Whatever you’re doing right now you should stop it and go read Kevin Williamson’s long essay in the Wall Street Journal about what, exactly, happened to him at the Atlantic. It is fantastic and a perfect reminder of just what the Atlantic gave up when Jeffrey Goldberg capitulated to the Twitter mob. Some samples:
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 hired 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 high church for liberals.”
My first piece appeared in the Atlantic on April 2. I was fired on April 5.
If you want to understand how bald-faced this power-play was, consider this exchange:
The late Christopher Hitchens was another frequent contributor to the Atlantic. He was routinely denounced by people on the left for his harshly critical views of Islam. He complained of the war in Afghanistan that “the death toll is not nearly high enough,” described the 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 Hitchens was in the family. You are not.”
There’s a lot to unpack Williamson’s essay, but one of the deeper points is the paranoid style of the liberal mind:
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.
This is exactly right. Liberalism controls the commanding heights of industry, technology, the media, entertainment, and the academy. Conservatives control, what . . . churches? (Though maybe not as much as people think.) And yet, the progressive left seems to genuinely believe that they are beset on all sides by conservative monsters.
Ultimately, the firing of Kevin Williamson wasn’t really about Kevin Williamson. It was simply a case of Who? Whom?
Just as it always is.
