The left likes to pretend, sometimes, that you’re either “with them or against them.” In other words, you’re either a woke warrior or you’re a servant of Donald Trump, a purveyor of the alt-right, and (of course) a white supremacist. But in reality, that’s not really the case. A list of prominent liberals who don’t buy into this claptrap could fill a book: Bret Weinstein, Sam Harris, Matt Taibbi, Coleman Hughes, J.K. Rowling, and Bari Weiss are just a few of the politically-active liberals who have no use for “wokeness.”
Indeed, there is an entire Hollywood-adjacent industry that has an extremely tenuous relationship to the New Left and its obsession with canceling free speech: Comedy. Legendary comedians from Jerry Seinfeld to Bill Burr to Dave Chappelle have spoken out harshly against this dangerous, ridiculous, anti-freedom movement. And it’s no wonder: When you have to craft your jokes in such a way that no “marginalized identities” ever get offended, it stops being comedy and starts being a bone-dry lecture.
One man who has known this for a long time is British comedy pioneer John Cleese, whose Monty Python franchise was and remains one of the most successful and border-erasing comedy troupes in history. Cleese has frequent run-ins with the cancel-obsessed left, and it happened again this week after the social media mob came after him for daring to support Rowling.
Reacting to the mob, which accused him of “standing in solidarity with transphobia and discrimination, Cleese said his critics are infected with a poisonous mixture of “wokery, humorless posturing, and moral self-promotion.”
“If you can’t control your own emotions, you’re forced to control other people’s behavior,” Cleese tweeted. “That’s why the touchiest, most oversensitive and easily upset must not set the standard for the rest of us.”
This angered at least one Twitter user, who raged: “Why the f*** can’t you just let people be who they want to be? Do you actually think there is some deep conspiracy to turn people ‘against their genders’?”
To which Cleese replied, “Deep down, I want to be a Cambodian police woman. Is that allowed, or am I being unrealistic?”
Another user said that Cleese should drop the pretense and be up front about his hatred of transgender people.
“I’m afraid I’m not that interested in trans folks,” Cleese explained. “I just hope they’re happy and that people treat them kindly.”
Perhaps realizing that these idiots wouldn’t understand that anyone could possibly be anything less than obsessed about identity and gender politics, Cleese elaborated: “Right now I’m more focused on threats to democracy in America, the rampant corruption in the UK, the appalling British Press, the revelations about police brutality, Covid19, the incompetence of the British government, China’s complete disregard for the necessity to abandon fossil fuels, the developments in France between Macron and Islamicists, diabetes, and the recent deaths of several of my close friends.”
Cleese closed out his epic takedown by saying of the woke mob, “I hope they fry in their own sanctimoniousness and narcissistic posturing. Until they get a sense of perspective, that is.”
We won’t be holding our breath for that “until.”
