National Review‘s Kevin D. Williamson was recently hired by the Atlantic, and it’s caused quite a bit of commentary among the kind of people who would care about that kind of thing:
There have been plenty of good pieces and posts accumulating all the vile things Williamson has said during his writing career, most of them pretty recent. Like a lot of conservative writers, he can’t stand trans people:
in an anti-trans essay titled “Laverne Cox Is Not a Woman,” he wrote, “regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman.”
He likes to write about race as though he’s putting those black hooligans in their rightful place with not-so-subtle references I’m sure he finds awfully clever:
‘Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka! White devil! F*** you, white devil!” The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge. Luckily for me, he’s more like a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg, a few inches shy of four feet high, probably about nine years old, and his mom — I assume she’s his mom — is looking at me with an expression that is a complex blend of embarrassment, pity, and amusement, as though to say: “Kids say the darnedest things, do they not, white devil?”
He thinks the state ought to execute by hanging those who give or receive abortions:
National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson made the real “pro-life” agenda very, very clear, expressing his opinion that women who have abortions should be put to death — by hanging. And not just the women; he says the doctor who performs the abortion, the nurses who assist, and the hospital staff who enable it should also be executed.
To prove that he’s not racist, he wrote a bit about how he hates poor white people so much that he wishes they’d just die off. He couldn’t keep himself from writing this nasty little paragraph about Gabby Giffords after she took a bullet in the head:
You really ought not to bring politics into your getting shot in the face, Gabby.
So yes, I think it’s good that there are people scattered across the internet compiling the dirty work of a man who’s tricked himself and a lot of others into believing he’s a Serious Conservative Intellectual©, and I suspect that his move to the Atlantic will wind up tricking a few more (especially since the Atlantic jettisoned its comments section—what a great way to foster debate and promote free speech!).
The reason I suspect others who consider themselves centrists will be tricked by Williamson’s eloquent bigotry is obvious when you see the kinds of arguments, if you can call them that, that are put forth to demonstrate why Williamson is best suited for the cesspool of National Review and doesn’t deserve the paycheck that comes with writing for the Atlantic. They’re not dissimilar to what I have written above. Most are just lists of things he’s said with no commentary added because the awfulness of his viewpoints are supposed to be self-evident.
But the awfulness of his viewpoints aren’t all that obvious to a lot of people. If they were, Williamson wouldn’t have been hired by the Atlantic (or who knows, maybe he would have; it’s run by Iraq War apologist Jeffrey Goldberg). Personally, I think remarks in which a black child is compared to a primate is far beyond a dog whistle; it’s very obviously a racist statement. But there are plenty of people—plenty of people—who think anything other than calling a black person the n-word isn’t racist. This, coupled with the other kinds of comments Williamson has made and continues to make, along with every other dingbat at National Review, is part of what worries me about the traditional “liberal” media.
Williamson and others are part of a cadre of conservative thinkers who are very much interested in maintaining the perception that they are Serious Intellectuals©, and a president like Trump endangers that, which is why they were nominally “Never Trump” (until he won the nomination and the presidency, after which most of them decided “Never Trump” didn’t actually mean “Never Trump,” because words don’t have meaning). But peruse National Review‘s archives over the last year and you’ll see that the main objection these Very Serious Conservatives© have to Trump is not an ideological one but an aesthetic one. The actions he takes are regularly praised, so the main objection is that he comes off as a boob when he tweets or goes off script from prepared remarks. Again, it’s not the ideas that repel them, it’s that the ideas are wrapped up in something that is so obviously repugnant to anyone who’s not a complete moron.
For some reason, nominally “liberal” outlets have deigned to hiring conservative writers with, at best, stupid ideas in the hope of appeasing critics who believe no proper platform has been given to conservatives (ha!), like The New York Times hiring Bret Stephens or The Washington Post recently hiring Megan McArdle. What do these “thinkers” bring to the table? Climate change denial and the idea that kids should bum rush school shooters, respectively.
And so while outlets like National Review for some reason have no obligation to hire anyone not on the far-right side of the political spectrum, the more “respectable” publications in this country believe it’s a good idea to give the far right a space to air their ideas. Why hire a socialist to pen a weekly column when you can have someone who thinks trans people are icky? Why hire someone who would give serious reasons for opposing capitalism when you can have someone who considers themselves “pro-life” but advocates for the death penalty for women who get abortions?
But let me ask this: for those who would defend Williamson (like Bret Stephens, whom I’ll get to later), is it impossible to find a conservative voice that hasn’t aired views as objectively repugnant as Williamson’s? Why vigorously defend him if there are plenty of other conservative thinkers who haven’t compared black children to primates?