John Cleese shares his thoughts on the destructive nature of today's cancel culture after discovering some shocking statistics in this Sunday's The Dinosaur Hour.
The GB News star is joined by famed pollster Frank Luntz on the show who delivers the surprise statistics that one in four Brits have "stopped talking to someone because they reject their point of view".
Cleese also sits down with Helen Pluckrose to detail her own experience with cancel culture as well as academic Greg Lukianoff who delivers startling research of his own.
On Sunday's show, Cleese addresses today's wokeness as he says: “Whenever I'm asked to be interviewed on the BBC, even though it's supposed to be about the mating habits of ringtail lemurs, the first question will be what about cancel culture?
"Because mentioning cancel culture is the best way of geeing people up and that guarantees they won't switch channels. Same with the word woke.
"Most people have little idea what it really means, but despite that they tend to have strong feelings about it.
John Cleese learns surprising statistics about wokeness on Sunday's show
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He adds: "As Winston Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
"Now, the essence of a liberal democracy is that people with different points of view discuss things and then we hope, in an ideal world, some consensus emerges that can be acted on.
"But the woke say, 'No, we're not prepared to discuss our ideas because we're right. And if we start discussing them, people might suspect there is another point of view'.
"I don't think that's a very constructive attitude."
Elsewhere in the show, Luntz explains the findings of a recent study which he has carried out into wokeness.
Luntz divulges: "We've been polling on woke for the last six months. Labour supporters are more than twice as likely to identify themselves as being woke than Conservatives. But one third of the British population doesn't even know what it is.
"The data that matters most to me, however, is that one out of four Brits have stopped talking to someone because they reject their point of view. And one out of five have had someone do it to them.
"And if you want to know who those people are, 18 to 29 year olds, half of our youngest population have cut someone off simply because they disagree."
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GB NEWSLukianoff even tells Cleese that cancel culture is worse than McCarthyism, as he weighs in on the show: "I noticed around 2013 that students were really clamping down both on freedom of speech, but they were also rationalising it in this kind of medicalised way that was all catastrophising, all binary thinking, all of these cognitive distortions.
"A lot of the ideology that we're seeing, particularly on campuses, is this very simple narrative that there is pure good and pure evil and you want to be on the side of pure good, and always at war with the other person.
"I have a book coming out called 'Canceling of the American Mind' and it's making the point that not only is cancel culture real, but it's so bad, we're going to be studying it in 100 years.
"One thing that we've collected is the number of professors who have been punished or fired. And, in the United States, you have to go back to the 1950s to McCarthyism to see numbers that are anywhere near as close to the number of Professors being fired. “The estimate is that about 100 to 150 professors were fired from 1947 to 1957. And right now, we're approaching 200 professors getting fired."
Fans can watch the full discussions on Sunday's The Dinosaur Hour exclusively on GB News.