John Cleese has announced he will be hosting a new show on GB News.
This sentence, perfectly banal in any other era or on any other channel, is now a statement of such vast controversy that it was trending on Twitter for an entire day.
As we are becoming used to with good old GB, the pre-frontally challenged mob immediately descended to explain to us that John Cleese was now ‘far right’, his Silly Walk now a sinister goose-step.
Ubiquitous Twitter Leftie and park serenader Femi expressed his disappointment that Cleese was now literally Hitler: “I just find it sad. I used to ADORE you. Your dark humour was era-defining. Your Hitler bit was hilarious BECAUSE you knew the audience understood the far right were the bad guys. Now you’re supporting a channel Andrew Neil left because even HE thought it was too far-right.”
The almost pathologically wrong on every issue ‘law academic’ Daniela Nadj stopped by to tell us all why she totally didn’t care about it.
And the usual slew of half-man, half-bots gave us their ‘reckons’. Some of which I could not resist addressing.
Of course, as Ms Nadj admits, none of these people have actually watched the channel (with the possible exception of Femi, who probably gets some sick thrill out of hate-watching it on rare breaks from savaging his Casio).
The real GB News is an Ofcom regulated, at times almost painfully balanced attempt at honest news untainted by most of the media’s blatant metropolitan liberal bias.
I can tell it’s balanced because they employ me, whilst also airing many views I find disgusting. Such as the idea that we should abort unborn babies all the way up to nine months, a disturbing and deranged opinion I recently heard twice on the channel within the space of a couple of days.
But none of that matters to the woke mobsters. To them, the sheer existence of GB News is a symbol of something, a mild but uncomfortable pushback against the woke hegemony, and they sense danger.
And the imminent arrival of one of Britain’s greatest comedy legends throws another rather large spanner into their woke works.
Much as President Biden deduced that if a black person voted for Trump, they suddenly were not, in fact, black, a comedy legend appearing on a bad and naughty channel must suddenly mean they were never a legend at all, but a secret Nazi agitator playing an incredibly long game.
The more that respected figures decide to make this beautiful transition, the harder it is to condemn GB as ‘far right’, and the more difficult it is for the wokes to maintain their fragile and simplistic worldview.
The ostensibly intelligent Paul Sinha recently tweeted: “People are of course free to go on GB News. I’m free to believe that by doing so you are knowingly enabling Far Right, racist, anti-LGBT agendas and will judge you accordingly. You of course are entirely free not to give a shit.”
He later deleted it after many explained the multiple errors in his Tweet (actually it was nearly all error: only the fact that people are free to go on GB News, and to not care what the bloke from The Chase says about it, was accurate).
All this is encouraging.
What Cleese has been calling ‘binary’ thinking is now faltering. We are entering the era of the non-binary.
People are so sick of the idiotic tribal ad hominems, they are beginning to embrace nuance again. As Sam Harris would say: the adults are back in the room. Except unlike Trump-deranged Sam, this time they actually are.
When I pointed out on Twitter that David Starkey regularly appears on GB News, and referred to him as our greatest living historian, someone tried to snipe me down with the classic “This David Starkey?” reply, whereby you dredge up the inevitable moment of cancellation to discredit a man’s entire life’s work. Where this might once have been effective, I was now unfazed, and effortlessly brushed the bot aside with a sarcastic reply well beyond his binary IQ (he then blocked me).
I sense more and more that ‘their’ tactics are failing. Their horribly narrow Overton window – less a window and more like the trash compactor in Star Wars, ever-encroaching and harbouring concealed monsters – is now being rent apart once more.
It is time to say a Chad ‘Yes’ to their shrill accusations, like the one that GB News is ‘Far Right’; to bear down the monsters and scare them away for good.
At the end of Tolkien’s epic novel The Lord of the Rings, in a scene I always regret did not make it into the films, the hobbits return to the Shire to find it has been taken over by a low-level thug named ‘Sharkey’ (not to be confused with Starkey).
Sharkey turns out to be the great evil wizard Saruman in disguise, but the hobbits nonetheless make short work of booting him out of their home.
Whatever allegories academics may read into the scene, my take, upon reading it as a teenager, was simply that the hobbits’ great journey has made them immeasurably stronger, to the point where figures and challenges that once seemed intimidating are now a breeze to shrug off.
I sense this point coming with the woke mob, after the onslaught we have suffered at their hands for the last decade. Their knavish tricks, to quote our anthem, have become exposed. Their swords blunted by our armour of reason.
The adults are returning to the room, silly walks and all, and this great country’s great tradition of free speech and civil discourse is coming home.
Nick Dixon is a GB News presenter, host of the Weekly Sceptic podcast and co-host on the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters. This article first appeared on his Substack page, which you can subscribe to here.
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