I'm Team Antifa

I'm Team Antifa: A Trans Comic's Clickbait Roast of Netflix's Dangerous Cishet-Supremacist Populism (and myself)



Are y'all ready? Here's my one-joke, three-word roast of Dave Chapelle's The Closer and the attitudes of his most apathetic bad-faith defenders, including Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos:

"I'm Team Antifa."

Hello ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary individuals. How are you folks doing tonight? It's wonderful to share this special safe space of stand-up comedy with you all. (Though I am indeed presently seated at my keyboard, touché...) Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jos and I am a transgender comedian, writer, labor organizer and agitator, Uber driver, fan of comedy, professional meme connieseur, internet activist, stroke survivor, formerly unhoused, and computer science student.

"Emoji and punctuation marks in the character-based medium of written word are analogous to inflection, miming, and delivery in stand up comedy. Empathy and intent are borne out in da delivery, DaBaby 🍑👶🍼... By the way, if y'all can understand that the word emoji is plural... why can't y'all seem to figure out the singular they?"

Heckler: "... Um ackshually, emoji is a collective noun, not a plural pronoun. Huge difference. Educate yourself before you speak, you absolute moron."🤦‍♀️

Chapelle's new special has had many labels slapped on its cover by cultural critics, advocacy groups, and even a few of his more open-minded and empathetic fans, perhaps the most obvious being the interestingly nebulous word "controversial". Or, perhaps more accurately: anti-intersectional and needlessly divisive. Or, perhaps more importantly, preachy and not-that-funny.

Comics are never ever supposed to forget to bring the funny. We're supposed to stay cool and collected and not allow ourselves to be triggered by hecklers or critics. That's how you lose the message. That's how you wind up as Cosmo Kramer having a very bad set at The Laugh Factory, yelling at a black member of your audience to sit down and shut up and get out while "ironically" dropping hard R's as you punch down and remind those lowly people of their true biologically-ordained place in white supremacist society and explain in great traumatic detail how the cruel white majority of the time would have gleefully harmed them 50 years ago for causing such disturbance in that sacred safe space. He wasn't wrong. Such behaviors and the attitudes driving them were normalized and commonplace in white American society at one point. That's unironically extremely messed up. Polite society rightfully cancelled Kramer for his “woke” crimes, despite the pleading of his good friend in comedy and fellow incomprehensibly-wealthy entertainer Jerry Seinfeld. Years later, Dave Chappelle would stand on the very same stage reminiscing about that cultural touchstone moment. "There won't be a next time, Kramer," he joked.

Yes, Kramer saw red and committed a crime of passion in the heat of the moment and blurted out slurs and ironically-racist presumably-comedic statements in order to put a black heckler back in their place beneath him... So you're right, the situations aren't perfectly analogous to Chappelle lashing out on Netflix at his LGBT hecklers on Twitter, which he says is “not a real place”... But I can absolutely draw parallels, because that's what comedians do. The entire meaning of the performance is found in the subtext of the work as a whole. This is glaringly obvious to comedians and fans of comedy. We can hear the subtext of a joke almost as easily as you're reading these words right now.

Something being controversial to discuss or joke about might indicate a discussion that needs to be had across a culture. I think that's the reason that stories and memes involving such issues spread like wildfire and drive insane amounts of engagement. Maybe that's our subconscious crying out to talk to each other about the things we need to talk about in order to be able to see eye-to-eye as a society and collaborate towards collective intersectional progress.

The great thing about wokeness is that it gives us a language and a framework with which to productively discuss controversial topics like this without causing offense or causing people to change the channel.

I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with taking the position of protecting the safe spaces of stand-up comedy in order to preserve such a unique tool for expression and group therapy (this is just one form of cultural communication amongst many which may be of particular value to the vulnerable and largely silenced black, trans, and LGBT minorities under a veritable cornucopia of conceivable contexts.)

To be transgender is to be controversial. To be controversial is to be silenced and excluded from polite society. To be controversial is to be a natural minority and to be in need of social protections and considerations from polite society if it is to remain polite. Comedians may fall into this minority group too. But the court jester cannot be on the king's payroll if he is to remain relatable and honest on class-related issues such as privilege with his audience while truly freeing the mind of the viewer from its societal shackles..

There are entire cities in America and across the globe where you couldn't even fill a small room with the entire LGBT population. That's how much of a minority our community is. Those are the numbers we are up against in our fight for the freedoms to life, love, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The problem is that when we attempt to stick our necks out and demand equality or at the very least acceptance or right to exist, cishet society punches us back down into our lowly places as freaks and and outcasts by propagating the antisemitic conspiracies of LGBT supremacy or social contagions in children or the feminization of the black man or overrepresentation in media as "asexual reproduction" or how we're turning the frogs gay.

But when a minority’s validity is threatened by a majority which wields its political numbers as a means of stepping outside and settling the debate about a minority’s right to exist by fist, there is only one majority group which ever has the courage to step in and defend vulnerable minorities en masse.

When the alt-white violently descended onto Charlottesville so the world may witness their brave public defense of white supremacist American historical attitudes… Yes, the majority of the red-faced tiki-torchers were white redcaps.

...But you know who else came out in the streets and raised their fists to punch-up that privileged antisemitic white polo woke mob which set out to cancel popular black acceptance? You know who stood in the spotlight on that world stage with the microphone of real activism and showed the white majority that America does not platform discussion of prejudicial supremacist ideas? Team Antifa. The left (or, according to the right: triggered and ironically fascist themselves). Jewish people (puppeteers conspiring and orchestrating this whole thing with their big brains just to divide the right and tarnish their image). LGBT people (not a real minority). White trans women (ew gross, not real women). Uppity blue-haired screeching feminists (ineffective woke white internet activists punching down on black people, barely real women because they make my PP soft and won't sleep with me). The media (fake news). Twitter (not a real place). Countless other minority groups standing in intersectional solidarity with the black community against oppression by the white supremacists making up the American cultural majority (largely visibly cishet whitemen, BTW, all while citing support by their token black friends on Fox news like Jeanine and Candice).

