A few more thoughts on the Williamson firing
I’m not going to write another book on this—yesterday’s tome was enough. But here’s a bit more on the subject of the Williamson firing and its fallout.
First, let’s get this straight: of course Williamson was hired in the first place as the resident conservative Never-Trumper. If he had been pro-Trump, I can’t imagine that he would have been hired. He was also hired as click-bait, for the very reason that he was later fired: his hard-hitting provocative style and controversial views. The particular view that got him into trouble—that women who get abortions should be treated exactly as murderers in the legal sense, not just the moral one—was a bridge too far for the Atlantic’s readers and editor.
Or so they say.
Second, let’s not pretend that Williamson’s views are not extremely—and I mean extremely—unusual and severe, even on the right. He was not fired for some sort of ordinary or common viewpoint. It is also extreme historically; even during the time that abortion was illegal in this country (roughly mid-19th to mid-20th century) the woman herself was not always penalized, and it was never the case in the US that the woman was treated and penalized by the law as a murderer (nor was it the case in almost every other country on earth).
Third, Williamson has stated that he is serious about that point of view. Whether he believes in capital punishment or not (he’s not sure if he does), he does believe that women should face the same penalties murderers face. So even without execution that would ordinarily be life imprisonment, for example. Anyone who says he was just joking has likely not listened carefully and objectively to that audio I presented in my previous post, in which he makes it quite clear that he is serious (and whether or not he believes in capital punishment is mostly irrelevant, as I just indicated).
Like nearly 50 percent of the American public, Kevin believes that abortion is a form of homicide, i.e., murder (“homicide” somehow sounds more antiseptic), and noted he was “absolutely willing to see abortion treated like regular homicide under the criminal code.”
I ordinarily admire Kimball’s work, but that is misleading. It is not only a possible point of view but a commonplace one to believe abortion is a form of murder in the moral sense but not in the legal sense and that it should not be criminalized at all (or only in a very minor way). That is the position held by about 50 percent of the American public, and it is a far cry from the position Williamson advocates.
Kimball says, later in the essay:
If you listen to the exchange, it is clear””or so I think””that the bit about hanging was a flip provocation. It was a provocation that Kevin apparently liked, however, for he repeated it in a tweet (since deleted).
I listened, and I see nothing flip about it. Kimball is correct that the hanging part was somewhat flip, but that’s not the point; that’s just the hook that got a lot of attention. Williamson’s point was that women who abort should be treated as murderers under the law, and he was not flip about that. I’m amazed at the excuses made around this by so many pundits. In that clip, Williamson makes it clear that he means what he says, and there is no reason not to take him at his word. You can agree or disagree with him, think he should have been fired or not, but don’t whitewash what he actually said (as so many seem to be doing).
I happen to think—as I wrote before—that the Atlantic wanted Williamson to make provocative comments in the periodical. Why else hire a provocateur? Their motive most likely was to get lots of traffic while making the magazine’s readers hate conservatives even more and to consider Williamson’s extreme views typical of conservatives in general (and maybe to generate more business for fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale). They got more than they bargained for, and let him go.
Or maybe they got just what they bargained for. After all, they’re getting a lot of attention, aren’t they? And so is Williamson. And the impression has been fostered that a lot of conservatives want to execute women who have abortions.
Very good piece by Ross Douthat on this — “Among the Abortion Extremists”. An excerpt:
In general. I think Williamson lacks the ability to walk in another persoN’s shoes. Think of the pro-life clinics where they try to offer pregnant women alternatives to abortion and succeed in saving lives. It takes real empathy to do that.
I apply this criticism to his views on moving from your home town to get a better job. As someone who left both my home town but also my country, I cried when I decided to marry and move to Germany. I am so happy to be able to call friends and family in the US now for a tiny fee per month. I am happy to be able to read my hometown paper online to see what is happening there. Every time I see a picture of downtown, I remember the shops that used to exist and see new shops that have replaced them. When a new hospital was built, I remember the many hours I spent with people being treated at the old hospital. When I see a name in the obits, I remember those people and their part in my life.
Leaving your home town means giving up part of your and your family’s past. And of other people I know that have left my home town, most are happy to get together and share memories. I have cousins who still drive older relatives to the doctor or take them shopping. They still shovel snow for neighbors and take them meals when they are sick. These are the kind of people I value, not just the ones who make money. Kevin doesn’t seem to get this.
