Now imagine an intellectual class rushing to the airwaves to insist that motives remained unclear. Meanwhile, a gigantic voluntary PR machine of global reach kicks into motion on behalf of the clergy, who remain mysteriously quiet about the whole thing. While all this is going on, ordinary Catholics go about their business and the rest of us are encouraged to worry on their behalf about a possible backlash.

If any of this is hard to imagine, it’s because our expectations would run in the other direction entirely. So much so that few in the Church would dare respond in any way other than perpetual contrition – the media and intellectual class nagging them into near madness, implicating them in the terrible actions they neither committed nor condoned.

We would hear other Catholics condemning the fanatics in their midst morning, noon and night. The public disavowal from Catholic priests, politicians, and celebrities would be deafening and unanimous. Every parish newsletter in the country would become a counter-terrorism pamphlet. The Pope would barely get through breakfast before issuing another statement. Nobody would need to ask where the moderate Catholics were, because we would be unable to hear ourselves think over the sound of them. We’d be bored with it, frankly. Here they go again, we’d say. Yes, we get the message: you don’t want any association with it, you condemn it utterly. Duh.

Would anyone say it was bigotry to ask why men invoking Catholic doctrine kept murdering children? Would people on discussion panels and newspaper op-eds insist that the real problem was “Catholicophobia”, a word so obviously absurd you’d have to be drunk on communion wine to say it with a straight face?

Do you really doubt any of this? Westerners are pretty good at apologising and worrying out loud for the sins of the past, after all. We’ve heard practically nothing else for decades. Why would this be any different? And what if we swapped out Catholic for Protestant or Quaker? Nothing changes.

How about Muslims?

Just asking that last question makes this piece controversial in a way every preceding line wasn’t. That should tell us something.

But wait a moment, you say. The comparison is unfair. The Catholic Church has a Pope, while Islam has no comparable figure who can issue a statement. This is true, but it’s not the point I’m making. The disavowal that counts springs from the op-eds and discussion panels, from the ordinary believers and those in the community who speak for them, who simply don’t want these things done in their name.

That’s not to say condemnations don’t exist. Of course they do. The Muslim Council of Britain issues its statement, and the press release goes out. Every serious survey finds the same thing: British Muslims condemn terrorism at least as readily as everyone else. Anyone claiming ordinary Muslims secretly approve of atrocities is not paying attention. But a press release read by no one is different from an organic expression of remorse for acts carried out in your name. You might not share that intuition, and if you don't, the rest of this won't move you. But many people, asked honestly, will recognise it.

The disavowal we’re talking about is the deafening, spontaneous, unanimous reflex we imagined for the Catholics, the kind nobody has to ask for because staying quiet would seem so at odds with the claims of the religion of peace. Nobody polls for that, and I cannot hand you a figure. But you do not need one. You know the difference between a reflex and a press release, and that’s what’s missing from the scene following every terrorist atrocity, the unmistakable sense that ordinary Muslims are impatient to condemn the evils carried out in their name.

This is a very different claim from one that says Muslims should perform some sort of disavowal ritual after every atrocity. Of course not – guilt by religion is grotesque, and we’d never impose it on anyone else. The question is why institutions, media and public culture appear to have no comparable expectation of visible, sustained disavowal from Islamic authority and civil society, a public expression of condemnation from ordinary Muslims through their community leaders and public figures.

John Cleese asked a version of that question recently, to which the broadcaster and author of Win Every Argument, Mehdi Hasan, answered: “Oh STFU you racist unhinged ignoramus.”

This is at least a step up from the accusation of “Islamophobia”, more honest in what it’s trying to do, which is to make the man asking the question sound morally suspect and intellectually defective. Anything but answer the question. One can almost admire the efficiency. Why answer the question when “racist” does the job, and the crowd does the rest? (I covered Hasan's record at more length in a note here.)

The question is never answered because answering it would be to admit that the question is reasonable. And it is reasonable, because we would ask the same of Catholics and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists if the most extreme elements were strapping bombs to their bodies.

What explains the anomaly? The radical of any other religion would be disavowed by moderates at no cost, because nothing exists to punish the person doing the disavowing. Not so with Islam.

Consider how much propaganda it takes to make criticism of child marriage feel gauche. Young girls were raped in England, and still are, by groups of men predominantly of Pakistani-Muslim heritage – but saying so makes people wince, because decades of top-down institutional pressure have made plain speaking about obvious evils sound like the real problem.

