Here’s something Thom Tillis said:

This was flagged for me by former Greensboro News & Record editor John Robinson, who says he’s lived in the South for his entire life and never heard anyone say the words “stupid on stilts” before. I will say that Tillis, a two-term U.S. Senator who’s not running again, is firmly in his “Fuck it, we ball” phase, wearing bolo ties (usually to shoutout the Lumbee, who finally got federal recognition) and saying stuff like … this. He followed this up a day later with this statement about Ken Paxton, now the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas: “To call Paxton ethically challenged is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.”

However! “Stupid on stilts” seems to be the phrase that’s been capturing people’s attention over the last week. Tillis first used it to insult President Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund for January 6ers during an interview on Spectrum News, also calling it “payout pot for punks.” But “stupid on stilts” resonated so much in the online newsosphere that he used it again during an interview on CNN. It was used in a ton of headlines. It was clever (and alliterative) enough to stick in people’s brains. Even people who don’t like Tillis grudgingly admitted that they might start using it.

Is it a Southern phrase? A folksy, edgier, blunter version of “bless your heart”? Let’s start by considering the messenger here. Thom Tillis was born in Jacksonville, Florida, lived in more than a dozen places growing up including New Orleans and Nashville, went to college in Chattanooga, and worked in Atlanta before settling in Cornelius, north of Charlotte. Fun fact: He and his brothers are all named Thomas.

So did he pick this expression up from longtime Southerners? The kind of people who drink sweet tea on rocking chairs and reminisce about picking tobacco? Unlikely. Again, consider our starting point: A newspaper editor who’s lived in the South for his whole life had never heard of it. Neither had almost all of the people I polled informally on BlueSky.

That’s probably because it’s not really a Southern thing—It’s an English thing. Blame Jeremy Bentham (who I’ve written about before), a philosopher and the father of Utilitarianism. Basically, in the famous Trolley problem, he’s the guy advocating for you to flip a switch to have a trolley change tracks and run over one person to save the lives of five people. Why? Because five is more than one, which means that’s the measurable way to do the most good. It would suck to be that one person! Bentham would not care!

(Also, Bentham decided to have his body preserved after he died so it could be, um, wheeled out at parties to hang out with his old friends. Today, it sits in the lobby of the student center at University College London. Is that weird? Yes. Weirder than naming all three of your sons Thomas? Well, yes.)

One of Bentham’s big ideas was that natural rights did not actually exist. You know life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? The unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence? Bentham was not a fan. “If the right of pursuit of happiness is a right unalienable, why are thieves restrained from pursuing it by theft, murderers by murder, and rebels by rebellion . . .?” he wrote in his Answer to the Declaration in 1776. Later he went on to expand on this idea during a response to the French Revolution, saying the concept of natural rights was nonsense, and the idea that someone could have rights that were not granted by the government was “nonsense on stilts.”

Bentham and his ideas became very popular, which helped “nonsense on stilts” enter the British lexicon. The phrase has had remarkable staying power. A search of one newspaper archive going back to the mid-19th century turned up more than 1,600 hits. “Nonsense on stilts” is still a favorite expression for extremely British newspaper columnists and the kind of people who write letters to the editor. Its most memorable modern usage may have come in 2001, when a member of Parliament and his wife described rape allegations made against them as “nonsense on stilts.” They were later cleared.

The expression does show up in the United States. In 1987, George Will wrote that “‘creation science’ Is nonsense on stilts.” In 1994, when Bill Clinton was toying around with the idea of putting a politician on the Supreme Court, columnist Bruce Fein wrote that “The statement that politicians, unlike sitting judges, bring a human element is nothing but nonsense on stilts.” As recently as February, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg said “I thought — and continue to think — that Trump's tariff policy is economic nonsense on stilts.”

In short, if you’re the kind of person who unironically uses the word “nonsense,” then fella, you’re gonna love “nonsense on stilts.” In which case, I can also point you to a pair of contemporary portraits that have been named for that expression.

Over time, referring to something as “on stilts” just became a way to say that it was extreme—“the norm on steroids,” according to a contributor to the Urban Dictionary in 2006. The example, from back then, was: “Bringing coals to Newcastle is stupid on stilts.” For a select few, “stupid” replaced “nonsense.” An economics professor at George Mason University, Thomas Rustici, was not a fan of Jeremy Bentham’s views on natural rights. But he also loved “nonsense on stilts” so much that he’s adapted it into his own catchphrase: “Stupid on stilts with flashing neon lights.”

Still, “stupid on stilts” didn’t catch on like “nonsense on stilts.” Coincidentally, one of the only other politicians who said it on the record lives just a few miles away from Tillis. In 2006, Democratic State Rep. Drew Saunders of Huntersville weighed in on a spending debate, telling the Charlotte Observer: “To say you’re not going to utilize money that’s being given to you to build school buildings is not only stupid, it’s stupid on stilts.” Saunders, who served six terms in the house, was far more well-known for another thing he said during an ethics debate: “Even the baby Jesus accepted gifts, and I don't think it corrupted him.”

So where, exactly, did Tillis pick up the phrase? Did he hear Saunders say it while they both served together in the General Assembly? Is he a fan of Jeremy Bentham? Utilitarianism? Does he know Thomas Rustici? Who knows. All we do know is that Tillis has tried out the phrase at least once before, and it didn’t catch on the first time. In March 2025, Tillis argued that despite Trump strongly hinting that he wanted to shut down FEMA, the agency wasn’t actually going to go away. “The narrative of it just going away is stupid on stilts, and they know that—and they’re not proposing that,” he told NOTUS back then.

This time, though, Tillis is using the phrase to go after Trump, not to defend him, which is far more interesting. And while you might think this is the greatest thing Tillis has ever said, it’s just the latest example of a long line of Tillisisms that have been calibrated to get the maximum amount of attention using the fewest number of words. I’ve known this for a decade, ever since Tillis went to a forum and declared that handwashing policies were an example of government overreach. “I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy, as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,’” Tillis said, to laughs. “The market will take care of that.” It worked on me! I did a whole TV news story on the handwashing thing. I even shot my standup on the toilet.

So yes, Thom Tillis is having a moment. He’s shooting up in my personal North Carolina Politicians Who Say Stuff rankings (Pat McCrory—toe-steppin’, stupid-hat-wearin’ Pat McCrory—is still on top). He’s got less than a year to go before he’s out of office, and instead of fading away during his lame duck period, he’s choosing anger. Sure, Tillis may be an originalist when it comes to the Constitution, but he’s willing to adapt a 230-year-old turn of phrase for a modern world. It’s not just politics. It’s politics on stilts.