After Its Latest Episode, I Sure Hope <em>South Park </em>Has Some Good Lawyers
I’m trying to work out where to begin. Do I start by telling you the latest episode of South Park saw President Donald Trump going to a Planned Parenthood, stripping down, and exposing (for the first time on the show) his anus and (for the umpteenth time) his micropenis, while sitting in a set of stirrups? Or do I say that the same episode saw him masturbating in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk with a pair of tweezers? Or later, in the presidential bedroom, with a pair of chopsticks? Trying to explain South Park in the year 2025 feels like both a fever dream and an endlessly pornographic one—which, if we’re being honest, is probably what the show has always truly been.
Wednesday night’s episode—the sixth in the show’s headline-making 27th season—comes three weeks after creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker delivered something of a cop-out in their last outing. But where that prior episode was weighed down by the burden of expectations as to how the pair might tackle the aftermath to Charlie Kirk’s killing (spoiler: mostly by sidestepping it), this new one had more room to play. Indeed, with the benefit of time, Stone and Parker seemed much more willing to tackle some of the most irresistible major MAGA news of the week: reports that Peter Thiel is obsessed with the antichrist. Yes, the tech billionaire and J.D. Vance patron is the latest figure to find himself being animated in the signature South Park two-dimensional style. If I were Thiel, I’d be calling up the lawyers I used to help bring down Gawker to sue Comedy Central for making me look like Skeletor.
Let me rewind, for those of you who (quite rightly) don’t want to pay for a Paramount+ subscription but still want to be briefed on what went down. Thiel figures into this latest episode because the students at South Park Elementary are as obsessed as all Gen Alpha kids across the country with the 6-7 meme. For those of you with 401(k)s, I’ll explain that this phrase has terrorized teachers across the U.S., as young students find any excuse they can to reference the two numbers. (More than 2 million posts have been made on TikTok alone using the hashtag #67.) It’s a slight reference to the lyrics of 2024 song “Doot Doot” by Skrilla, but mostly it’s an example of internet brain rot: a phenomenon in which young people repeat nonsense to one another as if they’re dropping code words that the rest of us can’t understand. (OK, fine. We can’t.)
Thiel drops by South Park Elementary to educate the children on the impending arrival of Satan and President Donald Trump’s “butt baby,” aka the antichrist. (It’s here that I have to say if you aren’t caught up on this season, a lot of what I’m going to say about Satan, Trump, and butt babies is going to wash right over your confused little head.) “The Lord God did shrink Satan’s asshole to the size of a tiny, little pinhole, so nothing could ever penetrate and ejaculate inside of it,” Thiel tells the confused children. “So Satan could never have a butt baby, until along came Mr. Donald Trump, whose penis is so teeny, teeny, tiny it could actually fit in Satan’s asshole. How small is Donald Trump’s penis? Somewhere between 6 and 7 centimeters.” (Cue the sounds of children screaming.)
Shocked by the children’s outburst, Thiel becomes convinced the 6-7 meme portends something numerologically dark, related to the antichrist. It soon becomes clear that Thiel is acting under the command of the minion-esque Vance, who, as was revealed in the last episode, is trying to ensure Satan’s baby is not born so that he can inherit the presidency. The billionaire follows the 6-7 trail to Eric Cartman, the one child who seems to be enjoying the meme so much that he is projecting devilish amounts of vomit each time it makes him laugh. In a scene parodying 1973’s The Exorcist, Thiel visits Cartman in his bedroom and is soon covered in his puke. After failing to extract any meaningful information from Cartman, Thiel decides to take the kid to D.C. as part of his bid to help ensure the antichrist doesn’t arrive on scene. And … that’s where that storyline ends—for now. You can safely bet that Cartman is going to figure more heavily into the ongoing Trump/Satan/Vance story—as, perhaps, knowing Cartman, we always knew he would.
The other half of Wednesday’s episode related more directly to its title, “Twisted Christian,” as Jesus Christ—now working as the guidance counselor at South Park Elementary, after Mr. Mackey was fired and joined Immigration and Customs Enforcement —struggles to accept how Christianity is being exploited and weaponized against MAGA’s foes. The school’s onetime aggressively politically correct principal rebranded in the season premiere as “Power Christian Principal,” but Jesus feels this right-wing charade is too much. It’s hard not to agree. Even the principal’s once normal-looking wife, Strong Woman, has undergone a MAGA makeover, and now sports a new pair of huge, fake breasts (adorned with a crucifix necklace, of course) and goes by the name Strong Christian Woman. “Have you ever seen a more Christian chick in your life?” the principal asks the son of God.
Soon, the principal is trying to set Jesus up with another “nice Christian lady” whose plastic surgery is even more extreme. None of this sits well with the Messiah, however. He objects to the performative manner in which people are pretending to be Christians. And he’s insulted by their using religion to target their enemies. “You and a lot of other people seem to have a very warped sense of what Christianity is,” Jesus tells the principal. “You need a way to bully people, and you’re using the Bible to do it.” (All of this sentiment prompts the principal to ask Jesus whether he’s a “fag.”)
Minutes later, however, as we hear the song “Sister Christian” by Night Ranger, we watch as Jesus wanders the streets of South Park alone, bereft and lacking purpose. Then, like others in the MAGA movement before him (including Vance), Jesus undergoes something of a conversion. He storms back into the Cheesecake Factory, grabs his Barbie doll of a date, cuts his robes into a muscle tank, and shaves his beard into a goatee. “Let’s fucking go, bruh!’ he shouts in full MAGA-ese as the episode comes to an end. Sigh. Another soul lost.
There are at least four more episodes this season, so it’s clear this one was acting mostly to move the plot forward. But what really struck me at the episode’s end was how the only singularly good character we’ve been introduced to this entire season is a very surprising one: Satan. It’s he who is shopping for baby goods and taking birthing classes seriously. It’s he who is acting as the one restraint against an out-of-control Trump. If he weren’t the Prince of Darkness, I’d be rooting for him. Still, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, it’s 2025: Up is down, left is right, and South Park is our voice of moral reason.
Slate
