TBT: The Left’s Cluelessness on Gun Control

19 September 201918 September 2019 The Portly Politico1 Comment

The Left is totalitarian in nature. As such, it seeks to utilize whatever means possible to deprive individuals of their liberty, and to amalgamate Americans into a faceless collective—all the easier to rule over us.

Gun control—by which the Left always means “total gun confiscation and disarming of American civilians”—then, is a logical goal for Leftists. Deprive Americans of their guns, and you’ve taken away their ultimate line of defense against the lockstep, persistent march against their liberties.

Sanford Announces Presidential Bid

10 September 201910 September 2019 The Portly Politico3 Comments

Former South Carolina Governor and Congressman for SC-1, Mark Sanford, announced Sunday that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2020 against incumbent President Donald Trump. When Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Sanford why, he said that “We need to have a conversation on what it means to be a Republican.”

Sanford’s ostensible desire is to draw attention to America’s massive national debt, and our political unwillingness to address the ever-expanding, elephantine gorilla in the room. But as local radio personality and former Lieutenant Governor Ken Ard said on his show this morning, Sanford is shining a bright light on himself as much as he is on the national debt.

TBT: Deluge

5 September 20194 September 2019 The Portly Politico3 Comments

Hurricane Dorian is roaring its way up the eastern seaboard today, and the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, where I live, is due to get several inches of rain and some high, heavy winds. I’m praying that the storm passes through quickly and as easterly as possible, so as to minimize damage from the winds and flooding. If the storm stalls, two or three inches of rain in Darlington County, South Carolina could become substantially more.

I’m no stranger to flooding. Back when Hurricane Matthew hit in 2016, my old place flooded about eight inches up the walls, destroying many of my worldly possessions, and afflicting my clothes and other belongings with a faint mildewy stench that never really went away.

Two years later, my old apartment—“a Handi House in two rednecks’ backyard,” as my younger brother put it—was flooded again in a torrential downpour—a pop-up rainstorm that dumped around ten inches of water onto Florence, South Carolina in the span of an hour.

Silence on the Epstein “Suicide”

28 August 201927 August 2019 The Portly Politico2 Comments

Has anyone else noticed that, after the flurry of headlines and memes, talk of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged suicide has died down substantially? The mainstream media’s uncritical acceptance of the autopsy results is not surprising, but the autopsy seems to have quieted down speculation considerably, even though homicides are often misidentified as suicides.

That’s unfortunate. There’s a great deal about Epstein’s death that is unanswered. So it was refreshing to read this excellent piece from Christopher Roach at American Greatness, “What Happened to the Epstein Story?”

Gelernter Gives up Darwinism

23 August 201923 August 2019 The Portly Politico6 Comments

Yale Computer Science professor and—as I found out today—Trump supporter David Gelernter has given up on Darwinism, finding it to be a “beautiful” but flawed theory. Gelernter acknowledges that species make small adjustments based on their environment, etc.—adaptation—and that Darwin was correct in that regard, but that the process of new species developing from existing ones is mathematically impossible, even if the universe is trillions of years old.

For conservative Christians, skepticism of Darwin’s theory of evolution is something you keep quietly to yourself, lest you’re mocked roundly, or that you militantly espouse, which tends to turn people away—they tune out. Regardless, the world at large has bought into Darwinism completely, even with holes in the theory (like the lack of a plethora of pre-Crambrian fossils that should, according to Darwin’s theory that all life descended from a common ancestor, be present given the Cambrian Explosion).

Ratcheting up Towards Civil War

21 August 201921 August 2019 The Portly Politico7 Comments

I’ve been catching up on photog’s excellent blog Orion’s Cold Fire, and boy did I miss a doozy. Good ol’ photog regularly presents his pick for American Greatness “Post of the Day,” and on August 7, he wrote about a sobering Angelo Codevilla piece, “Igniting Civil War.”

Meanwhile, Southern history think-tank The Abbeville Institute posted an essay Monday asking “Is Political Separation in Our Future?” These pieces suggest that something cataclysmic is looming for the United States. Are they right to be concerned?

Creepy Techno-Elites Spy on Users

16 August 201914 August 2019 The Portly Politico4 Comments

If you weren’t convinced that techno-elites are working hand-in-glove with the Deep State, news that Facebook hired scribblers to transcribe voice calls on the Messenger app should wake you to the fact.

That’s a level of creepy beyond merely selling your data or using an algorithm to use facial recognition software. That’s creepy, to be sure, but when it’s some faceless formula it doesn’t seem as bad. When a living, breathing humanoid is pouring over your voice conversations (salacious or otherwise), it adds a whole other layer of skin-crawling chilliness to creepiness factor.

Losing the Faith

14 August 201914 August 2019 The Portly Politico6 Comments

I’ve written quite a bit about the “God hole” in modern Western life, and how that place—intended for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit—is being filled with everything but. We desperately search for meaning wherever we can find it—politics (for the progressives and some conservatives), witchcraft, power crystals, celebrity, money, sex, etc.

Part of this state of affairs stems from the persistent onslaught of postmodern, relativistic ideas that permeate our culture, so much so that they effectively infiltrate even our churches. The ethos of “if it feels good, do it” sinisterly insinuates itself into Christian teachings in a form of Christology that reduces Jesus to a spiritual boyfriend who is unfailingly supportive of our bad life choices.

But Jesus is not a soy boy, and Christianity is not a pick-and-choose faith that is copacetic with sin.

Sickly Tuesday with Fredo

13 August 201913 August 2019 The Portly Politico5 Comments

Teachers reported back yesterday at the little private school where I teach, so things are about to from busy to insane for yours portly. Amid the hours of training sessions and diversity seminars, I came down with a bit of a cold yesterday afternoon.

The congestion and general wooziness that comes with it is not exactly conducive to mental activities like blogging, but some expired children’s Dimetapp, a hot shower, and Vick’s Vapor Rub helped immensely. Toss in a good night’s sleep and some early morning ibuprofen, and I’m already feeling better.

That’s all to say that I don’t have much to write about this evening. We’re still amid the summer news slump, wherein the smallest non-troversies grow startlingly out of proportion.

Clinton Body Count Rising?

12 August 201912 August 2019 The Portly Politico3 Comments

The “suicide” of infamous pedophile and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has shattered whatever illusion remained that Deep State isn’t entirely in control of our politics and culture. What’s remarkable is that it seems that a large number of Americans don’t buy the suicide-by-hanging story, and there are serious reasons to doubt it.

While Epstein came off of suicide watch at the end of July, he was still under heavy surveillance while in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correction Center. Allegedly, inmates there are under CCTV surveillance constantly, even as they shower, and are confined to their cells for 23-hours a day.

An anonymous former inmate of the MCC suggests the paper-quality sheets are too fragile to hang a 200-pound man, and that the ceilings are too low for a tall man like Epstein to hang himself, anyway.

The far likelier explanation is that Epstein was murdered.

The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

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