I’ve spent my entire adult life in an academic and media environment that put a premium on shocking the conservative conscience. Advocate for the most barbaric abortion practices? Fine. Celebrate an artist who dips a crucifix in urine? Cool. Decry 9/11 first responders as “not human” because of white supremacy? Intriguing. But the marketplace of ideas isn’t for the faint of heart, and good conservatives learn to simultaneously defend the culture of free speech while also fighting hard to build a culture of virtue and respect.
David French, writing about former National Review writer Kevin D Williamson, who committed the heinous crime several years ago in a podcast (Mad Dogs and Englishmen) of saying something nasty about abortions. (Whether he was right on this issue is not the issue here; the point is that the Atlantic Monthly hired a guy on the conservative side of the political spectrum, including one who has attacked the alt-right, the excesses of Trump, etc, but to no avail.) And this is the rub: no matter how subtle, nuanced or intelligent you are, if you offend against the prevailing social justice agenda, or offend someone, that’s it. Kaput, goodbye, exit followed by a large bear. The AM has now fired Williamson. That was quick.
I should add straight away that the Atlantic Monthly is entitled, as a private firm, to hire and fire whom it wants, for whatever reason, though of course that magazine, given its left-liberal ethos, presumably supports state interference with property rights and voluntary contracts (such as support for affirmative action, etc). And people are equally free to ignore its output and read something else. But something about this affair, which may only interest the media in-crowd, tells us that there are now very severe limits to the breadth and tolerance of “liberals” in the West (and it remains a tragedy that that word has been so distorted as to mean the opposite of what it may have meant in the past). Also, it is useful to have media outlets where people of very different outlooks can gain access to ideas they might not otherwise encounter, if only to train their intellectual muscles in much the same way that I try and keep strong by lifting barbells in the gym. The Balkanisation of opinion gets worse.
Some readers will remember the case of John Derbyshire who wrote what in my view was a blatantly racist comment for a magazine and, as he was a columnist for National Review (ironically, as this was where Williamson used to work), was sacked by editor Rich Lowry. The Derbyshire piece was awful; Lowry was entitled to fire a columnist if he wanted to do so, but then again, it is important for some arguments to be aired, even if they are terrible, so that people get the practice of refuting them. (John Stuart Mill, the 19th Century liberal, argued that this is why censorship is so bad because people lose the habit of making good arguments.)
It is not even as if Williamson has been blocked or banned like an internet troll for the offence of filling comment threads with abusive remarks, threats, or hi-jacking discussions to promote some very different agenda. (The editors of this blog, and others, have had to kick out some nutters and abusive people over the years, just as I have blocked people from my social media feeds, in the same way that I would kick out a party guest who urinates on the floor.)
It is necessary to state that Williamson ultimately hasn’t had his freedom violated and he can and no doubt will get work somewhere else. In this age of blogs and new media outlets, it is harder than before to silence views, although some of the recent developments at Facebook etc suggest a worry that social media is becoming an intolerant echo chamber.
The editor of the Atlantic Monthly isn’t a tyrant, but speaking as a media person myself, I think he has made a serious mistake by losing a fine writer, even if I don’t always like what he writes (if Williamson has a fault he can come across as a bit of a snob). Also, in explaining the decision, I get the impression that the Atlantic Monthly has reinforced the notion I have that many so-called “feminists” today aren’t the doughty fighters for equality of old, but actually playing to the idea that women quiver with fear at the very mention of ideas they don’t like. Apparently, the very notion that Williamson was a columnist was traumatic to some women.
Williamson being fired at shows us that the last reasinable left periodical has fallen.
Let the culture war continue.
If you give shallow, arrogant people that kind of power, they will use it regardless of the consequences to society. They have no doubts about their righteousness and no sense of limits. Women are on public record as saying that the destruction of innocent lives and due process itself are of no concern in light of the necessity of destroying the Patriarchy and its Oppression. The definitions of which are subject to change as needed.
Saw a Tee Shirt today which proclaimed “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted”. Sums up that mindset very nicely.
T-shirt needs editing:
(Because most things are dangerous to some. And most people lack the intelligence and sympathy to recognize them, or are too mean and insensitive to refrain from them on their own hook.)
1. I have a number of (rural) black friends who thought that Derbyshire’s “The Talk – Non-black Version” was quite accurate in its depiction of the flaws of urban black culture. As for being racist, it was racist in the same way that noting that “blacks have darker skin than others” is racist. I have lived in places where both versions of “The Talk” (black and white) are very wisely passed down to kids every day. Read it and see. It’s short and pithy. You’ll wonder what the big deal was.
