By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, April 20, 2018
In early March, I met up with Jeffrey Goldberg, the
editor in chief of the Atlantic, at an event sponsored by the magazine at the
South by Southwest conference in Austin. He had just hire me away from National
Review, the venerable conservative magazine where I’d been a writer and editor
for 10 years.
“You know, the campaign to have me fired will begin 11 seconds
after you announce that you’ve hired me,” I told him. He scoffed. “It won’t be
that bad,” he said. “The Atlantic isn’t the New York Times. It isn’t a high
church for liberals.”
My first piece appeared in the Atlantic on April 2. I was
fired on April 5.
The purported reason for our “parting of ways,” as Mr. Goldberg
put it in his announcement, had nothing to do with what I’d written in my inaugural
piece. The problem was a six-word, four year-old tweet on abortion and capital
punishment and a discussion of that tweet in a subsequent podcast. I had responded
to a familiar pro-abortion argument: that pro-lifers should not be taken
seriously in our claim that abortion is the willful taking of an innocent human
life unless we are ready to punish women who get abortions with long prison
sentences. It’s a silly argument, so I responded with these words: “I have
hanging more in mind.”
Trollish and hostile? I’ll cop to that, though as the subsequent
conversation online and on the podcast indicated – to say nothing of the few
million words of my published writing available to the public – I am generally
opposed to capital punishment. I was making a point about the sloppy rhetoric
of the abortion debate, not a public-policy recommendation. Such provocations
can sometimes clarify the terms of a debate, but in this case, I obscured the
more meaningful questions about abortion and sparked the sort of hysteria I’d
meant to point out and mock.
Let’s not equivocate: Abortion isn’t littering or
securities fraud or driving 57 in a 55 mph zone. If it isn’t homicide, then its
no more morally significant than getting a tooth pulled. If it isn’t homicide,
then there’s no real argument for prohibiting it. It if is homicide, then we need to discuss more seriously what should be
done to put an end to it. For all the hatter today about diversity of viewpoint
and the need for open discourse, there aren’t very many people on the
pro-choice side, in my experience, who are ready to talk candidly about the
reality of abortion.
Which brings us back to that event at South by Southwest,
where the Atlantic was sponsoring a panel about marginalized points of view and
diversity in journalism. The panelists, all Atlantic writers and editors,
argued that the cultural and economic decks are stacked against feminists and
advocates of minority interests. They made this argument under the prestigious,
high-profile auspices of South by Southwest and their own magazine, hosted by a
feminist group called the Female Quotient, which enjoys the patronage of
Google, PepsiCo, AT&T, NBCUniversal, Facebook, UBS, JPMorgan Chase and
Deloitte. We should all be so marginalized. If you want to know who actually
has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas
get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.
The event itself was revealing, not for the predictable
banalities uttered on stage but for the offstage observations coming from the master
of ceremonies: my new boss. Mr. Goldberg in private sometimes takes an
amusingly ironic view of the pieties of P.C culture. After giving the opening
remarks, he joked about inflicting upon me the “wokiest” thing I’d ever
suffered through and said that he himself was “insufficiently intersectional”
for the event. He had a good laugh.
I couldn’t share so easily in his humor. Mr. Goldberg
knows something about the power of the Twitter mob. A Jewish liberal with some
hawkish foreign-policy view and a clear-eyed understanding of the problems associated
with the poorly assimilated Muslim minority communities in Europe, he has been labeled
everything from a perpetrator of crimes against humanity (he served in the Israeli
military as a young man) to an “Islamophobe” to the intellectual author of
George W. Bush’s ill-conceived war in Iraq.
But he underestimated the energy with which that mob
would pursue someone like me. Mr. Goldberg sits atop one of the most celebrated
magazines in our country’s history, and before that he was a star at the New
York Times Magazine and the New Yorker. He can survive the occasional heresy.
I’m an unassimilated conservative from Lubbock, Texas.
Much of my career for the past 20-odd years has consisted of writing pieces
that tell people things they don’t want to hear. My angry critics on the left
thing I’m a right-wing monster; my angry critics on the right don’t like the
fact that I’ve reported extensively from Trump country and I haven’ thought
very highly of what I’ve seen. If I’d been hired for a new job at some
conservative outlet, you can be sure there would have been talk about how I
pray each night for the death of the white working class.
But this time, the tsunami came from the left, as I’d
predicted.
On March 22, the Atlantic announced that it had hired me and
three others as contributors to its new section “for ideas, opinions and
commentary.” In no time, the abortion rights group Naral was organizing
protests against me, demanding that I not be permitted to publish in the
Atlantic. Activists claimed, dishonestly, that I wanted to see every fourth
woman in the country lynched (it is estimated that 1 in 4 American women will
have an abortion by the age of 45). Opinion pieces denouncing me appeared in
the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Slate, the
Huffington Post, Mother Jones, the Guardian and other publications.
The remarkable fact about all this commentary on my
supposedly horrifying views on abortion is that not a single writer from any of
those famous publications took the time to ask me about the controversy. (The
sole exception was a reporter from Vox.) Did I think I was being portrayed
accurately? Why did I make that outrageous statement? Did I really want to set
up gallows, despite my long-stated reservations about capital punishment? Those
are questions that might have occurred to people in the business of asking questions.
