Dave Chappelle is happy to make tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans comedy routines—”I’m team TERF,” he said in a 2021 special—but now apparently draws the line at Republicans turning those jokes into policy.
In a Wednesday interview on NPR’s Newsmakers show, Chappelle said he resents that the Republican Party’s 2024 platform “ran on transgender jokes” and was “a weaponized version of what I was doing.”
He recalled a time when Lauren Boebert, then a GOP House rep from Colorado, took a photo with him and shared it on Instagram with the caption “Just three people who understand that there’s only two genders.”
“She should never do that with a person like me,” Chappelle said.
But the comedian has long injected anti-trans material into his comedy shows, most notably in a multiyear, multi-special streak beginning with his 2017 Netflix special Equanimity. In that special, and in 2019’s Sticks & Stones, Chappelle called being trans similar to lying about one’s racial background: In Equanimity, he compared being trans to Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who pretended to be Black. The 2021 comedy special in which he claimed to be on “team TERF,” The Closer, included Chappelle’s extended defense of J.K. Rowling, whom he stated was “canceled” for saying “gender was a fact.”
“On behalf of the trans community, I’ll go ahead and address your weakest defenses. How much do you have to participate in my self-image? Not at all.” Dahlia Belle, a transgender comic, wrote in the Guardian shortly following the release of The Closer.
On Wednesday, Chappelle asserted that he was the subject of “rage-baiting” during this time. “I am a filthy nightclub comic,” he told NPR’s Michel Martin. “That’s all I see myself as.”
“People had drinks, and they just were gruff and said what they said back then. And it was never a big deal,” he continued.
But Chappelle’s fixation on trans people, and anti-trans routines, extended across years and multiple specials. They were indistinguishable from, and grist for, the material of conservative streamers and right-wing edgelords. The comedian’s remarks about what would happen if LeBron James said he was a woman and dominated the WNBA were used in Donald Trump’s 2021 rally against trans rights; Candace Owens made the same Rachel Dolezal comparison last year.
Content note: sexual assault, sex trafficking, real bad misogyny
On June 9, 2024, a 26-year-old former soldier and security guard named Kyle Clifford went to the home in Hertfordshire, England, where his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt lived with her mother and sister and killed all of them using a crossbow — though not before raping and torturing Louise Hunt for several hours.
Hunt had recently broken up with him over his “views and behavior.” Not surprising, given the fact that it was later discovered that, in the run-up to the massacre, the soon-to-be family annihilator spent many hours listening to Andrew Tate.
Prosecutors argued that this should have been admitted into evidence because “the sort of violent misogyny promoted by Tate is the same type of motivation that … fuelled both the murders and the rape.” The judge, however, determined that it would be “deeply prejudicial” as Tate was “almost a poster boy for misogynists.”
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Why am I telling you this horrible, horrible, deeply disturbing story? Because just recently, Andrew Tate — the violent, (alleged) sex trafficking misogynist who was in prison in Romania until the Trump administration freed him (no sex trafficker left behind!) and who makes a large portion of his money teaching men how to trick women into making them money as cam girls and allegedly inspired Kyle Clifford to violently murder three women — shot to the very top of Substack’s New Bestsellers list. Tate joined the site earlier this month and has since racked up 1.1 million followers … which is pretty incredibly depressing.
As a result, Substack ended up trending on social media yesterday, with many people (fairly!) saying that they would no longer support any site hosted on the platform. Who is a website hosted on the platform? Wonkette is a website hosted on the platform. Many users already left Substack when it was revealed that they hosted several anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi sites (and made money off of them, too). It’s likely that more will leave now.
I’m a big fan of free speech — even beyond the idea that it’s only illegal if the government censors speech, which is factually true. And this isn’t like, complaining that Bari Weiss’s “Free Press” sucks. (Bari Weiss’s Free Press sucks.) But there’s a difference, a big one, between permitting speech and platforming it, and an even bigger difference between that and making money off of it. Substack takes 10 percent of every subscription, so they’re technically making money off of Andrew Tate, an (alleged, but also self-confessed) sex trafficker and rapist who makes his money off of teaching young men how to be garbage human beings who think women are obligated to serve them.
