Chappelle became the new Rowling, which is a phrasing that both admirers and enemies of Rowling would find equally agreeable.

The consequence?  Everything he says is interpreted through a new lens.  Omar can spout the most vile antisemitic tropes in existence, and the same people who worship Marx and send death threats to J.K. Rowling will never say a word about it, or at most, a few mild intonations of, "now, now, Ilhan!  Don't you talk like that!  Now, I think we can all agree that this wonderful woman has clearly learned her lesson, and let's never speak of it again!"

Why?  Because the left just doesn't take antisemitism very seriously.  That's not what matters to the left.  What matters to the left is gender.  This is an empirical observation, and you can decide for yourself what matters to you.  However, it is an empirical observation that Ilhan Omar can spout antisemitism without cancelation, yet gender is the third rail.

Chappelle crossed the left's most important line on gender, and you can decide for yourself what you think of his comments and routine.  I have no comment on that.  I will, however, comment on his SNL routine, and charges of antisemitism.  And if I wish to challenge the left's bullshit virtue-signaling on this particular topic, that's why I carry a Jew Card.  Don't leave home without it!

I call bullshit.  I have had antisemitism directed at me.  Chappelle's routine is not what it sounds like when an antisemitic piece of shit is threatening me with physical violence, berating me, or anything like that.  Nor were Chappelle's jokes even up to Ilhan Omar's standards of antisemitic garbage.  Rather, this is a bunch of disingenuous wokestirs looking for reasons to get offended by someone predetermined to be their enemy, not because they want to defend me, but because he crossed their line on gender.  They don't give a fuck about antisemitism, or they would have canceled Ilhan Omar long ago.  Decide for yourself what you think of his comments on gender.  Antisemitism?  Bullshit.  See:  Omar, Ilhan.  Her words were always spoken in contempt and hatred, not in a stand-up comedy routine.

What did Chappelle actually say?  Consider.

Chappelle starts with a well-performed but not terribly original joke of a pre-apology.  I've seen Stanhope do that one, but then Chappelle turns it into a good joke, with the buying-some-time line.  The purpose of the joke is the segue into tearing apart the more directly antisemitic comments by others.

OK, now stop and think about this, because if all you heard were a couple of seconds selected by the cancelation mob, you may have missed this.  I go to bed way before this, and I don't watch tv, so I certainly wasn't watching, but I do not fucking trust the cancel mob, so when stories started circulating about Chappelle and antisemitism, I wanted to hear the whole routine.  And then you find out that he is ripping into antisemitism during the routine.

Um... does something seem off here, if you are trying to lump Chappelle in with the psychopathic, antisemitic piece of shit who threatened me with physical violence a few months back?

What's the line that the wokestirs claim is so offensive?  If they're black, it's a gang; Italians, it's a mob; Jewish, a coincidence, and you should never talk about it.

Um, I'm not sure if y'all noticed this, but Dave is black, so if he's going after me, he's going after himself too.

But here's the real comment, followed by some actual, fucking social science.  Well, social science.  There is also social science about fucking, or at least, scholarship about fucking, but most of that is polluted by wokeness, and hence no longer scientific.

Anyway, there is a set of antisemitic conspiracy theories about me and my fellow hook-nosed money hoarders controlling various sectors of society, most notably banking and the media.

That antisemitic piece of shit who threatened me a few months back?  He loves those conspiracy theories, and in particular, a pseudo-scholarly screed by Walt & Mearsheimer called The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.  Batshit, antisemitic conspiracy theories, mostly rejected by academics, except... well...

Fuck that guy.  Or better yet, follow a corollary to the John Waters rule.

So yeah.  There are conspiracy theories, and those conspiracy theories are both bullshit, and capable of leading people to threats and acts of violence.  My life has been affected.

No, there is no conspiracy to control the banking world, the media, foreign policy, nor anything.  Old joke.  Four rabbis are sitting around arguing about the torah.  We argue.  It's what we do.  Three of them read a passage the same way, one dissents.  The three in agreement get frustrated that the dissenter just doesn't see things their way.  'What, are you meshuggah?'  The dissenter eventually says, 'Hashem, would you please give these yutzes a sign?'  God, himself, comes down, and says to the three in agreement, 'WHAT, ARE YOU BLIND?  HE'S RIGHT!  OY, NEVER HAVE I SEEN SUCH MISHEGOSS!'

The three look at each other, shrug, and say, 'eh, three to two.'

You think we can form a fucking conspiracy?  Have you met us?  We can't conspire on the proper recipe for matzo ball fucking soup.

Oy.

Anyway, that said, it is empirically true that we are over-represented, statistically, in the management of the media, and in the financial sectors.

Yes, I fucking said it.  Jew-boy, me, said it.  You know where else we are over-represented?  Every fucking field that requires a college or graduate degree.

You know why?  Because we all go to college.

My son, the doctah!  It's a joke, but it's not a joke.  Is that because we are conspiring to take over the medical profession?  No.  We all go to fucking college, disproportionately to graduate school, and that means any sector that is "prestige," or highly paid will have more of us.

Take a look at the medical field right now.  Lot of South Asians.  Engineering?  South and East Asians.  Conspiracy?  No, high rates of college attendance combined with funneling into highly paid, high prestige professions.  Why isn't this playing into a conspiracy theory?  There isn't a pre-existing conspiracy into which it might feed.

This suggests two important ideas.  One is confirmation bias.  If you are already looking for Group A in Sector M because of a narrative, they will stick out because of that narrative.  Also, our noses.  But, you have some confirmation bias going on.

The other is something more subtle, but important.  What happens when you say, 'you're not allowed to talk about this!'  That was actually the most important part of Chappelle's joke.

A true thing that you cannot say.  I really don't like that idea, yet what Chappelle observed, as only the jester can, is that there are true things we cannot say.  Chappelle did not say that there is a conspiracy of lox-a-holics running the media, or the banks, or anything like that, but he observed that there are a lot of us in the media (true) and that there is a threat of punishment if you say it (true).

There should not be true things you cannot say.  Instead, we should analyze them in context.  Otherwise, they fester as conspiracy theories and resentment.

Empirical analysis actually demonstrates why the conspiracy theories are bullshit.  It is, in fact, more simple.

We all go to fucking college.

Is there more to it?  Possibly.  But the point is that if you look broadly, conspiracy narratives either don't hold up, or you have to go full nazi.  Why?  Well, watch.

Critical race theory and the dogma of equity say that if there is a difference between outcomes, and Group A performs consistently better than Group B, then the system is designed by and for Group A, as a Group A-supremacist system.  Critical race theorists are too stupid and narcissistic to think beyond black/white most of the time, but once you realize that we have higher levels of education, we make more money, we are over-represented in all high-income, high-prestige fields, and so forth, one of two things has to happen.  You either throw out the doctrines of critical race theory, or go full antisemite, and say that we're the ones running the system, and oppressing whites along with everyone else.

And now, if you wonder why the far left is so accepting of antisemitism, perhaps you begin to see why.  It's either that, or abandon the new religion.  Every once in a while, someone like Ilhan Omar says the quiet part out loud, and they gently ask her to use her inside voice when saying what so many of them really think of us.

Yet that creates an obligation.  The left wants to pose as the side that opposes bigotry more broadly.  It's hard to do that when you go full Ilhan, who doesn't sound so different from Marjorie Taylor Greene to me.  (Chappelle, on the other hand, actually made fun of antisemitism.)

How does the left manage that?  They look for opportunities.  Chappelle was an easy choice.  He had already violated the most core beliefs of the left, so it didn't matter if his actual jokes didn't rise to the level of Ilhan Omar.  All that mattered was the need to signal that the party and ideological movement of Ilhan Omar is anti-antisemitism.

I'm not buyin' it.

Form your own opinions of Chappelle's gender routine.  That SNL routine?  That was nothing.  What we are observing is a movement that is fully tolerant of antisemitism looking for an opportunity to virtue-signal otherwise, and using their preexisting rejection of Chappelle as an opportunity.

Ilhan Omar is more of a threat to me than Dave Chappelle.

Big Bill Broonzy, "Banker's Blues."  I'm puttin' this one on my Jew Card.  Fuck you, Ilhan, and fuck every disingenuous, sanctimonious wokestir going after Chappelle while kissing her ass.