Celebrity Activists Are Dangerous Morons

When the stupidest people in the room have the biggest microphones.

“It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.” ―Thomas Sowell

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.