Greetings! Welcome to Monday, June 15, 2026. National Big Boy Day, National Smile Power Day, National Megalodon Day, Nature Photography Day, and National Foam Party Day.
1215: King John of England signs the Magna Carta at Runnymede near Windsor in Surrey, limiting royal authority and establishing the principle that the king and his government are not above the law.
1626: King Charles I dissolves the English Parliament.
1842: John C. Frémont sets off from the Kansas River on his first expedition of the Oregon Trail with frontiersman Kit Carson as his guide.
1864: Robert E. Lee's former estate in Arlington, Va., becomes a national military cemetery.
1916: Boy Scouts of America forms.
1924: Ford Motor Company manufactures its 10 millionth automobile.
1969: Hee Haw with Roy Clark and Buck Owens premieres on CBS TV. Ran for 26 seasons.
1974: Back Home Again, the eighth studio album by John Denver, was released.
Birthdays Today Include: David Rose, Emmy Award-winning composer and orchestra leader; Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1982-84; Erroll Garner, jazz pianist ("Misty"); Waylon Jennings, country singer-songwriter and guitarist; Harry Nilsson, singer-songwriter; and Xi Jinping, Current General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.
If today's your day too, have a great day.
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Over at Instapundit, Ed Driscoll notes a piece by S.D.Wickett, whom I presume to be a British writer. The article is around four years old, but the commentary is still valid. Indeed, the passage of time has moved us closer to the end the author is concerned about.
I’d like to draw your attention to an anonymous post on the forum website 4chan, which forms the basis for what I have titled the Tragedy of John Cleese. It goes:
“He was a Progressive, Liberal degenerate in 1960s uber-white uber-polite Britain. He could take the p*** out of the people he saw as uptight and repressed while enjoying the clean, safe streets and quiet little hamlets full of those same uptight, repressed, polite-to-a-fault, helpful, white Christian Englishmen.
“The best part was that those same British conservative Anglos were generally pretty humorous about themselves. So, when you made fun of them, they laughed along with you and shook their heads saying ‘Ha! You know, Margie, he’s got a point!’ It was heaven on earth for him, to be a popular counter-culture icon loved by conservatives and liberals alike for being hilarious, but also enjoy the benefits of a strong, stable and homogeneous culture.
I've been a Python fan for a long time. But even back in the '70s when they first burst onto the scene, I noticed they almost invariably targeted traditional conservatives — or at least members of the cultural majority. The one exception I can think of appears in the 1979 film, The Life of Brian:
That's about as prophetic as the Pythons in general, and Cleese in particular, ever got. Since then, that small crack of light has widened, and thereby revealed to the remaining Pythons a lot they’d not faced before.
Wickett continues:
Now, he’s an old man, staring at a desolate wasteland where in London, Britons are now in the minority. Everyone is suspicious, the hamlets and villages are economic dead-zones. Every week, there’s a new group you’re not allowed to make fun of, no one has a sense of humour anymore. Little girls are being sold as sex slaves, women are harassed in the street and the men are suspicious and surly over their lowered living standards. The sinking realization that the world he made fun of, but loved more than anything, is gone forever and will never come back. The horrifying conclusion that his own counter-cultural irreverence may have helped to kill it. So, he impotently gripes on Twitter and wonders where the laughter went, when did the jokes stop? Where are those wonderful, repressed and uptight conservatives?
So now, apparently, Cleese is making a documentary titled Cancel Me on the cancel culture phenomenon that my PJ Media colleagues and I have written about often enough. One really must wonder if he can see signs, however dimly, suggesting he himself has long been part of the problem. Wickett seems to wonder about that as well:
"I want to bring the various reasonings right out in the open so that people can be clearer in their minds what they agree with, what they don’t agree with, and what they still can’t make their mind up about."
He mentions political correctness as if it were new. Something that emerged out of a campus vacuum in the mid 2010s. Yet, its true origin is something far closer to home. John Cleese cut his teeth in the 1960s. As I've previously stated, it was a time of revolution, a springboard into hyper-modernity, hyper-liberalism. It was the death of the suit, the family, the stigmatic removal of undesirable and unbecoming behaviour. The normalisation of sex, drugs, and psychedelia. A time of free expression without limits, restraints, or shame. Hedonism without consequences. Pregnant? Just have an abortion. Bored at a party? Here, take this. 'Only God can judge me, except he doesn't exist.'
The last fifty years of evidence have finally handed us the bill, and it's steeper than anyone, including Cleese, wanted to admit back when the dreaming was seen as being without cost. I've long maintained that Britain is the canary in this particular coal mine, and that we colonials are only a few stumbles behind them.
Buried inside the 1960s counterculture was the cheerful slogan "God is dead" — lifted, naturally, from Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman, by people who couldn't be bothered to read past the bumper-sticker version. Had they done so, they'd have found a warning, not a guide. Nietzsche wasn't celebrating the death of God; he was outright terrified of it. His point? Without a moral and cultural framework, the foundation under everything crumbles. The social left grabbed that warning, mistook it for a manifesto, and promptly set about proving him correct, both in terms of the Judeo-Christian ethic and the culture that sprang from it.
The cultural rot and the cancel culture springing from it that has Cleese wringing his hands today is exactly what Nietzsche was describing. Shakespeare's Miranda squealed with delight at her brave new world, blissfully ignorant of what lurked beneath the surface. Cleese and his fellow progressive cheerleaders spent decades doing the same, pompoms and all. Now they stand slack-jawed while Huxley's ghost is joined by Rush Limbaugh and other cultural conservatives in saying, "See? I told you so."
Turns out the architects of that brave new world built precisely what we were warned they would. Cleese is getting a masterclass in a very specific flavor of irony: you never know what you treasure until the revolution you spent your career championing shows up to confiscate and burn it. Or as another leftist icon, Joni Mitchel so famously put it, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?”
Cleese has a history with the left in the UK, the Labour Party, the Social Democrats, and the Liberal Democrats, but he has changed in recent years. Just this last February, he joined the Restore Britain party, which the Brit pass has laughably tagged as a "far right group."
The really sad part? He will likely be called out by the far left for finally noting these things and for being open-minded enough to recognize the damage done by the positions he once championed.
Did he cause all of this? Of course not. (No single raindrop, however fat and self-important, floods a valley alone). However, he makes a perfect starting point for diagnosing what led us to this pass. Will he ever own his role in it? Please. Red pills don't get easier to choke down when you get older — they get harder. So, John Cleese, I'll borrow from Bruce Willis here: "Welcome to the party, Pal."
Thought for the Day: A question for those demanding proof of voter fraud: When has a late-night mail-in ballot drop ever gone overwhelmingly Republican?
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Take care today, and smile. As Tigger once said, it's always darkest before the lawn. I'll see you tomorrow.
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