A Mountanish Inhumanity

“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you.…these aren’t people that work. … they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch. We don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”

--Donald Trump, during a cabinet meeting on December 2, 2025, speaking of Somali immigrants

A few nights ago, Stephen Colbert welcomed the knighted English actor Sir Ian McKellen to The Late Show. McKellen brought a brilliant theatricality to Colbert’s stage—not simply by his stunning two-minute performance, but by constructing a bridge across four centuries, crystalizing our cultural moment in a way that made the speech not only relevant, but necessary.

McKellen begins by describing a scene from a collaborative Elizabethan play that never quite entered the canon, but never quite disappeared either.^[1] An angry mob has flooded the streets of London, shouting about the presence of “strangers”—by which the play means immigrants. They rail that these strangers should be sent back home, “wherever they came from.” Into this melee, McKellen tells us, enters the man sent to quell the riot: a young lawyer named Thomas More.

Turning to Colbert’s audience, almost casually, McKellen says: “I need someone to set this up. Can someone shout out: ‘The strangers should be removed’!”

And many voices from the audience oblige—loudly. “THE STRANGERS SHOULD BE REMOVED!” McKellen rises from his chair, walks to the front of the stage, and delivers More’s soliloquy:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation;
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl…

More asks the crowd to see the people in front of them—to picture bodies, burdens, children, movement. The crime he names is not illegality or trespass, but refusal: the refusal to imagine the human cost of removal.

What had you got? I’ll tell you. You had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail;
How order should be quelled…
And men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

¥ou’ll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats? Possess their houses?

This is a warning—violence against the stranger does not stop with the stranger; it teaches that power exercised without restraint and without “seeing” does not remain targeted. It circulates; it migrates inward, it destroys its own. Such power may just as easily reach and kill a local mother of three who writes poetry, or a nurse who spends his days tending to those in need of intensive care.

Then comes a devastating turn—the moment in the speech that lands with precision. The mob is asked to imagine themselves as strangers: displaced, unwanted, hunted.

Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country…
Should give you harbor?
Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal…
Why, you must needs be strangers.

In the modern idiom, this is where asylum is denied. Where borders harden. Where nations declare that no one is owed refuge.

More follows with yet another question—one that needs to be shouted back at the armies occupying our cities, at the officials of Congress who appropriate billions to expel those we still insist on calling strangers:

Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That… would not afford you an abode on earth,
Spurn you like dogs…
What would you think
To be thus used?

The speech ends without consolation. It was written four hundred years ago—before the European strangers came to America, before a Constitution was written that promised liberty without naming whose liberty, before a gift from France inspired these words to welcome strangers arriving in New York’s harbor—

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”^[2]

—before detention centers, before biometric surveillance, before immigration law learned to speak in acronyms and quotas and charts, and to present itself as hordes of masked thugs. And yet really, nothing in this speech requires updating.

This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountanish^[3] inhumanity.

^[1] The soliloquy delivered by McKellan comes from Sir Thomas More, an Elizabethan play originally written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, and later revised in part by Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, and others; a three-page section of the manuscript containing More’s speech is widely attributed to William Shakespeare’s hand.

Sir Thomas More, Act II, Scene 4, manuscript (late 1590s), including the speech known as “The Strangers’ Case.”

^[2] from Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty

^[3] “Mountanish” is an early modern adjective meaning brutish, savage, uncivilized — literally mountain-like, but associated with those thought to live outside law and polity.