Kevin Williamson is an unpleasant kind of person — the ugly conservative who really ought to be mumbling in a gutter somewhere, despised and pitied, but instead got himself a paying job at the National Review…which, come to think of it, is a kind of gutter. He’s the kind of guy who repeatedly insists that women ought to be executed for having abortions, which tells me that he’s absent any theory of mind or empathy, and ought to be labeled as a sociopath.
This weekend, Kevin Williamson, whose Twitter bio describes him as a “roving reporter for the National Review,” declared on Twitter that all abortions should be treated as premeditated homicide, and that women who have had abortions should face capital punishment, namely hanging. No exceptions.
@Green_Footballs Yes, I believe that the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) September 28, 2014I have hanging more in mind. @LeveyIsLaw @charlescwcooke
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) September 28, 2014
Well, he doesn’t work for the National Review anymore.
Instead, he’s been hired by The Atlantic.
On Thursday, the magazine — which is now led by Iraq War cheerleader Jeffrey Goldberg — announced a new opinion and commentary section, “Ideas.” The staff of this new section includes two current Atlantic writers, economics writer Annie Lowrey and former MSNBC host and contributor Alex Wagner, and two new hires: the writer and academic Ibram X. Kendi and National Review columnist Kevin D. Williamson.
Williamson holds a long list of odious views, and I don’t just mean repellant to liberals, but so vile and stupid that they should not be held by thinking human beings.
It’s a strange time. In an era when the worst president and the worst congress in the history of the country are in charge, our national media, led by cowards, are hedging their bets by hiring conservative scum. Instead of challenging great wrongs, they seem instead to be concerned with pandering to the wrong-doers.
It’s as if journalistic opinion now considers itself a representative democracy.
No, it’s as if journalistic opinion now considers itself a for-profit business. Which it is, and always has been. All that stuff about journalistic ethics and a mission to inform the electorate is just advertising.
That’s another great example of why the word that defines the Trump era is “kakistocracy”.
Trust no one.
I had never heard of Kevin Williamson before. He really is truly vile.
What was the Atlantic thinking? I would haven thought than Breitbart would have baulked at hiring him. Humm, perhaps it did and that is why he went to the Atlantic?
FIFY
The inimitable (and invaluable) Roy Edroso at alicublog has been reporting on Williamson’s antics for quite some time – you can start here and follow the links. I think my personal favourite is probably the time he compared “the American Left” to H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain – as an insult.
I don’t think they’re hedging their bets as much as they’re manufacturing consent. The people who own all of these huge national and international media outlets profit substantially from the chaos that’s going on.
He compared a question about a woman having an abortion to save her life a “middle school trolley problem”. Does this shitheel not understand that ectopic pregnancies and other fetal complications can kill pregnant people? This isn’t some hypothetical scenario, this happens regularly. I’m beginning to think that most of these anti-abortion jackasses are so ignorant of how reproduction works that they don’t even know about the health risks involved.
Beep beep. Media reporting true things about us detected, problem!
Analyzing… Analyzing… Weakness found: some peoples’ views are systematically discriminated against, and this is considered bad. Deploy anti-media weaponry: claim systematic bias against us. Deploy warbots on Twitter to boost signal. Success! Media now clenching hands in terror and hiring our agents preferentially.
Problem solved. All other views now suppressed. Truth now suppressed. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Fascist messaging is nothing if not predictable. It’s a shame the country is too ignorant to deal with it at all.
Herman and Chomsky (well, Herman mostly…) identified this process as “Flak” in Manufacturing Consent back in 1988. It was filter number 4 in their 5 filter model of editorial bias. The problem seems to have gotten worse since then…
I take it that the Atlantic was going for irony with the name of their new section?
Well, hey, The Atlantic has to keep those numbers up. They can’t have the millions of hateful, misogynist, racist assholes in this country thinking their views are unrepresented or unwelcome in their magazine. I mean, truth is all well and good, I suppose, but flattering lies sell so much better!
The Atlantic has been so hard to pin down, and there has been a pretty sharp downturn in a lot of the non-feature quality since Goldberg took the helm. Still plenty of good reporting, but just more junk along with it. I don’t get how you can have Ta-Nehisi Coates on staff, and all the stuff he’s written and put out there, and then hire some of these jackasses as if it was some sort of counterpoint, and not just proving the point.
Might explain why Coates has been doing more in comics than the mag, lately.
Say what you will about Williamson’s beliefs, but you must admit that he is a great singer.
This is a telling exchange for the article linked to above:
This suggests that his opposition to abortion is a reflex reaction and not a considered response that he has thoroughly thought through. In fact, he has thought so little about the question of abortion that he cannot answer the simplist and most obvious of questions about abortion. In other words, his opinion is not worth anything.
I suppose it’s the result of the financial crisis that all newspapers are facing these days. They’re hiring opinionated click-baiters instead of actual journalists.
He doesn’t work for The Atlantic any more either: The Atlantic splits with conservative writer over abortion comments. Of course, a little research beforehand would have avoided this embarrassing episode.