According to Nietzsche, maximum nihilism is reached in the overthrow of old systems by actions that amount to total destruction; to be nihilistic, one must lack the capacity to go beyond obliteration. This is one interpretation. But at least since Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trial, this has arguably been the role of the comedian in show business: to search, destroy, and savage establishment institutions the bourgeoisie views as sacrosanct, usually without much concern for empathy or collateral damage.

The problem is that we’re so divided today that defining the establishment (especially in comedy) has become as dizzying an affair as distinguishing civilians from enemy combatants in urban warfare.

Is Hannah Gadsby a rebel or is she status quo? Probably both, but the media that rallies behind her would like you to remain ignorant of the fact that she probably has more cultural veto power than Dave Chappelle. If Gadsby went on social media and campaigned against a comedian she found “homophobic” or “transphobic,” she could count on support from the press and influential LGBTQ figures like Roxane Gay. Her target would face near-inevitable “cancelation” on social media. Dave Chappelle has no such veto power or capacity for that kind of political mobilization. He’s a comedian; he is not a professional activist. Sure, he’s wealthier, more famous, and more applauded in comedy clubs than Gadsby, but Chappelle cannot launch a takedown campaign that could threaten Gadsby’s social standing, while she could do it to him with relative ease. Chappelle is one legitimately homophobic or transphobic comment away from being boycotted by the clubbable comedians and bloggers that stalk his comedy specials; which is why his comedy has to be a rather ingenious combination of nihilism and defensive maneuvering. This is how you know Dave Chappelle has never publicly said anything rooted in homophobia or transphobia, because there would be no new Netflix special if he had.

But still, I ask, who is the current establishment in the culture? Are Dave Chappelle or Hannah Gadsby a part of it? It depends on what you believe the function of comedy to be.

Currently, there’s a kind of civil war brewing in comedy. One side believes that comedy has a responsibility to be a moralizing agent for progress, while the other sees it as something more nihilistic: “punching up” against the uniform and coordinated efforts of the media’s peer-pressure groups. They are running counter-hegemony to what they view as the new establishment. They are trolling the empire.

For the ascendant minority who wield most of the cultural power — a group including Gadsby and her publicity machine — “punching down” is a patriarchal power-play. Sometimes, this is true, but certainly not always in today’s show business, where the oppressed have become some of the most hostile oppressors. It is also in their best interest to ignore the appalling amount of power they possess by redirecting all the focus to the grotesqueries of Donald Trump. If “President Pussy-Grabber,” the anti-PC brute with a small penis, possess all the legitimate power, then the likes of Ms. Gadsby, etc., are the rebels (never mind that moralistic pedagogy is inherently in opposition to subversion, especially in comedy). This is why the narrative of “punching up” and “punching down” is so confusing when dealing with humor.

Historically, for generations, it was clear that “the establishment” in America was the Christian right or the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) majority who ran the publishing and TV networks. That’s who the comedian pelted from the 1960s onward. Those are the groups Bill Hicks targeted in the early nineties. But they no longer seem to influence popular culture, only politics.

In the 1980s, MTV was broadcast through cable networks run by conservative moguls like John Malone; the president was conservative, and most of the studios, sports leagues, publishing giants, and record labels had either a conservative bent or functioned within a traditionalist framework. This was the establishment Bill Hicks made fun of — and now, it has “gone woke,” as they say. Most of today’s entertainment and media moguls either subscribe to this peer-pressure orthodoxy or at least conform to it under the watchful eye of editors, publicists, pop stars, talk show hosts, Twitter trolls, and occasionally even comedians.

The “digital mob,” as some refer to it, can strong-arm corporations into channeling its talking points. You see this in Gillette’s advertising strategy, which risks its bottom line in order to toe the party line. You see this with Nike sponsoring Colin Kaepernick, because regardless of the political realities, woke is a fashion label. So, is Colin Kaepernick the establishment or the underdog? If you agree with him, he’s Che Guevara. If you disagree with him, he’s as corporate as a shoe deal.

Today’s progressive celebrities, which include Kaepernick and Gadsby, hold sway over most of the American media the way conservative moguls once held sway over television. This is important, because it’s the media that generally decides what kind of content we consume.

For the more apolitical majority, which includes more traditional comedians, punching down is now punching up, because they feel more culturally voiceless than ever. They have little say in how culture is communicated to the masses or what is voted up or down as acceptable or problematic. This group also includes parents who feel powerless as Hollywood educates their children. These are angst-ridden teenagers who don’t feel accepted by the mean girls or chauvinists masquerading as “allies” in slim-fitted blue jeans. For the non-woke minority, or perhaps the majority, depending on who you ask, they are exhausted by speech-policing and internet shaming. For them, a comedian punching the group they view as the establishment provides the feeling of crisp and sensational relief; like downing a can of ice-cold Pepsi at a filling station.