The concept of “Islamophobia” is just a few decades old, but it has completely changed how we think about a set of beliefs alongside the people who hold them. It has merged these two things in a way that makes the latter a protected entity, so that criticising Islamic ideas now reads as hatred of Muslims themselves. To say that it’s been wildly successful as a way to deflect criticism of Islam is to state the obvious.

Muslims, like everyone else, deserve equal dignity and legal protection. Islam is a collection of beliefs and traditions that should be open to critique like any other. Nobody is arguing that criticism of Marxism is bigotry against Marxists, and we can run the analogy with any other ideology. Only Islam gets a pass.

Which is why today, everyone in public life has reached the conclusion that thinking clearly about Islamist atrocities is bad for community cohesion. It’s a form of moral confusion, of course, but it’s also strangely condescending – as if Muslims need to be held to a different standard. And it’s ordinary Muslims who count the cost of that confusion, since it’s their own dissidents who pay the highest price for speaking in ways we would expect of any other religion. And the more dangerous the question becomes – for Muslims and any of us who dare raise it – the more its absence is presented as proof of good manners.

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The last James Bond movie was five years ago. I remember nothing about it except that, in a first for 007, he dies at the end. This was the best part of the film because it signalled that it was over and I could drag my CGI-battered senses to the exit sign, which had been the most interesting visual in the cinema up to that point.

There was a lot of messaging in the film, of course (masculinity is bad, etc), but as I say, I don’t recall the details; nobody does. The next instalment, when it arrives, will likely ignite the usual media buzz, the sort that accompanies the England football team going into the World Cup before getting knocked out by Uzbekistan on penalties in the quarters. These two events, coming every few years, have tested the patience of an exhausted people who just want a few wins to punctuate the decades-long managed decline of their country – something that says “we can still pull our weight, make a splash, hit the target”.

I doubt the next Bond will deliver on that promise. There’s been speculation about a woman in the lead role, but the more likely move will be to make the next Bond black. Idris Elba’s name has popped up a few times. He would be a fine choice because he would fit the expectation that actually counts. He could inhabit that masculine, brutal, slightly cruel character of the Fleming novels if they let him. Because Bond is resolutely not a feminist. He’s not checking in with Moneypenny about her boundaries or filling out MI6’s inclusivity survey. He’s an assassin. True, Fleming imagined him as a Scots-Swiss product of the British establishment, but the franchise stopped treating that as binding decades ago. This is an action movie, first and foremost, with a recognisable character at its centre. The colour of his skin (it seems to me) is irrelevant.

I’m not sure I would say the same about the casting of Helen of Troy. We recently learned that Lupita Nyong’o will take the role in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. The film, which opens in July, is Nolan’s most expensive and ambitious to date. Like Bond, Helen is a character in a work of fiction. But unlike Bond (a franchise character invented in 1953), she’s foundational in a 3,000-year-old text of Western civilisation. Hers is the face that launched a thousand ships. Homer’s stories are what the Ancient Greeks told themselves about who they were, and Helen of Troy is a pivotal figure in that account. Homer describes her as “leukōlenos” – white-armed.

To cast a black actress in the role is to make a statement, and Nolan knows it. The issue isn’t whether Nyong’o is beautiful (I’ve no argument there), nor that she’s black per se. It's that we're being spoonfed an anachronism that shoehorns modern sensibilities into the ancient world. Bond is a character in a franchise. Helen belongs to the Western canon. Casting them isn't the same kind of choice.

If you think it’s irrelevant who plays Helen, then imagine a film adaptation of the Bhagavad Gita – the most sacred text of Hinduism – starring Ben Affleck as Lord Krishna. Or a biopic of Confucius with Tom Cruise in the title role. Or Lady Gaga in the musical version. No Hollywood studio would dream of making these casting decisions today, so why does the same logic operate in reverse for the Odyssey?

Nolan might yet surprise us. He’s made a dozen films, and none that I remember were interested in identity politics, so maybe he’ll leave ideology at the door for his latest as well. But the early signs are not encouraging. There’s already a rumour that Elliot Page will take the role of Achilles, armoured with pronouns and a six-pack. Then there’s rapper Travis Scott. Nolan recently told Time magazine that Scott was cast because the Odyssey was “oral poetry, which is analogous to rap” – the reasoning of a man who has just discovered both.

