RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Missile defense needs to be part of the United States’ strategy” against North Korean nuclear threats, conceded even a February 11 New York Times editorial in an incoherent anti-missile defense rant. Yet the Times still derided vital missile defense efforts like Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), a continuation of the leftist Gray Lady’s longstanding dangerous folly of opposition to protecting America’s homeland from nuclear attack.

The Times probably would have preferred that President Donald Trump had kept his initial Fiscal Year 2018 budget request with the missile defense spending levels of his predecessor, Barack Obama. However, growing North Korean nuclear threats prompted Trump and legislators to add $368 million to missile defense, reflecting a growing missile defense commitment noted on March 7 before Congress by undersecretary of defense John C. Rood. The Alaska- and California-based GMD is central to these missile defense efforts. As the Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) notes, GMD “is currently the only U.S. missile defense system devoted to defending the U.S. homeland from long-range ballistic missile attacks.”

Nonetheless, the Times simply repeated decades-old sophistries about missile defense’s futility, something that “will never provide a foolproof, comprehensive shield against a nuclear adversary.” “After more than 30 years of research and more than $200 billion, the nation’s ballistic missile defense program remains riddled with flaws, even as the threat from North Korean missiles escalates,” the Times wrote. The Times cited a 2016 Pentagon report that supposedly “faulted” missile defenses (it actually describes GMD’s “limited capability to defend the U.S. Homeland”).

Kevin Williamson has been fired by The Atlantic. Williamson is one of the great conservative intellectuals of our times. He has a keen wit and frequently engages in heterodox opinions that make his writing and thinking intriguing. For a decade he wrote at William F. Buckley’s National Review until hired away last week by Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic.

The Atlantic fancies itself a place of intellectual diversity where the best writers across ideologies can share their views. But Williamson’s hire drew burning rage from the left. Williamson’s birth came from an unplanned pregnancy. Instead of aborting him, his birth mother gave him up for adoption. As you might imagine, Williamson has strongly held views on the matter of abortion. A week after hiring him, Jeffrey Goldberg bowed to the leftwing mob and fired Williamson for, in part, how he might make the pro-abortion women in the office feel.

Never mind Williamson’s feelings on abortion and that he could have been aborted himself, the editor took the brave stand of worrying about the hypothetical feelings of pro-abortion women in the office. The left told us that the purges happening on college campuses were contained to the campus. Yet here we are today with one of the best voices of conservatism fired from a job for his conservative views.

It will only get worse. Just a few years ago, a liberal reporter walked into an Indiana pizza parlor to see if that parlor would cater a same sex wedding. The owner said he was a Christian so he could not do that. The news set off a wave of antagonism against the pizza parlor, which had to close down for several days. It faced harassment online and in the store for the owner having the audacity to answer a reporter’s hypothetical question.