Time to Chuck Chuck; Let’s oust the royals, once and for all.

Time and again, I excused her. I saw the Blair revolution lead the country down the wrong path. Labour, once the party of patriotic working-class Englishmen, became the home of overeducated urban sophisticates. Increasingly, the National Health Service was treated as an object of worship. The Tories, instead of mounting a real challenge to New Labour, pretty much went along and became Labour Lite. With both of the major parties now captured by the elites, white working-class English families found themselves struggling and ignored – making less money than virtually every other demographic.

And through it all, the Queen nodded and smiled and waved. The 2006 movie The Queen ends with the vomitous suggestion that Elizabeth, after being head of state since 1952, has seen the wisdom of allowing Blair, her relatively new prime minister, to educate her in the ways of his brave new world.

In retrospect, of course, it’s clear that during all that time, everyone in Britain should, at the very least, have been flooding Buckingham Palace with letters insisting that she put her foot down. But nobody dared. There were other unpleasantnesses. Prince Andrew, supposedly her favorite son, left a slime trail extending around the world, but Mum kept mum. Harry and his bride made vulgar spectacles of themselves and found a multitude of tacky ways to cash in on their royal titles. Still, silence.

Things went from bad to worse. On her watch, the number of Muslims in the U.K. rose from about 10,000 to over four million. Many of Britain’s major cities acquired Muslim mayors. The failure of local authorities to address the rise in Muslim crime has been attributed to the fact that many government bureaucracies, police departments, and the like have effectively come under Islamic control. Yet Elizabeth did nothing. Unforgivably, she appears never to have said or done a single thing about the Muslim grooming gangs situation – which for decades was an open secret, and which is now known to have been far more widespread, and to have involved far more victims, than even the worst statistical estimates suggested.

That’s not all. During the latter part of her reign, the government that rules in her name began to arrest and prosecute and imprison decent, patriotic citizens for having opinions that were not consistent with the official government line. The focus was especially on unacceptable opinions about Islam. Even as Britain continued to pose as a free country, the number of its inhabitants who found themselves in trouble with the law for making statements that in America would be entirely protected by the First Amendment dwarfed the number of people taken into custody in some of the world’s least free countries on similar grounds.

Yet the Queen kept nodding, and smiling, and waving. And even if some of us began to grow a bit irritated at what seemed to be her bland indifference to the disastrous direction her kingdom had taken, we held our tongues. After all, she was old. Very old. And perhaps there were certain matters about which she was, quite simply, ill-informed. Perhaps she was stymied by the lessons she had learned as a girl about the constitutional limits of her official role. And yet when a country in the process of destroying itself –how could its queen, who was plainly devoted to it, keep her mouth shut.

But she did. And when she died, many of us expressed admiration for the continued ability of the British to put on stately, dignified ceremonies. Eight months later, watching the coronation of her son Charles, we oohed and aahed some more – never mind that this narcissistic fool is devoted to homeopathy and climate hysteria, and even more devoted, by all evidence, to Islam.

Which brings us to the latest wrinkle. Charles, who has always been openly uncomfortable with the notion of the British sovereign as head of the Church of England and “Defender of the Faith” – a title that goes back to Henry VIII, who, like Charles, was famous for his marital problems – has now determined that henceforth he wishes to be regarded as “Supreme Governor of the Church of England” and as protector of “the space for Faith within the multi-faith nation.”

Aside from the incredibly strange language (“the space for Faith”?), isn’t this single move by Charles a hell of a lot more audacious than anything that Elizabeth ever did? If he, by this transformation in wording, is basically accepting the role of Islam as a religion that is every bit as legitimately British, and therefore as assuredly under his care and protection, as the Church of England, why couldn’t his mother, years ago, have nipped the nightmare of Muslim takeover in the bud by making some equally strong statement in criticism of Islam?

But she didn’t. She was a different animal from Charles, who has never been silent about his partiality to Britain’s Muslim community. This has been demonstrated in a variety of ways. In 1993 he became patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies; last year he opened its “King Charles III Wing.” As prince, between 2011 and 2015, he took €3 million in cash from a former Qatari prime minister, purportedly for one of his charities. (Although apparently legal, the money transfer looked pretty damn sleazy.) During his brief reign, moreover, he has taken the time to issue statements in commemoration of Muslim holy days while ignoring Christian festivals.

Then there’s this. In recent months, Tommy Robinson has organized two “Unite the Kingdom” rallies, their objective being to bring together patriotic Brits who oppose their country’s Islamization. Aside from being a folk hero for ordinary British subjects who have long felt that their concerns and their welfare were being ignored by their rulers, Tommy enjoys the public support of Elon Musk as well as of a great many high-ranking American politicians, who fear that the terrible direction taken by the UK in recent years could spell the end of the Special Relationship. But has Charles ever said a word in public about Tommy? If he did, it would probably be negative – the usual swill, churned out by the BBC and the Guardian, which depicts Tommy, a national hero for the ages, as a bigot and a felon.

As an American who has lived for over a quarter century in two constitutional monarchies in Europe, I’ve gone back and forth over the years on the value of these systems of government. At the times when I felt some sympathy for them, it was rooted in the fact that they’re supposed to represent tradition, a tie to the past, a reminder of national identity.

But that sympathy has, time and again, been sorely challenged.

In 2004, Theo van Gogh, a courageous writer, film director, and television commentator, was butchered to death on an Amsterdam street by a Muslim for daring to criticize the Religion of Peace. And what did Beatrix, who was Queen of the Netherlands at the time, do in response? As quickly as possible, she made a public display of her own standpoint – by rushing off to a Moroccan youth center to make nice with the Muslim boys and girls and demonstrate her disdain for the views of the late Mr. van Gogh.

I’ve since lived in Norway, and have written extensively about its colorful royals – from the wacky New Age princess, whose second husband, a bisexual black shaman from L.A., claims to be able to cure cancer, to the Crown Princess, whose close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was recently revealed, and whose son from a relationship prior to her royal marriage was sentenced the other day to four years in jail for two counts of rape, among other crimes.

I feel sorry for the Crown Princess, who after eight years of living with chronic pulmonary thrombosis was given two new lungs just the other day. But these people’s sufferings, however horrible, are beside the point. These people are all ensconced in palaces, dressed up in the fanciest of duds, given titles and adorned in medals for doing nothing – and when you meet them you’re supposed to bow and scrape as if they’re your superiors, even though you’re the one whose tax payments are funding their lavish lives.

Indeed, the only reason why any of these people should be granted any privileges at all is that – and I repeat – they’re supposed to be symbols of their countries, embodiments of their people’s values, incarnations of their nations’ unique histories. But none of these royals, or any of the others I’m familiar with, seem to get it. They’re all more or less like Charles, kowtowing to the enemies within and disdaining their few brave subjects who, out of a real love of country, venture to take on those enemies in a way that he would never dare to do. Consider, too, this point: the very existence of these crowned heads perpetuates an idea that, in these times that so fiercely demand action by the people, is entirely counterproductive: namely, the idea that the country, from the Royal Mail to the Royal Navy and including everything in between, actually belongs to the monarch rather than to the people. And such an attitude, in turn, breeds a deadly passivity, a powerlessness, a tendency to perceive oneself not as a citizen but as that awful thing, a “subject.”

So as we see Charles stepping further and further away from his real duties, and more closely into the warm embrace of Islam, I think it’s high time for the British people – and, I would propose, for all of Europe’s so-called subjects of kings and queens and princes – to rid themselves of these burdens, to take full control of their own countries, and to focus their efforts on the solemn job of saving themselves before it’s too late.