Well, by now you’ve all heard the news. Shortly after the recent American bombing of Iran began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio came running into the Oval Office to tell President Trump: “The Ayatollah has been hit by Israeli missiles.”

President Trump said, “Khamenei?”

And Rubio said, “About five or six.”

So ended the life of the Supreme Leader of Iran. The Washington Post immediately ran an obituary for him that stated, and I quote, “With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut an avuncular figure… He was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic Western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Oh, Klavan, you marvelous, merry-making merchant of mirth, what a sparkling comedic imagination you must have to dream up a fantastical and absurd newspaper that would stock its obituary of a monster of mass murder and oppression with a description of his avuncular figure and sophisticated literary tastes.

You must be saying: Oh, how we held our bellies and laughed hardy-har-har when you pretended that a well-respected journalistic institution like the Washington Post, which only recently fired 300 of the 800 people working in their newsroom, would nonetheless have kept on staff the sort of human-shaped but worm-souled font of scatological moral corruption who would spew such flattery at the corpse of a man who murdered tens of thousands of his own citizens, not to mention thousands of Americans.

You’re probably thinking: Oh, Bravo and Five stars, you Klavan of Klavans, for inventing an implausible yet biting political satire of the Post worthy of Juvenal himself, if Juvenal had allowed his imagination to run amok, making him a Juvenal delinquent, ha ha ha.

But no, I am not making this up.

The Washington Post, where democracy dies in an ethical darkness so complete that even the fires of hell would be a welcome source of illumination, actually honored the Ayatollah with a description of his bushy white beard and avuncular smile that might have made their readers think, Oh no, now that the Ayatollah is dead, who will fly around the world on Christmas Eve to deliver toys to all the good little children?

And the Washington Post was not the only outlet that lamented the death of a tyrant whose personality was, in fact, greatly improved by his being blown to smithereens. Tucker Carlson was outraged that a man he called “the Pope of Shia Islam” had been killed by Jews, those wascals. After all, why are we making an alliance with wascally Jews, when we could be friends with an actual Pope like the Ayatollah?  What have the Jews ever contributed to society besides the Old and New Testaments, modern physics, the great old Hollywood that spread American values around the world, countless technological and medical breakthroughs, including a cure for polio, and all the really good Christmas Carols?

Tucker was especially angry that Donald Trump had celebrated the death of Pope Ayatollah. Trump claimed the Santa-like Shiite Pope had tried to have him assassinated. But no. Carlson, citing anonymous sources close to Candace Owens’s imagination, revealed for the first time that the intelligence proving the Shiite Pope had tried to kill our president was unreliable because it had come from Israel, if by Israel you mean the FBI, where maybe the I stands for Israel, I’m not really sure.

But really, many prominent Jews have also come out against the killing of Khamenei, including Chuck Schumer and Bill Kristol, who were strongly in favor of killing Khamenei until Donald Trump actually helped do it, whereupon they changed their minds so fast that their brains ricocheted off the inside of their heads and flew out their ears, leaving them so brainless that they were reduced to being Chuck Schumer and Bill Kristol.

But you know, maybe these people have a point. As good Christians, we should restrain our celebratory guffaws at the admittedly hilarious image of the Ayatollah being particlized by his Israeli enemies, and only emit those occasional snorts or snickers that we find impossible to suppress as we wag our fingers at the Israeli Air Force and sternly say to them, “Boo-yah, you friends of humankind!”

* * *

This excerpt is taken from the opening satirical monologue of “The Andrew Klavan Show.”

Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. Klavan is the bestselling author of numerous books, including the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The fifth installment, After That, The Dark, is NOW AVAILABLE. Follow him on X: @andrewklavan.

The views expressed in this satirical piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

A question about “queering” maps — raised during a Thursday hearing on Capitol Hill — revealed just how deep the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives were buried in the U.S. State Department under former President Joe Biden.

Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) posed the question to Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, who assumed the role previously held by Biden-appointee Liz Allen in 2025, asking her what it meant to “make maps more gay.” Mast was questioning Rogers on a series of programs that were given grant funding during the Biden administration to push DEI priorities.

WATCH:

.@RepBrianMast: How do you make a map more gay? @UnderSecPD brings reciepts exposing just what the Biden State Department wasted tax dollars on for four years. pic.twitter.com/4nQvIptIFM

— House Foreign Affairs Committee Majority (@HouseForeignGOP) March 6, 2026

“Can you tell me, what is queering the map?” Mast asked Rogers.

“So I think we were trying to make the maps more gay,” Rogers replied.

“Literally? That’s — How do you make a map more gay?” Mast asked, clearly baffled by the concept. “Or gay at all?”

“Especially with AI — since the age of cartography we’ve had pretty good maps, but maybe they weren’t gay enough,” Rogers said. “I know also — I took critical theory in college, I think sometimes people use ‘queer’ as a verb. I do understand that the maps that we were trying to make gay were I think of Czechia and Slovakia, so maybe those countries asked for it. I doubt it, but I don’t know.”

Mast made it clear that he was unimpressed by the previous administration’s priorities, adding, “We do have real things to work on in Congress like what’s going on with the imminent threat of Iran, and it is embarrassing that we have to talk about the fact that things like this were funded.”

Mast went on to list a few other similar DEI-focused initiatives that had been funded during the Biden administration, including introducing “non-binary and trans francophones” to minimize the heavily-gendered nature of the French language in order to make it more inclusive.

The goal, Mast explained, was to shift “linguistic attitudes and ideologies towards inclusive French in Montreal, Canada.”

Turning to Rogers, he asked the undersecretary to provide him with receipts for other such initiatives and with the identities of those who were writing the grants.

“Whatever documentation they have on all of these things, we would love to see that and would absolutely love to know the individuals specifically that were busy writing these grants because they have no business receiving another paycheck from the people of the United States of America,” Mast concluded.

Rogers commented on the exchange afterward, offering her apologies to the people of Czechia and Slovakia for what the Biden administration had done to their maps.

“Czechia and Slovakia are great countries. I’m sorry that my predecessors ‘queered’ your maps! This is why future public diplomacy grants will be streamlined, accountable, and channeled toward real American interests, like free speech and sports diplomacy,” she said.