Even if all these speculations are just to create noise (as I’m doing here), there’s no escaping the broader trend. Hollywood, the BBC, and every other production company keep casting people in roles in ways that run counter to audience expectations. It’s designed to elicit a reaction that can then be filed as evidence of the racism or transphobia it sets itself up to combat. This is a feedback loop that has played on auto for years and shows no signs of wearing itself out. But what the cultural establishment fails to understand is that the pushback is not, for the most part, a protest about historical accuracy and rarely, if ever, actually racist in any literal sense. The actual complaint is more mundane.

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Antisemitic malware works in a similar way. It first presents itself as something noble: justice, compassion, solidarity with the oppressed. In some cases, it comes preinstalled with the ideology you were born into, but for others, it’s a program they voluntarily install. Before long, they’re giving Heil Hitler salutes and screaming genocidal slogans.

Nothing in the compilation video above will surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to the Free Palestine movement up close, but it should make uncomfortable viewing for politicians and media types who think criticism of the movement is just a misunderstanding. If pressed, they might call these people a few bad apples rather than the less inhibited elements of a sinister movement.

Of course, most people on a Free Palestine march are not giving Hitler salutes. The people in a curated video are at the extreme end, but we might fairly ask why this movement attracts so many antisemites. It isn't just the people in the video; it's also the “polite” ones who claim the label of anti-Zionism while focusing so obsessively on Israel that you can almost hear the same software whirring in the background.

As I wrote about recently, it’s not just thugs and morons who get caught up in the hate, but people who wear suits and wouldn’t dream of doing a Nazi salute (at least not in public) but who nevertheless feel the same vengeful hatred toward Jews. The malware infects people of all demographics and classes, but especially those who are already envious and vindictive.

The writer Dara Horn, in her article “Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies”, observed that:

“Free Palestine” had, even before October 7, become a kind of verbal swastika—not because of its meaning, but because of how it is deployed. Apart from its use in political or protest contexts, it has also been used as an online-harassment technique: Trolls tag any post with Jewish content—including material unrelated to Israel—with #FreePalestine, summoning more freedom fighters to the noble cause of verbally abusing Jewish teenagers who dare to post pictures of challah. This verbal vandalism made the jump to real life…and harassers now routinely scrawl it on Jewish communal buildings, shout it at their Jewish schoolmates, and scream it out of car windows at anyone wearing a kippah.

The irony is that they think they’re the anti-fascists, the morally sane ones correcting a terrible evil, when the opposite is the case.

It’s not just on the Left, although the left frames it as “compassion” because that’s their identity marker – the signature move in the status game. On the Right, we have the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who seem to treat Hamas as a resistance group and blame the Jews for the world’s ills – and their own grievances, which are many.

There’s effective antiviral software for all this, and it’s called critical thinking. But that’s also the first thing a certain kind of university education drags to the trash can, if it was there to begin with. Too many universities, which once at least pretended to be about the pursuit of truth, now function like churches with a new theology formed of social justice slogans and critical theory. How easily antisemitism slots into that oppressor/oppressed framework, the easiest virtue-signal machine ever invented, overwriting critical thinking and corrupting the operating system it runs on.

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A guide to five common deflections

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I’m against violence, on the whole. It’s ugly and nearly always unnecessary. It’s ubiquitous because humans are ubiquitous, but it’s the worst of us. I don’t wish to see violence visited on anyone except people I vehemently dislike – rapists, for example – in whose case I welcome violence as long as it’s delivered solemnly, after a fair trial and preferably by firing squad.

But then again, even capital punishment makes me uneasy. What if they have the wrong person? What about forgiveness and redemption? But this is a different matter from violence outside the state’s monopoly: the lone shooters and wannabe assassins who emerge when certain elements in our society have become so radicalised that they are willing to act on their feelings of hatred, although it's just as likely to be feelings of self-righteousness, even justice and heroism. Their self-aggrandising manifestos usually tell us their act of violence is for the greater good, that they’re ridding the world of an evil only they see clearly, and only they have the courage to eliminate.

It’s the same rationalisation, by the way, that any decent person would likely make if transported back to Weimar Germany. You find yourself with a gun in a deserted alleyway, a young Hitler approaching from the other end. Who wouldn’t shoot him for the greater good? Who would dare not to assassinate the man who caused so much human misery on such a scale, given the chance?

