This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… CROSSPOST: IAN McKELLEN: William Shakespeare (& Other Playwrights) on Thomas More on ImmigrantsOn “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”. Immigration, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Thomas More, ICE, Minneapolis, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, & Senator Collins’s little carve-out for Maine from the ICE...
On “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”. ““Grant Them Removed”: Immigration, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Thomas More, ICE, Minneapolis, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, & Senator Collins’s little carve-out for Maine from the ICE terror-harassment campaign to try to boost her reelection chances…When Ian McKellen brings a 1517 anti‑immigrant riot onto Colbert’s stage, it throws Trump, Miller, ICE, Minneapolis, and Susan Collins’s Maine exception into a very harsh light. A four‑hundred‑year‑old speech about “wretched strangers” explains more about America’s ICE raids and senatorial clientelism than a shelf of think‑tank reports. Shakespeare’s version of Thomas More demands we imagine ourselves as the immigrant; Trump’s Washington and Collins’s Maine prefer a bespoke exemption from the terror-harassment.  Ian McKellen & Stephen Colbert. 2026. “There Is Nothing I Enjoy More Than Acting In The Theater”. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. February 4. <https://youtu.be/2l2RqzVG4ag?si=Kaf0sXCC8qEsjjs-&t=1339> On Colbert’s Late Show, Ian McKellen ended his very delightful interview by performing the Thomas More speech calming the London anti-immigrant riots of 1517, according to William Shakespeare and his coauthor-playwrights, together authors of the “Sir Thomas More” play never staged in Shakespeare’s lifetime. It is, ala, entirely current:
Ian McKellen walked onto Stephen Colbert’s stage and did something that American “grown‑up” politics has not managed in a very long time: he made the moral stakes of immigration policy unmistakable. He did it not with a white paper, or a pollster‑tested slogan, but by reaching back four centuries to a fragment of Shakespeare—a speech Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights had written to put into the mouth of Thomas More—and dropping it squarely into our Minneapolis‑2026, ICE‑on‑the-streets present. The setup, as McKellen patiently explained, is simple:
And then the knife:
It’s hard to imagine a more direct rebuke to the core emotional engine of Trump‑Miller immigration politics: the insistence that the people we turn into examples and statistics cannot, must not, be imagined as ourselves. Now juxtapose that with the news crawl under McKellen’s performance. While McKellen is channeling Shakespeare’s version young Thomas More, the actual United States government is conducting what Minneapolis protesters, the ACLU, and Common Cause are calling and what we are all seeing the ICE terror‑and‑harassment campaign. Masked ICE and Border Patrol agents in unmarked vans; murder; “surge” operations that look less like law enforcement and more like a test run for an internal security service. The administration’s priority is not removing dangerous people without legal immigration status. It is demonstrating, for the cameras and the base, that there exists a class of humans inside the United States who may be treated as less than fully human. Moreover, the president and his functionaries are the ones who decide who is in that class—and if you anger them, you may join them, and the Supreme Court’s corrupt majority is likely to stay any attempt by any lower court to vindicate the rights the American Constitution gives you. Stephen Miller wrote the anti-immigrant riot-crowd’s talking points in his sleep. There is a “moderate” wing of the Republican Party. There are people who insist that they are troubled by the tone, uncomfortable with the cruelty. But, alas, somehow they find themselves voting to fund the apparatus almost every time it comes up. Which brings us to Senator Susan Collins of Maine. Collins has built an entire career out of wringing her hands while walking, firmly, with her caucus. On the Supreme Court, on tax cuts, on impeachments one and two. She specializes in expressing concern while enabling outcomes. And so, when the ICE surge operations finally began to bite politically – not morally, not constitutionally, but politically—how did she respond? By asking that they please, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, stop in Maine. The reporting is striking. As she watched Minneapolis, Collins was on the phone to the White House and DHS leadership working toward a “solution”: the administration would call off large‑scale ICE operations in her state. Not everywhere. Not as a matter of the rule of law. As a carve‑out. The official line is that this was a “win”: Collins, we are told, “stood up” to the administration and delivered for her constituents. And it is, in the crudest transactional sense, a win. Fewer Black and brown families in Maine will have to look over their shoulders in the supermarket parking lot. If you live there, you would be crazy not to be relieved. This is, I think, the piece that McKellen’s performance throws into such unforgiving relief. Shakespeare’s More insists on universality. The whole rhetorical trick is to force the rioters to imagine themselves as the people they wish to drive out, and then to ask: when you are the stranger, what rights do you want to claim, and what obligations will you wish others had recognized? And Collins? As a good New England retail politician she seeks an accommodation: a local exception, a temporary dispensation. There is a word for this kind of bargaining with arbitrary power. It is not “moderation”. It is clientelism: I will do nothing to stop the despot, but I will plead for my village. But once you accept that the category “stranger” is a legitimate political target – that there is such a thing, in a constitutional republic, as a population against whom terror is a permissible tool—the only remaining question is whether your donors and voters are inside or outside that category. And that is something that you cannot control, not even by offering the Trumpists more and more of your resourcesm and of your soul. The administration’s own language—“domestic terrorism”, “secret funders”, “antifa” as an all‑purpose bogey—is an open invitation to turn the same machinery now used against immigrants against everyone. Once the norm is that the president can unleash masked federal agents into disfavored jurisdictions and then dial them back when a friendly senator asks nicely, we are a long way down the road from “equal protection of the laws.” I do know this: the “stranger’s case” is being argued right now in Minneapolis streets, in ICE field offices headed by imported Border Patrol brass, and in senatorial phone calls that seek not to end the abuses but to redirect them. The playwrights’ Thomas More has a question for Susan Collins, for every Republican who has made their peace with Trump‑Miller immigration policy, and, frankly, for every Democrat tempted to treat Minneapolis as unfortunate but distant: when the categories flip, and you find yourself the stranger, what standard will you wish that you had enforced? Because you do not get to negotiate a permanent exemption for Maine, or for yourself. Grifter-politicians and plutocrats may think that the kleptocrats of the Trump affinity regard them as friends. They do not. They ultimately regard them—as they regard all of us—as prey. If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##crosspost-ian-mckellen-william-shakespeare-other-playwrights-on-thomas-more-on-immigrants |
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