Motus Mentis

Long ago, in a previous age of the world, I found myself in the recording studio with a guitar player, a member of an immensely popular costumed rock band, who was working on a self-financed solo album project. Solo projects by famous band members being, in general, notoriously unsuccessful, I asked him one evening if he had found a label yet who wanted to put the record out.

“Oh,” he said, “I could sign with anybody I please.”

…pause…

“I just hope I please somebody soon!”

The polemicist Kevin Williamson, formerly of National Review, must feel the same way. He has managed, it seems, to irritate just about everyone who might take an interest in publishing him. He certainly alienated a good many of us on the Right a couple of years ago with his sustained assault on Donald Trump’s critically important bid to deny That Woman a seat in the Oval Office, and with his pitiless essays about the plight of the white working class in America’s heartland. After leaving NR to become, in his words, “an apostle to the Gentiles” at The Atlantic, he was swiftly defenestrated for his view that abortion is murder and should be dealt with as such.

Mr. Williamson is a very good writer, though, with intelligence, style, and wit. I agree with him more often than not, and I always enjoy his columns. I hardly ever read one without picking up some little bon mot to tuck away for future use.

Here he is today at The Weekly Standard, commenting on our established Church and its treatment of heretics.