Anything that causes us to deal with people – individuals – in ways that are driven simply by their membership in a group without regard to that one individual’s qualities and character is unfair to that individual. At the same time, sending my kids out into the world without educating them about probabilities and group statistics is a disservice to my kids. There is harm in either approach. I choose to protect my kids by telling them to be guarded but, within that protection, to always be willing to give individuals the chance to show their qualities. Which is what The Talk prescribes.
2. Progressives have a small number of “truths” which they absolutely cannot allow to be impugned. The primacy of a woman’s right to abortion over the right of an unborn person to life is one of those. Williamson said (and later amplified) that women who had an abortion should be hanged. In his pre-employment conversations with The Atlantic, he (apparently) tried to deny and minimize this. It was foolish of him to expect that this would be acceptable to The Atlantic’s readership and power structure. He has burned his bridges to both sides through his own choices.
‘But the marketplace of ideas isn’t for the faint of heart…’
There can only be a marketplace if buyers and sellers are both present. If only sellers are allowed, then it is a pulpit not a market place, and there are no ideas just preaching of doctrine by the clergy.
I should add straight away that the Atlantic Monthly is entitled, as a private firm, to hire and fire whom it wants, for whatever reason
Well, yeah. Only most of those doing the complaining enjoy protected, unionised government jobs or work in taxpayer-funded organisations from which they will never, ever be fired. It all seems a bit one-sided. No, I don’t have a solution but if enough people get fired from their private sector jobs because of lefty rent-a-mobs hounding the CEO and HR, there will be serious consequences.
One of life’s little pleasures is posting an off-message comment on a Guardian article, watch it get a load of approvals in a short time and then seeing it deleted for infringing the community guidelines.
There does not a day go by that I thank God that I became an engineer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHzmjBRixX8
And this is probably the funniest cartoon ever: the great Don Martin of Mad Magazine:
https://imgur.com/gallery/6esLV8l
But in the UK: Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England forget we are not old countries but ancient countries and those that forget that do so at their peril.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvM
Kevin Williamson is a prize dickhead. During the election campaign he wrote an atrocious article saying that the “hicks of the rust belt deserved” their shitty lives. He would never have said the same for example of blacks in the inner cities.
I refuse to respect any ponces who sneer at their own.
This one?
That’s the one. I’m of course going to be waiting forever for his article on why we should abandon the black urban ghettos….
Its ironic – Kevin Williamson even has a UK analogue – Matthew Parris. Both gay. One furiously anti-Trump, one furiously anti-brexit.
Both gits.
Kudos to Julie near Chicago (April 6, 2018 at 10:27 am) for rephrasing the old existentialist motto to fit the spirit of modern PC. 🙂
I agree with bobby b’s criticism (April 6, 2018 at 11:19 am) of the OP calling Derbyshire’s article ‘racist’. I recall reading it. I had a point or two of moral disagreement – for example I would have preferred (10h) to begin “Be statistically and situationally aware if considering acting …” rather than “Do not act …”. I suspect he exaggerates for comic effect in:
Although it worked out very well indeed for Obama, I suspect some members of the group could argue against taking that literally. And of course one may discuss John’s percentages, though not the trend. But I find it ludicrous to call the talk racist – and utterly predictable that the PC would call it so, and that he’d be fired for it.
In Stalin’s Russia, parents did not dare warn their children about the dangers of that society’s political correctness, or the dangers of bumping into its quite different reality. In the US, by contrast, you can advise your children that the real world diverges from the PC fiction, and that refusing to know this can be dangerous.
I’d be amazed if it wasn’t.
The left does not understand that one can DISAGREE with someone (strongly disagree with them – really rage at them, as I do at times) without DESTROYING them, or FORBIDDING them to speak or write.
The left are totalitarian – the truth is as brutally simple as that. They do not want to argue with opposing people, they want to FORBID opposition.
And remember this publication (the Atlantic) is the moderate left – and they are moderate, relatively speaking.
The Atlantic will only fire people – the main left want to put “Hate Speech” people (i.e. anyone they disagree with) in prison.
Niall, 😈
I cannot be bothered to re-read Derbyshire’s infamous “talk”, but i seem to remember that my reaction was similar to Niall’s: the article included some moral idiocy, but i would hesitate, in today’s climate, to brand even the morally idiotic paragraphs as “racist”.
