Kevin Williamson is an unpleasant kind of person — the ugly conservative who really ought to be mumbling in a gutter somewhere, despised and pitied, but instead got himself a paying job at the National Review…which, come to think of it, is a kind of gutter. He’s the kind of guy who repeatedly insists that women ought to be executed for having abortions, which tells me that he’s absent any theory of mind or empathy, and ought to be labeled as a sociopath.

This weekend, Kevin Williamson, whose Twitter bio describes him as a “roving reporter for the National Review,” declared on Twitter that all abortions should be treated as premeditated homicide, and that women who have had abortions should face capital punishment, namely hanging. No exceptions.

@Green_Footballs Yes, I believe that the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) September 28, 2014

I have hanging more in mind. @LeveyIsLaw @charlescwcooke
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) September 28, 2014

Well, he doesn’t work for the National Review anymore.

Instead, he’s been hired by The Atlantic.

On Thursday, the magazine — which is now led by Iraq War cheerleader Jeffrey Goldberg — announced a new opinion and commentary section, “Ideas.” The staff of this new section includes two current Atlantic writers, economics writer Annie Lowrey and former MSNBC host and contributor Alex Wagner, and two new hires: the writer and academic Ibram X. Kendi and National Review columnist Kevin D. Williamson.

Williamson holds a long list of odious views, and I don’t just mean repellant to liberals, but so vile and stupid that they should not be held by thinking human beings.

It’s a strange time. In an era when the worst president and the worst congress in the history of the country are in charge, our national media, led by cowards, are hedging their bets by hiring conservative scum. Instead of challenging great wrongs, they seem instead to be concerned with pandering to the wrong-doers.

YouTube is cracking down, and banning all those macho gun-flogging videos that have apparently been so popular with the more violent segment of society. So the poor gun exhibitionists have had to find a venue that will tolerate them.

They have. It’s called PornHub.

I can’t imagine a more appropriate choice. Not to disparage the harmless people who just like to show off their primary and secondary sexual characteristics in action, but gun-nuts do at least have something in common with obsessive and unrealistic displays of penises in ecstasy.

John Bolton is our new national security advisor. Trump has once again picked the worst man for the job.

He has now selected John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton has distinguished himself as one of America’s most hawkish and ineffective diplomats for decades. He is known as an architect of the Iraq War, an enemy of multilateralism and foe of the United Nations, where he served during the George W. Bush administration through a recess appointment when he could not win Senate confirmation. He is also a harsh critic of the Iran nuclear deal and of North Korea, and is seen as someone who might promote conflict in both cases.

Few prominent national security figures are as ill-suited to the job of national security adviser as Bolton when you consider his views, his temperament and his ability be an honest broker. In fact, he is actually one of the few people on earth who would be worse than Mike Flynn, who was the worst national security adviser of all time.

Really, Bolton is terrible. For anything.

Keep your eyes open. There’s going to be a desperate search for excuses to go to war with someone, anyone, to prop up the president’s plummeting popularity. There are going to be more inventions, like “WMDs in country X”, or “Aluminum tubes!” and there are going to be assholes promoting pre-emptive nuclear strikes, and there will be torture advocates in the CIA slavering at the thought of getting to clean up afterwards.

I wouldn’t put anything past them. The only provocation to war that I’ll believe wasn’t engineered by John Bolton and his vicious crew would be the assassination of our national security advisor. I don’t think he’s mad enough to go that far. But I could be wrong.

Seems fitting — he blew himself up.

Also, he turns out to have been a Young White Male, which isn’t at all surprising anymore. Now we wait for the revelation: was he mentally ill, or a lone wolf? He couldn’t possibly have been a terrorist.

I will not, however, be surprised at all if the oncoming rummaging through his internet history reveals associations with racist or alt-right groups. Those associations will be minimized, though, if it is discovered that he also played video games.

---

The whitewashing begins.

Well, isn’t that nice. What a nice quiet boy.

I’m liking this article, and the term, on the Free-Speech Grifters. You know who they are: the usual suspects who go into a tizzy of denunciations of the illiberality of people who espouse liberal views; who want to use the First Amendment as a cudgel to silence protests; who constantly, shrilly complain about people who use their free speech to demonstrate against liars and neo-fascists, but are strangely mum on the actual goals of said neo-fascists. It’s all ‘free speech for me and my fellow travelers, but not for libs and progressives and feminists and communists and environmentalists, you guys need to sit down and shut up’. All this in a time when open, vocal protest is fully warranted.

