The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 04.11.18

Posted on | April 11, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.11.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: Hold Them Accountable!
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #222
EBL: CBS Freaking Out About Charlie Rose (Again)
Twitchy: Women Pose For Open Carry Pics In Solidarity With Brenna Spencer
Louder With Crowder: President Trump Signs Executive Order Requiring Work For Welfare


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #80 – The Survivor Episode
American Power: Laura Ingraham Blasts “Stalinist” Left In Return To Fox News, also, Glenn Reynolds, The K-12 Implosion
American Thinker: Guess Whose House Wasn’t Raided By The FBI
Animal Magnetism: Rule, Britannia No Longer, also, Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: Instead Of Actual Content, Enjoy Some Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg Hearing Memes & Links
CDR Salamander: Turkey Moves In The Syrian Civil War
Da Tech Guy: CPAC 2018 – The Data Points & My Conclusions
Don Surber: My White House Correspondents Dinner Routine
Dustbury: The First Merch Of Equestria
The Geller Report: Facebook Has Dozens Of Former Obama & Hillary Staffers In Senior Positions, also, In Australia, Murder Charges Dropped Against Muslim Who Stabbed Two While Yelling “Allahu Akbar”
Hogewash: NGC 3185, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Joe For America: Boehner Backs Righteous Buds – Marijuana Buds
Legal Insurrection: FBI Reportedly Looking For Info On “Access Hollywood” Tape In Cohen’s Office, also, Speaker Ryan Not Running For Re-Election
Michelle Malkin: The Student Data-Mining Scandal Under Our Noses
Power Line: What is The FBI Hiding? (4), also, In Twitter Diplomacy, China Is Up, Russia Down
Shark Tank: “Fake News Nelson” Twitter Targets Bill Nelson
Shot In The Dark: The Ultimate Urban Progressive Privilege
Sister Toldjah: The MSM Owes Apologies In The Wake of Noor Salman’s Trial
STUMP:  Around The Pension-O-Sphere, also, Mornings With Meep
The Jawa Report: Israel Bombs Iranians In Syria, also, Coming Soon! Scruffy Looking Nerf-Herder
The Political Hat: Republicans Should Be Hitting The Panic Button
This Ain’t Hell: This Man Is Not A Vietnam Vet, also, Phony SEAL
Victory Girls: Rapper Cardi B Refuses An Abortion, Says Pregnancy Won’t Hurt Her Career
Weasel Zippers: Bank Of America Won’t Lend To Some Gun Makers, also, Satellite Photos Show Russian Ships Leaving Syrian Ports
Megan McArdle: Bias Against Conservatives Works Like Any Other Prejudice
Mark Steyn: Holden On, also, Flacks & Flicks


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Category: Linkagery

Get Woke, Go Broke: #MeToo Movement Seeks to Destroy Black Texas Professor

Posted on | April 11, 2018 | Comments Off on Get Woke, Go Broke: #MeToo Movement Seeks to Destroy Black Texas Professor

 

To be “woke,” in the lingo of social-justice warriors (SJWs), is to be conscious of the various oppressions and privileges of “intersectionality.” When corporations embrace the SJW worldview, they lose money, thus inspiring the classic Instapundit headline “Get Woke, Go Broke” (referencing the NFL’s decline in the Colin Kaepernick era).

Academia is usually immune to the consumer market influences that make “Get Woke, Go Broke” happen, but the dangers of embracing SJW values are not negligible, even on university campuses. Case in point, University of Texas assistant professor Robert Reece.

It would be difficult to imagine a more “woke” faculty member than a black sociology professor who writes for the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), who got his Ph.D. at Duke for a dissertation entitled “Legacies of Slavery: An Analysis of the Dimensions of Slavery’s Post-Emancipation Effects,” who has published such research as “Sex as Subversion: The Ethnosexual Protestor and the Ethnosexual Defender,” and who taught a course called “Masculinities in America” devoted to “topics like trans men, female masculinity, men’s place in feminist discourse, and, finally, sexual violence, assault, and consent.” As my friend Matthew Vadum observes, “Reece checks so many politically correct boxes that he’d normally be immune from criticism.”

