Many of us Boomers and Gen X people remember the great BBC comedy, Monty Python's Flying Circus, whose troupe prominently featured the towering John Cleese. From the Dead Parrot sketch to the Ministry of Silly Walks, John Cleese always made us laugh, with his improbable height, his range of voices, and his channeling of stuffy British upper-middle-class attitudes. He is a comedian of the best sort, one who has been able to make us laugh for generations now.
Lately, though, John Cleese has been rather more serious. He is an advocate of keeping Britain British, and shocks leftist sensibilities by maintaining that not all cultures are created equal. Now, Mr. Cleese is no Nigel Farage; his attitudes, as far as I've seen, are pretty much mainstream British left. But he's not a victim of the growing plague of suicidal empathy that is eating up the left on both sides of the Atlantic, and he's been called out with the usual leftist attack - racist - and, to his credit, he's pushing back. He's not a racist, as he points out in an X post, but a culturalist, and that's a whole different thing.
I'm not a racist. I'm a culturalist
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) July 30, 2026
I believe some cultures are superior to others
For example, I prefer cultures that do not encourage wife beating, paedophilia, clitorectomies, stoning and constant inflation of the male ego
I am also aware of the difference between… https://t.co/WNCRrzQvZi
Mr. Cleese writes:
I'm not a racist. I'm a culturalist
I believe some cultures are superior to others
For example, I prefer cultures that do not encourage wife beating, paedophilia, clitorectomies, stoning and constant inflation of the male ego
I am also aware of the difference between Islamoscepticism and Islamophobia
Notice that hate does not come into this
Only moral preferences
There's a key distinction here.
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Take a look at the long march of Western civilization, from ancient Greece to date. While there have been dips and spikes, as with any complex and chaotic system, the overall arc of history in the Western world has been towards the positive by any rational measure: Individual rights, liberty, and property. Look at the United States Constitution, and you'll see what is (so far) the ultimate development of that; the first ten amendments are a solid statement of individual rights and the restrictions placed on government. Again, there have been dips and spikes, but the trend remains.
For now, anyway. We may be approaching one of those dips, with some of our bluer jurisdictions electing, well, communists. But we have sensibilities and moral principles that are absent in other parts of the world. As Mr. Cleese points out, we do not encourage wife beating, pedophilia, female genital mutilation (unless the female in question claims to be transgender) or stoning. Men in the Western world are expected to protect women and children, not to abuse or attack them.
Americans, by and large, still live by these principles. We work. We save. We take care to raise our children to do the same. That is, objections of the left aside, a superior culture to that of, let's say it plainly, much of the Islamic world.
The Muslim world is a world where, by and large, women have no rights, and are treated as property. Worse, they are required to dress up as garbage bags to conceal any hint of femininity, lest the men go mad with lust, or so they claim.
The Muslim world is a world where girls are married off at ages where Western girls are still playing with dolls, often to much, much older men. This is a world where cousin marriage is all too common, with all the genetic disorders that can arise from that.
The Muslim world is a world of catastrophic intolerance. Our Bill of Rights guarantees us freedom of conscience. Even in Israel, Israeli Arab Muslims are free to practice their faith. But almost nowhere in the majority-Muslim world is that tolerable, and in most of these places, the penalty for apostasy is death.
That's the kind of culture that John Cleese says, appropriately, that he doesn't want to live in, and it is people from countries that practice these things that the United Kingdom is allowing in, in their thousands, and who will eventually remake Britain, and much of the rest of Europe.
And, once more, opposing this isn't racist. It's culturalist, and it's a perfectly appropriate and understandable concern.
Here's the thing: The world, right now, is in a major conflict, of which President Trump's ongoing Iranian efforts are only one part. It's not a clash of cultures; it's a clash of civilization vs. barbarity, and if anyone thinks barbarity is too strong a word, I would suggest that they speak to any of the survivors of the October 7th, 2023 attack on Israel. This is not only something that the left, on both sides of the Atlantic, can't admit, but worse, many of them are making common cause with the barbarians, and a nastier and more humorless lot of people never walked the earth.
Mr. Cleese may be, in Britain, a voice in the wilderness, but I suspect more people are listening than not.
This isn't the first loony-left position Mr. Cleese foresaw, and it's certainly not the first he's made fun of:
But that, folks, is comedy done right. That, too, is part of our superior culture.
