The fat acceptance movement, when you get down to it, is one of the most hideous ideological aberrations on the social media scene right now. (And there are plenty of aberrations to vie for those top spots.) It’s almost perfect in its perversity. When other pet causes of the culture war Left try to corrode normalcy, they’re at least somewhat subtle about it. There’s some sort of bait and switch in play. They want you to call a masculinized woman “empowered” or they want you to call some mental illness a “gender identity.” They want you to merely distort the truth. […]

My father is getting on up there in years, early sixties to be exact, but he’s in enviable shape for his age. Just last September, for instance, I saw him paddle a kayak for a couple miles against the wind on a choppy lake without taking a breather, and it didn’t get the best of him. He hikes with his dog regularly. And he’s got that proverbial old man strength in his hands, which you can witness any time he picks up a tamp bar. To my knowledge, the last time he lifted weights or even had a dedicated workout […]

G. K. Chesterton—a reactionary hero of mine and someone I try my best to imitate when I write rambling essays about whatever old thing that happens to cross my mind—took his subtitles seriously. (Well, as seriously as he took anything.) In one of his articles, the one published in the London News the day before he died in fact, he wrote that “those who endure the heavy labour of reading a book might possibly endure that of reading the title-page of a book.” He was talking to literary critics in particular, whom he suggested “might solve many of their problems […]

Last Thursday, I wrote about the ethnic dimension of politics. More specifically, I wrote about a strange phenomenon in American public discourse whereby conservatives consistently pretend, in all their official correspondence and rhetoric, that no such dimension exists. I argued that this habit puts them at a marked disadvantage against many of their competitors in the national arena, who exhibit no such compunctions and feel free to speak, protest, lobby in terms of plain ethnic interests. The conservatives have to engage in proxy arguments and byzantine circumlocutions and the occasional ritual sacrifice of one of their own on the altar […]

All politics are tribal. And so it follows that all politics are ethnic, however and at whatever scale you decide to define the ethnos. Race in part generates and delineates tribal identities. Tribal identities drive politics. Them’s the breaks. Not everyone’s willing to admit to this state of affairs, of course. But trying to play the game of politics while studiously ignoring the racial warp thereof is like trying to beat someone at Risk without acknowledging the defender’s-advantage mechanic. It’s going to be much more difficult than anticipated. Your hopes will be frustrated. Battles that you reckoned you had in the […]

I don’t rant about Barack Obama too often, at least not compared your average Tennessee conservative. And I try to hold back because, well… at the end of the day he’s just a fruit. (I mean that in the sense of “low hanging,” of course, of being an easy target. I would never cast aspersions against our Commander-In-Chief’s unimpeachable heterosexuality.) That and it’s important not to take DC political theater too seriously. But every once in a while I have to indulge my inner red-stater and upbraid old Obummer for some egregious display of mendacity or another. His comments at […]

I don’t know any of this for a fact, but I would imagine that, if you were to administer a spelling bee to a given middle-school classroom, there would be a fairly significant correlation between success at the bee and overall writing ability. I’d further imagine that this correlation begins to fall apart the closer you get to a country-wide scale, like the Scripps National Spelling Bee. (Perhaps I’m being ungenerous there, but I don’t see too many future Hemingways in that crowd.) The reason I’d wager that these propositions are true is that good spelling is wrapped up with […]