Ah, but it’s 2018, and nobody is immune to criticism. Lie down with SJWs, wake up with Antifa demanding your resignation:

Late last month, a group of students at the University of Texas (UT) called for “revolutionary violence” against a black feminist professor who has been accused of rape. While he admitted to being “coercive” in sexual situations in the past, he also said he had gone to counseling and apologized to the woman many times. . . .
The Revolutionary Student Front (RSF) quoted professor Robert L. Reece, who wrote in a story for Vox that “the search for the type of sustainable solutions and cultural changes necessary to ensure the safety and pleasure of intimate encounters remains elusive.” The RSF, which proudly displays the Communist hammer and sickle in its logo, took matters into its own hands.
“Change is not elusive to us. Reactionary violence, like rape and domestic abuse and torture, can only be responded to with revolutionary violence,” the RSF declared. “We are inspired by women across the world from revolutionary moments who have turned on abusive husbands and serial rapists, reclaiming violence and wielding it against their oppressors.” . . .
“In a capitalistic system, men will always be granted some ownership over women and will feel entitled to much more,” the RSF added. “A feminist movement for working women must be created, one that intends to topple not only patriarchy, but capitalism imperialism as well.”
The RSF insisted on “revolutionary violence” against Reece because he has been accused of sexual “coercion” against a few women. When Reece’s Vox story went live, one of his former girlfriends, Jazmine M. Walker, a Washington, D.C. abortion activist . . . came out with allegations against him.
Walker posted allegations on Twitter, saying she and Reece were in an emotionally unhealthy relationship as graduate students in sociology at the University of Mississippi six years ago. According to Walker, Reece was chronically unfaithful and lied about it, but when she slept with someone else, he responded with aggressive sex. . . .
Since Walker made her allegations, she said “multiple” other women have reached out to her to say that Reece mistreated them as well. She posted screenshots of allegations from an anonymous accuser who claimed Reece pressured her into having sex, filming it, and agreeing to allow other “womxn” to take part.

 

Reece’s career is clearly in jeopardy:

Walker has tweeted, tagging the university’s official Twitter account, to say that Reece is a potential safety risk to the Texas community. She said she’s received no response thus far. J. B. Bird, university spokesperson, said via email that Texas “takes all accusations of sexual misconduct seriously and follows up on accusations through its Title IX office and the Office of Inclusion and Equity, following established procedures, as it will do in this case. Sexual harassment or violence in any form is unacceptable and in contradiction of our core values.”
Walker said some of what she’s heard about Reece from other women since tweeting about week allegedly involves his time at Texas.

Reece only joined the UT faculty last August, so he doesn’t have tenure protection and, in the current #MeTo climate, he’s likely to be unemployed very soon. “Get Woke, Go Broke,” indeed!



 

Category: Education

K-12 Implosion Update

Posted on | April 11, 2018 | 1 Comment

Good teachers are leaving the public education system:

A teacher has slammed her ‘disruptive’ students and their ‘rude’ parents over their lack of respect for her ‘poorly paid’ profession in a Facebook rant that’s gone viral.
Julie Marburger, 45, a mother-of-eight who works at Cedar Creek Intermediate School in Texas, said she had been pushed to quit her role as she feels as though she has ‘no way to do the job I was hired to do… teach kids.’
Along with her status, which has had 322,000 likes and more than 400,000 shares, she posted images of her messy classroom, showing broken shelves, books and even an iPad, explaining that many of the items destroyed by the children were paid for out of her own pocket as she has no budget.
Julie, who is originally from Utah and teaches students aged between 11 and 12, revealed she had been pushed to the brink of quitting that day by a ‘disrespectful’ parent who shouted at her in her classroom for holding her son to account.
In the post, she wrote: ‘I left work early today after an incident with a parent left me unable emotionally to continue for the day.
‘I have already made the decision to leave teaching at the end of this year, and today, I don’t know if I will make it even that long.
‘Parents have become far too disrespectful, and their children are even worse.
‘Administration always seems to err on the side of keeping the parent happy, which leaves me with no way to do the job I was hired to do… teach kids.’
Julie, who has four daughters, and four stepchildren, then shared a stream of classroom pictures taken over the past few days of her messy classroom, including broken shelves, broken books and even an iPad discarded on the floor.
‘I have finally had enough of the disregard for personal and school property and am drawing a line in the sand on a myriad of behaviors that I am through tolerating,’ she added.

