Woke Folk: Going To The Chappelle And We're Going to Aggravated

News Item: Crypto giant FTX collapses the day after U.S. midterms provoking stories of Ukrainian money laundering and $ 40-million Democratic Party donations.

As the expression goes, you can always tell a liberal. You just can’t tell them much. Which might account for the seismic reaction to Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue last week. No, not the anti-semitic gargle. That’s political boilerplate that matters only to the chattering class. Average people see it for what it is. Insider baseball. 

No, what was truly unique was Chappelle’s observation that the midterms just passed were not Donald Trump’s last stand. He started his riff by saying his enlightened New York crowd probably think #orangemanbad is done. But from his own home among the poor whites in Ohio it’s not so clear to Chappelle. 

Trump, he says, is still loved. Why?  Chappelle points out that real estate mogul/ TV host  was the first rich white person to confess to the commoners: “We are doing all the things you think we are doing.” 

“He’s what I call an honest liar…” Chappelle said. “That first debate, I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen a white male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘This whole system is rigged.’ … (asked for proof) he said, ‘I know the system is rigged, because I use it.’”  

When accused during the debate by Hillary Clinton of not paying taxes, Trump shot back: “That makes me smart... if you want me to pay my taxes then change the tax code…But I know you won’t, because your friends and donors enjoy the same tax breaks that I do.” And with that, said Chappelle, a star was born. 

What was interesting about all this cynicism is that it's still news to the #SNL audience fed cartoons about Trump and his base. Six years later, the Rob Reiner crowd is still huffing and puffing about Russia. The Anti Trump Republicans can’t fathom that the base created Trump, not vice versa.

Leading disaffected conservative author George Will to observe of the RINOs under Donald Trump, "A large number of its elected officials are terrified of their voters ... And if you’re afraid of your voters, you don’t really respect your voters. And if you don’t respect them, you don’t really like them.” Now, the Liz Cheneys and Mitt Romneys are a hunted class thanks to Trump’s base.

Trump the opportunist was the first person in on the game who was honest about The Fix. (Bernie Sanders was always an outsider). Poor middle-class people respected that cynicism. He gave them rough honesty. They gave him loyalty to pursue their agenda. 

Naturally the preening cool kids in the NBC studio and the sneering Canadian commentariat prefer the byzantine Russia hoax and the bleach and the MAGA hats. The Rachel Maddow lecture series and the Keith Olbermann eye rolling. They never understood that the unrelenting scorn they poured out since 2015 could not remove Trump’s connection to the people that Chapelle lives with in Ohio. It enhanced it.

The knowledge workers and performance artists and Greta Thunbergs— used to hapless Republicans who just blew the midterms— could never fathom the elemental link between Trump and his rallies. The Jimmy Kimmel slappies still believe the “GOP Friends of Big Business” tag.

The political polar opposite to Trump is Canada’s serial fabulist PM Justin Trudeau, who blew off Remembrance Day to hobnob in SE Asia with third-world bullies, Klaus Schwab technocrats and to be lectured like a schoolboy by Xi Jinping. He, too, is petrified of real people. To protect himself he flaunts his privilege. He despises anyone outside his Great Reset club. He wears blackface while lecturing on race tolerance.

As a member of the WEF Brahmin caste, he’d die before lowering himself to honesty with the Freedom Convoy untouchables. (But try to keep him from attending a drag show!) Even as his fellow ESG toffs around the world are being sacked, no amount of shame from the Emergency Measures debacle or sacking Jodie Wilson Raybould could force Trudeau to level with the Convoy types.. 

He’s a Woke made man, after all. He knows the NDP support will protect him from the populist rabble. His refusal to “slum” is his eternal bond with the CBC snobs. Portraying himself as a brave hero in Covid times, he locks down people and fires them for not taking vaccines. His virtuous vanity gives him purpose. That’s also supposed to make his ardent supporters into heroes, too. This fake virtue is enough to cover every insult to Canadian voters, every grab for power.  

Which brings us back to FTX and its neurodivergent  founder San Bankman-Fried. Even as he (and as-yet unknown parties) launched this massive fraud he made sure to blanket his nefarious business in all the Woke pieties Trudeau worships. From climate to veganism to trans sensitivity, SBF played the system, just as Trump assured his voters the exploiting class would do. 

SBF now admits it. The “virtue-signaling game where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” SNL will never say a word.

It seems he took down a number of the In Crowd— Shaq O’Neal, Tom Brady and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan among them— with his pathetic virtue videos. But the people on the inside made out just fine. The Democrats used his laundered Ukrainian millions to corrupt GOP primaries that produced Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker. The Wealth Class doubled its billions during Covid. Big banks wrecked the crypto start-ups. The status quo survived and thrived.

As Chappelle has noted, for all their failings the Trump base sees the world as it is. The progressive left sees a world as they wish it to be. Eventually they are going to collide.

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx