Dave Chappelle has a talent for revealing the inconsistencies of the intersectional Left. In his latest Netflix special “The Closer,” Chapelle presented the argument that a black man’s life holds less value than a trans person’s feelings. As if on cue, trans activists mobilized in the halls of social media to protest Chapelle and Netflix for promoting speech that trans people considered hurtful.

It is interesting to note that many of the most vocal trans activists were, until very recently, white men. One of the first to speak out in umbrage was Jaclyn Moore, the co-showrunner of Netflix’s series “Dear White People.” Moore declared on Twitter that she was quitting the show and boycotting Netflix because she refused to work for a company that was “promoting and profiting from dangerous transphobic content.”

Until last year, Jaclyn was known as John Patrick Moore, a white man hired to write on a show about the experiences of black college students at the fictional Winchester University. The writing of the show has been criticized by Ta-Nehisi Coates and other black writers for its flat, one-dimensional characters and fixation with white racism as the sole defining factor of their lives. As Coates says in a review in The Atlantic, the show is “concerned primarily with racism, and only secondarily with black people.” As is often the case with white liberals immersed in anti-racist dogma, the full complexity of black people’s human experience is reduced to their relationship to “white power.” Moore took offense at a joke Chapelle made comparing men who identify as women to the gendered version of blackface. In Moore’s case it could be argued that he was quite literally writing in blackface.

Only in our society’s current game of Woke Twister could we arrive at the tangled irony of a white man writing about the experiences of black people seeking to silence a black man for speaking about his actual experiences.

This isn’t the first time that black men have run afoul of the powerful LGBTQ lobby in Hollywood. Comedian Kevin Hart was scheduled to host the 2019 Oscars until activists unearthed decade-old tweets in which he made jokes about homosexuality. A public shaming ensued and he was banned from hosting.

The late Patrice O’Neal was openly critical of what has come to be known as cancel culture. He was a canary in the coal mine, sounding the alarm back in the early aughts about the erosion of free speech and the move towards “legislating feelings.” He spoke very bluntly about how his own career had been deliberately hamstrung because he refused to censor his comedy routines to make them more politically correct. In particular, he called out the pressure from within the entertainment industry to silence any discussion of homosexuality or queer lifestyles that was deemed critical. And he condemned the attempt by gay activists to co-opt the historic civil rights movement by comparing being gay to being black.

In 2011 activists complained that Tracy Morgan had gone on an anti-gay tirade in a stand-up routine, a tirade that allegedly included the controversial claim that “women are a gift from God.” O’Neal explained in a radio interview that Morgan was given an ultimatum by white Hollywood executives who forced him to kiss the ring in order to save his career. He went on an apology tour to denounce his jokes as “unfunny in any context.” And he was made the personal subject of ridicule on his own show, “30 Rock,” where Tina Fey, a white liberal, lectured him about his insensitivity to the gay community. O’Neal claimed that in order to preserve his career, Morgan sold out his comedic integrity and personal agency, becoming in effect an ambassador for GLAAD.

One of the earliest victims of modern cancel culture was Isaiah Washington, who was famously fired from the popular medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy” in 2007 after he was accused of using a derogatory slur against a gay castmate. His story is particularly instructive in this context. Washington played Dr. Preston Burke on the series, but was originally slated to play the romantic male lead. Instead, the part of Dr. Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd ended up going to Patrick Dempsey, who is white, after lead actress Ellen Pompeo objected to a black actor playing her love interest. Dempsey became notoriously difficult on set and got into a heated argument with Washington, who told him to stop treating him like a “faggot.” The story was leaked to the press along the lines of a game of telephone where it was reported that he had directed the slur at T. R. Knight, a fellow cast member who happened to be gay. Knight claimed to be a victim of a homophobic attack and after Washington’s initial apology, he was ultimately let go from the show over the incident and he was blackballed by the Hollywood establishment.

In this case we see a black man whose career was injured twice: the first time when he was recast as a supporting cast member because a white actress refused to act opposite him on the basis of his race, and then again when he was fired for allegedly hurting a gay man’s feelings.

Anyone who thinks Dave Chappelle was “punching down” by joking about trans people, does not understand the outsized power and influence the Alphabet Mafia has on pop culture, media, and corporate industries. And they completely miss his point that this totalitarian suppression of speech is coming at the expense of the rights of black people, and in particular, black men.

The media vents its outrage over every perceived slight against the LGBTQ “community” but remains largely silent as thousands of black men and boys are slaughtered in city streets every year. Black lives matter only when black deaths serve a narrow political agenda, one that sacrifices black men to a left-wing, feminist and queer ideology. One of the stated aims of the Black Lives Matter organization is to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” and to support communities of women and transwomen. Black men – FATHERS – are deliberately erased from their worldview.

In fact, much of intersectional ideology today can trace its roots back to black queer/feminist activism of the 1970s. The term “identity politics” was itself coined by the Combahee River Collective, a socialist collective of black lesbians. Black men are literally expendable in this movement in its very foundations. This is evidenced in the Black Lives Matter platform and even in as unexpected a place as the Baltimore City Public School Board where Commissioners boast about preserving spaces for “Black women and femmes” and disrupting anything that threatens “single mother households.” 

The abject failure of Baltimore City schools under such leadership is a perfect microcosm of the devastation that these perverse ideologies wreak on black communities at large. Without black men, black communities suffer to the point of extinction. Crime rates increase 17% for every 10% increase in fatherless homes. Being raised in single mother households increases the poverty rate for black children by 73% compared to children raised in married two-parent homes. 90% of all homeless and runaway youth, as well as 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. 

And just as the campaign to silence Chapelle was launched by a white man writing as the voice of black people, so too are these destructive policies financed and formulated by white liberals advancing their own agenda. Kimberle Chrenshaw, who explored the concept of intersectionality in her seminal work Mapping the Margins, is now the Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, which is funded by George Soros. Soros’ Open Society foundation also finances Black Lives Matter. Famed black radical Angela Davis was a student of Herbert Marcuse, a white Marxist. 

These ideas are poisoning black communities in the name of intersectional wokeness and LGBTQ sensitivity. It’s time to stop letting white men write the script for black progress. 

Black men need to step up and take back control of their own narrative before white liberals write them out of existence.