From Neo’s earlier post, this is still operative:
“You want to hire the guy who wrote that, surely you know you’re not going to get politeness and a tentative touch. You’re going to get someone who will write hard-hitting articles that will offend a lot of people (probably on both right and left), although those same people will be talking about those articles a lot. The Atlantic wanted an entree into that kitchen, but they couldn’t take the heat.”
* *
Judging from his NeverTrumper stance and his one-and-only article for them, possibly they assumed Williamson would mostly be offending the Right.
As for Neo’s take today, it seems pertinent to me.
“I happen to think–as I wrote before–that the Atlantic wanted Williamson to make provocative comments in the periodical. Why else hire a provocateur? Their motive most likely was to get lots of traffic while making the magazine’s readers hate conservatives even more and to consider Williamson’s extreme views typical of conservatives in general (and maybe to generate more business for fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale). They got more than they bargained for, and let him go.
Or maybe they got just what they bargained for. After all, they’re getting a lot of attention, aren’t they? And so is Williamson. And the impression has been fostered that a lot of conservatives want to execute women who have abortions.”
* * *
As you said, Vox dutifully helped with that part.
Which may have been The Atlantic’s goal, just maybe not aiming at that specific topic, and not this soon. Here’s what I wrote this morning:
(great minds think alike, and all that)
http://www.neoneocon.com/2018/04/07/weighing-in-on-the-kevin-williamson-firing/#comment-2380745
“They want to hire fringe elements, or at least edgy ones, whose writings they know will be attributed to the majority of conservatives, who don’t agree with those opinions at all.
They don’t have to do anything more than publish the not-representative personal views of their writers and contributors, stir up the Leftist opposition, and sit back to gather the rewards: (1) credit from some on the right for at least attempting to present some viewpoints outside their usual readers’ ken; (2) validation for the left that considers all conservatives as holding views identical to the radical and UNrepresentative ones published; (3) discrediting the writer with another part of the right for daring to deal with the devil; (4) raking in money from the hits and publicity-churning (Charity alleges this to be the primary motive).
Win-win-win-win for the paper; why wouldn’t Atlantic follow that lead?
Maybe Jeff Goldberg isn’t as stupid as I thought he was.
Maybe.
If he didn’t know specifically about Williamson’s abortion=murder riffs, I bet he knows there are plenty other stories out there that would generate enough ire to “force” him to fire Kevin eventually.
My suggestion is that the storm that upset the boats of Williamson and Norton were premature: there should have been a period for readers to build up their hate for the dastardly righties, reinforcing their negative views of every conservative , and then the perfidious past of the unsatisfactory hires would be “discovered” and they would be (oh-so-sadly) dismissed, and others brought on board for the same charade, after suitable furor to generate revenue.”
National Review is regular read for me, but I never warmed to Kevin Williamson. I couldn’t figure out where he was coming from and sometimes he seemed downright nasty.
Not just the hang the women stuff, which I missed the first time around, but his unrelenting attacks on Trump and his white working class supporters.
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2016/03/28/father-f-hrer/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/04/white-working-class-donald/
Ta-Nehisi Coates claims to love KW’s writing, which can be colorful, but I suspect Coates’s real love is for their shared enemies.
Since Coates is the “Voice of James Baldwin Made Flesh” over at Atlantic, I further suspect Coates’s endorsement was a key factor for Atlantic to hire KW.
When I saw the current photograph of KW — bald, bearded, ear-ringed with wacky clothes — I assumed he is gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But I wonder if Atlantic also saw him as a potential Andrew Sullivan on the brink of defection from conservative ranks.
Ann Says:
April 7th, 2018 at 7:29 pm
Very good piece by Ross Douthat on this – “Among the Abortion Extremists”. An excerpt:
* **
another excerpt — maybe The Atlantic did conservatives and even Williamson a favor.
“Now: The fact that Williamson is an extremist doesn’t change the fact that to hire him for his pen and then fire him for having expressed an extreme opinion was stupid and gutless – akin to hiring Christopher Hitchens and then firing him for antireligious bigotry (and yes, Hitch was a bigot, but worth publishing anyway), or adding Hunter S. Thompson to your masthead and then dropping him because it’s pointed out that he writes under the influence of drugs. But still there is a part of me, as someone whose goal is to persuade liberal readers to reconsider their pro-abortion views, that’s glad Williamson won’t be carrying the pro-life flag at The Atlantic, out of fear that his extremities could make the work of persuasion harder.
