On Billie Eilish, stolen property, and performative moral theater

If you’re anything like me, you didn’t know the name Billie Eilish until you heard the news of her declaration on the Grammy stage: “No one is illegal on stolen land.” After her remark, the room rewarded her with applause, celebrating an alleged moral truth, even though what Eilish said was a tired, pandering, and nonsensical slogan.

Her now (in)famous line is a cultural cheat code because it offers instant visible righteousness and posturing, but demands zero intellectual rent due. It treats the past as a single crime scene with a single perpetrator and a single victim, even though the past, especially in North America, was a long narrative of shifting peoples, shifting borders, shifting events, and shifting power, with tragedies that demand real study and honest context.

Further, history possesses categories that simply do not comport with the modern activist habit of flattening everything into a binary ideological accusation. This is not even a question of hindsight; it’s simply irresponsible historical revisionism. Consequently, that statement ends up sounding brave and compassionate, but it is historically unserious, and that is a terribly dangerous combination in a country whose civic health depends on citizens to have the intelligence and virtue to tell the difference between legitimate moral concern and performative moral theater. Eilish and her comrades at the Grammys fall into the latter category, having all the collective moral and rational prowess of a teacup.

The “stolen land” framework works in media soundbites because it is rhetorically tidy. That kind of feigned neatness is the chief false virtue of social media politics, as it so often spares the speaker from having to quantify their position with reason and evidence. Forget about the facts that indigenous nations fought, displaced, absorbed, and conquered one another long before any European arrival, and that territorial control across any global continent existed in flux. Or that there was never a set of neat, universally recognized parcels akin to a modern county recorder’s office.

Those truths are too inconvenient, too intellectually difficult. Therefore, when that slogan is presented as an intellectual argument, it has to surreptitiously smuggle in a Christian and Western concept of property ownership and title. And then it has to retrofit that concept onto eras and cultures that operated through entirely different structures of land use, sovereignty, kinship claims, and military power.

This is exactly why the result is a moral indictment whose premises are just outright hypocritical: they assume the very same rights for their narratives that they simultaneously criticize in others.

In addition, even if one grants, for the sake of argument, that a “stolen” label could be applied to lands in many episodes of conquest and dispossession, Eilish’s slogan still detonates its own logic the moment it is aimed at just immigration policy. Its conclusion is laughably circular: if land is “stolen” in the sense that it passed through conquest, displacement, or coercion at some point, then borders (literally all borders) become practically illegitimate everywhere, and any system of law becomes nothing more than tyranny enforced by whoever holds power today.

Accordingly, her slogan does not simply critique one administration’s enforcement priorities; it effectively dissolves the premise of all government, justice, order, and sovereignty itself. And sovereignty, in the ordinary sense, is the political condition that makes any stable system of national rights possible, including the very rights that allow activists to complain about their rights and privileges.

At the same time, her statement’s moral force depends upon a myopically selective memory. The modern world, especially the United States, especially after World War II, spent an enormous amount of political energy and material resources reinforcing the integrity of sovereign borders and rebuilding nations across the world precisely because border collapse leads to chaos, predation, and war. A rules-based international order, however imperfect, is the only remedy against the oldest method of social governance in human history, namely, hot lead, gulags, rifles, and bayonets.

In that light, when an ignorant and entitled celebrity chants against borders, rational people simply cannot see moral insight. Instead, we see it for what it is: a luxury belief, which is a belief that is virtue signaled by the claimant whose social costs are always paid for by someone else, usually the working-class neighborhoods that experience the downstream consequences first. Celebrity progressivist positions always demand that others foot the bill while they receive the acclaim.

Meanwhile, there has been some backlash to Eilish’s statement, which contains a moment of twisted irony. The Tongva, whose ancestral territory includes much of the Los Angeles Basin, reached out to Eilish after her public statement with a reminder that her slogan is cheap if she doesn’t put her money where her mouth is. The reporting around the episode stated that Eilish’s home sits on Tongva land, and a Tongva spokesperson expressed hope that she would explicitly reference the tribe so people understand the region, including her luxury mansion, remains Tongva territory. In fact, Sinai Law Firm of LA is offering to evict Billie Eilish from her Los Angeles home on a pro bono basis on behalf of the Tongva Tribe based on her public statement at the Grammys.

If a person sincerely believes the land beneath his or her feet is stolen in any way, then that belief imposes an immediate moral duty; the next step is painfully clear: repentance is supposed to cost something. So, yes, hand over your deed, surrender your keys, transfer your assets to whatever tribe you believe you stole it from, and live elsewhere, hopefully someplace you didn’t steal. Or at least place your wealth in direct restitution. The worst possible thing to do is to offer symbolic grandstanding and condemnation from a lit global stage, because without real cost, your moral performance is nothing more than sanctimony with stage lighting.