And here lies the problem, because Hitler belongs in a category all by himself. My political adversary isn’t Hitler. Shooting the British Prime Minister (say) would be unthinkable. I would never endorse violence against him, let alone have a direct hand in it. Keir Starmer may be a useless political android – and if he had an off-switch, I might consider flipping it for a bit – but even I concede he’s a human being in the final analysis. And I don’t think he’s motivated by evil intent but simply mistaken and deluded on matters of huge significance. It’s become common for some on the right to complain that Britain can’t vote its way out of its current mess, but at the edge of that lament are some who would act on that impulse if they could with violence. I want nothing to do with them.

But I know what it feels like to loathe people in politics. I’d be willing to bet you do too. Take podcaster and former Conservative MP Rory Stewart. He’s everything I dislike about the modern-day UK politician, a ghastly homunculus in the body of centrism, the Golem of Eton as I think of him. And then there’s his cohost, Alastair Campbell, a creature so unaware of his flaws that it’s become his primary flaw, his unawareness compounding all other flaws in an infinite loop. I’m not alone on this. JK Rowling recently described the pair as “exceptionally arrogant” and “dripping with classism and misogyny”.

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Dear America,

I write today on behalf of a small and bewildered country in the North Atlantic which, until recently, answered to the name Great Britain. You might recall that the people of these islands invented parliamentary democracy and gave the world the Industrial Revolution. We were long famed for standing agreeably in queues and talking politely about the weather. Many of us still consider these achievements evidence of civilisation.

It is, then, with a heavy heart that we require your immediate assistance in a very grave matter. Our country is in peril, governed as we are by technocrats determined to ruin the nation they inherited.

Accordingly, I ask you to invade.

Before you object that such things are normally reserved for oil states and clerical fascists, allow me to outline the present situation. Britain today is run by a strange cohort of people who have been educated to think that their own country is uniquely awful, its history unforgivable, and its traditions contemptible. They consider free speech dangerous and observable reality a matter of interpretation. They treat ordinary common sense like a biohazard.

The country of Shakespeare and the Magna Carta has lost its way. We’re not the same people who sent you taxes, then soldiers, then apologies, and eventually a steady stream of television actors. We are not quite unrecognisable yet, but the people who lead us are. The country that stood alone against fascism is run by people who think the man who led that effort was the real problem.

It started with Tony Blair – promising to carry us from a more-than-tolerable postwar settlement into a new century of “progress” and a plan to make that transition permanent. First under his watch and then under his apprentices, our institutions deformed from the inside, supervised by PR people first, politicians second, patriots never. A new order emerged, characterised by utter contempt for the nation that gave them birth, and a positive genius for the administrative management of decline.

They ran as different parties, naturally. Labour first, then Conservative, now Labour again. Not a liberal or a conservative or a democrat among them. Not working-class Labour either – a respectable tradition in its way.

We threw out one party and elected another. For a brief moment – Brexit, you might recall – it felt like the public will meant something. It didn’t. We had merely swapped one dinner party cohort for another. The guests became the hosts, then the guests again. The same dinner party continued. We were not invited.

Just this week, we learn that our banknotes will be redesigned on the grounds that historical figures are “polarising”. Churchill out, badgers in. Or is it beavers? We can be sure it won’t be dogs.

Labour councils have advised teachers that children’s drawings may constitute blasphemy under Islamic law. Female genital mutilation, we are told by our esteemed academics, is “culturally complex”; stigmatising it is the problem. Just recent examples. We have been wallowing in this humiliating cultural pigsty for twenty-five years.

For two decades, gangs of men raped thousands of girls in the towns of northern England. The authorities declined to intervene on the grounds that intervening might appear culturally insensitive. They put tact before the rape of children.

Last weekend, on the south bank of the Thames, crowds gathered to mourn Ayatollah Khamenei – a man whose militias were still killing their own people two months ago – with children waving placards bearing his face. A journalist who objected was surrounded by a mob and escorted away by police.

In London, this scarcely counts as unusual. You may think the mayor of New York is an eccentric choice for a city twenty-five years after 9/11. But we have Sadiq Khan – someone who’s spent a decade turning London into a city where you can be stabbed on the way to a vigil for the people who want to stab you, and still win re-election.

