Kevin Williamson is a deft provocateur, someone who forces readers to confront difficult arguments not oft expressed by other writers on either side of the aisle. His writing is among the best in the business — but it’s not for everyone. That’s fair enough.
Intent on derailing his new gig at the Atlantic, Media Matters found audio from a podcast discussion of Williamson flirting again with the position that women who get abortions should be subject to hanging. He was fired within 24 hours. Though Williamson admitted to being “squishy on capital punishment,” he ultimately affirmed in the conversation he was “absolutely willing to see abortion treated like a regular homicide under the criminal code.”
That sounds callous and outrageous to many (and I disagree with it) but much of the squeamishness on the Left probably stems from the disconnect between pro-life people who firmly believe abortion kills babies and pro-choice people who firmly do not. If you believe abortion extinguishes a human life, as millions of people do, treating it as such in the justice system is a logical argument to advance, however uncomfortable it may make us, and however few people accept it. That was the crux of Williamson’s statement, both in tweet form and the podcast, though he expressed it with the characteristic flair of a professional provocateur.
If we are to accept that polemicists are a necessary part of the media ecosystem, as I suspect most in the industry would, it’s counterproductive to disenfranchise only those who happen to be conservative.
I don’t want to lose perspective on the importance of this story — people in the media writing about people in the media like their hirings, firings, and musings constitute major national news is getting old. But Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg knew Williamson had made this argument on Twitter and only fired him after the podcast clip resurfaced, making it seem as though he found a convenient excuse to oust the National Review veteran after a week of intense pressure from the Left. By Goldberg’s account, Williamson seems to have hedged on the tweet in their conversations before he was hired, which (if true) probably enabled his firing when it turned out the post was fairly representative of his thinking on the matter. And the Left should be advised that Williamson will be writing no matter what and probably would have been tempered at the Atlantic.
But we did not get an honest explanation for Williamson’s firing, which is either that there is no longer room for polemicists to work in the media — for all the outrage select tweets and statements culled from decades of published work can generate today — or that only liberal polemicists can work in the media. Both are fair arguments to make, but those who believe them should take a cue from Williamson and be transparent about it.