Let’s see the author name-drop a whole lot of popular, influential people I just happen to despise.

On the topic of campus politics and free speech, Andrew Sullivan has written in New York magazine about a half-dozen articles, warning that “the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy.” His colleague Jonathan Chait has written another dozen on PC culture, arguing that “these episodes are the manifestation of a serious ideological challenge to liberalism.” In The New York Times, Bret Stephens regurgitated a speech as an article called “Free Speech and the Necessity of Discomfort,” while David Brooks dedicated a piece to “Understanding Student Mobbists,” for which he spoke to exactly zero students. In ten months, Weiss has racked up three articles on the subject. You would think that these “mobs” on college campuses and Twitter were sending the unwoke to a Soviet-style gulag.

The enthusiasm to defend those triggering libs makes the Free Speech Grifters uniquely susceptible to right-wing propagandists. In her last op-ed, Weiss featured an obvious parody Antifa Twitter account, run by alt-right trolls, and YouTuber Dave Rubin fell for the same gag. In 2016, Sommers unwittingly did a full hour on a Swedish white-supremacy podcast. And the same year, in a since-deleted tweet, she announced she would be “defending free speech and reason” with Milo Yiannopoulos, who was recently outed by BuzzFeed for working with white nationalists to smuggle their ideas into the mainstream. He also appeared alongside Maher, railing about free speech, on Real Time. This isn’t all complete ignorance. Columbia University College Republicans invited Tommy Robinson of the far-right English Defense League, while the new Canadian free-speech club Laurier Society for Open Inquiry announced white nationalist Faith Goldy as its first speaker. In the National Review, Elliot Kaufman chided fellow campus conservatives for purposely giving the alt-right a platform in an effort to bait the left into doing something “silly and destructive,” so that they could play “martyrs for free speech on campus” and draw media coverage. “The left-wing riots were not the price or downside of inviting Yiannopoulos,” he wrote. “They were the attraction.”

What’s really amusing is how most of those named like to claim in public that they are soooo liberal and open-minded and prepared to give all sides equal support, yet somehow consistently only side with far-right extremists and centrists, and then misrepresent the left as a reason to dismiss them. Don’t be fooled. The Free Speech Grifters aren’t really about free speech, except as a noble-sounding excuse for their deeply regressive views. I would make two points in response to them.

• First point: They tend to exaggerate the threat to fundamental liberties of protests. No one goes out to protest free speech: they use their freedom of speech to speak out against oppression and crimes against humanity. The left loves free speech — it’s a tool to use against the corruption and criminality that has taken over our country. Over and over again, we find that universities are hotbeds of liberalism and free speech values, simultaneously.

  But the alarmist case put forward by civil libertarians — that, as the American university has become more open to people of color and women, conservative perspectives have been censored — is empirically false. Poll after poll shows that universities are incredibly tolerant of divergent perspectives, much more so than arguably any other major institution in American culture. A recent survey of college students conducted by FIRE (the very group that has done the most to raise the alarm) indicates that the vast majority of students, including conservatives, feel relatively uninhibited in expressing their views. In response to a question about the appropriate reaction to a speaker who holds repugnant political views, only 2 percent chose “make noise during the speaker’s event so he/she can’t be heard,” and just 1 percent chose “use violent or disruptive actions to prevent the event from occurring.” Generally speaking, American attitudes regarding free speech have held steady, suggesting that college radicals are not altering national opinions of the First Amendment.

  In short, outrage about threats to free speech is overblown. It’s also ahistorical: The college campus — where young people, finding their place in the world, discover that the social order is not as it should be — has always been a breeding ground for protest. Sometimes these student actions displease the self-important graybeards who believe it is their job to police student behavior. Whenever there is student protest, there will be those who see it as a threat to American norms. (Gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan won the support of a majority of California voters in the 1960s by calling student protests “contrary to our standards of human behavior.”) And sometimes the demonstrations are uncivil and illiberal. But the long view shows us that campus-level revolts are not a threat to liberal values like free speech.

  But why would the Dave Rubins and Bill Mahers and CH Sommers of the world want to exaggerate “outrage about threats to free speech”? Because free speech is only a stalking horse to them, allowing them to slide oppressive talking points into the discourse under the banner of something the majority already favors.

