Once upon a time, The Atlantic hired Kevin Williamson, a conservative columnist who likened a black child to a primate, wrote that transwomen were effigies, and tweeted that women who have abortions should be hanged. The Atlantic said this was OK, because that was just a bad tweet. Then it transpired it wasn't just a bad tweet after all. Then The Atlantic fired Kevin Williamson. And everyone lived… well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Atlantic EIC Jeffrey Goldberg:
"The language he used in this podcast—and in my conversations with him in recent days—made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views."
The real problem was never Williamson. It was the blithe, clueless, disinterested hiring of the first spicy Never-Trump conservative that came along without the slightest serious regard given to what he otherwise wrote, said and believed. In their rush to defend him, countless conservatives exposed a taste for political violence — which is what hanging women means in a country where no-one has been hanged for decades — that everyone would do well to remember.
