CLAY: You know, all of this insanity… Obama accused the right of getting fired up about made-up culture wars. Meanwhile, we’re in two weeks of the Dave Chappelle comedy special continuing to be a controversy where people are protesting and demanding that Dave Chappelle’s comedy special be pulled off the air. Those are not right wingers that are demanding that that take place.

And social media continues to ban people for saying truthful comments. Representative Jim Banks was banned by Twitter for pointing out that Rachel Levine, now a four-star admiral, is not in fact the first woman four-star admiral because she was born a man and decided to change her gender, and that — just sharing that fact — got Representative Jim Banks banned by Twitter. That is an unacceptable fact to share on social media, which is crazy, and this also ties in with the attacks being leveled upon Dave Chappelle.

Here’s activist Ashlee Preston on Netflix talking about the Dave Chappelle special.

PRESTON: So, to be clear, this conversation is about equity in entertainment. And we see that there is a lack of equity, uh, with trans content with content such as, uh, Dave Chappelle’s. We know that Netflix paid him $23.6 million for the Sticks and Stones special in 2019, and for The Closers he was paid 24.1 million, making transphobic content in the middle of one of the deadliest years on record for the trans community, and so this is about the emergence of a hate economy that incentivizes media that marginalizes.

CLAY: This is the insanity.

BUCK: This is insane. This is what the activists do. And, Clay, if they had a real argument to make that wasn’t rooted in hysteria, that wasn’t rooted in the deadliest…what? I would like to see the numbers here, “the deadliest year for trans individuals,” so we’re supposed think that that’s because of Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special?

Obviously not, but this is the justification for the censorship and the totalitarian thought police that go people always have. They always say, “There’s some good reason for why we can’t allow you to have your thoughts,” and this is the “speech = violence” paradigm the left has been running with for a long time, which is just…

You’re seeing things now. They’re trying to hammer through and force people to bend the knee to fundamental untruths, to lies. They want you to live by lies. They want you to say that a man is a woman. They want you to say that speech equals violence, because if they can get you to do that there’s no limit to their control. If they can disorient all of us into thinking or into believing or even just going along with obviously untrue things, what limitations do they have Clay on controlling us in any respect?

CLAY: Well, and, Buck, we watched this comedy special, and my wife turned to me after we finished the comedy special and she said, “Did any transgender people who were protesting actually watch this special?” Because what Chappelle was doing was ridiculing much of the modern language that exists across a variety of spectrums right?

One of the lines that stood out to me was he talked about Caitlyn Jenner was named Woman of the Year in the first year that she had ever become a woman, and the analogy he made was like, “Hey, if the BET awards gave Eminem the Black Person of the Year award, people would be, ‘Oh, this is an outrage! This is crazy.'” So the first year Caitlyn Jenner decides she’s a woman, she’s the Woman of the Year?

Look, I can’t speak exactly for you ’cause I’m not sure your exact perspective. I don’t think most people care what gender you want to identify as, right? If it makes you happier and you are a fully grown adult, I really just don’t care at all. I don’t think we ought to be giving hormones to 5-year-old kids to try to change their gender. I think that’s crazy.

BUCK: Do you think we should be forced to call a he a she?

CLAY: No. I’m saying… But if you make that choice in your own life, that’s fine, but expecting that the entire world is going to bend to define you and use the pronouns that you choose and all of these other things? To me, this is about power, right? And I don’t feel like the “marginalized group” is the one that has all the media behind them, that has all the major corporations behind them, that has all of the might of the intellectual left behind them.

And you’re demanding that someone can’t make joke about you? This is what authoritarians do. I always used to talk about terrorists aren’t probably very funny, right? Because absolutism is the enemy of humor. Maybe I’m wrong and they sit around in Tora Bora back in the day and they’re telling all sorts of jokes.

BUCK: No, I saw Al-Qaeda jokes back in the day; they’re not funny, and so there’s that. But I can also say that when you’re looking at the… You’re right about the power dynamics here — the power, the paradigms of who’s actually calling the shots. They’re telling… They are straight… The trans activist community is trying to establish, “We cannot take a joke and you cannot make jokes” as a rule.

And if you try to break this, they will ruin you. They will destroy your career, they will run you out of town and then they turn around and say, “We’re so oppressed.” It’s remarkable that we are still having this conversation. Dave Chappelle is perhaps the most successful — there are a few names to put in there — comedian, period, certainly among of the most successful African-American comedians in his generation. But probably just comedians across all categories as well, and he still has to deal with this, and he has to kind of apologize and all the rest of it? Who has the power here?

CLAY: Not only that, Buck, I’ll just leave you with this thought — and I always think it’s a really massive way to think about it. If you choose your race like Rachel Dolezal did, it’s super racist. If you choose your gender, you’re a hero. Isn’t it harder to choose a gender, shouldn’t it be, than to choose a race? Yet one is racist, the other one is heroic.