Of course, this is exactly how hyper-woke folks feel when a feminist comedian makes fun of Trump’s penis, or when Gadsby emasculates her subject, or when a female comic opens with, “I’m a feminist,” as the audience applauds in agreement. For them, comedy that negates this feeling is either problematic or misanthropic. For them, Dave Chappelle is the pimple-faced hacker trying to infiltrate their system and infect it with a virus. He’s the substitute teacher who dares to freestyle around the established curriculum. He’s the punk rocker who doesn’t want to play in the right key.

Reactionaries like the folks at The Federalist have their own Dave Chappelle complex. They’ve tried to co-opt him by remixing his joke on abortion to tease their followers with the claim that he’s “subversively pro-life.” He is nothing of the sort, and it’s too bad that such messaging plays right into the hands of groups who want to use comedy as a vehicle of political propaganda. According to his parochial right-wing “fans,” Dave Chappelle is punching up on abortion. He’s not. It’s as desperate a cling to a celebrity as wanting to befriend Kanye West for wearing a MAGA hat. It is as cheap and opportunistic as the comedy of Steven Crowder.

For the non-woke, i.e., perhaps the majority of the comedy viewing public, Dave Chappelle produces the sort of comedy that makes them feel accepted.

In comedy, the intersectional usage of “punching up vs. punching down” creates a hierarchical shaming system in which any joke directed at progressive culture is deemed “punching down.” The actual power dynamics are irrelevant. This becomes the equivalent of bullying when Dave Chappelle jokes about the LGBTQ community, for example. Chappelle’s critics are essentially problematizing him in order to mute his influence on America’s youth. For Americans who don’t get to decide who can and cannot have a platform, Dave Chappelle is Johnny Rotten in 1976 snarling into a BBC camera in a mohair sweater and molten-orange hair and saying something vulgar. Netflix is the millennial BBC, or more accurately, their MTV.

Anyone who isn’t as far to the left as possible, or so massively famous as to be immune to such extremism, is to some degree canceled by today’s culture. The only people who can make them feel accepted are the ones who cannot be canceled. The only people who make them feel relief are comedians; those specific comedians who’ve been grandfathered into an unassailable position of being so famous that the media can’t just erase them for being morally questionable.

These are the members of the brat pack of comedy, which includes Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, and Ricky Gervais. They infuriate the hyper-progressive media because they are, as the saying goes, “too big to fail.” Which probably won’t last long, but for now, Netflix is willing to platform and profit of their subversiveness. Netflix isn’t being ideologically diverse, per say, just savvy enough to know that Americans want their comedy to remain liberated. They want Dave Chappelle, not reformed Dave Chappelle or empathetic Dave Chappelle. They certainly don’t want another moralistic finger-wagging form a comedian whose audience is almost entirely composed of the media and academics.

Because the youth absolutely adores Chappelle, his critics take their anger out on their keyboards and punch him with blatant and hypocritical ageism. A comedian like Dave Chappelle — middle-aged, wealthy, straight, male, and unclubbable — has suddenly gone from the great philosopher in comedy to a bitter curmudgeon who’s “dug in his heels” like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008). This reflexively ageist view ignores the fact the George Carlin was in his comedic prime well into his sixties , and that some of his best bits revolved around making fun of the trends and the peculiar habits of Gen-X. Nobody said he was “out of touch” or “problematic.”

Dave Chappelle is suddenly ignorant, according to Playboy, when just two years ago he was their poet laureate. Because he’s someone who can’t be added to a blacklist or sent packing to the unemployment line like the rest of us, he must be problematized to the point where audiences can no longer talk about Chappelle without feeling guilty or suspected of being a bigoted Trump supporter. Cancel culture may not extinguish him, completely, but it can turn him into an “unlikable property,” which is an old Hollywood term for someone you don’t discuss at a dinner party.

This is accomplished by pummeling Google with negative results: headlines that portray Chappelle as an aging, tone-deaf chauvinist, for example. Chappelle is 46, which isn’t old, but he’s “out of touch” when he mocks some of the logical wrestling matches facing trans people. Sarah Silverman, 48, and Chelsea Handler, 44, are “advancing the discourse” and appearing on magazine covers when they mock the things the press wants to see mocked. This is why the media sells them as subversive, while relabeling Dave Chappelle as a sellout; or, as The Root put it, the comic that all “the worst white people” love.