(In preparing this account, I have confirmed my recollection of what Mr.
Goldberg said with Mr. Goldberg himself.)
Instead of interviewing the subject of their pieces, they
scanned my thousands of articles and found the tidbits that seemed most likely
to provoke. I was half-amused by progressive activists’ claims to have “uncovered”
things that were, after all, published. Goodness knows there’s lots to choose
from: I have unpopular and contrarian views about what we used to call
sex-reassignment surgery and are now expected to call “gender-confirmation
surgery,” and I have argued that the much-remarked upon epidemic of sexual
assault on American college campuses does not in fact exist (check the numbers).
But no, I didn’t call an African-American child a “monkey,”
and, as should be clear by now, I’m not eager to be any sort of executioner. I
am one of what I suspect is a very small number of American journalists to have
seen a hanging (a lynching in India), and that kind of violence is worth taking
seriously.
Having my views misrepresented is familiar territory for
me. In 2014, I got a call from a friend who was disturbed by my public support
for Donald Sterling, the owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, who had
gotten himself into trouble for some racist remarks. I had, at the tie, never
heard of Mr. Sterling, but there was a quote from me right there on Twitter: “’Looks
like the antiracist gestapo are already lacing up their jackboots for Donald Sterling,’
National Review’s Kevin Williamson commented.”
I mention that one mainly because I know the source of
it: It was invented by Matt Bruenig, a left-wing blogger and lawyer formerly
associated with the progressive think tank Demos and a contributor to, among
other publications, the Atlantic. That quote was not a distortion; it was not “taken
out of context” or anything of the sort. It was pure fabrication. (Mr. Bruenig
says that the quote, produced in its entirety above, was intended as “satire.”)
You can find other tweets attributed to me that are pure
invention. And while the claims against me during the course of the Atlantic fiasco
were not created ex nihilo, the distortions and exaggerations represent a
similar kind of intellectual dishonesty: indifference to the facts of the case
in the service of narrow ideological goals.
It is easy to misrepresent and exaggerate view that are
controversial to begin with. I have argued for years that the current U.S.
model of capital punishment is defective and that the practice ought to be
tightly restricted or eliminated entirely. I also have argued that if we are to
have capital punishment, then it should be carried out by means that are
forthrightly violent – firing squad, hanging, etc. – rather than the current
pseudo-clinical method of lethal injection. We should always be honest about
what it is we are doing, and the involvement of the medical profession in the
willful imposition of death is a perversion of its creed, whether in the matter
of abortion or in the matter of executing criminals.
Whatever you think of my views on this issue, I’d suggest
that they’re more interested than hearing someone repeat the same shopworn
talking points on capital punishment for the thousandth time. The editors of the
Atlantic though so, too, until the mob started doing their thinking for them.
The Atlantic has often welcomed controversial writers, the
magazine’s best-known contributor today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, arguably the nation’s
foremost writer on race. He came in for criticism after writing, in his book “Between
the World and Me,” that the first responders on 9/11 were “not human” to hi,
that he had come to regards such uniformed figures as menaces I don’t share his
view, but if that’s what he thought at the time, then I’m glad he wrote it. He
could have pretended to have had thoughts and feelings other than the ones he
did – but the truth is usually more interesting, and it is always more useful.
The late Christopher Hitchens was another frequent
contributor to the Atlantic. He was routinely denounced by people on the left
for his harshly critical view of Islam. He complained of the war in Afghanistan
that “the death toll is not nearly high enough,” described Jewish scriptures as
“evil and mad” and directed shameful vitriol at Mother Teresa. Hitchens
routinely and gleefully gave occasion for offense – and he was one of the
invaluable essayists of our time.
“Yes,” Mr. Goldberg said when I reminded him of this
precedent. “But Mr. Hitchens was in the family. You are not.”
And that, of course, is what this whole episode was
really about. No one is very much interested in my actual views on abortion and
capital punishment – I am hardly a household name. Anyone genuinely interested
in my views would have done what journalists do and inquired about them. It isn’t
hard to do.
I’m working on a piece right now touching on the way that
my fellow conservatives sometimes misrepresent the views of the economist ad
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Mr. Krugman is not the left-wing radical
of the right-wing imagination but a moderately liberal Democrat with more
traditional views on trade that the Trump administration; his critique of
Republican tax policy is fundamentally a conservative one. I think Mr. Krugman
would say that’s a fair accounting of his views. I am confident of this because
I asked him, and he said so.
Where my writing appears is not a very important or
interesting question. What matters more is the issue of how the rage-fueled
tribalism of social media, especially Twitter, has infected the op-ed pages
and, to some extent, the rest of journalism. Twitter is about offering markers
of affiliation of markers of disaffiliation. The Left shouts RACIST!, and the
Right shouts FAKE NEWS! There isn’t much that can be done about this other than
treating social media with the low regard it deserves.
But when it comes to what appears in our newspapers and
magazines, some of the old rules should still apply. By all means, let’s have
advocacy journalism, but let’s make sure about the journalism part of it: Do
the work, ask the questions, give readers a reason to assume that what’s
published adheres to some basic standards of intellectual honesty. To do
otherwise tis to empower those who dismiss the media as a tangle of hopeless
partisan opportunism.
Without credible journalism, all we have is the Twitter
mob, which is a jealous god. Jealous and kind of stupid.
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