This just in – The Atlantic has fired Kevin Williamson, the “women who get abortions should be hanged” guy.
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/981955064515448833
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/981956057344901120
That’s good, but why was he hired (or signed up) in the first place? It was already known that he thought and wrote that women should be executed for ending their own pregnancies. Would the Atlantic sign up a writer who had written that Jews should be murdered? Bosnians? Muslims? Atheists? Tutsis? I doubt it. It’s weird that women are apparently an exception.
It's almost like he told @TheAtlantic exactly what to expect from him and they failed to listen to his literal words and the words of all of the women who pointed them out. Go figure.
— Alyssa Leader (@alittleleader) April 5, 2018
Goldberg initially defended Williamson’s hiring, dismissing the fringe view as simply “extreme tweeting” for which he deserved a “second chance.” New York Times conservative columnist Bret Stephens echoed that defense, writing, “[F]or heaven’s sake, it was a tweet.”
However, on Wednesday, Media Matters for America revealed that Williamson’s deadly solution for women who’ve had abortions wasn’t just an aberrant tweet. In a 2014 podcast, the liberal watchdog found, Williamson repeatedly and forcefully defended his view that those women should be executed.
He described current methods of execution—like lethal injection—to be “too antiseptic” and suggested that the state administer more “violent” forms of capital punishment befitting the “violence” of an abortion.
Goldberg decided that might make things awkward with female colleagues. Good call.
Comments
11 responses to “His carefully considered views”
Presumably, Williamson would be in favour of putting any woman who miscarries on trial as well. After all, I’m sure he would agree that we can’t be too careful in this area, and women have been known to resort to all sorts of measures to end unwanted pregnancies.
Omar,
Don’t be silly. No American politician would introduce legislation to make miscarriage a capital offense.
Or forcing doctors to report miscarriages to the State for investigation.
Well, ok, maybe some fringe politicians might do that. But at least nobody who, say, signed a law requiring funerals for fetuses would rise to high office like, say the Vice Presidency.
You’re so paranoid!
Bret’s response to all this was really disappointing… He is usually a lot daner.
” “[F]or heaven’s sake, it was a tweet.””
Poor excuse, given the current high likelyhood of this very medium being used by a certain orange head of state to declare nuclear war.
I suspect it is more likely someone would say what they mean in a tweet than in a carefully considered article where they could parse their words to make sure they meet the minimum standards of decency.
So, when Goldberg actually bothered to ask, Williamson confirmed it? That means that apparently the sequence is this:
1. Goldberg hires Williamson.
2. People point out the tweets about executing women.
3. Goldberg simply assumes that this doesn’t reflect Williamson’s actual views, or at least pretends to assume this rather than doing any investigation.
4. People provide additional evidence that no, Williamson actually believes this.
5. Goldberg finally deigns to, you know, ask the dude if that’s his considered view.
Tells you something about how seriously Goldberg took these concerns that he couldn’t be bothered to make a simple phone call to his new employee to check it out, until the evidence started piling up.
Doesn’t it though?
I should note, though, that I just read the full letter from Goldberg. Part of if that Valenti’s tweet cut out (and I don’t blame her, as it wasn’t relevant to her point, but it does relate to mine) is:
“The tweet was not merely an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post, as Kevin had explained it.”
So that does suggest that Goldberg had some discussion with Williamson about it, in which case the story then becomes “Williamson lied.”
And Goldberg believed him. Sort of like Trump affirming Putin’s innocence because he sad he didn’t do it. It’s very easy to believe someone’s lies when you are not the one hurt by it.
All that bogus ‘other-sidery,’ and whatabouttery, and ‘on the other hand’ pseudo balancing. This is where it goes: a categorical unwillingness to recognize evil when it spits in your face.
Well, here’s an interesting bit of Jeff Goldberg history.
Background for those who aren’t familiar or have forgotten: once upon a time, there was an email listserve called JournoList that was a private discussion network for bloggers and writers of a left-of-center bent. I think it had maybe a little over 100 members — which is probably at least 2 or 3 times too many for anyone to have expected it would stay private, so inevitably someone downloaded the discussion archive and leaked it to conservative writers, who promptly went apeshit over the fact that liberals sometimes privately said uncomplimentary and downright crude things about conservatives.
Anyway, one of the contributors to JournoList was a then-young Washington Post reporter named Dave Weigel, whose beat was the conservative and libertarian political scene. The Post fired him when his JournoList comments came to light. I don’t particularly quarrel with that; given his particular assignment, he probably had to be reassigned at a minimum, and if there wasn’t another beat open, let go. (Weigel ended up fine — he spent several years at Slate, and was hired back by the Post a couple of years ago.)
On the other hand, while I don’t quarrel with the decision, I certainly wouldn’t have written the particularly snotty piece of commentary that Goldberg did (link in first paragraph). Goldberg’s smug commentary on Weigel’s firing is, shall we say, interesting, in light of recent developments:
So there we have Jeff Goldberg’s view of decorum and journalistic standards:
1. If you say some intemperate things about conservatives in what was supposed to be a private conversation, then you are lacking in “toilet-training,” deserve to be fired, and frankly should never have been hired in the first place.
2. If you say, on a publicly available social media posting, that 1 in 4 women deserve to be executed for exercising control over their bodies, then it’s just a stray intemperate remark and we shouldn’t judge you for it, and certainly shouldn’t judge the editor who decided to hire you.