Paul:
At times???
I suspect he could have left out the entire section dealing with intelligence and not only left his thesis unaffected, but he might still be employed at National Review.
There’s an “I’d hate to see you really angry” joke in here somewhere.
Whilst it’s true that Kevin D. Williamson is a snob, and whilst I dislike his mannered writing style and have allowed my National Review subscription to lapse partly because of it, the fact is that NR is a snobbish magazine and always has been. Somehow, though, the snobbery of William F. Buckley, Jr. and of the likes of Jay Nordlinger et al. are/were tempered with humour and a lightness of touch, whilst Williamson can often be cruel. He’s one of the reasons why the Speccie is a better read than NR. Maybe now they can give Victor Davis Hanson more column inches, and (hope beyond hope) bury the hatchet with Mark Steyn.
That said, I do take issue with Johnnydub’s comparison of Williamson to Matthew Parris. They couldn’t be more different, ideologically or personally. To illustrate the personality differences, there’s a story Williamson once recounted in an episode of Mad Dogs and Englishman concerning his days as the editor of a local newspaper in some rural part of the States. They would often get complaints from readers who had been “exposed” in some way by the paper (crooked businessmen, criminal husbands, etc.), some of whom would come to the office to try to intimidate him. In response, he simply instructed the receptionist downstairs to direct any would-be antagonists upstairs to his office, saying “you can’t miss him, he’s the big bald guy with the gun on his desk”. As a result, he didn’t have a single person confront him.
On the point about abortion, for which he was fired, I note that Trump was ridiculed for saying much the same thing: that women who have abortions should be judicially punished for it. So now Williamson and Trump are being lumped into the same category, no doubt much to Williamson’s chagrin. And they’re both wrong. Whilst I view abortion as an evil in and of itself, Peter Robinson points out at the beginning of the most recent Ricochet podcast that even were abortion to be viewed as a crime, it lacks the element of “malice aforethought” on the part of the mother, so would at most be manslaughter under the English common law system which obtains across most states of the USA, and that if anyone should be punished it ought to be the abortionist, as was the case prior to Roe v. Wade.
I don’t think Williamson is doing conservatives any favours by being such a ludicrous provocateur on this issue, and I think he rather lost the plot, so quite frankly I don’t blame the Atlantic for firing him. However, it’s evident that someone went to a lot of trouble to listen to all the old Mad Dogs and Englishman podcasts in order to get the goods on him, which is enough to prove the gravamen of the OP that they don’t want diversity of thought at the Atlantic.
Not quite sure how this has gained currency, so I think it’s worth noting that Kevin D. Williamson has never said he’s gay. Here he is in conversation with Charles C.W. Cooke (from this podcast @ 17m50s):
I’m not sure classical liberalism really has anything to do with it.
(And here I am again defending Trump. There was a time when I was more selective about my friends.)
Williamson and Trump said very different things. Here’s how Chris Matthews got his money quote:
If you oppose legal abortion, what other answer is possible? (“Bring in the comfy chair!”?)
The woman arranges the abortion, travels to the clinic, signs consent forms, and submits herself to an operation. Are you saying that this is all involuntary or accidental?
Bobby,
I don’t think Trump and Williamson said “very different things”, rather they said “much the same thing: that women who have abortions should be judicially punished for it”. The difference is perhaps just one of degree.
As to your question about what judicial punishment ought to be meted out to prevent abortions (should all abortions be illegal), I would certainly think that abortionists ought to be treated more harshly than the women concerned, since such a person would in most cases be a professional criminal receiving financial compensation for the crime, rather than a potentially desperate woman. And whilst I would like to see all abortion illegal, I think it’s possible to use the carrot (i.e., adoption) as well as the stick. That’s a pretty vague answer, but frankly I don’t have a considered opinion on the matter of suitable punishments, though like Ovid’s Hera I would think life imprisonment “a bit harsh”.
You may have a point about “malice aforethought”. I was rather credulous concerning Peter Robinson’s view there.
“They couldn’t be more different, ideologically or personally.”
Well they’re peas inn a pod when being snobby and dismissive of the issues of poor white people, while conspicuously avoiding any criticism of minorities…
They’re both cowards and self loathing white people.
I would agree.
I’m only saying that if one accepts the rationale against abortion that it is the wrongful premeditated killing of a human, then there’s no easy (logical) way to then pronounce an aborting woman innocent of any crime. And then, inasmuch as (in the American system) we essentially define “crime” as “an act for which a legal penalty against liberty or pecuniary interest is prescribed”, there needs to be such a penalty assigned to that crime. A “criminal” statute without penalty is really just an advisory statute. And if we write a statute that punishes only the doctors, I think they then have a viable Equal Protection argument.