• Second point: the protests have been working. The right has to be feeling a bit of panic, because while they were all over the news and getting a lot of PR, their tactics haven’t been successful at all, and instead have inspired a strong backlash. They would love to stomp down the protests that give some individuals notoriety and press attention, but in the long run that attention is going to lead to their downfall. Milo Yiannopoulos, anyone? But also, the alt-right can’t handle the pressure.

  It’s a good time to offer an observation: on the terms it set itself, antifascist organizing in the United States has worked.

  Consider the failure of Spencer’s long-planned address at Michigan State University. Though it was spring break, students and organized antifascist groups showed up to protest, and Spencer gave his pitch for a white ethnostate to an almost empty auditorium. He issued 150 tickets, but only managed to get 20 people along. Spencer himself blamed the protesters for the event’s failure, just as he is blaming them for his movement’s declining ability to muster any numbers in public.

  And that non-event was not an outlier. The same weekend, a planned alt-right conference in Detroit fell apart after venues pulled out under public pressure and one of the organizers, lawyer Kyle Bristow, announced he was leaving the movement. Various “March 4 Trump” events around the country, featuring alt-right contingents, were also small, and met with significant counterprotests.

  Other events in the latter half of last year were also poorly executed and sparsely attended. On a recent podcast, Spencer said the movement was “in a dark place”. And it has been put there by those determined to oppose it.

  I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’re winning — the right has managed to scramble their way into power, and are busily knocking apart the physical and cultural infrastructure of the United States to keep their electorate, the poor and ignorant, on their side — but what the evidence does say is…DON’T STOP. Keep hammering on the right. Protest. March in the streets. The alt-right are actually weak and not as bright as they think, so those tactics of vocally speaking out (you know, free speech) actually work, because what we’re fighting for is right.

There are embers of optimism glowing in the ashes. Keep fanning them into flame.

Partly because I’m growing tired of the frequent puncturings of his obvious lunacy, even the well-written ones, because he and his fanboys just keep blithering on. The latest, though, by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books, seems to have had some effect — Peterson is raging on Twitter and threatening to slap him. You know, that “underlying threat of physicality” that Peterson believes to be a necessary part of our social interactions.

I sympathize. If I met Mishra, I’d have to get physical too, and shake his hand.

Closer examination, however, reveals Peterson’s ageless insights as a typical, if not archetypal, product of our own times: right-wing pieties seductively mythologized for our current lost generations.

Peterson himself credits his intellectual awakening to the Cold War, when he began to ponder deeply such “evils associated with belief” as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and became a close reader of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. This is a common intellectual trajectory among Western right-wingers who swear by Solzhenitsyn and tend to imply that belief in egalitarianism leads straight to the guillotine or the Gulag. A recent example is the English polemicist Douglas Murray who deplores the attraction of the young to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and wishes that the idea of equality was “tainted by an ideological ordure equivalent to that heaped on the concept of borders.” Peterson confirms his membership of this far-right sect by never identifying the evils caused by belief in profit, or Mammon: slavery, genocide, and imperialism.

Reactionary white men will surely be thrilled by Peterson’s loathing for “social justice warriors” and his claim that divorce laws should not have been liberalized in the 1960s. Those embattled against political correctness on university campuses will heartily endorse Peterson’s claim that “there are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men.” Islamophobes will take heart from his speculation that “feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance.” Libertarians will cheer Peterson’s glorification of the individual striver, and his stern message to the left-behinds (“Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark.”). The demagogues of our age don’t read much; but, as they ruthlessly crack down on refugees and immigrants, they can derive much philosophical backup from Peterson’s sub-chapter headings: “Compassion as a vice” and “Toughen up, you weasel.”

Peterson’s response:

And you call me a fascist? You sanctimonious prick. If you were in my room at the moment, I'd slap you happily. https://t.co/sC3Lc9Hhlu

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 20, 2018

Yeah, if those quotes were attributed to me, I’d be pissed off, too.

Jason Wilson writes about the alt-right’s tactics. Here’s one perfect example: Andy Ngo is a kind of inflammatory yellow journalist whose specialty is capturing tiny slices of left wing events that he then distorts into the kind of lie useful for enraging the Fox News/Breitbart crowd. For instance, here’s how he handled a visit by James Damore to Portland State:

In the lead-up to Damore’s appearance, Ngo penned an article for the Wall Street Journal alleging that the event had been threatened, writing that that “we expected controversy. But we also got danger.” The evidence of danger, as reported in Willamette Week, was “two violent threats on Facebook, three diversity events held on campus as counter-programming, and a scornful blog post”.