Another part of me, though – the more important one – thinks that this is a case study in exactly the problem establishment editors are trying to address by widening their pool of writers: the inability of contemporary liberalism to see itself from the outside, as it looks to the many people who for some reason, class or religion or historical experience, are not fully indoctrinated into its increasingly incoherent mix of orthodoxies.
…
Williamson, who was put up for adoption in poor-white Texas just before Roe. v. Wade was decided, had personal reasons to make that imaginative leap, and it carried him all the way to an eye-for-an-eye impulse in response. His views are not common among pro-life writers, they rather deliberately give offense, and I have no doubt they would make inter-office events more uncomfortable than, say, my interactions with Ruth Marcus.
But if they are “callous and violent,” to use the pursed-lip language of Williamson’s firing, they reflect back an essential fact about our respectable reproductive rights regime – which is justified with the hazy theology of individualism, but implemented with lethal violence against the most vulnerable of human bodies every single day.”
* * *
How long before Douthat gets the too-extreme-for-us ax as well?
I haven’t followed his writings for a long time, finding that there just isn’t enough time to read everything written on the internet, although so much of it is worth reading (and there is that paywall thing).
What is his position on the Left-Right continuum and its assorted orthogonal axes these days?
Whatever it is, has he come close enough to the Red Line to be relieved of his title of Tame Columnist at the Times?
expat Says:
April 7th, 2018 at 8:02 pm
* * *
I’m not sure where Williamson was coming from on his “all you poor folks shut up and move or die” schtick, but it offended me enough in its lack of empathy and practical reason to quit reading him regularly.
Maybe I “fired” him for being too extreme?
Looking at the titles of Douthat’s articles since March and the one post I was able to read before reaching my “free” limit (I will not subscribe to the Times, so thanks to those who do and relay their stories), he scores as a subtle naysayer of the “Trump might be okay policy-wise as long as his handlers keep control (= I am a conservative of the acceptable kind), but isn’t he an awful person?” variety.
Kind of what The Atlantic was looking for in Williamson?
Paul at PLB expands on the more existential aspects of the Williamson affaire, with sobering conclusions.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/04/lessons-from-the-kevin-williamson-affair.php
“Moreover, virtually all controversialists will have taken at least one position that many regard as beyond the pale. Doing so doesn’t make them beyond the pale. One must view their work as a whole before reaching that judgment.
But that ship has sailed when it comes to liberal media. Such outlets can’t thrive without yielding to the increasingly strident demands of leftists for orthodoxy and “correctness” down the line.
…
The fact that leftists increasingly exercise a veto over who appears in mainstream media outlets makes it imperative that they have no say over who appears in center-right ones. This seems obvious.
Yet the left just made a run at having Laura Ingraham expelled from Fox News. We don’t whether they came close to succeeding, but the mere fact that they tried without being laughed out of court is sobering
…
We need two distinct sets of media because the fully formed set has little tolerance for conservative views – and less all the time.
It’s likely that with two sets of media will emerge two sets of corporate sponsors, one of which will be immune to boycott campaigns by leftists. Conservatives have as much purchasing power as liberals do. Though we are less prone to boycott, that reluctance will give way as the left becomes more aggressive. In response, corporate America will either stop taking sides or divide roughly evenly into two sides based on the opinions and prejudices of the bulk of their customers.
Surprising as it seems, this is the optimistic scenario.”
This will not end well.
AesopFan and expat:
Actually, if you look at it closely, Williamson didn’t say the people should die, he said the communities should die.
But no, he’s not exactly a poster child for empathy.
neo-neocon Says:
April 8th, 2018 at 12:25 am
…he said the communities should die.
* *
Now that you mention it, of course you are correct.
Communities die all the time when their source of work goes away, but that is not the same as telling people they don’t have any other choice and just let it all go without, apparently, any sympathy for their plight.
Yeah, not a poster boy.
But NRO didn’t fire him for being insensitive and offensive, even though I suspect some of the other staff didn’t agree with him here any more than they did on the abortion=murder assertions.
BTW, this illustrates the fallibility of memory, and that if you read something often enough you begin to “remember” it that way.
IOW, what the Left trades on in their fake news.
Early on I enjoyed Williamson’s writings but as they became more extreme I read him as no more than a ginned up contrarian and provocateur; so I stopped.
