John Cleese told his followers he believes MAGA supporters are capable of ramming cars into Democratic congressional candidates, even though police investigating one of the three crashes say they found no sign anyone was targeted.
Quick Take
- Three Democratic women running for Congress — Mary Peltola, Heidi Kuhn, and Marcy Kaptur — were hurt in separate car crashes in late October 2026, days before the midterms.
- John Cleese posted online that he believes MAGA supporters “would certainly be capable” of deliberately causing the wrecks.
- Anchorage police and Peltola’s own campaign say they found no evidence her crash was a targeted political attack.
- Independent reporting found no verified connection linking the three accidents together.
Three Crashes, One Viral Theory
The timeline looks striking on paper. Mary Peltola’s car was hit from behind in Anchorage on a Saturday evening. Heidi Kuhn survived a three-car pileup on Interstate 240 in Memphis on October 23, suffering a broken nose and a fractured jaw. Marcy Kaptur was also in a crash around the same stretch of days. All three were Democratic congressional candidates, and all three accidents happened within roughly a week of each other.
What Cleese Actually Said
The coincidence caught fire online, pushed in part by commentator Dean Obeidallah, who framed it as a pattern of political violence against women. John Cleese, the Monty Python actor turned frequent Trump critic, jumped into the conversation on October 29. He wrote that “we all believe that the MAGA people would certainly be capable of this,” endorsing the idea that Trump supporters might have deliberately targeted the candidates with their vehicles.
Cleese carries real weight with a certain audience. He has built a second career skewering Trump and his supporters on social media, and his endorsement of a theory instantly gives it more reach than a random online post ever could. That is exactly why public figures making this kind of claim deserve more scrutiny, not less, before they tell millions of followers that a political movement is capable of running down candidates with cars.
Police And The Campaign Push Back
Facts on the ground tell a different story than the theory suggests. Anchorage Police Department official Gina Romero said there was “nothing new to share” and added there were “no indications that this was a targeted attack”. Peltola’s own campaign spokesperson went further, telling reporters the team had no reason to believe the crash was politically motivated at all. Police described an ordinary rear-end collision at an intersection, not a deliberate assault.
No Verified Link Among The Crashes
An independent review of the public record found the same gap in every direction. As of late October, no reporting had established that Kuhn or her husband were deliberately targeted in Memphis, and no publicly confirmed connection tied any of the three accidents together as coordinated attacks. A separate commentary piece reached the identical conclusion: three car crashes involving Democratic candidates, on their own, are not evidence of a political conspiracy.
Why The Theory Spread So Fast Anyway
None of this stopped the story from traveling. Research on conspiracy beliefs helps explain why. A recent Harvard Kennedy School study found that 41.05 percent of people surveyed believed at least one conspiracy theory, a sign that coincidence and timing can override missing evidence for a large share of the public. Add a tense midterm election and raw partisan anger, and three unrelated fender-benders start looking, to some, like a coordinated plot.
Sigh: John Cleese Buys Into Theory of MAGA Terrorists Crashing Into Female Dems Running for Congress https://t.co/EwW1vxCdp4
— Jim Polk 🇺🇸 (@JimPolk) October 29, 2026
Common sense still matters here. Car accidents happen every day to people of every party, and treating three of them as proof of organized political terrorism asks Americans to ignore the police, the campaign, and the available facts. Cleese is free to comment on American politics, but lending his name to an unproven theory about his political opponents being capable of vehicular violence is not satire. It is the exact kind of careless accusation that deepens division without a shred of evidence behind it.
Sources:
twitchy.com, johnweyermuller.substack.com, yahoo.com, democraticunderground.com, nbcnews.com, firstamendment.mtsu.edu
