For more than a week now, The Atlantic has taken heat from many on the left for hiring conservative columnist Kevin Williamson for a new opinion section they are launching. Much of the criticism over the hire has focused on Williamson’s inflammatory comments in the past, such as tweets in which he called for women to be hanged for getting abortions.
As you would expect, there have been a number of hot take columns written on the situation, especially since some are calling for The Atlantic to drop Williamson. In a New York Times column today, conservative writer Bret Stephens came to Williamson’s defense over his past remarks while pushing back against the outrage over The Atlantic hiring him.
“Sorry, first, that you have to endure having your character assailed and assassinated by people who rarely if ever read you and likely never met you,” Stephens wrote. “Sorry also that your hiring as a writer for The Atlantic has set off another censorious furor in media circles when surely there are more important subjects on this earth.”
After noting that the case against Williamson appears to center around the tweet on executing those who get abortions, Williamson’s belief that gender shouldn’t be a choice and his description of a young black kid as a primate, Stephens argued that critics should weigh that against the “hundreds of thousands of words of smart, stylish and often hilarious commentary, criticism and reportage” that Willamson has written.
The NYT columnist then brushed aside the tweet on abortion, stating that he would only be worried about Williamson’s opinion on that subject if he wrote a book on it:
Shouldn’t great prose and independent judgment count for something? Not according to your critics. We live in the age of guilt by pull-quote, abetted by a combination of lazy journalism, gullible readership, missing context, and technologies that make our every ill-considered utterance instantly accessible and utterly indelible. I jumped at your abortion comment, but for heaven’s sake, it was a tweet. When you write a whole book on the need to execute the tens of millions of American women who’ve had abortions, then I’ll worry.
He went on to bring up the tweet again, using it to knock those criticizing the new Atlantic writer.
“But your critics show bad faith when they treat an angry tweet or a flippant turn of phrase as proof of moral incorrigibility,” he wrote. “Let he who is without a bad tweet, a crap sentence or even a deplorable opinion cast the first stone.”
After the column went up, a number of folks took issue with it, specifically over Stephens’ brush-off of Williamson’s tweet.
Bret Stephens defends Kevin Williamson bc when he proposed that 1 in 4 women should be put to death by hanging it was *on the Internet* and not in like a *book* pic.twitter.com/CcL6XviU76
— andi zeisler (@andizeisler) March 31, 2018
Honestly, Bret Stephens should never be able to get away from that sentence for the rest of his life.
— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) March 31, 2018
Bret Stephens argues that a tweet about "the need to execute the tens of millions of American women who’ve had abortions" is ok, but a book would make him worry. https://t.co/0vnFb1S5z9
— Andrew Golis (@agolis) March 31, 2018
Thank god @BretStephensNYT came to Kevin Williamson's defense to call for women who have abortions to be hanged without social or professional consequences. America is saved.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 31, 2018
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Follow Justin Baragona on Twitter: @justinbaragona
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