The youth gravitate towards contrarians. Convince them that a comedy special on the dangers of “toxic masculinity” is contrarian, and you’ve made intersectionality fashionable. Convince them that Dave Chappelle has lost his edge in his accumulation of wealth, and you’ve made him less appealing. Of course, one can reap financial rewards and still be contrarian or punk, as we’ve see from the careers of Andy Warhol, John Lennon, and Hunter S. Thompson. But the press wants you to believe Chappelle is a black Mr. Burns. Why? Because it makes them feel better to be “punching up,” instead of having to look in the mirror and see what they are: the establishment.

Dave Chappelle, a black man with lots of money, is suddenly “out of touch” with white trust-fund liberals because he refuses to conform to their accepted vernacular. For everyone else, he’s communicating how fed up they are with current orthodoxy, which has turned America into a high school cafeteria food fight that’s going to invariably end in a school shooting.

Dave Chappelle is the metaphorical school shooter, and with Sticks and Stones, he’s managed to turn the high school cafeteria into a crime scene where every eyewitness has a different version of events. Was it a roaring success or a flop? The tragically outdated lament of a jaded Gen-Xer or a caustic savaging of the status quo by a rebellious edgelord? That depends on your perspective.

Chappelle’s critics seem to be working off the same script, however, so much so that they might as well consolidate into one organization. According to this group, Dave Chappelle is the spokesman for rich people complicit in Trumpism, transphobia, homophobia, and racism; he is the voice of the bigoted establishment. He refuses to change. He’s old and outdated. Dave Chappelle is exploiting “old tropes,” as Playboy argued; his comedy is the face of “toxic ideologies,” which is how Complex reviewed him; he is “adamantly opposed to change,” according to The Ringer — as if the comedian must be the voice of the current media’s defintion of “change.”

VICE went so far as to say that Chappelle is a misogynist and a transphobe. And yet aside from a few messy punchlines, there’s no evidence to suggest he is actually misogynistic or transphobic. I recall the same lunacy from second-wave feminists who reviewed American Psycho and decided that the author, Bret Easton Ellis, was a misogynist because he wrote a dark satire about a sociopath who grotesquely mutilated women. Satire is exaggeration; it is relief from polite society. It is not journalism. It is certainly not something that should always be fact-checked or used as a corrective measure.

The argument that Chappelle, simply because he is successful, has a fundamental misunderstanding of power isn’t based in any sound logic. An editor at Paste argues that Chappelle sounds increasingly entitled because he’s a millionaire, forgetting, of course, that the entire driving force behind comedy is to be so entitled as to stand in front of people and expect them to want to know how you feel—without ever asking them how they feel! Every comedian wants special treatment; this is inherently part of their peculiar need to be heard over everyone else. Hannah Gadsby gets paid handsomely to be entitled.

Of the above reviews, Salon’s was the only one to put a premium on comedy:

Comedians are supposed to express the things we can’t or won’t say. … Black comedy is like The Hunger Games; it’s not a place for respect or rules. People who can’t take that should not tune in, just as I chose not to watch the racist NFL. Comedians aren’t political activists.

But that’s just one voice in a massive chorus of condemnation. And while “Woke Media Inc.,” as I cheekily refer to them, cannot cancel Dave Chappelle, they can make sure the comedy career of any future Dave Chappelle is aborted long before it reaches viability.

For a lot of his fans, Chappelle is funny because he is humorizing the things we’re being told we can no longer humorize. Chappelle is punching up because he’s voicing the feelings of people who have no voice, or blue checkmarks next to their names — and telling the foot soldiers of today’s media to simply kiss his black ass. This kind of cheeky nihilism is no longer acceptable in comedy. The comic must be progressive or sensitive to its peer-pressure groups, or else they are “trolling,” which is a criticism The Root levied on Chappelle in a shameful attack on his craft.

Chappelle’s greatest talent isn’t his musical delivery, where he transitions like a jazz musician, or the way he scores a smooth uppercut by leaning back on the ropes like a boxer who confuses their opponent. It’s his comedic IQ, which weaves nihilism together with the storytelling of a sage that oscillates between drunk uncle and aged philosopher. In this regard, he is America’s sharpest battle rapper and he’s dropping diss tracks that cut the orthodoxy up into tiny little pieces.

This is why we need him to remain as sharp as a Hattori Hanzo sword. Whether he’s right or wrong is irrelevant (he’s a riotous comedian, not a dull journalist). We don’t need him to be an ally. We don’t need him to be “subversively pro-life” or some right-wing folk hero; we need him to level the playing field between the voiceless majority and the sensitivities of the one percent who seemingly control 99-percent of the keyboards.