Author: VD

An astute comment at Steve Sailer’s about the Kevin Williamson firing:

The NR staff currently wailing on twitter about the injustice of dumping a talented writer for being provocative on an independent website can show it’s not just crocodile tears by apologizing to Derbyshire.

Apologizing? They should offer to rehire him with a raise as well. Consider David French’s wailing about “the cowardly firing” with just a few changes to it.

The AtlanticNational Review has caved to the intolerant mob and fired Kevin WilliamsonJohn Derbyshire, and in so doing has contributed to a slanderous fiction — that KevinJohn is so beyond the pale that he has no place at one of the nation’s premiere mainstreamconservative publications. His millions of words, his countless interviews, and his personal character were reduced to nothing — inconsequential in the face of deleted tweets and a five-minute podcast dialoguea single column. Look, I know it’s easy for some to dismiss KevinJohn’s termination as mere inside-baseball media drama. But it’s more than that. It’s a declaration by one of America’s most powerful mediaconservative entities that it can’t even coexist with a man like KevinJohn. If he wants to write, he should run along to his conservativeAlt-Right home. His newlong-time colleagues simply couldn’t abide his presence.

These cuckservative Never Trumpians simply do not realize that their time is past. They have been exposed for hypocrites and fools. They do not lead opinions, they are led by the Left instead, following it slavishly from one societally destructive policy to the next. Give them a little more time and they’ll be dutifully laying out the conservative cases for cannibalism, child sacrifice, and Satan worship.

Hence the real reason for their wailing. They know they are losing the right-wing audience that is increasingly rejecting their soft leftism, and now they are beginning to realize that the hard Left has no use for them either.

The Littlest Chickenhawk has been crying about that on Twitter, in addition to issuing the conventional dire warnings of consequences never being the same. He thinks he is one of the “virtuous people” to decide who is acceptable and who is not, to decide who is chased down and disemployed and who is not, intstead of the overt Left.

This is, we are told, the “stone cold truth” and “the Left won’t like it”.

The Left continues to radically narrow the Overton Window – the spectrum of acceptable discourse. They separate discourse into two categories: the acceptable and the unacceptable. Then they shrink the acceptable down to the opinions located between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This necessarily places Kevin Williamson and @bariweiss and @SamHarrisOrg and me and everyone else the Left finds unpalatable into the “excluded” category. But the unacceptable category is already populated by those who are actually unacceptable: alt-right trolls, for example. This means that the population of opinion in the unacceptable category – let’s call them Deplorables, since the Left does – come to be a majority by way of exclusion. Unless, that is, virtuous people who have been excluded by the Left draw distinctions among themselves. Which they should, of course – Kevin and @bariweiss and I and @SamHarrisOrg all get lumped in as Nazis by the Left, but we all fight the actual alt-right Nazis.

But counting on the virtue of people you’ve just deemed unacceptable not to band together against you is both stupid and unrealistic over time. Which means the Left is doing something unethical here, and deeply dishonest – and something that is likely to foster polarization that results in the mainstreaming of truly gross opinions. This is how you get a reactionary movement willing to countenance alt-right evil: you tell people they’re part of the alt-right when they’re not, and treat them as such no matter how much of a lie that is. What just happened to Kevin Williamson leads conservatives to side with anyone the Left casts out, good or bad, merely as a form of protection. That shouldn’t happen. But it does. And the Left causes it with this bulls***.

Demonstrating, once more, that Ben Shapiro is not of the Right at all, but of the soft Left. That’s why they are always trying to a) disassociate from the Right and b) fix the Left.

Glenn Reynolds and Kurt Schlichter have similar takes. From Instapundit:

What really happened is that women at The Atlantic complained that Kevin’s abortion views upset them. And since making women feel bad about their life choices is a mortal sin, he had to go.

The difference between progressives and conservatives is that progressives assert that making women or blacks or gays or Jews feel bad is sufficient reason to lose your job. Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that only making blacks or Jews feel bad is enough to justify disemployment.

What goes around comes around. The truth about the dysfunctional, downscale writer Kevin Williamson is that he deserves to die. Economically, he is a negative asset.

Conservative commentator Kevin Williamson was fired from The Atlantic, just weeks after being hired, the magazine told TheWrap.

“Kevin is a gifted writer, and he has been nothing but professional in all of our interactions. But I have come to the conclusion that The Atlantic is not the best fit for his talents, and so we are parting ways,” said editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in an email to staff on Thursday.

In his memo, obtained by TheWrap, Goldberg explained that Williamson was being terminated over his views on abortion, which have come to wide attention in recent days.

“Late yesterday afternoon, information came to our attention that has caused us to reconsider this relationship. Specifically, the subject of one of Kevin’s most controversial tweets was also a centerpiece of a podcast discussion in which Kevin explained his views on the subject of the death penalty and abortion,” wrote Goldberg.

Williamson even appears to have been fired despite lacking the courage to stand by his previous convictions. There was no “errant tweet”, as the podcast footage subsequently demonstrated. So, who led Jeffrey Goldberg to believe that there was? Did he come up with that on his own, or was that an excuse that was given to him?

While Goldberg himself once trumpeted Williamson’s hire from the National Review, the writer immediately drew outrage — particularly over a tweet in which he argued that women who had had an abortion should face the death penalty. Williamson defenders — and Goldberg himself — had argued that his career should not be judged on an errant tweet.

Some on the Right still don’t get it. The Left is not fixable. The time for worrying about “the heckler’s veto” is long past. There is no public square anymore because there is no common ground. The Left is fighting a cultural war by any means necessary, and even if you’re not willing to do the same, it is reprehensibly foolish to expect them to do otherwise, much less mend their ways for fear of handwringing moderate right-wingers following through on ominously implied threats which they are manifestly unwilling to even articulate.

And we are supposed to imagine what happens to us in light of Williamson’s rapid ejection from The Atlantic? Where have you been for the last ten years? We don’t have to imagine anything. We’ve already experienced it.