To borrow a feminist slogan: “Blame the system, not the victims.” My aunt Barbara Ellis was a science teacher at LaGrange (Ga.) High School, recognized and awarded for her excellence, but toward the end of her career, she became profoundly disillusioned with the system. There were pressures to “dumb down” the curriculum and lower standards. This was even before the nightmare of the Bush administration’s misguided “No Child Left Behind” policies, but it was already apparent during the 1990s that discipline was becoming impossible because the system undermined teachers’ classroom authority. When we see how “red flags” were ignored in the case of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz because of Obama-era policies and Broward County’s PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support & Education) program, we recognize that the decline of discipline has become a crisis.

Somebody ought to write a book. Oh, wait . . .

 

 

Category: Education

Zuckerberg and the Trump Exception

Posted on | April 11, 2018 | Comments Off on Zuckerberg and the Trump Exception

 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was “grilled” in front of a Senate committee Tuesday about his company’s violations of privacy, and Toni Williams at the Victory Girls blog reminds us that Facebook’s role in electing Barack Obama president was not controversial. In fact, Obama’s use of Facebook was celebrated by the media:

U.S. News & World Report, Nov. 19, 2008
Barack Obama and the Facebook Election
We know that Obama’s landmark victory was due, in part, to a groundswell of support among young Americans. Early in his campaign, political pollsters were observing that Obama was “rocking the youth vote.” This proved true: Exit polls revealed that Obama had won nearly 70 percent of the vote among Americans under age 25 — the highest percentage since U.S. exit polling began in 1976.
Obama enjoyed a groundswell of support among, for lack of a better term, the Facebook generation. He will be the first occupant of the White House to have won a presidential election on the Web. . . .
It has even been called the “Facebook election.” It is no coincidence that one of Obama’s key strategists was 24-year-old Chris Hughes, a Facebook cofounder. It was Hughes who masterminded the Obama campaign’s highly effective Web blitzkrieg — everything from social networking sites to podcasting and mobile messaging. . . .
Obama was by a long stretch the most effective online politician during the presidential campaign—not only against John McCain but also against his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. For the past two years, Facebook has overwhelmingly been pro-Obama virtual territory. Some have attributed Obama’s victory to a “Facebook effect.”

Ten years later, of course, your Grandma is on Facebook, but in 2008, online social media was a new phenomenon, and Team Obama exploited it to maximum effect. Nobody in the media questioned this at the time, and it wasn’t until Donald Trump was elected that we heard complaints against Facebook because of “Russian bots” and “fake news.”

It was the need to make excuses for Hillary Clinton’s defeat that inspired this conspiracy theory. Somehow, the pro-Clinton media suggested, the Trump campaign had done something illegal to win the election, and it was this claim which inspired both the Mueller special-counsel investigation and the outrage over the revelation that Cambridge Analytica leveraged Facebook data on behalf of the Trump campaign.

Was the data-mining done by Cambridge Analytica illegal? Was it unethical, was it immoral, was it wrong? From the perspective of the liberal media, anything is wrong if it helps Trump, but it is far from clear that Cambridge Analytica did anything with Facebook data that the Obama campaign had not previously done with Facebook data.

Meanwhile, of course, conservatives have complained that Facebook has penalized right-leaning sources on its pages — Diamond and Silk being one obvious case — and so Zuckerberg not only had to face Democrats angry about the Trump campaign’s use of Facebook, but also from Republicans demanding that Facebook treat conservatives fairly:

Cruz raised a number of issues during his questioning, including the recent censorship of Diamond & Silk on Facebook, the controversial firing of Oculus VR founder Palmer Lucky, and the question of Facebook’s legal status as a neutral public forum.
Sen. Cruz started by asking if Facebook considers itself to be a “neutral public forum.” . . .
Zuckerberg avoided giving Cruz a direct yes-or-no answer, despite the Senator asking numerous times.
“We consider ourselves to be a platform for all ideas” said Zuckerberg.
“Are you a First Amendment speaker expressing your views, or are you a neutral public forum allowing everyone to speak?” pressed Cruz.
Zuckerberg went on to list some of the things that are banned from the platform, including “hate speech, terrorist content, nudity” and “anything that makes people feel unsafe in the community.”
Accusing Facebook of giving “conflicting answers” on whether they are a neutral public forum, Cruz went on to outline voters’ concerns about political censorship.
“There are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship.”
Cruz went on to cite the trending news scandal of 2016, in which it was reported that Facebook “routinely suppressed” conservative stories from its Trending News feature.
“In addition to that, Facebook has initially shut down the ‘Chick-fil-A appreciation day page,’ has blocked the post of a Fox News reporter, has blocked over two dozen Catholic pages, and most recently has blocked the Trump supporters Diamond & Silk’s page – with 1.2 million Facebook followers – after determining that their content and brand were ‘unsafe for the community’.”
In response, Zuckerberg said concerns over political bias were “fair,” and conceded that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place.”