This was more than enough for Fox News, who ran an item under the headline “Antifa targets ‘Google memo’ author James Damore’s talk at Portland State”.

Impressive. Everything is coming up antifa nowadays. I suspect this post makes me antifa, at this rate.

Then the ever-ridiculous Peter Boghossian chimes in. This is where it gets really interesting, because there is a phenomenon many of us have noticed before: people who like to claim to be on the Left, usually referring to themselves as “classical liberals” or “centrists”, who are remarkably consistent in siding with the Right to deplore anything and everything anyone on the Left does, yet also pay lip service to rejecting the traditional Right. Maybe we ought to start recognizing that the usual political binary is often invalid, and that there are multiple axes of polarization. Maybe we ought to appreciate that someone like me can despise, for example, Bill Donohue, and so can a Boghossian, and at the same time, Boghossian and I can mutually reject each other. It’s amazing! More than two categories? Brains will explode!

Still, people will cluster in domains of mutual sympathy, it’s just that there are definitely many more than two of them. Boghossian helpfully engages in a little taxonomy for us, in the process of saying stupid stuff.

Boghossian does seem to see members of her discipline in a dark hue. At the Damore event, he said that “diversity is a Trojan horse for a political agenda.”

When asked later what was inside the Trojan horse, he said “the diversity they try to create is the most superficial kind of diversity and doesn’t include ideological diversity.”

When asked who “they” were, Boghossian replies “all disciplines infected by postmodernism, and women’s studies and gender studies in particular.

“It’s intersectionality, it’s diversity, it’s those values which are riding in the wake of postmodernity,” he added.

“Jordan Peterson speaks about this, Gad Saad speaks about this, Steven Pinker speaks about this, there’s a whole circle of us speaking about this.”

Despite his criticisms of the campus left, however, Boghossian insists that he is not rightwing, that he “can’t stand Republicans”, and complains about recent accusations that he is “alt-right”. He insists it’s all about Enlightenment values.

Ngo too. “I identify as a centrist if I was forced to answer”, he writes, adding that “Freethinkers is a nonpartisan organization”.

Strange, then, that they, and the movement that Boghossian claims membership of, take such trouble over antagonizing the left, and drawing rightwing attention.

I’m actually kind of impressed here. There are quite a few people mentioned in the article who I, as an outsider to their group, would have lumped together, and there’s Boghossian, unconsciously affirming my taxonomy. Yes — Boghossian, Peterson, Saad, Pinker, they all belong in a single taxon. The defining character seems to be, at least in the context of this excerpt, that they are all pretentious academics who do not understand the meaning of the word “post-modern”, while hating it fiercely, all while huddling under the banner of the Enlightenment, an 18th century movement that they believe entitles them to consider themselves progressive. They also consider themselves liberal while hating diversity in a multicultural nation, and despising gender and women’s studies at universities that are encouraging students, who are mostly women, to examine the complexity of our social and cultural environment.

They’re a weird, regressive bunch. Their clique also includes other people mentioned in the article, like Christina Hoff Sommers, the anti-feminist who calls herself a feminist, and Dave Rubin, the cheerleader for right-wingers who insists he is a centrist, Enlightenment liberal.

I’m perfectly willing to recognize that this is an ugly mess of a beast that is completely different from the ugly mess of a beast called the Republican party. The American landscape is filling up with a diverse collection of shambolic monsters, united only in their willingness to shit on anything that resembles a progressive vision of our future.

That’s the message Donald Trump is sending about himself with the firing of Andrew McCabe, 26 hours before he would have earned his full pension for 21 years of service in the FBI. What amazes me is that he thinks he’s sending a positive message.

Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2018

“a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI”…I think what those hard-working men and women ought to see is that their retirement is now subject to the whims of a tyrant — that what they earn can be whisked away at the last moment by a president who is going to gloat over his ability to punish them. Every federal employee has got to be questioning how reliable their employer actually is.

Get ready. Trump is surrounding himself with sycophants and is probably thinking of firing Mueller next. Do you think Republican-controlled congress will react responsibly to that?