Word Magic

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 29, 2025

 

Like the river rafting guy told me when he said I couldn’t bring my full-size refrigerator on our trip, let’s keep this light.

 

Speaking of keeping things light, have you seen Meghan Trainor? She’s the singer best known for two things: her song that is the unofficial anthem of our two “great” political parties, “All About That Base” (though she spelled it “bass”), and being that moderately successful singer who is what Hannibal Lecter would describe as “big through the hips, roomy.”

 

But that’s the thing. She’s now quite svelte. I say good for her.

 

And good for Jonah Hill, Mike Pompeo, Kathy Bates, John Goodman, and everyone else who has shown remarkable weight loss in recent years. I think it’s great when people can achieve the weight or other health goals they set for themselves. One of these days maybe I’ll try that again myself.

 

But I don’t think it’s great for the idea of “body positivity.” Up until a few years ago, the body positivity movement was making remarkable strides. While the agenda came with a good deal of nonsense (an example of that in a moment), there are some very sound arguments behind the effort as well. The Body Mass Index Police declared that lots of superstar athletes were “obese,” while people who looked like skeletons covered in thin pizza dough were healthy.

 

The photoshopped supermodels in magazines convey an unhealthy conception of healthiness—particularly to young girls—and a problematic notion of desirability to boys.

 

I’m not going to go down a rabbit hole on the evolving and globally diverse definitions of beauty—go walk around the Louvre and you’ll see that pasty-white, full-figured gals were once the Margot Robbies of their day. Calling a woman Rubenesque, after all, was once more of a compliment than it has become. Personally, I was always a little envious of the Asian cultures that held that a beer gut—sorry, “sake belly”—was a sign of status and prosperity. But I do think there’s a sound moral principle behind non-judgmentalism when it comes to the rich mosaic of body types and notions of beauty.

 

That said, I did promise examples of nonsense.

 

I’ve mentioned this article before, but I think about it more than I should. A few years ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article titled “To end fatphobia, we need to dismantle Western civilization, says Philly therapist Sonalee Rashatwar.”

 

We are told that “Rashatwar traces contemporary fatphobia to colonial brutality and how enslaved people were treated. Citing researcher-advocate Caleb Luna, Rashatwar said curing anti-fatness would mean dismantling society’s foundation: ‘I love to talk about undoing Western civilization because it’s just so romantic to me.’”

 

Call me a defender of structural fatphobia if you must, but burning down the village of Western Civilization to save the self-esteem of people who shop at Big and Tall shops seems like a pretty steep price. “I sure do miss the rule of law, property rights, Judeo-Christian morality,  and free speech, but man it’s nice to say goodbye to my Spanx.”

 

The reason this current slimming trend is bad for “body positivity” is that the best role models for it are opting to lose weight rather than lean into their role model status. Imagine if there were some sort of procedure by which black people could just become white and everyone from Denzel Washington to Spike Lee took advantage of it. I think that would be terrible and not for any weird racist reasons, but man, the controversy would be wild to behold.

 

That brings to mind Eddie Murphy’s legendary “White Like Me” sketch on Saturday Night Live.

 

My real problem with body positivity is that it’s part of this ancient tradition of thinking that if you just re-label things that have negative connotations—real or alleged—you can change reality.

 

Some of you may be old enough to have been raised by TV like I was. And if so, you might recall “The Adventures of Letterman” (“Faster than a rolling ‘O.’ Stronger than silent ‘E.’ Capable of leaping capital ‘T’ in a single bound!”) on a PBS children’s show called The Electric Company. In every episode, Letterman and his nemesis Spell Binder would remove letters from words to change reality. Spell Binder would visit a kid washing his hands for dinner at the sink and change “sink” to “ink.” Oh no, he’s a mess! But then Letterman appears, pulls an “S” from his jersey and transmogrifies “ink” back into a sink! If that sounds too trippy to be real, watch for yourself.