The question is why Silicon Valley is so left-leaning, and I’ve answered that question in relation to James Damore’s firing from Google:

What happened at Google, I suggest, is that decades of (federally mandated) “diversity” policies in higher education have replicated, in workplaces where university education is a prerequisite for employment, the campus climate of intolerant political correctness. . . . No young graduate of an elite university leaves campus without knowing that racism is the worst thing in the world, an unforgivable sin, and that the only things that are even remotely as evil as racism are sexism and homophobia. Because companies like Google are staffed almost exclusively by alumni of elite schools — the Ivy League, M.I.T., Stanford, Cal-Berkeley, etc. — the politically correct attitudes promulgated on campus are inevitably imported into the workplace.

Liberal bias at Facebook, like liberal bias in the news media, does not simply materialize as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Both are largely byproducts of the Left’s hegemonic control of higher education. And it is this bias which has inspired the paranoid attitude toward the Trump presidency. Recall that students at Yale University were reportedly “traumatized” by Trump’s election — why? Who taught these privileged youth that Republicans are evil monsters, that Trump’s election meant the dawn of a nightmare era of racism, sexism and homophobia?

“I cannot even function right now. As a queer, black woman, I feel unsafe in this country.”
— Isis Davis-Marks, Yale sophomore, Nov. 10, 2016

“You’ve got to be carefully taught” — what Rodgers and Hammerstein said of racial prejudice is true also of political prejudice, and it is obvious what Yale and other elite schools are carefully teaching students.

In point of fact, 15 months into the Trump presidency, nothing remotely resembling the prophesied fascist nightmare has transpired. There is no more reason for a “queer black woman” to “feel unsafe” in America today than there was when Obama was in the White House, but Democrats and the liberal media refuse to recognize this reality. They cling to their paranoid delusion that Trump is a “threat to our democracy,” because this was the message promoted by Hillary Clinton, and the media are still fighting the 2016 campaign. But if you say this on Facebook, you’ll probably be suppressed. Liberals are engaged in an attempt to turn social media into an online cocoon, replicating the stifling environment of political correctness on elite university campuses where no student is ever exposed to any information that contradicts the liberal narrative.

(Hat-tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)



 

 

Category: Media Bias

In The Mailbox: 04.10.18

Posted on | April 11, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.10.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: What To Do When There Are No Good Options
EBL: Zuckerberg Almost Passes Turing Test
Twitchy: Dana Loesch Takes On Broward County Superintendent Over “Massive Errors” As School Board Meets
Louder With Crowder: Ted Cruz Hammers Zuckerberg For Facebook’s Anti-Conservative Bias

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Blog Update (NSFW)
American Power: Divided Americans Can Unite, also, Among The Abortion Extremists
American Thinker: Will Wyoming Get A New Governor – And Conservatives A New Superstar?
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday, also, Animal’s Daily Second Amendment Scholar News
BattleSwarm: Texas Democrat Lawyer Benadvides Gets 80 Years For Sex Trafficking
Bring The HEAT: Here, Have Some 1960s Splodey
CDR Salamander: A Whiskey On The Rocks Chaser’s Hangover In Sweden
Da Tech Guy: No Godless Chaplains In The Navy – Yet, also, IL Democratic Governor Candidate Mum On Details Of Proposed Pension Bailout Tax Hike
Don Surber: China Surrenders Its Auto Tariffs
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, Distance Worth Keeping
Fred On Everything: In Search Of Intelligent Latin Policy
The Geller Report: Twitter CEO Praises Article Calling For Extermination Of Republicans, also, UK Christian School Hosts Islamic Workshop
Hogewash: Adjourned Sine Die, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Vicious Russian “Hooli-Girls” Training To Brawl With English Soccer Fans
JustOneMinute: A Big Deal
Legal Insurrection: Geoffrey Berman Recused From Michael Cohen Investigation, also, So You Want To Delete Your Facebook Account
Power Line: The FBI Escalates Its War On The President, also, What Is To Be Done?
Shark Tank: Rubio Asks Floridians To Support Scott
Shot In The Dark: I Wonder If Lori Sturdevant Has Read This?
STUMP: Memory Monday – Flu Season Ain’t Over & First Week of April 1918, also, Taxing Tuesday – NY Tries Its “Fix”, Married Couple Base Scenario For Tax Calculator
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – The Rolling Stones Are Haram, also, Damascus Chemical Attack
The Political Hat: Mandatory Trans In Sweden
This Ain’t Hell: Military Religious Freedom Foundation Assaults POW/MIA Table In Okinawa, also, Brenna Spencer’s Graduation Photo
Victory Girls: Thoughts On Zuckerberg’s Testimony
Weasel Zippers: Mueller Investigating Trump Over $150K Donation From Ukrainian Who Gave Hillary $13 Million, also, WI Democrat Berates Bank Teller As “House N****r” For Refusing To Cash Check
Megan McArdle: Some of Us Are Drowning In Social Capital, Others Are Quite Parched
Mark Steyn: An Englishman’s Home Is His Proportionately Responsive Castle, also, Take Me Out To The Ball Game


