I don’t know what world you live in, but in my world those photos and videos indicate nothing of the sort about Williamson. It is almost laughable to me that you consider him to be “remarkably, grotesquely fat…passed morbid obesity a way back.” I see him as somewhat overweight and perhaps even technically obese but certainly not morbidly obese, something between 30 and 40 pounds overweight. Which makes him sort of typical for an American male, including even some baseball players (see this). That’s especially true if he’s on the tall side, which I think is the case but I really can’t tell about that.

Why not just say you don’t like his writing or his attitude? Isn’t that enough?

It is absolutely an overestimate.

I know many people of Williamson’s general heaviness, and unless he’s over 7 feet tall he’s not even all that close to 300. I’d estimate – depending of course on his height, which I don’t know – that he’s somewhere in the 240 to 250 range. If he’s short, his weight is less than that. To me, he looks like a fairly tall person, around 6 ft or so.

Quite possible, I can’t say I’ve knowingly met too many 300-pounders, I have a hard time believing they look much worse than that. For his own good Kevin didn’t progress to the “needs to be cut out of his house” stage of morbid obesity and hopefully peaked at the “loose dark clothes” stage in evidence here. Clearly his derangement at perceived white working class pathologies is powered to a great extent by extreme projection on his part.

Good point.

I’ve never felt anything like that from Victor Davis Hanson. If he mentions what’s going on with his farm, he doesn’t do it to establish his common man bona fides, but to get his point across. If he talks about daily life during the Punic Wars, it’s not to show you how smart he is, but to draw an analogy.

Victor Davis Hanson is what George Will was all those years ago: effortlessly intellectual and conservative to boot. George Will isn’t that anymore, primarily because he doesn’t have to be. I suspect VDH will always be that, especially when he doesn’t have to be.

By that standard, none of us should be dissatisfied with any situation this side of vagrancy.

From the beginning of his life to age 22, there were three different men supervising the household in which he was reared (and five step-siblings to navigate). There’s a reason he didn’t respect his mother. However, he did not need to hang her out to dry publicly or to forget that his father, his aunts, and his cousins did not live that way.

I think that’s an overestimate.