SAY WHAT? - Failed Republican politician Caitlyn Jenner defended comedian Dave Chappelle’s right to make transphobic jokes on Netflix.

In a tweet posted Tuesday morning, Jenner wrote, “Dave Chappelle is 100% right. This isn’t about the LGBTQ movement. It’s about woke cancel culture run amok, trying to silence free speech. We must never yield or bow to those who wish to stop us from speaking our minds.”

Her tweet included a two-minute, 20-second clip of Chappelle addressing the controversy over his transphobic Netflix stand-up special The Closer. The clip came from a five-minute video that Chappelle shared via his Instagram on Monday.

In the clip, Chappelle said that Netflix’s transgender employees had never invited him to discuss their concerns about his stand-up special. Netflix’s trans employee group had previously said Chappelle had turned down their invitation to talk.

SAY WHAT? - And lo, the permutations of anti-mask/vax/reason/science crackpottery have been many, from world-wide hoax to heathen attack on godly bodily autonomy to conspiracy by Nazis and/or Commies, and yes, it's ongoing. In Iowa, after the Ankeny School Board voted to reinstate a mask mandate, tomahawk-toting QAnon freak Scott McKay, aka "Patriot Streetfighter," threatened "you forkin' scumbags will not walk away from this clean," even though his 81-year-old father died of COVID after attending one of his rallies; he blames the death on "deep-state motherfuckers." Orange County, CA. just saw its first trial of someone for refusing to don a mask - though she did wear a Trump skirt - in a grocery store while proclaiming her "freedom." California's also home to assorted madmen, a right-wing radio host who says he just got COVID on purpose to "walk the walk," and anti-vaxxers who've taken to stalking masked kids and parents en route to school.

SAY WHAT? - Having banned abortion, trans athletes, COVID vaccines - and, increasingly,  any vaccines in "a very, very, very bad" trend we're calling "Let's Bring Back Polio!" - Texas is going full, crazed "Very-Fine-People-On-Both-Sides" by not only refusing to acknowledge this country was founded on systemic racism, but taking it easy on genocide, which they suggest was maybe not so bad. Alas, the move to whitewash history isn't going so well in one of the last states to tell slaves they were free, perhaps due to their lingering belief in a secession a few years earlier that declared, “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race."

SAY WHAT? - Fulfilling their sonorous, longtime mission to "explore strange new worlds...To boldly go where no man has gone before!", Starship Enterprise's intrepid Capt. James Tiberius Kirk, 90, has finally gone to "the final frontier" - albeit briefly, on a penis-shaped rocket, in a somewhat tacky marketing ploy by a gazillionaire plutocrat whose catastrophic greed, hubris and hypocrisy represent all the worldly ills an admirably Utopian-themed Star Trek sought to overcome. In one small irony among many, William Shatner's 11-second ride into space Wednesday on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket - a trip the last passenger reportedly paid $28 million for - came free to a guy who for years has been hawking affordable travel on Priceline. If he was still with us, some Trekkies might have preferred the anti-war Leonard Nimoy, whose Mr. Spock was the cerebral, stoic "conscience of Star Trek." But the Canadian, determinedly apolitical Shatner is viewed fondly for his portrayal of the iconic, decisive commander who bravely undertook - in fact insisted on - one of television's first inter-racial kisses. Preaching the way to survive was mutual trust and a faith in beauty, his deeply human Kirk, flawed but decent, reflected a belief in "man, that lofty spirit." As such, he got some of the best, often Shakespearean lines: "The prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other...I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing...A species that enslaves other beings is hardly superior...The greatest danger facing us is ourselves."

SAY WHAT? - A scary heads-up: Almost a year after Joe Biden won the election (really, he did) and nine months after thousands of lunatic yahoos threw a tantrum about it at the Capitol, they and their squalid  kingpins are still out there freely raving, lying, browbeating, fantasizing, subpoena-defying and spreading like foul mold. As is often the case, justice has been slowly coming for the low-level reprobates - at least 671 Jan. 6 rioters have been charged in what's officially deemed the Capitol Breach - but their ignoble puppet masters remain disconcertingly untouched by the whole let's-overturn-democracy-and-install-a-mad-king-in-an-insurrection phenomenon, in part because said king has found his role as "Pope of the Church of Perpetual Grievance" works so well with his infamous we-love-the-poorly-educated audience.

SAY WHAT? - The hateful crazy goes on apace. Of course it's everywhere: On Monday in New York City, which just mandated vaccines in schools, a marching mob of anti-vaxxers destroyed a mobile COVID test site as cops blithely waved them away but took no further action, which was def not because they were all white. Still, at this point Tennessee might take the lunatic cake. Last month, the state ranked first in the nation for both new COVID cases - up daily since August by nearly 90% to almost 12,000 new cases a day - and COVID-related school closures even as GOP Gov. Bill Lee has stubbornly resisted mask or vaccine mandates in favor of opt-out policies and wishing on a star.

"We're beginnng to see what we think and hope, cautiously optimistic, we're hopeful is a plateau," he said recently. "We do not know. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it spikes back up" - especially in a state with a mere 38% vaccination rate. Meanwhile, over 400 schools have at least temporarily shuttered due to COVID infections, deaths of school employees arerising, ICUs are full of "vaccine refusal regret" and a record number of hospitalized children, the National Guard has sent 215 members to support 20 struggling hospitals, and after being fired this summer their top vaccination official charged officials have "jumped off a vaccination cliff" by halting all vaccination outreach for kids, even for measles, warning, "People will continue to become sick and die from this vaccine-preventable disease because they choose to listen to the nonsense spread by ignorant people."