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Category: Linkagery

TRIUMPH: Orban Wins Big in Hungary

Posted on | April 8, 2018 | 2 Comments

 

Ten days ago, I advised “Keep an Eye on Hungary’s Election.” President Viktor Orban stood up against the European Union’s open-borders plan to flood the continent with Muslim “refugees.” He was targeted for defeat by left-wing activists funded by George Soros. Orban didn’t back down. Instead, he told the truth about the “invasion” of Europe and called out Soros by name. Voters just re-elected him by landslide:

Hungary’s conservative-populist premier Viktor Orbán has won a third term in office in a landslide election victory.
With 85 per cent of the votes counted, Europe Elects is sharing stats which suggest Fidesz, the party founded by Prime Minister Orbán while he was a young anti-Communist dissident, has won 134 seats, along with his coalition partners — which would give him with not merely a decisive majority but an outright super-majority, allowing changes to the national constitution. . . .
The results will be extremely disappointing for top bureaucrats in the European Union and activists working for so-called civil society NGOs funded by billionaire open borders campaigner George Soros, who had been hoping for an upset defeat, or for Fisesz to lose its super-majority, at least.
Prime Minister Orbán has been the most determined foe of the compulsory migrant quota regime the EU has attempted to impose at the behest of pro-migration NGOs, and served as the focal point for an increasingly influential eurosceptic, anti-mass migration bloc within the EU centred on the Visegrád Four countries.

Orban supporters celebrate the election victory.

The Guardian reports from Hungary:

“We have won.” With these three words Viktor Orbán began to address the crowds outside Fidesz headquarters.
He starts by congratulating the voters for turning out to vote. “Thank you for having placed your faith in us; thank you for having stuck with us.”
Viktor Orbán continues by thanking “all the people who prayed for us and prayed for me personally”. Also on the list of thanks are the party volunteers and his wife.
He says we now have a major battle behind us. “This has been a decisive win… in the future we are going to be able to defend our mother country.”
Orbán is leading the crowd in song — it is the anthem of the revolution from 1848, Euronews says. He finishes by saying “long live Hungary, thank you for everything.”

Gosh, it’s as if standing up for your country is popular, or something.




 

 

Category: Hungary

SHOCK: Texas Subsidized Lesbian Couple’s Adoption of Children They Killed

Posted on | April 8, 2018 | 3 Comments

The Hart family at a 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign rally.

People in Texas should be angry as hell about this:

An Oregon woman found dead at the base of a Northern California cliff with her spouse and three of their adopted children late last month likely received more than $270,000 from the state of Texas to help care for the children, according to a Texas newspaper.
The San Antonio Express-News reports the state paid a Jennifer Jean Hart monthly adoption subsidies for her children over the past decade. Hart got nearly $1,900 each month, most recently in March, the newspaper reports.
Most families who adopt children out of foster care from Texas get monthly payments that range from $400 to $545 per child to help cover care costs until the child turns 18, according to the newspaper.
Jennifer and Sarah Hart adopted all six of their children from Texas.
The couple and three of their kids — Markis, 19; Abigail, 14; and Jeremiah, 14 — were confirmed dead after their family’s SUV was discovered at the base of a 100-foot cliff about 20 miles north of Fort Bragg, California, on March 26. Their three other children — Hannah, 16; Devonte, 15; and Sierra, 15 — were believed to have been in the vehicle and are missing.
Though initially investigated as an accident, officials have said in recent days they believe the crash was intentional.
The family left their home in Woodland, Washington, shortly after the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services opened a Child Protective Services investigation in which the Hart children were “identified as potential victims of alleged abuse or neglect” after neighbors contacted authorities.