This whole thing with the Atlantic and Williamson makes me laugh – am I supposed to believe they offered him a job without knowing about his most extreme writings and policy positions? Please.
Very few pro-life people want women to suffer the harshest penalties for abortions. The current state of law has gradations of severity for homicide:
– accidental
– not planned
– planned
– murder for hire
The abortionists clearly fall into that last category, the one with the highest penalties.
Women fall into the second, at most. And, I would argue that minor women are often pushed into that decision by parents/significant others – making them another victim, not a perp.
“But no, he’s not exactly a poster child for empathy.”
.
Ah, the speck in Kevin’s eye. KW is to be admired on several fronts, perhaps the most admirable is his fierce conviction coupled with an honest self-assessment by way of a polymath intellect. This little empathy loop is a pitiable attempt at casting Kevin Williamson as insufficiently sensitive.
.
On multiple occasions Kevin reminds readers of his upbringing and the high risk of his birth circumstances rendering him aborted. While all the pro-choice leaners are cultivating an expectation of empathy for their plight should they have to deal with a pregnancy without absolutely ideal conditions — he’s saying YOU’RE DAMNED RIGHT I’M PRETTY EXTREME ABOUT NOT BEING SNUFFED OUT EARLY IN LIFE BY THE MORAL FAILINGS OF OTHERS.
.
But thanks for femsplaining how he’s the one who fails to understand the circumstances of the people involved.
LC Peterson:
And thanks for completely misunderstanding my point, as well as insinuating that I care about whether a man is making a point or whether a woman is making a point. Words like “mansplaining” are not in my vocabulary, although I’m well aware of how other people use them.
By the way, you seem to have failed to notice that my remark about Williamson’s relative lack of empathy (“no, he’s not the poster child for empathy” hardly indicates he lacks it entirely) was part of a discussion not of his attitude towards abortion, but his attitude towards communities or people in communities that are experiencing economic failure. One of the commenters here had thought that Williamson had said the people in those communities should die, and I was correcting that and pointing out that Williamson had actually said the communities should die, not the people.
In other words, I was saying he had more empathy than that commenter had indicated. But I added that he is nevertheless not a poster child for empathy.
Which he is not. It’s not his strong suit. His stock in trade is that he is hard-hitting, unafraid to say controversial things, and also a very good writer. I am merely listing his qualities there, not making a judgment (except on the plus side: he’s a good writer).
Now, to address whether Williamson is showing insufficient empathy in his attitude on abortion, I would say that he certainly shows much empathy to the fetuses and none to the women. He puts all his empathy cards, as it were, in one basket and not the other. The vast vast majority of pro-life people (and/or adopted people) disagree with him, and I would wager that the vast majority of them (men or women) would find him insufficiently empathetic.
In addition, empathy is not a male or female trait, it’s a human trait. I am pretty sure that women are somewhat more likely to test high in it, but that does not mean that men lack it. Nor does it mean it’s better to have an excess of it. I happen to think that a balance is best.
If you actually want to learn what I happen to think on subjects such as that, read this. I also find the work of Robert Frost (a man, by the way), both his poetry and journals, to contain some fascinating and brilliant explorations of the balance between what he called mercy (that’s the “empathy” part) and justice.
I agreed completely with Neo, but the more I read the more I became bothered with the slightly facile nature of the discussion. If all the abortions were 1st and 2nd trimester abortions, the ones explicitly legalized by Roe v. Wade (I think?), then it seems easier. But there really is a Mt. Everest of slippery slopes and nuances and logical/legal inconsistences.
(And there is the important but separate issue of big media speech control.)
_____
Here’s a Williamsonesque statement. There probably have already been a small and rare group of people who have received capital punishment because they murdered a fetus. As huxley suggested in the previous post, it is common (but not universal I think) that the murderer of a pregnant woman is charged with a double homicide. I’m pretty sure there are at least a few instances where this has been used as an aggravating circumstance to convert to a capital murder case.
Imagine the clever defense attorney arguing that we don’t know if the dead woman intended to deliver her child before my client decided to kill her. Why is the fetus a person here, does it matter what the pregnant woman’s intent is, and if so how much?