 

The activist word warriors think they can change reality in the same way, not with letter legerdemain but pretty similar lexicological wardrobe changes. Call trial lawyers “community protection attorneys” and boom, everybody will love them!

 

The thing is, people aren’t stupid. If you make everybody call feces “Shinola,” pretty soon people are going to say, “Damn. A bird Shinola’d on my windshield” and “Peter Navarro is so full of Shinola.”

 

There’s a great scene in the television series The Boys in which some marketing executives are touting a new superhero to join the team (it’s too complicated to explain the backstory, so just stay with me). One of the execs says something like “She’s great. She hits all the demos … she’s body positive but still doable.”

 

You don’t have to be as neurodivergent as a fox to get the joke.

 

Speaking of neurodivergence, I recently had Emmet Rensin on The Remnant to talk about his fantastic piece for us about insanity, a subject he has much personal experience with. One of the really refreshing things about how he—as a man of the left—talks about the issue is that he doesn’t shy away from words like “lunatic,” “crazy,” or “insane.”

 

I think there’s room for terms like neurodivergent, but one of the problems with this addiction to word magic is that the connotations people want to make disappear are there for a reason. If you ban the use of all words with negative connotations and replace them with new ones, the negative connotation will simply follow the new word, like an exorcised demon inhabiting a new host.

 

When I was a kid on the subway in New York City, we might see some dude muttering to himself about the CIA or the Brady Bunch and eating Cheetos out of a sneaker. My dad would say, “Stay away from that guy, he’s crazy.” If you banned the word “crazy” he’d have said, “Stay away from that guy, he’s neurodivergent.” 

 

And if you tell people that they’re bigots for being nervous about such people, they’re not going to abandon all common sense and agree, they’re going to come to the commonsensical assumption that the people calling them bigots are themselves neurodivergent. It turns out that it’s counterproductive to use weird, highly politicized, and impenetrably ideological language and then sanctimoniously impose it on people.

 

Indeed, one cause for optimism about our politics these days is that the left is baby-stepping its way toward this realization. The center-left think tank Third Way recently came up with a list of words they think progressives should stop using. I celebrate the effort.

 

But I have quibbles about some of their rationales for why progressives should stop using “chest feeding,” “birthing person,” “Latinx” etc.

 

For instance, I think “birthing person” isn’t just incandescently stupid politically, it’s kind of bigoted on progressive terms. I mean, I was told by my feminist professors that reducing women solely to their role or—shudder—function as persons who give birth is profoundly sexist. I mean it’s like The Handmaid’s Tale when you think about it.

 

Just the other week, CNN profiled Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson’s church (which our defense secretary reportedly has attended). Wilson told CNN’s Pam Brown that women are simply “the kind of people that people come out of” and that fact determines their place in society. That is why they are not allowed to have leadership roles in his church and why he thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

 

Take the debate(s) about transgenderism out of it, and the “birthing person” peddlers share with the Christian nationalists a very similar view of people who give birth.

 

But given Third Way’s audience, I have considerable sympathy because that group is not talking to me. It’s talking to progressives. And asking people who have invested their careers in the deployment of these terms—in some cases literally monetizing their use of these euphemisms and shibboleths—to abandon them is like asking a samurai to abandon his sword or telling Art Laffer to never speak of tax cuts again.

 

I’ll be honest—the lazy pundit in me partly wants them to fail, if for no other reason than that this stuff is such easy column fodder. I feel a bit like Jerry Seinfeld when he made a whole HBO special out of having a funeral for his most cherished, but ultimately played-out, jokes.

 

But I think it would be great if Third Way’s project succeeded. Yes, the left would become more effective and persuasive, but it would also become less neurodivergent in the process. A decline in left-wing lunacy might—just might—result in a decline of right-wing batshittery. Imagine the bowel-stewing panic of, say, Jesse Watters’ producers if the left started talking like liberals in the mold of Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson, or even Bill Clinton again. They’d stare blankly at the screen trying to figure out how to make sense of serious arguments. “What are we supposed to do with this?”