The liberal media want to make this story go away. Don’t let that happen.




 

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Category: Crime, Gays, Racism, Texas

The Compulsory Approval Doctrine

Posted on | April 8, 2018 | 1 Comment

News Item #1:

Harvard is now determined to ostracize, censor, and ultimately root out orthodox Christianity from a university that was founded to train ministers in the Puritan tradition. That is the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the school’s little-noticed decision this year to suspend and defund the largest evangelical fellowship on campus.
The fellowship, Harvard College Faith and Action (HCFA), ran afoul of the school’s progressive dogmas last September when it asked one of its student leaders to step down from her post. The student was in a same-sex relationship, which meant that she had “an irreconcilable theological disagreement pertaining to our character standards,” as the HCFA’s co-presidents told the Harvard Crimson in February. The HCFA’s character rules on premarital sexual activity apply to students of all orientations, the co-presidents insisted, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Egged on by a ravenous progressive mob, the Harvard administration suspended the group in February, and last month the Undergraduate Council voted to cut its funding.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Evangelical Christians aren’t allowed to be evangelical Christians at Harvard, because disapproval of homosexuality is not allowed at Harvard. Undergraduate Council member Sarah Fellman said: “I think this is, as it’s called, about solidarity. I think this is an important symbolic move to show that we, as the elected representatives of the student body, will not tolerate discrimination.” It would seem doubtful that Ms. Fellman has thought through the potential consequences of the “solidarity” principle she has invoked.

News Item #2:

Kevin Williamson, a National Review scribe with a brilliant pen and a long paper trail of insults and wild opinions . . . was boldly hired by The Atlantic and then quickly jettisoned, after it came to light that he had not only suggested hanging as a penalty for abortion in a since-deleted tweet but also more carefully defended the idea of someday prosecuting women who obtain abortions the way we prosecute other forms of homicide. . . .
The fact that Williamson is an extremist doesn’t change the fact that to hire him for his pen and then fire him for having expressed an extreme opinion was stupid and gutless — akin to hiring Christopher Hitchens and then firing him for antireligious bigotry (and yes, Hitch was a bigot, but worth publishing anyway), or adding Hunter S. Thompson to your masthead and then dropping him because it’s pointed out that he writes under the influence of drugs.

Exactly so. Last month, I defended Williamson at length:

We are living through a Buffalo Springfield “For What It’s Worth” moment in our history. There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear. Williamson’s reporting helps us make sense of why there’s a man with a gun over there telling us we’ve got to beware.
The quality of his reporting, however, means nothing to liberals, who consider Williamson unacceptable because of his opinions.

Some of my friends despise Williamson for his “Never Trump” stance, but that’s irrelevant to the issue involved here. Jeffrey Goldberg brought Williamson into The Atlantic to give their readers access to a point of view they might otherwise never encounter. Douthat’s comparison of Williamson to Christopher Hitchens is apt. In 2007, Marty Beckerman and I spent a summer evening at a D.C. bar buying whiskey for Hitchens just for the pleasure of hearing him tell dirty jokes. His “antireligious bigotry,” as Douthat calls it, was just part of the package with Hitchens, like his taste for whiskey (Johnny Walker Black) and his cigarette habit.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Hitchens took alarm at the reflexive “anti-war” reaction of the Left. Because a Republican was president, the Left adopted a posture that was objectively pro-Islam, and Hitchens (who was half-Jewish) saw the dangerous consequences of such a posture. His disillusionment with the Left was much like Orwell’s disillusionment after the Spanish Civil War, and Hitchens became a formidable critic of the Left. Conservatives and libertarians were therefore willing to tolerate Hitchens’ ideological peccadilloes, for the sake of his ability.

Why couldn’t liberals, who share Kevin Williamson’s loathing for Trump, display a similar “strategic alliance” attitude toward him?

The answer, I believe, is simple: Liberals have become totalitarians.

Or perhaps they always were.

 

Category: Liberals
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