So I’m really just saying that, if one accepts the pro-life premise as Trump appears to do, then one must definitionally accept that there must be some punishment for that act, even if it’s only mandated counseling or some such order.
Williamson went much further than Trump, in my mind, when he said that such women ought to be hanged. I see that as more than a matter of degree.
Johnnydub,
I’m not going to go too far defending the guy, since as I’ve said I do find him a snob, but at the same time I have to disagree with you when you describe him as being “dismissive of the issues of poor white people”. On the contrary, and for example, he’s covered a lot of miles over several years gathering material for serious in-depth pieces on the “opioid epidemic” and the other problems of white working-class people. Now, one could certainly criticise his tone, because he does think a lot of white working-class people are stupid (he uses the term “stupid white people” a lot); but that’s not the end of his analysis. Nevertheless, I would contrast his work with that of Victor Davis Hanson, who writes and speaks about people in rural California in an entirely more sympathetic way, and who genuinely understands the Trump phenomenon in a way that Williamson really doesn’t… which is, I suppose, one reason (amongst many) that I think VDH is the best of NR.
“Self-loathing” though? I dunno. This reminds me of Chris Rock’s “Black People vs. Niggaz” routine. Is Chris Rock a self-loathing black person for saying those things? I don’t think so. I think Rock, like Williamson, has lifted himself up and is frustrated that some people he knows haven’t been able to do so. So I don’t think Williamson loathes all white people, just “stupid white people”. But then, as I say, he is a snob…
I”m not totally dismissive of Williamson’s point that in a lot of cases people are the cause of their own misfortunes.
Its the fact that he will go in all guns blazing (and not a smidgen of empathy) on “fellow white people” and conspicuously avoid any similar assessment of say the gun crime epidemic in the inner cities of Chicago et al.
When you apply that level of scrutiny only to one ethnic group you’re a coward, especially when the one group you’re targeting is the one group where open racism is now the norm – “white privilege” and so on…
I also agree that VDH is a far superior writer and human being.
Johnny,
I think you’re being a bit mean to the guy, he’s probably just writing about what he knows. And every writer has their own “beat”. Also, I don’t think he’d get very far criticising black culture in the US – he would be dismissed out of hand. Bear in mind the treatment folks like Thomas Sowell and Jason L. Riley get for criticising “their own side”. Say what you like, he’s no Matthew Parris.
Could it be a case of someone being concerned with what he most relates to, for all kinds of reasons – circumstantial, cultural, emotional, etc.?
As to VDH, I find his articles some of the less interesting on NR (and in general).
Also, does anyone know why Williamson left NR in the first place?
Bobby,
Sure, a crime without a punishment is not really a crime in any meaningful sense, but there is scope for prosecutorial discretion in the public interest. Not sure the Equal Protection clause really applies here, though, but I’m not a constitutional lawyer.
One has to bear in mind the severity of the crime, too. I find it really difficult to wrap my head around the idea that killing a tiny embryo is the same as partial-birth abortion. I appreciate the principle, but I’m a bit more old-fashioned and believe there may be such a thing as “the quickening” (which perhaps sounds silly to an atheist). I’m really hesitant to weigh in on all of that with respect to mothers, though I would have been more than happy to see Kermit Gosnell get the death penalty; but out of interest, what would be your scale of sentencing for a mother convicted of procuring an abortion, for instance?
He was offered a job at the Atlantic.
No clue. I don’t think that the issue of abortion is solvable given the human condition, so I’m hesitant to even deal with it through the legal system at all.
I absolutely hate Roe v. Wade because of the way it abandons all pretense of true reading of the Constitution – it was a bunch of made-up drivel – and I also appreciate it as one of the most careful and reasonable balancings of the competing interests involved and the lack of consensus about the morality of abortion and the sheer situational practicalities.
But IF we decide to use the legal system to stop the practice, we would need to assign a penalty to the women sufficient to make them not do it, and, given the drastic impact on life that having a child can have, a de minimus penalty would be worse than useless. (If having a child would wreck your life, ten days in jail as the price of NOT having one would be an easy trade.) Plus, if we aim our legal ire only at the involved docs and medical professionals, the result would involve women seeking abortions which would be legal for them so long as they avoided the services of doctors, which doesn’t strike me as a good result.
Oops.
should read ” . . . ten days in jail as the price of having one . . .”
Dammit. It was right the first way. 😕
Bobby,
Fair points all.
The contorted and unconstitutional “privacy” argument in Roe v. Wade is indeed absurd.
Given the difficulty of finding suitable deterrents for abortion (yup, ten days in prison would not really deter), perhaps we ought to hope for better medical control over the reproductive process, such that accidental pregnancies were a thing of the past? Of course, this would seem to present problems of its own, the suicide of the west and so on…
It’s all a bit of a mess, but I do think that in a hundred years time, or so, humanity may well look back and think us barbarians in the same way we view the Greeks leaving babies on mountains to die as barbarous.
bobby b: Thanks for posting that transcript. At the time I, like everybody else, paid attention to the punishment thing and ignored what preceded it.
It’s fascinating to read and observe how Trump took control from the start. Unsurprising that the WaPo would run it as Matthews duping Trump, but that’s not what happened. PDT bossed it from the get go.
As for Williamson, I had always believed him to be black. Probably something to do with the poorly lit byline photos and my cataracts. Now that said cataracts have been fixed, I can see that he appears white. I couldn’t tell you whether he’s gay or not, not on a visual inspection.
Abortion is a difficult matter. I first wrote “tricky”, but deleted it. The French are tricky, abortion is difficult.
Lately, being concerned with other matters, I have been avoiding the issue by taking the position that I’ll put it on the back burner, as long as I’m not asked to pay for it.
Then came the spending bill. That position got fucked in the ass, with a cactus. So, I may have to revisit it.
I don’t think that I’ll be alone. The left acts like abortion is a sacred cow but, in truth, I suspect that the only ones wedded to it (hah!) are the surviving traditional Democrats, who can’t resist an opportunity to kill black folks.
The modern left doesn’t care about abortion, per se. It’s merely useful to them as a wedge issue. And that will change.
My prediction? When radical Islam reverses into the Democrat party, we’ll see agitation for abortion to be illegal again, unless the father is a kuffir, a Christian or a Jew.
That’s interesting, because so did I until just last year, and I don’t know why. And my vision is just fine.
Nurse!
Even so, it gets more difficult to actually make a living at it. How many people actually pay the bills with political punditry? Andrew Klavan had a little aside on one of his segments about people who contact him:
“We think your writing is great, and we’d really like for you to do a weekly column for our site.”
“How much does it pay?”
“Well, nothing, but we get a lot of page views…”
You missed the point of the article, which is that in the past it was generally accepted, at least in the US, people would move to where the jobs are instead of going on the dole. I’m not going to go through all his old articles, but I think he did make the same point regarding inner city blacks, though his footwork was probably a bit more careful, this being that kind of age.
I agree with him. There are a whole lot of people on disability for chronic back pain and other sorts of maladies on the existence of which we sort of have to accept the patient’s word. Far too many to be believed.
Fibromyalgia seems to be the unimpeachable condition in the UK, many years back I saw with a good friend a TV debate with patients with such conditions bemoaning their perceived lack of support from the State. He volunteered that an instructive test might be to let loose a tiger in the studio and to see who moved and how fast.
I recall reading c.15 years ago about some towns in Labour areas where a quarter of men of working age were on Incapacity Benefit, so off the Dole figures.
Quite a few years ago, I was in a partnership with a personal injury lawyer. He had a stable of tame chiropractors and orthopedic types who he used for whatever medical opinions he needed to win his cases.
Through these people, I got to know one of the heads of the local chiropractic community. He was involved in the fight to get this new “disease” of fibromyalgia recognized by the med establishment. He was very excited about it, because the recognition of this vague “it hurts all over” complaint made by so many of his patients would entitle him to claim that all of his treatments of it were “medically necessary” and thus compensable by medical insurers. It was to be the next big chiro profit center.
Most real docs wanted nothing to do with this, but his association eventually gathered sufficient “expert” testimony (and helped enough political campaigns) so that our legislature passed a law stating that fibromyalgia was indeed a real disease and thus insurers must pay for its treatment. This movement has spread all across the USA, and now people speak of it like it’s a real disease.
It’s about as valid as the claim that silicone breast implants were causing autoimmune diseases. In other words, it’s fiction. But profitable fiction.
has the principle of roe vs wade been used to overturn other laws? i would have thought large swathes of law would be unconstitutional using a similar application of logic.
Thanks Ian.