Furthermore, the persistent habit of celebrities demanding sacrifices from the abstract public while guarding their own comforts with ferocious intensity reveals the central vice of this contemporary elite virtue signaling: social justice is nothing more than a branding strategy to them.

In fact, even the more sophisticated defenders of the “stolen land” rhetoric often drift into conceptual confusion. Ralph Gaebler—writing at The Imaginative Conservative last April—has pointed out:

The statements are not only confused but also use problematic language. For example, the first statement that the lands were ‘stolen’ assumes a concept of property that is embedded in western legal and cultural traditions.

Additionally, Felix S. Cohen, in The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers (1960), stated:

The notion that America was stolen from the Indians is one of the myths by which we Americans are prone to hide our real virtues and make our idealism look as hard-boiled as possible. We are probably the one great nation in the world that has consistently sought to deal with an aboriginal population on fair and equitable terms.

Why? Because comparative history matters, moral judgment requires historical context, and historical context requires the discipline to study, understand, and compare actual policies, treaties, failures, and reforms across nations across the decades, rather than ignorantly treating the United States as uniquely demonic for the sake of Marxist, progressivist, and ideological fashion.

Jeff Fynn-Paul’s recent work, Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (2025), drives a stake into Eilish’s mythology:

America was not ‘stolen’ from the Indians but fairly purchased piece by piece in a thriving land market. Nor did European settlers cheat, steal, murder, rape or purposely infect them with smallpox to the extent that most people believe.

That claim, whether one agrees with every emphasis or disputes portions of it, signals the larger point that history, when read honestly, is a battleground of evidence, demography, disease, diplomacy, and war.

Immigration policy is a branch of law, and law is an instrument ordered toward the common good, which includes public safety, social trust, human flourishing, and the protection of citizens whose lives are shaped by the state’s decisions, whether they asked for those decisions or are invited to the microphone on the Grammy stage. The USCCB, in Welcoming the Stranger Among Us: Unity in Diversity, clearly states, “We recognize that nations have the right to control their borders.” Understandably, activists deliberately ignore this fact because it lacks the glamour of a liberalist chant. Furthermore, the Catechism, in paragraph 2241, reiterates that public authorities may regulate migration with an eye toward the common good and the capacity of society to receive newcomers without fracturing its own responsibilities towards its own citizens.

The Catholic tradition points above and beyond this farcical celebrity moralism. It refuses the false dichotomy and coerced choice between overt compassion and alleged tyranny. The Catholic truth refuses the adolescent fantasy that the mere existence of borders is a sin. In addition, Catholic social teaching also refuses the economic naivete that assumes societies can absorb an unlimited influx of illegal immigrants without consequences for wages, safety, housing, economics, schools, health systems, the job-sphere, and community cohesion. Those consequences always land hardest on the legal poor and middle class, who lack gated neighborhoods, private security, higher than average incomes, and influencer insulation.

I reiterate for those who are quick to levy a supremacist accusation toward my words: I am a black immigrant from a small Asian nation. I write these words not out of cultural or nationalistic loyalty but out of fidelity to the truth of the Church and natural law. My feelings on the matter are beside the point.

Finally, beneath the “stolen land” chant and sentiment lies a deeper moral confusion about property itself. The Church speaks very clearly on this as well. Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum, states, “For, every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own.” Likewise, Pope Pius XI, in Quadragesimo Anno, teaches, “For since the right of possessing goods privately has been conferred not by man’s law, but by nature, public authority cannot abolish it, but can only control its exercise and bring it into conformity with the common weal.”

Consequently, the Church defends private property, and she also commands moral responsibility in its use, and this is precisely why celebrity rhetoric that deliberately leaps right over moral duties is always hollow and irresponsible. It undermines property in practice while relying on the distribution of property in theory; at the same time, proponents cling tightly to their own acquired goods and property.

Yet there is still hope, as Christians view and contemplate history through covenant. And covenant means God deals with real people in real places with real obligations and real circumstances, and He calls Christians to fulfill those obligations through the One who gathers the nations without dissolving their unique and respective moral order.

Therefore, the answer to Billie Eilish and her elitist cohort’s progressivist slogans is neither cynicism nor rage. Rather, it is conversion to natural law and the teachings of the Church. In that light, the Church can affirm the human dignity of the illegal immigrant, and insist on humane treatment, while also demanding honesty in speech, upholding the legitimacy of borders and laws, and acknowledging the violation of just laws, because a society without ordered love becomes a society governed by chaos, appetite, and force of will. That way lies national dissolution.

Ultimately, the Christian center remains Jesus, the true King, who judges both the powerful, the fashionable, and the (supposedly) musically talented. He calls every nation to repentance and every person to charity grounded in the fullness of truth, so that real mercy, grounded in truth and justice, is what is upheld in sovereignty for the sake of the flourishing of all human persons. Perhaps the Tongva should place that truth on a sign and erect it on Billie Eilish’s “stolen” front porch.