The White Minstrel Show by Kevin D. Williamson

No snark. Asking honestly:

are there left/liberal writers on staff at the opinion page of conservative publications?

 

Not that I know of. But doesn’t The Atlantic sell itself as decidedly not of one side or the other?

And to be clear, I worry not a whit about KDW’s future (and I haven’t been able to access the WSJ piece). But, to me, there’s a little Overton’s Window dynamic going on here ... it’s analogous to the scene in The Blues Brothers ... “Oh, we’ve got both kinds of music! Country and Western!”

 

The Atlantic sells itself as exactly that - politics neutral. And historically the magazine has been pretty good about hiring voices of almost every kind.

That said, Williamson is his own worst enemy here.

It's not as if he wrote a stylish satire in which American women were condemned to death for abortion; nor did he write through a tightly argued, rigorous thought experiment in which extremes of violence and volition and punishment were explored.

He made a stupid tweet, then kept doubling down on it.

 

The Atlantic hired him in spite of, then fired him because of, a very well-known tweet.

It made an average writer into a martyr.

I can’t access the article, but I hope Williamson points out that the real effect of the Twitter mob is on the other employees of The Atlantic. I’m sure many of them weren’t happy in the first place that Williamson was hired but became apoplectic after more coverage of the tweet.

 

Main takeaway from this thread: more of you need to subscribe to WSJ! Great paper!

 

I get it free through work ...

 

Please. KDW is not an “average” writer. Give me a writer, any writer, and I can find some MFA swinging on a tit somewhere who considers said writer to be a mediocrity. Such is the stock-in-trade of that set. I assume @Azrael needed a mere millisecond’s tryst with the Google to find his KDW slayer. Yet far too many writers/thinkers of consequence who stand in opposition to virtually every syllable penned by KDW admire his work to condemn him to the “average” ranks.

But KDW isn’t a martyr, either. The big loser here is The Atlantic.

 

Kevin Williamson Won’t Tell Me What Should Happen to Women Who Have Abortions

 

Maybe he doesn’t know what he thinks, but he knows what not thinking about it at all looks like.

 

Maybe he was just joking!

 

Maybe it was his edition to play heel.