There’s an argument that could be made for allowing all speech, no matter how vile, but there’s not really one for allowing (and benefiting from) monetization. Nearly every content creation site that allows for monetization allows for this.
On YouTube, creators who reuse content, who make automated, repetitive content, or who engage in hate speech or even serious profanity cannot make money off of their videos. The site has also banned several users entirely … including Andrew Tate. TikTok bans hate speech, bullying, and hateful ideologies and will demonetize or ban users who engage in this. Users like, again, Andrew Tate, who is also banned from TikTok. Even Meta, which, grossly, specifically allows users to “call for exclusion or use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality,” says they ban “hateful conduct” against protected classes and still restrict hate speech on monetized content. Andrew Tate is also banned from Meta. Twitch also bans hate speech and will demonetize content creators who violate that policy. Andrew Tate is also banned from Twitch.
Hell, even The Site Formerly Known As Twitter will take away users’ ability to monetize their feed, though less for hate speech than for, uh, getting mad about people using AI to post fake child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) of them. That would, for the record, be just about the only site other than Substack that has not banned Andrew Tate (well, since Musk has been in charge, anyway, he was banned before that).
It is worth noting that while it’s not very substantial, Substack at least has a policy against inciting violence against protected classes.
Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.
We can’t know what Tate is publishing on his Substack, as it is for paid subscribers only (unlike Wonkette, which will always be free), but we do know he has a long and storied habit of encouraging violence against women — who are, in fact, a protected class.
He has bragged about breaking a woman’s jaw. Once, when describing how he would react if a woman complained about him cheating on her, he said, “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch.” He has said that women should “bear some responsibility” for being raped. He’s also been accused of raping and strangling at least two women he’s dated.
In fact, he directly told one of these women “I love raping you.”
On top of that, for several years now teachers have said that they and their female students now have to deal with sexual harassment and bullying from boys as young as 11 who idolize Tate. That might not directly be “violence” but it seems highly unlikely that it won’t get to that level eventually, as these boys grow up. Even when he’s not actively encouraging violence against women, he’s promoting hatred of them in a world in which nearly 9 out of 10 women who are murdered by men are murdered by men that they know, in which we’ve seen myriad men go on mass murder sprees simply because they hate women. Indeed, an Andrew Tate admirer in the UK was sentenced to six years in prison a couple years ago after plotting an attack on his university.
If we can’t see his posts, we can’t know what kind of violence he is encouraging against women, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of that policy. Given that we know, for a fact, that this is one of his areas of interest, it would really behoove Substack to follow in the footsteps of practically every other platform on earth and kick his ass off.
Substack is not a publicly traded company. If it were, one could say it had an obligation to its stockholders to not do anything that would damage the brand so severely. However, they should feel some obligation to the world at large to not promote and make money off of someone who encourages violence against women (or anyone!), as well as to their other users who stand to lose subscriptions and money as people defect. (That’s us again, hi.)
Unfortunately, we are not in really a position to leave because (inside baseball!) we have 22 years of posts that would need to be transferred to a new site — something that took many months and tens of thousands of dollars the last few times we’ve done so. It would be a whole lot better for us if the platform would just not host and make money off of neo-Nazis and violent misogynists. It’s not actually that hard. If practically every other site on earth can do it, we think Substack can manage.
But if you’d like to continue (Or start! Always feel free to start, any time!) supporting us without supporting Substack, you can donate through Paypal, join our Patreon, or buy our merch.
We appreciate you. This bullshit, not so much.
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Some days the news-iverse brings tales of terror and destruction, but other days, well … defrost the Girl Scout cookies, re-heat a Little Caesar’s and chill a TaBⓇ or six, y’all, because yesterday First Lady Melania Melanija Knavs Knauss Trump emerged from her million-dollar closet to declare she did not fuck with Jeffrey Edward Epstein, he did not introduce her to Trump, she was not a victim of his, nor a witness, and her affectionate communications with Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell and more than 100 appearances in the files represented only a “casual correspondence,” of her being “polite” to someone in her overlapping social circle. Good to hear, now go say it under oath in court, or in Congress, even, and release the other 3 million Epstein files to prove it!
And gee, why were Epstein and Melania’s social circles so overlapping, who, what, when, where, and whyhow came the jizz that stuck the pages of that particular address book together? It is a puzzle! She must be so furious Trump brought her around all those creeps.
Anyway, watch, read along, and/or we will attempt to parse how much BS she packed into one short pop-up, poopsie, and to keep under 2,000 words!
First, why is Melania surfacing now? Devoted readers of this mommyblog already know it is certainly not out of nowhere, no fucking sir! The mostly ghostly silent chatelaine of Mar-a-Lago is selective about when and how she appears, from her pussy bow to the jacket that underscored how she really DOESN’T CARE, DO U, about immigrant children in cages and/or what the press thinks of her. You can count her speaking appearances within the past decade on your fingers and toes with your pants on, and all of them with the exception of the GOP conventions were to make a buck.
This apparition before us is surely at least somewhat about potential discovery demands in the lawsuit against her from author Michael Wolff.
Refresh!
And, or, perhaps also about the book by Brit Andrew Lownie, Entitled, mostly about the Duke of York but with a passage where Epstein claimed he had sex with Melania in 2007, a passage Wolff said publisher HarperCollins removed from future and audiobook versions after the First Lady made legal threats.
Melania has long been litigation-happy. In the first term she successfully sued the UK rag Daily Mail and a Maryland blogger for saying she had been an escort, and last year threatened to sue author Michael Wolff and Hunter Biden for a BILLION dollars each for saying hers was a “sham marriage, trophy marriage, hardly any marriage at all,” that Melania was “very involved in the Epstein scandal,” that she met Trump through Epstein’s social circles, and that Epstein had claimed Trump first explored Melania’s ladyjungles while airborne on the Lolita Express, because that was what Jeffrey Epstein had told him.
And Hunter Biden said that Wolff had said “Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep” and “Jeffrey Epstein introduced Melania, that’s how Melania and the First Lady and the President met. Really? Epstein made the intro? Yeah, according to Michael Wolff.”
Which is not exactly what Wolff said Epstein said. But Wolff did spend more than a hundred hours in 2017 interviewing Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon on tape about Trump, and Melania’s ties to Epstein sure did come up! Wolff has written four books all about Trump, and knows perhaps more than any person alive outside of Trump’s circle about how deep his and Melania’s ties might go. And Wolff has the receipts and knows the law, because he is a professional journalist. So he was like AIGHT BET and last October anti-SLAPP sued Melania right back in New York, whee!
Last we heard, Melania had not yet pursued her threat against Hunter Biden, and was trying to get the venue for Wolff’s suit moved down to Florida, even though, uh, isn’t her official address 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC? (Wonkette has been sued for libel in Palm Beach, and it did not go well for Not Wonkette!) Guess it’s official that she’s been working out of Palm Beach and/or now that $70M gently used Noemdowski fuck plane since her husband had her East Wing office and glamor room torn out, and Barron turned the Trump Tower penthouse triplex duplex into his personal Bone Zone, no mommies allowed!
And of course Melania is fighting discovery with every veneer and press-on! Possibly her lawyers have delivered unto her some unwelcome news.
Onto the parsing of the notable moments, top fibs and linguistic double-dutch rope skipping!
Dood afternoon. Dang, she looks and sounds SHOOK.
Betcha she plays up her accent because it turns Trump on. She could speech-therapy it out in a few weeks if she wanted to, as all Southerners have to if they want to go into newscasting, PR, or otherwise be taken seriously by the rest of the clippy and nasal-talking USA. All of Trump’s wives and many of his girlfriends were known for their strong accents, IJS.
So, yes, lawsuits’ demands are surely pressing. Especially if any requested discovery about Melania is in part of that 3 million hidden tranche that the DOJ is already illegally withholding and has not even tried to excuse with any NATIONAL SECURITY cop-out.
Melania’s statement is also certainly, primarily, as Epstein’s survivors note, about deflecting the blame away from herself and her husband, and “shifting the burden onto survivors under politicized conditions to protect those with power.” And don’t forget Madam Child Pimp is still alive and kicking in puppy prison, too.
If one must get ahead of things, now is as a good as a distract-y time as any.
Anyway, gee, yeah, who was Pam Bondi’s boss? Pam Bondi is gone now, refusing to testify before Congress, and Todd Blanche is (Interim, Acting) attorney general, so, where’s the files and the child-rape accusations that Trump’s own FBI found credible in 2019. And who is telling Todd Blanche, Mike Johnson et al. what to do and who to subpoena now, huh, huh?
