News Summary

• Dave Chappelle told NPR he resents how Republicans co-opted his comedy.
• But he's following their playbook.
• The comedian's first taunts of trans people began in his 2019 Netflix special “Sticks and Stones,” where he compared trans identity to performing an offensive Chinese racial caricature.
• By then, there was already rising anti-LGBTQ violence under the first Trump administration; specifically, violence against Black trans women had accelerated.
• He was so defiant about his trans tirades masquerading as comedy that they ultimately turned into something less comedian and more monologue from a disgruntled conservative uncle in a Black barbershop doling out verdicts about a community he knows nothing about.