Antifa is meant to be a majority group which prevents minorities from being punched down on. They came to the aid of black America in Charlottesville and showed America that white Supremacy will be driven out of polite society by any means.

Do you think a black trans woman could ever in cishet white America have an Obama moment, gaining enough popularity and influence to ascend to the highest office, wielding power from the resolute desk to affect real Hope and Change? If not, would this be due to her blackness or her trans-ness or her womanhood or lack thereof in the cishet public eye? 🤔

I would submit that Netflix is running an uncontrolled, unethical experiment on society by releasing The Closer into the wild. They’re throwing a bag of popcorn in the microwave as they sit back and watch in great interest how much those oversensitive LGBT cry and complain on social media about how their feelings were hurt by the black man on TV and how the rest of society will react to conflict between these two vulnerable minority groups. I wonder if any resulting harmful societal effects could be quantified and measured along with incidences of phobic violence and trans suicide before and after Netflix's platforming of The Closer?

I don't think my problem is with the things Dave has to say so much as it is with Netflix proudly standing behind them and using technological means to propagate them as rapidly as possible to majority cisgender people who likely already agree with the premise of Dave's jokes that trans people are pretty weird and fringe and will likely never be accepted and seen as normal by polite cis society. It feels like tech-assisted pot-stirring.

I think Dave thinks we trans *have* been normalized and given protections because things like women with penises or men giving birth are given play in the media, when often they are given play for purposes of making fun of and stirring controversy. I may say I feel that black Americans have been normalized to a large degree, as I'm not sure if I've ever seen a white person overtly question the idea of a black doctor or a black scientist or a black comedian or a black president, except on FOX news of course. But let's be clear here: FOX and the right wing does not and never will platform controversial LGBT voices unless in a tokenizing, pot stirring way despite their virtue signaling about the free exchange of ideas. And I'm pretty sure a trans president would be a nonstarter in white cis America.

...Not to mention the plethora of states where it is legally protected for cishet men who feel shame for their attraction to trans bodies to claim that the controversiality of trans people caused them to panic and see red and murder a beautiful trans woman as an acceptable defense in a court of law. That ish is legal and written down somewhere in cisgender lawbooks. What the heck, cis?. Trans people are not a specially-privileged "protected" class in any significant way. We get murdered in the street by majority white men pretty often for no reason besides existing, especially if we also happen to be black.

The only reason Dave's "LGBT are bad because LGBT are white" reasoning passes muster is because in woke culture white supremacy is not condoned and automatically thought of as unspeakable evil. So by drawing that connection and calling it privilege, Chappelle almost seems to fall victim to the very same ironic “woke” fallacies he himself lays out.

People participate in outrage culture and cancel culture for the same reason they watch pro wrestling. It's all about the kayfabe. We're all here to stand witness as the moral and righteous hero deservingly bodyslams the villain-coded man in tights 47-feet through a solid steel folding table. It's a spectacle that truly must be seen to be believed.

We all just want to believe in a cohesive narrative, we all want to see "good" win out over "bad". We all think our team is the good team. We all cheer for our team. We all fight for our team and rabidly defend its reputation in popular culture. We all want our team to win. We all want a satisfying resolution to our story. All of this is human. Humans are intently quite tribal.

...And I swear to god if someone starts rambling about chimps or Joe Rogan right now imma slap that Onnit elk meat out they mouth.

Rogan and Chappelle are touring together, by the way. Suddenly all the noise about trans women and cancel culture makes a lot of sense….

But the best part about wrestling is that sometimes you watch your heroes become the villains and your villains become the heroes.

...And In this space the audience and performers are always self-aware and know their fans well and are often paid quite handsomely by the white men in suits who own the arenas.

Netflix must cease to platform fascist cishet-supremacist content and publicly justify its place in society on a basis of its popularity (fascism is by definition popular and uncontroversial) while continuing to gaslight the trans community about the true nature of the threat of cishet fascism.

The only way that a political minority may accomplish anything is to convince a majority group to care. Which, again, I think parallels what Dave is trying to say in trying to convince white gays to stop "punching down", the irony being though that LGBT people and especially trans people are a political minority which Dave is simultaneously proclaiming from the same stage that he doesn't personally care to listen to and prefers instead to publicly troll for reactions and ratings.

Its like he thinks he's the only one allowed to sit at the judges table for the Oppression Olympics



Did Dave intentionally generate as many ironic situations in the press as he could to manufacture controversy and clout-chase right wing wedge issues for personal benefit? Or did he intend to provoke reflection, consideration, and thoughtful discussion of strategically-targeted and deeply, personally significant issues? None of us may judge. Only Dave will ever know.

Maybe he thinks it's hilarious. Maybe he'll do a *killer* bit about it one day. Maybe Netflix will host it. Maybe their continued cisgender subscribers will watch it. Maybe their apathetic cisgender CEO or cishet shareholders will defend it. Maybe his cishet fans will continue browbeating-off that dead horse 6 feet underground to knowing, sniveling laughter.

Antifa, if you're listening, stand back and stand by.I hope you will look at the demos and do the math and stand with the wildly-outgunned LGBT minorities to drive cishet supremacy out of Netflix and mixed audiences and fandoms. It propagates through society, media, and pop culture and must be driven out by any means. Intersectional LGBT acceptance is the only answer.

...But this is all just jokes, right?