Notes from this week’s conversation with Doug — the Ceuta invasion, Fauci’s free pass, Nolan’s Odyssey, and how many countries it takes to make a world war.
Doug and I recorded Friday morning, and there was only one place to start: the day before, an estimated 49,000 Moroccans crossed into Ceuta, the small Spanish enclave on the North African coast. Not a caravan. Not a surge. An invasion — I don’t think there’s another word for it.
49,000 men, no shoes, no plan
The images tell you most of what you need to know. Young men, all of them. Half shirtless. Many without shoes. Nobody carrying so much as a blanket. Doug’s first question was the practical one: “If you’re shirtless and barefoot, where’s the next meal coming from? I guess they expect the conquered locals to provide it — voluntarily or not.”
Ceuta is seven square miles, about 80,000 residents, GDP per person around $20,000 — far better off than the Morocco surrounding it. Around 20,000 have reportedly gone back already; call it 25,000 who stayed. Against a population of 80,000, that’s not a migrant flow. That’s a demographic event that happened in an afternoon.
And there’s no obvious way to reverse it. Spain has three army regiments in Ceuta — roughly 6,000 men — and hasn’t deployed them. Under Spanish law, everyone who made it across can now claim asylum. Italy, Finland, and Norway are already moving to cut Spain out of Schengen, Europe’s passport-free zone, over it. Doug’s summary: “How can you stop an invasion of feet people? You don’t need an army. In fact, having an army to invade is totally counterproductive.”
Doug just started The Camp of the Saints, the 1973 Jean Raspail novel that was effectively banned for decades and is somehow back on Amazon. I read it last year. This is that book. They just wash over them.
There’s precedent, too. Doug collected stamps as a kid, which is how he knew there was once a place called Spanish Morocco — taken when Morocco organized an invasion of 200,000 civilians who simply walked in and claimed it. It worked then. Why wouldn’t it work now?
Who organized it?
You don’t mobilize 50,000 people in a day spontaneously. There’s footage of trucks packed with migrants driving the highway to the crossing points, and of a Moroccan border guard unlocking a gate. Moroccan young men have been probing Ceuta in dribs and drabs for twenty years. This was different in kind, not degree.
Consider the timing. In recent months Spain called Gaza a genocide and — more to the point — denied the US use of Spanish airspace to prosecute the war in Iran. Trump made threats. So did Netanyahu. A few weeks later, Morocco’s border gates swing open. Maybe coincidence. But we watched the same playbook under Biden, and under Merkel in 2015 — organized migration logistics, NGOs running support, and not one of those organizations ever punished. Doug’s take: “There’s got to be some organization. That’s all there is to it. Who is behind it — and will we ever find out?”
The first Muslim member of Congress, Keith Ellison, was elected in 2006 from Minnesota — where the Somali arrivals were settled. Now there are half a dozen, plus Mamdani in New York doing his best to remake the city, government grocery stores and all. All popularly elected. Move the people, and the votes follow.
How many countries make a world war?
I put a question to Doug I’ve been chewing on: at what point do we call the Iran conflict what it is? Count the participants. Iran striking multiple countries. The Houthis and Saudi Arabia trading attacks, with Houthi cells in Iraq drawing US and Saudi strikes there. Ukraine hitting an Iranian ship in the Caspian. American LNG tankers hit by drones in Egypt. A Saudi-organized coalition of 14 countries trying to reopen the Bab el-Mandeb strait. Washington now working to seal Iran’s land borders, pulling in Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Depending on how you count: 29 countries — before Russia and China, who are involved whether counted or not.
Doug: “It’s very reminiscent of the lead-up to World War II. It started with the Japanese invading China, and then the civil war in Spain, which everybody got involved in — not officially, but indirectly, using it as a testing ground for weapons. The pot is getting close to boiling over.” The only de-escalation path he sees is US withdrawal, and the US is doubling down. His hope is it stays below the nuclear threshold — maybe settling for massive cyberattacks instead.
Two market observations. Doug is surprised oil is still hanging around the mid-80s with this much production and refining capacity under fire — he doesn’t think that lasts, and he’s happy being long oil producers outside the Middle East and Russia. And note the calendar: Ukraine’s campaign against Russian refineries began March 2nd; the Iran war began February 28th. If cheap oil were the goal, we’d have backed off in the Persian Gulf and stopped supporting the refinery strikes. We did neither. Whatever this is, it isn’t about keeping crude cheap.
Fauci walks
We both enjoyed watching Rand Paul take Fauci apart in the Senate this week — helped along by the discovery of Fauci’s diary sitting on a government server. And we both think it goes nowhere. Trump says he’ll honor Biden’s blanket pardon, presumably because he’ll want his own honored someday. Never mind that a pardon covering all acts over a span of years tells you, as Doug put it, that the person was committing crimes on a broad scale — or that it may have been autopen-signed while Biden was non compos mentis.
So the highest-paid official in government, a man who became a multi-multimillionaire on a public salary — royalties on drugs he had a hand in approving — showed up with six lawyers and a lifetime Secret Service detail, and will walk. “It’s just theater,” Doug said. “If nothing bad happens to Fauci, it’s kind of all over. Nothing bad will happen to any of these horrible people.”
Nolan’s Odyssey, and the DEI trick
Lighter fare: Doug finally saw The Odyssey. My theory, which Doug came around on: Nolan took the DEI constraints every $250 million production operates under and turned them on their head. Yes, he cast Elliot Page — but not as Achilles, as the internet feared. Page plays a fool, gets outwitted over the Trojan Horse, and dies pathetically by the second scene. Every DEI casting choice gets the same treatment: included, then portrayed badly. Nolan worked under the constraints and quietly subverted them.
Doug enjoyed it despite himself — Scylla and Charybdis, the sirens — and liked Nolan’s speculation that the returning Greek veterans became the Sea Peoples who wrecked the Bronze Age Mediterranean around 1200 BC. Not in Homer, but interesting. Verdict: worth seeing. My expectations were so low that I came out pleasantly surprised, which may be the whole trick.
The Fourth Amendment, in practice
A traveler at US customs was ordered to unlock his phone. He entered his distress code instead, wiping the device — and is now being charged for it. Doug’s read: “The Fourth Amendment, in practical force, doesn’t exist anymore. If they want something, they’ll get it.” Courts have stretched the border-search exception to within 100 miles of any border — which, practically, means the whole country. “Further proof that America really no longer exists. We’re just another nation state called the United States at this point.”
The best you can do
I asked Doug what can be done about any of this. His answer is the one that animates everything we do here: “Nothing we can do about it except try not to be too adversely affected personally.”
We’ll be back next week. For the specifics — the portfolio, the stock work, the questions we don’t cover on the free podcast — that’s what the paid side is for: https://crisisinvesting.com
— Matt
