There’s a scene in the latest South Park episode, “Got a Nut,” in which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem leads a squad of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents through the pearly gates of heaven. “Only the brown ones. If it’s brown, it goes down,” she instructs. It’s a depiction so grotesque and absurd it could only come from the show’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who revel in taking real-world figures and dialing their worst traits up to cartoonishly sociopathic extremes.

But before conservatives rush to denounce South Park as the latest casualty of “wokeism,” it’s worth remembering that this is tame compared to past episodes skewering liberal sacred cows. Stone and Parker have lampooned Al Gore as a delusional fearmonger chasing ManBearPig (climate change hysteria), portrayed Hillary Clinton with a literal nuke hidden in her nether regions, and recast former President Barack Obama as a jewel thief. South Park has always been an equal-opportunity offender, and the ability to laugh at your side is essential to appreciating its clever, ruthless comedy.

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Picking up where the season premiere left off, the latest episode opens with PC Principal informing school counselor Mr. Mackey that, due to budget cuts, his position has been eliminated — a veiled dig at cost-cutting bureaucratic absurdity and government waste (not-so-subtly referencing the Department of Government Efficiency). Out of work and desperate, Mackey finds himself recruited by the only agency still hiring: ICE. What follows is a scathing satirization of the agency, portrayed as a violent clown show staffed by incompetent loners unfit for any other profession.

When she isn’t zealously shooting dogs, a recurring gag riffing on her real-life memoir, Noem leads hordes of ICE agents into Dora the Explorer productions to round up Latinos, all while shouting jingoistic commands with sadistic glee.

Meanwhile, in a separate plotline, Clyde Donovan launches a podcast and adopts the persona of an unhinged right-wing shock jock, a sardonic blend of Matt Walsh’s deadpan delivery and Alex Jones’s conspiratorial mania. He spouts lines such as, “You can’t trust Jews, white people are the underprivileged, and women belong at home,” all while posturing as a crusader for Christianity and truth.

Cartman, who feels his entire personality is being ripped off, promptly launches a competing show. The episode’s funniest moment comes when Cartman’s mother overhears him behind a closed door mumbling passionately about abortion rights and storms in, only for Cartman to clarify defensively: “I’m just master debating. I have my arguments down rock solid, so I can destroy these college girls and edit out the ones that argue back — it just feels so good.”

Donovan’s podcast persona is less about ideology than attention. He incoherently “debates” campus leftists, demanding “What is a woman?” moments after launching into antisemitic tangents. It’s a well-drawn parody of the current outrage economy, where monetized provocation is the point. In a rare moment of sincerity, he explains, “As a kid, if you can do a podcast, say some really divisive shit, you can really make your nut.”

And that’s the core of the episode’s title: “Got a Nut” refers to chasing the grift. The implication is that nothing they are doing, whether podcasting, pseudointellectual debate, or even political advocacy, is sincere. It’s all performance art for clout and clicks.

WHO’S AFRAID OF SYDNEY SWEENEY?

Though we are still early in the season, there’s a creeping sense of exhaustion in the air. Much of this humor feels rooted in mid-2010s Twitter-era politics: “debate me,” “own the libs,” and other long-expired culture war tropes. If South Park is going to spend this season obsessing over political podcasting and campus discourse, then surely a subplot about Cartman joining a pro-Palestinian protest purely out of spite for Kyle (and the Jews) must be on the horizon.

Unlike earlier seasons in which each episode stood alone, South Park‘s recent shift toward serialized storytelling hasn’t always benefited the pacing or novelty of its satire. Two episodes in, the narrative arc is clear, but the jokes are beginning to feel recycled. The targets, including ICE, conservative grifters, Noem, and even President Donald Trump (still Satan’s lover), are low-hanging fruit. And while the show still lands more punches than most, one can’t help but start to wonder whether Stone and Parker are just trying to make their nut.

Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds an MBA from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.