Why They Can’t Cancel Joe Rogan or Dave Chappelle
There’s a lesson in this for the rest of us.
Have you seen Dave Chappelle’s new special, “The Closer” on Netflix? It’s AMAZING. It’s funny, it’s profound and it glories in being outside of the bounds of woke discourse. Dave Chapelle isn’t just saying, “I don’t care if you like what I’m saying or not” to the woke, he’s running over them Bo Jackson-style and spiking the football in their faces in the end zone.
Chappelle stood up for J.K. Rowling, said he was on “Team TERF,” correctly noted that gender was a fact, and finished up the special with a long riff on a transsexual friend of his, Daphne Dorman, that included lots of trans jokes.
His comments were funny and sometimes pointed, just like his jokes are about everyone else, but not mean-spirited. Earlier in the special, he even made a comment that cut to the heart not just of his act, but of the controversy that followed his special:
"(Rapper) DaBaby shot and killed a n***er in a Walmart in North Carolina and nothing bad happened to his career. Do you see where I’m going with this? In our country, you can shoot and kill a n****, but you better not hurt a gay person's feelings."
Of course, the world’s most easily offended people didn’t like that, so they did what they always try to do, which is cancel him.
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Did Dave Chappelle cave after this outcry? Hell, no. He said, “If this is what being canceled is like, I love it” and “F*** Twitter, this is real life!”
Did Netflix give in to the woke pressure and pull Dave Chappelle’s special? Nope. Why? In his memo about why he wasn’t pulling the special, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos included this telling line,
“Chappelle is one of the most popular stand-up comedians today, and we have a long-standing deal with him. His last special “Sticks & Stones,” also controversial, is our most-watched., stickiest, and most award-winning stand-up special to date.”
In other words, Chapelle is a cash cow and Netflix isn’t willing to roll over on him just because the blue hair and nose ring crowd say so.
What about his fans though? Did they think his jokes were over the line? It sure doesn’t look like it.
Of course, what Chappelle is going through is just the short version of the never-ending whinge the woke crowd has had about Joe Rogan since he was signed by Spotify. Despite the fact that Rogan is a Bernie bro who generally leans to the Left, he’s supremely entertaining, famously open-minded, and interested in discussing alternative points of view. The woke crowd doesn’t like his position on vaccines, the fact that he “platforms” people they don’t like (translation: he’s willing to have a conversation with them on his show), his comments about the trans community, his imaginary “racism,” “homophobia,” or his willingness to mock anyone if he thinks they deserve it.
They’ve never been able to get rid of him because like Chappelle and his fans, Joe Rogan and his listeners aren’t willing to give in every time one of the weepy crybabies starts bawling again.
Of course, when Joe Rogan was famously signed to Spotify for 100 million dollars, that’s when the crybullies thought they finally had him. If they couldn’t cancel Rogan, they could get Spotify to do it for them!
Back in September of last year company employees requested to have a meeting within the company to discuss the “anti-transgender” views that they accused Joe of having. This sentiment may have come after one of Joe’s shows where he openly criticized the fact transgender athletes were being allowed to play women’s sports. A sentiment since echoed by Caitlyn Jenner of all people.
In October Spotify formally rejected a proposal to have Joe’s podcast go through an internal “editorial supervision.”
Gee, what could be behind the fact that Spotify didn’t cave? Maybe this?
Although Spotify hasn’t given specific numbers detailing Rogan’s listenership since he came on board, it has repeatedly boasted about his success. The company confirmed that he quickly became the platform’s biggest podcaster after jumping to Spotify. He “stimulated new user additions, activated first-time podcast listeners, and [has] driven favorable engagement trends, including vodcast consumption,” the company wrote in a February 2021 earnings release. In April, it said Rogan’s show had “performed above expectations” in regard to adding new users to the platform and engagement.
