On Friday, the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe invited acclaimed conservative writer Kevin Williamson on to discuss his latest book The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics. It was sure to be a discussion of note, given anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s own polarizing roles in our politics.
Of course, Williamson wrote this book after falling prey to the outrage mob himself. Last year, he was hired by the Atlantic and, just a few days after his first article, fired at the behest of an incensed Twitter mob and liberal staff within the Atlantic. His only crime was having tweeted an admittedly unserious and offensive tweet on his abortion views four years prior.
Shortly after Friday’s interview, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League tweeted, “1 in 4 women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Kevin Williamson has argued and continues to argue — most recently today on Morning Joe — that those women should be executed by hanging . Why is this anti-woman extremist still being given a platform to spread dangerous hatred?”
1 in 4 women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Kevin Williamson has argued and continues to argue—most recently today on Morning Joe—that those women should be executed by hanging . Why is this anti-woman extremist still being given a platform to spread dangerous hatred?
— NARAL (@NARAL) July 26, 2019
There was one major problem: They were totally wrong. Throughout the interview, Williamson didn’t even mention abortion.
NARAL issued a correction a couple days later, but their initial tweet is still up and has garnered over 1.4k retweets and 3.8k likes. Meanwhile, as of this time of writing, their correction received a mere 10 retweets and 47 likes.
Their original tweet was by no means a good-faith mistake. It was either a deliberate lie designed to stoke outrage or it was negligent commentary that prioritized their narrative over the truth.
Despite its reach, the mendacious tweet is, of course, not all too consequential on its own. After all, it’s unlikely that NARAL’s audience would have ever liked Williamson anyway. That said, it’s worth examining why they felt compelled to tweet this. It’s not like this interview was done behind closed doors. How does any organization publish something so demonstrably false?
Well, NARAL isn’t really concerned with the truth.
Like any highly political organization these days, NARAL is interested in mobilizing their supporters. Williamson is a talented writer, which is a fact even recognized by people who disagree with him profoundly on key issues — which is why Williamson is dangerous in NARAL’s eyes. And because Williamson disagrees with NARAL on their central political issue of abortion, they seek to cast him out of the Overton window of acceptable discourse.
In other words, it benefits NARAL to portray Kevin Williamson as outlandishly as possible. They see outrage as a form of currency. This, as Kevin Williamson discusses in his latest book, is a symptom of the disease plaguing our nation’s discourse.
Marked declines in church attendance and social trust mean that ordinary sources of meaning are hollowing out. Now, people increasingly turn to politics to find meaning and belonging. That’s why political divides between self-identified Republicans and Democrats are reaching record highs. But more tellingly, the gap between the perception of the opposing party’s positions and that party’s actual positions is becoming increasingly wide: In other words, both sides of the political aisle believe the other holds more extreme positions than it actually does.
Twitter can easily exacerbate this tribal divide. The social media platform makes it easier for the politically addicted to find a sense of community. And by restricting the limit to 240 characters, Twitter makes it exceedingly difficult to engage in thoughtful discourse. Therefore, the easiest way to go viral is by tweeting something inflammatory and misleading — like NARAL did.
In an age where interest groups rely on demonizing their opponents, reasoned discourse can be hard to come across. And while Kevin Williamson’s interesting interview with MSNBC’s Morning Joe was a sign for optimism, it’s a shame that NARAL was right around the corner to ruin it all.
Ethan Lamb (@realethanlamb) is a Young Voices contributor and an incoming law student at Georgetown University.