_______
In the 30’s and 40’s I’d guess that partial birth abortions were extremely rare, for the very real reason that a doc feared being brought up on murder charges. In the 90’s the Clintons claimed that there were 550 partial birth abortions performed/year. A decade later a journalist got an off-the-record quote from the head of the OB unit a large hospital in NJ, that his hospital alone did 500 partial birth abortions in one year. I won’t go into botched partial birth abortions which is a big issue.
________
Linda Fox brings up an important point, but doesn’t quite get it right I think.
A pure accident is never a homicide. If depraved negligence led to an accidental death, then it is 3rd degree.
I’m not sure whether murder for hire generally elevates above standard 1st degree murder but regardless, is it the employer or employee who gets the more severe punishment? I’ve seen cases go in either direction (cooperation w/ law enforcement matters), but often the employer is hit the worst. So why should the employer of the abortionist be given a pass? This is a logical/legal mess IMHO.
We Deeply Regret Hiring the Perpetrators of the Salem Witch Trials as Opinion Columnists –
Last week, after many fruitful discussions with the gentlemen behind the Salem witch trials, we here at The Atlantic made the decision to hire those men as opinion columnists. This was done in an effort to strengthen the diversity of thought within our op-ed section. We wanted to introduce some fresh, new, and extremely scary ideas into the mix. Although we were well aware of these individuals’ controversial views on due process and medicine, we simply could not pass up an opportunity to ignore massive red flags under the guise of nonpartisanship.
While I’m not a big KW fan, I do take the point his defenestration from “The Atlantic” is yet another signal that conservative thought will not be tolerated in open deabate by liberals and progressives.
They are out to “deplatform” all of us, just like they really are out to take away all guns, not just some guns, and to repeal the Second Amendment.
It’s almost like the Leftists wanted a moby, a conservative they could point to and say “look what he did, you guys should be ashamed”.
But it looks like even the Left can’t withstand the abortion-women issue.
I don’t know if the Left is smart enough to do this, but this may all be to plan, as per Neo’s last speculation in the OP.
In that case, the comment I wrote on the last thread would apply here: http://www.neoneocon.com/2018/04/07/weighing-in-on-the-kevin-williamson-firing/#comment-2380915
It won’t be hard to find Leviticus, 10 commandments, and tie it all to Bible believers on this issue.
Some might then argue that Trum’s marriage means that he needs to die for his adultery…
The truth is that the USA is not under the Law of Moses or the 10 Commandments. You people are not Israel, the 12 tribes descended from Jakob. Some of you are now, but certainly not even half of you.
Unless you want to end up in a siege where the enemies of America starve your cities out to the point where the women are eating, not aborting, their babies due to hunger, don’t follow the Law of Moses.
Trum is not married to Melania with the authority of YHVH. Trum is married on the authority of the goyim nations and princes: the Civil Law.
This is not a Divine Law contract violation, thus even under the Law of Moses, Trum being a Gentile Goy, is not under the same penalty of the Law.
But for Christians and other Americans who want to be under this kill whatever abortion law… you might want to read the entire Torah before you jump on this little band wagon.
I find it difficult to understand how Goldberg made such a bad hiring decision. I agree with Glenn Reynolds that Goldberg should resign, since he apparently can’t manage the publication properly. He has made a complete ass of himself.
As has been widely observed, nobody who read even a few of Williamson’s columns could mistake him for someone like Douthat. So the Atlantic clearly wanted a provocative voice. If someone really thought he would only be provocative about things the Left agrees with, that person shouldn’t be in a position of responsibility at the magazine. Unless Williamson flat-out lied. Which seems unlikely, although Goldberg’s statement seems to imply something along these lines.
Yes, the Douthat column is terrific. It’s interesting to note that the Atlantic would probably never hire him. Imagine if they had, and he had written something measured like this about abortion. They would have to either accept that their other writers were freaking out and tell them to pound sand, or they would have to fire someone for his non-provocative anti-abortion stance.
They didn’t take that risk. Instead they hired someone they knew they could blame if he got too far out of line, someone they knew they would feel comfortable ejecting, because he wasn’t really one of them. They probably thought of him as disposable all along.
I really wonder why Williamson took the job. He hasn’t said anything about this yet, has he?
It’s a rather Utopian view that everything that is wrong should be illegal. Both Aquinas and Augustine, I understand, regarded prostitution as wrong, but neither supported making it illegal. I regard abortion as murder – but I would not support making it uniformly illegal. In a sane society we could discuss where to draw the line, come to a consensus. This is not a sane society.
Banana Republics usually are not sane.