August 1, 2026

BRENDAN O’NEILL: We should call the Ceuta border breach an invasion.

Spain was invaded yesterday. There is no other way to put it. Close to 50,000 foreigners, mostly men, swarmed into Spanish territory and laughed and jeered as they went. Every generation before ours would have called that an invasion, and we should too. The era of euphemism is over. The left’s house of lies has fallen. We can all now see with our own eyes that our nations are being overwhelmed by cocky, often hostile men from afar.

It isn’t only Spain’s sovereign integrity that lies in tatters following the storming of Ceuta – so does the tyranny of euphemism we’ve all been forced to labor under these past few years

The footage from Ceuta is extraordinary – throngs of foreigners, mostly men from Morocco, gatecrashed an enclave of the Spanish kingdom. They scaled fences, kicked down gates, colonized the beach. Some punched the air with glee, clearly delighted with their successful storming of Spanish territory. I dare the left to call this “asylum seeking.”

It isn’t only Spain’s sovereign integrity that lies in tatters following the storming of Ceuta – so does the tyranny of euphemism we’ve all been forced to labor under these past few years. Europe’s rulers have more keenly policed our language than the borders. They savaged every right-winger who used words like “invasion” or “colonization” to describe illegal immigration. Such patrician censure is surely untenable in the wake of Ceuta.

Elon Musk sounded remarkably prescient in his recent interview with a robotic Zanny Minton Beddoes of the Economist:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll