Any rational person’s list of the most intelligent and pungent columnists now writing will perforce include the name Kevin Williamson, late of National Review and, as of Thursday, late of The Atlantic as well.
And anyone with a working internet connection knows that Williamson, hired to a chorus of drooling leftoid obloquy by The Atlantic a few weeks ago, was summarily fired by the magazine’s preening, oleaginous editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, after having written only one article, “The Passing of the Libertarian Moment.”
That article was not the problem. The problem (prescinding from Goldberg’s obvious spinelessness in capitulating to the baying mob) was a remark Williamson made about abortion during a podcast with his former NR colleague Charles C. W. Cooke. 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.” When asked how he thought those found guilty of abortion should be punished, he said although he was “kind of squishy on capital punishment in general,” death by hanging might be appropriate.
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). The weaponized cyber garbage-dispensing service known as Media Matters insinuated its tentacles into the recesses of social media to compile snippets of Kevin’s views about abortion and other matters about which there can be only one opinion, and dumped the lot into the contemporary equivalent of the public square, i.e., much-visited internet sites. Then its politically correct masters sat back and waited for the mob to do its work.
Which it promptly did.