So, dear America, invade. Bring your boats and your helicopters, rain down missiles if you must. Smash through the diversity barriers with tanks, level the BBC and salt the earth.

At this rate, Britain will become the first country to erase itself in the name of progress. A country that gave the world Jane Austen will likely replace her on the ten-pound note with a fucking otter.

Invade, dear America. Rid us of the progressive aristocracy and return this country to its people. Do it for old times’ sake.

And when it’s all done, we’ll send you some tea – no taxes this time.

Yours faithfully,

The proud but exhausted people of Great Britain

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John Cleese is one of the very few celebrity activists I can get behind. Actually not “activist” – a word that now calls to mind trustafarians and murder junkies marching side by side through the world’s capitals for a recently deceased ayatollah.

Cleese is not an activist, then, but he is delightfully vocal and unfiltered on the absurdities of the moment. He’s become that rare thing in a stupid age – an influential voice of common sense in a world that treats such things as “problematic” and inflammatory.

Evidence of this comes from his recent posts on X, which point to the UK's unutterably stupid descent into an intellectual suburb of Islamabad.

Here’s a taste of what he’s been saying:

Cleese has probably retweeted things he shouldn’t. He’s 86 and posting in hurried disbelief at what’s happening to his country. The occasional loose cannonball is inevitable – and forgivable. I’d rather that than the bland, inoffensive slop that passes for conviction among people with more to lose and less to say.

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If Cleese were just another retired octogenarian, I suspect someone from the Starmer Stasi would have knocked on his door by now. They haven’t and probably won’t because he has an enormous online presence, or “reach” as marketers say – and reach, in this climate, is the only reliable protection.

Protection from what? Protection from saying what so many people think but have learned not to say: that Great Britain has been shat upon by a spiteful, technocratic, ideologically bamboozled collection of characters who belong in a Monty Python sketch, not the UK Parliament. That sort of thing.

Cleese has nothing left to prove. This is the man who co-wrote The Life of Brian and gave us Basil Fawlty. A man who has gifted the world more laughter than all humourless ideologues could ever bury under an avalanche of sanctimony.

More importantly for this discussion, he’s at an age where he has nothing to lose. Freed from the social calculus that keeps younger celebrities rigidly aligned to progressive orthodoxies, he’s able to post freely about extremism and the institutional cowardice that refuses to name it.

The response from the cultural establishment has been predictable: he’s gone mad; best not to engage; old white man howls into the wind. The instinct, as always, is to pathologise common sense as some kind of cognitive defect. “Is John Cleese OK?” – that patronising little question that implies mental illness while pretending concern.

He’s more than OK. He’s enjoying a second burst of the same irreverence that made him famous – which makes sense, because the target is essentially the same. When The Life of Brian was released in 1979, it was widely banned and picketed by people who apparently couldn’t tell the difference between Jesus and Brian. Cleese and the other Pythons, then in their thirties, skewered precisely the sort of people who most needed skewering – the pious and the pompous. The sort of people who today tell you to “educate yourself” and call you a racist for noticing things, in the belief that this wins the argument rather than advertises the absence of one.

Cleese has been thinking about this problem for a long time. Years ago, he gave a wonderfully clear explanation of the mentality of fanaticism – the habit of dividing the world into the pure and the impure, the enlightened and the damned.

The fanatics have only multiplied since. Like a lot of truly great comedy, the clip hits the target long after the first shot is fired. This was from a time when comedy and satire had a job to do and did it well.

What a pity, then, that modern comedians are so tiresomely quick to share their moral positioning on climate, trans rights, and every other urgent “moral emergency”, yet remain silent on the actual evils in our society. Today, satire is almost dead, not because so much of what surrounds us is beyond parody, but because the reputational costs are too high and the rewards for toeing the line too compelling.

What are the odds that at next week’s Oscars anyone will show solidarity with the massacred dissidents of Iran or call out the grotesque apologists for theocratic fascism? We won’t hear a word. Instead, we can expect the usual ejaculations about Gaza, Trump’s threat to democracy, and the existential horror of border enforcement. The causes that cost nothing, aimed at the enemies that are safe to have.

Not Cleese, though. He hasn’t been stupefied by fame and in his later years is using it for something useful – stirring things up and being a nuisance, or a gadfly, as I like to think of it.