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“I call on Congress to provide the women who have been victimized by Epstein with a public hearing specifically centered around the survivors. Give these victims their opportunity to testify under oath in front of Congress, with the power of sworn testimony. Each and every woman should have her day to tell her story in public, if she wishes, and then her testimony should be permanently entered into the Congressional Record.”
Like the victims her husband’s DOJ illegally un-redacted? Why, so they can get re-victimized all over again by the pedo-hugging cretins in Congress and doxxed some more? It is not any victim’s job to go publicly out these men and hold them to some kind of account. That is the job of her husband’s DOJ, to release the files as the law requires them to do. It’s their job to go prosecute people, ma’am, not play step-n-fetch for Ghislaine Maxwell with a puppy and some Chick-fil-A in prison, believe it or not.
It’s the same game they always play. Trump is Godlike strongman, only he can do it, whatever it is, yet he is helpless as a pinky mouse against the machinations of the people he himself installed and what they put into motion, and any consequences of the deals he himself art-ed. Is America stupid enough to keep rocking to that broken 8-track? At least a good one-third, it seems!
“I never been friends with Epstein. I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump.
“I had never met Epstein and had no knowledge of his criminal undertakings. Numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been calculating [sic] on social media for years now. Be cautious about what you believe.”
Epstein never said that exactly. By all accounts, including Trump’s and Melania’s, Trump introduced himself at a party at the Kit Kat Club in New York in 1998 held by either Melania’s friend, according to Melania, or her agent, Paolo Zampolli. And Melania claims she first rejected Trump because he had arrived on the arm of another woman, reported long ago by the unimpeachable New Yorker as Norwegian cosmetics heiress Celina Midelfart, who also happened to have been one of Epstein’s ex-girlfriends. So is “in the same circle” fair to say? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
How Wolff portrayed what Epstein had related to him: “She’s introduced by a model agent, both of whom Trump and Epstein are involved with. She’s introduced to Trump that way. Epstein knows her well.” And Trump and Epstein met at some point in the late ‘80s and were confirmed hanging tough by 1992.
How Andrew Lownie portrayed it:
Milanese model agent Paolo Zampolli also sponsored Melania in 1996 for that genius Einstein visa for her extraordinary modeling ability, an episode that has always been rather mysterious! Trump later gifted Zampolli many cushy jobs, starting in 2004 when he made him Director of International Development for the Trump Org selling apartments, and eventually promoted him all the way up to an Ambassador for Global Partnerships in the current administration, where he was just hanging out with JD Vance in Hungary this very week!
Zampolli allegedly used his connections last year to try to get ICE to deport his (ex-) girlfriend of two decades to Brazil so he could get full custody of their child. What a guy! And now the ex is claiming to have dirt. She got with Zampolli around 2006, so maybe?
Also as it happens, Zampolli has recently made it clear he’s willing and eager to step up and testify on Melania’s behalf to her version of events, so perhaps she is feeling her new huevos as an empty-nester and film star. And urgency to help her husband, as she has been newly named the most unpopular First Lady of all time.
Epstein had also claimed to Wolff (and also Andrew Lownie’s source too, it seems) that he had met Melania before Trump had, and that Trump and Melania had fucked for the first time on his Lolita Express, because a billionaire’s plane is the same thing as the working man’s back of a minivan, apparently. Which may or may not be true, Epstein was a well-known liar and braggart, of course, and only three people would know the fuckplane part for sure, and one of them is not alive, and the other two aren’t saying!
Donald John Trump chose Melania to be his third wife for a reason. They were simpatico the minute she rejected his first offer as too low. Their partnership might not be what most would call the most romantic sort of love, but they are partners in something.
Did the First Lady always keep it classy? Was she truly so blind to the same creepiness that everyone else from Luther Campbell to Howard Lutnick to eventually even her own husband claimed they saw in Epstein? Were contacts with Epstein and his kiddie pimp really as limited as she claims? Did Wolff in good faith accurately relay what Epstein said on the tape? Can’t wait for court!
In the meantime, all anyone can say for sure about her is she can boogie, boogie woogie, all night long, yessir.
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