In other words, Rogan and Chappelle can’t be canceled because they don’t have any embarrassment or shame at offending the woke, their fans don’t care what the woke think, and they’re making so much money these big corporations aren’t willing to shiv them to make the “how dare you misgender me” loons happy. This is where it starts to get interesting for the rest of us because do you know what terrible penalty Spotify and Netflix paid for refusing to cancel Chappelle and Rogan? Nothing of significance – and they made dump trucks full of money in the process.
So, that brings us to an interesting question. Why should companies give in to the woke in the first place? It’s fair to say that “go woke, go broke” doesn’t universally apply to every company, but there are enough companies that have taken significant economic damage from trying to be woke that it would give any smart company pause.
Know why that is? Because the power of the woke is all an illusion. They are small in number, generally disliked not just among conservatives, but amongst most independents and even a lot of liberals. They’re like yappy little chihuahuas running around a dog park intimidating the pit bulls and Rottweilers into giving them toys based on fear of…what exactly? A trending topic on Twitter driven by a few hundred people and a bot network? A mean article at Jezebel? A few hundred people publicly claiming that they’ll never use a product again and then secretly using them anyway? How much of a threat is a boycott from emotionally unstable people that engage in performative outrage against something new every other day? Today, they’re mad at you, but two weeks from now they’ll already have found half a dozen new outrages to percolate over.
Ultimately, one of the biggest differences between the saner societies we used to have in America and the sort of cancel culture lunacy we deal with today is that people used to laugh at weirdoes instead of bending over backward to cater to them.
In America today, we have a dysfunctional relationship with the most easily offended people in our society. It’s almost like being in a relationship with a woman with a borderline personality disorder. Incidentally, I can tell you from personal experience that I wouldn’t recommend trying that. Granted, it’s pretty amazing at first, when they treat you like God’s gift to humankind and they think you’re the most amazing person they’ve ever met. That’s called “love bombing” and if I didn’t know what came afterward, I would tell you that every man should experience it. In her mind, you are the hero, the king, the best thing that ever happened to her. Bathing in that sort of adoration from a woman you care about is sweet indeed. Of course, when things start to change later, you start to realize something was off about it. It’s like those lines from “Heart Emojis”:
I should've known by your eyes, girl
no one really smiles that much
and I probably should've known it by the way
that you lied 'cuz
I don't even like me that much
This is the equivalent of the woke crowd’s, “Wow, you’re a really good person who’s much more sensitive than all those other people. You’re special and stick up for the little guy! You should feel so good about yourself!”
That’s when, with a woman that’s borderline, it all goes south, and it feels like ANYTHING could set her off. Suddenly, the woman who worshipped the ground you walked on can spend the whole night mad at you because she doesn’t like the tone of your voice when you ask her what she wants for dinner or become enraged because you politely asked her if it’s a good idea to yell at her mother. It can change on a dime from having a great night with the girl of your dreams to the two of you fighting over nothing and suddenly, you start to realize that you’re always walking on eggshells (that book is phenomenal if you are dealing with someone like this in your life) trying to keep everything together.
This is where we are in America with the woke movement. Everyone has to walk on eggshells because they never know when the confused pronoun gang might pitch a fit over a joke or a tweet from 10 years ago. Except, in this case, the beginning stages were never all that great to begin with and we’re trying to accommodate angry women with multicolored hair along with people that usually spend more time stoned every week than they do talking to their therapist about how unfair the world is. At some point, as a society, we just have to say, “enough” and let them work their own issues out instead of tying ourselves in knots trying to please them. If people who could fairly be described as moderate Democrats like Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle are already there, what is the rest of our society waiting for?
Love the way you're calling out the utter nonsense and divisiveness of wokeness (personally, I hate that term as an identifier). The "woke" are not awake to anything but a herd-mental illness and are the useful idiots for the progressive left whose motives are solely for the purpose of destroying our traditional culture . If that happens, guess what woke-idiots, you will be sent to a very special gulag of your very own, if you aren't first outright murdered by them en masse.
Like Dave, you pull no punches and tell it like it is. Frankly, I am mystified by the willingness our culture has shown to be browbeaten and worse by a very small crowd of mentally ill people.