Not that I agree with him on everything – of course I don’t. Agreement is not the point. Intellectual honesty and the courage to speak plainly are.

There’s something both funny and faintly melancholy about all this. The satirical tradition he helped build was supposed to be self-renewing – each generation finding the next sacred cows and roasting them like before. Instead, we’re watching an octogenarian do the job that a younger generation has decided is too risky to pursue, preferring instead to bore us with sermons about diversity and inclusion. Who the hell watches a comedian for that?

Cleese has remained true to his vocation. By the standards of the current moment, that makes him a dissident. Which probably says rather more about the moment than it does about him.

If you want to take the pulse of a culture, start with its comedy. Ours, with a few exceptions, is very unwell

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Gadfly Quotes

I’ve added a new section to The Gadfly – a place for some of my favourite quotations, aphorisms, quips and epigrams. These are the sort of lines you can dip into when you’d rather hear from people who have thought more deeply about the big questions than most of us.

If you have a favourite of your own, add it in the comments of the post below. I’ll update these posts with the best ones as the collection grows. Over time, I hope to build up a small library worth dipping into.

Here’s the first one.

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The Ayatollah’s obituary

It’s a good time to be in the hate business. You probably feel it too. If someone bothered to plot it on a graph, the line would look like one of those stock charts from a bubble economy: steady climb, minor dips, then a vertical. Ever since the internet became our second brain and social media the public vomitorium, the opportunity to despise people at scale has never been greater.

Let’s not pretend this is new, though. There have been far more dramatic surges of hatred in history. The 1930s were pretty full-on, albeit the media was less in-your-face. Back then, people had to go to a cinema to see a lunatic with a funny tache get very cross about things – and I don’t mean Charlie Chaplin but the other guy he was mocking.

Mocking tyrants is a good thing, by the way. Celebrating their downfall even better. Which is why the media obituaries for Ayatoll…

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They’re going to be more insufferable than usual, aren’t they? Greta will come out of hiding, and Jeremy Corbyn – who increasingly resembles the late Ayatollah Khomeini but with less charm – will pop up in TV interviews. He’ll declaim on the evils of regime change, waffle something about international law, and become indignant and evasive the moment anyone points out the nauseating hypocrisy – which they won’t because it’ll be on the BBC.

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I’m generally against criminalising stupidity. Nobody can be blamed for being born with a low IQ, or for having the misfortune to miss out on an education – although the latter isn’t strictly stupidity, and avoiding a Western university education is increasingly the smart move.

But some utterances are so stupid, so utterly devoid of logic and sense, so obviously designed to win applause rather than connect with intelligent life, that I find myself believing there must be a cost. A price must be paid. I’ll return to this.

Billie Eilish, I’m assured, is a talented singer. She’s the sort of person who can fill a stadium and make teenagers cry with a chord change. She’s also the sort of person who stands at the Grammys and tells the world that “nobody is illegal on stolen land” – and gets a standing ovation for it.

Let’s take a moment to unpack this. If all land is stolen – and it is repeatedly, by different groups throughout history – then the logical conclusion is either that everyone is illegal everywhere, or nobody is illegal anywhere. If the latter, then every country on earth should open its borders to every person who wants to come in.

Even a child can work out that this wouldn’t be practical. But Billie Eilish isn’t a child, she’s a celebrity – completely insulated from the real world and surrounded by sycophants and other moneyed morons who all think alike.

She doesn’t need to understand what the scripted line means. The only calculation she has to make is whether the phrase sounds compassionate. In her world, that’s the same thing as being compassionate – which is top-tier positioning for the status-hungry. The standing ovation confirms it.

Why does this matter? Who cares what singers and actors think?

Well, imagine someone tells Eilish that the Earth itself is stolen land. Stolen from whom, exactly? Doesn’t matter. Maybe the dinosaurs. The point is that by Friday, there’d be a #FreeEarth march in Los Angeles. A pin would be designed in the shape of a T. rex. Celebrities would wear it, and fans would follow suit. Within a month, Greta Thunberg would ditch the keffiyeh for a lizard-patterned onesie and release a spoken-word manifesto called Asteroid about the ancestral trauma of the Mesozoic Era. And anyone pointing out that the Earth belongs to nobody – or, more likely, to everyone – would be accused of being a planet supremacist.

And then someone would blame it on “Israel”. Then they all would.

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