Kevin Williamson Firing Shows the ‘Nonpartisan’ Media’s True Colors
Posted: April 9, 2018 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank, U.S. News | Tags: Atlantic Magazine, Kevin Williamson, Media bias, New York Post, New York Times Leave a commentWilliamson came to The Atlantic from the conservative National Review, and his hiring sparked an uproar on the left. After combing through over a decade of his writings, detractors found a tweet where he called for death, by hanging, for abortion. When Goldberg learned Williamson also had referenced the tweet on a podcast, he gave in.
Surely Williamson’s quip was mere hyperbole, meant to provoke. After all, he never wrote an actual column making that argument, despite having written extensively, including about abortion. And his first tweet simply argued that “the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.”
Only when he was asked what kind of punishment he had in mind did he tweet back: “hanging.” He was “absolutely willing to see abortion treated like regular homicide under the criminal code.”
You don’t have to agree with that; I don’t. But Williamson’s position (not all pro-lifers’) is that abortion is murder (literally, the killing of a baby), that it should be made illegal and carry a punishment equal to that of similar crimes.
Is this more radical than Ruth Marcus’ view in The Washington Post? “I’m going to be blunt here: That was not the child I wanted,” she wrote about how she would have aborted her child if the baby was found to have had Down Syndrome. Her view is disgusting to conservatives, yet there was no move to get her fired. Read the rest of this entry »
Re: CNN’s Dumbest Column Ever
Posted: April 16, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank, War Room | Tags: CNN, Daily Caller, Democratic Party (United States), Frazier Glenn Miller, Kansas, Kevin Williamson, Ku Klux Klan, Peter Bergen, Southern Poverty Law Center, United States 1 CommentCNN is irrelevant, and the SPLC should be recognized and branded in polite society as a “Hate group”
NRO‘s David French asks some good questions:
I’d like to thank Kevin Williamson for pointing us to perhaps the dumbest column I’ve ever read on CNN – an actual argument that allegedly “right-wing” extremists are more deadly than jihadists. In addition to Mr. Williamson’s spot-on critique, can we also say something else about jihad since 9/11? The death toll in the U.S. may be “only” 21, but the American toll overseas is at least 6,802 with well over 50,000 injuries, including 16,000 serious injuries. Peter Bergen evidently does not think this important enough to explore, but in the aftermath of the actual worst terrorist attack in American history we engaged in direct combat against jihadists in two separate countries, combat that continues in Afghanistan to this day. In that process, these jihadists not only killed thousands of Americans, they inflicted an unholy death toll on allied soldiers and civilians.
Are these American lives any less precious or important because they were lost overseas? Does the fact that jihadists have proven capable of killing thousands of the best-equipped and best-trained soldiers in the world tell him anything about the destructive potential of jihad compared to the allegedly “right-wing” Klan? (read more)
Unmentioned in some of these critiques of the discredited CNN column: Since when is a KKK member a “right wing” figure? Except in the imagination of dishonest journalists and political propagandists? The Klan was the military-terror arm of the Democratic party in the south, this is not exactly news. The accusation that the KKK is connected to conservative or right-wing ideology is pure fantasy. The famous white supremacist, anti-Semitic murderer Frazier Glenn Miller, ran for public office as a Democrat.
On the other hand, Miller ran for office as both a Democrat and a Republican, making any effort to use his ideological profile to score political points a useless exercise, as the Daily Caller‘s Neil Munro reports:
The gunman who murdered three people in Kansas on Sunday was defeated in primary races in the Democratic and the Republican parties, which could complicate any partisan effort to associate either party with the unusual anti-Semitic attack.
Frazier Glenn Miller was reportedly arrested after the attacks in Kansas, which killed one Jewish woman, and two non-Jews, a grandfather and his 14 year-old grandson.
Religious Liberty After Arizona
Posted: February 28, 2014 Filed under: Law & Justice, Think Tank | Tags: Arizona, Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Freedom of religion, Jan Brewer, Kevin Williamson, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Same-sex marriage 1 CommentFor The Federalist Ben Domenech writes: Government, properly understood, is an agent of force. It can cause people to not do things they would otherwise do, and can compel them to do things they otherwise would not do. It does this in small ways and big ways, in nudges and at the end of a gun. At its best, as limited government conservatives and libertarians alike understand, government causes and compels only in those arenas it must, invading the scope of human life as little as possible. At its worst, government becomes, in Saint Augustine’s phrase, a system of “great robberies” where plunder is divided by the law agreed on, and people are subdued by force in accordance to the whims of the powerful elite.
So what are we to make of the divisions that emerged in the course of Arizona’s consideration of its version of a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the responses it inspired? I think it comes down to a matter of priorities, and to the broad-based willingness to let personal inclinations about what society ought to look like overwhelm a reasonable understanding of the ramifications of giving government the power to shape that society.
Give Felons the Vote? Eric Holder’s Interest in Restoring Their Rights Seems to End There
Posted: February 24, 2014 Filed under: Law & Justice, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Attorney general, Disfranchisement, Eric Holder, Felony, Kevin D. Williamson, Kevin Williamson, National Review, Suffrage, United States 1 Comment[AUDIO] Mad Dogs & Englishmen: Charles Cooke & Kevin Williamson Discuss the Over-Importance of the Presidency, Minimum Wage, and the 2016 Mid-Term Elections
Posted: February 20, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Charlie Cooke, Kevin Williamson, Labor, midterm elections, Minimum wage, National Review Online, United States, YouTube 2 CommentsCharlie Cooke and Kevin Williamson discuss the 2016 midterm elections, the presidency being too important, and the minimum wage.
Mad Dogs & Englishmen: February 20, 2014 – YouTube

Award: The Kevin D. Williamson 100+ Word Single-Sentence SOTU Adjective-Bomb
Posted: January 28, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Democratic, Kevin D. Williamson, Kevin Williamson, National Review Online, Roman temple, SOTU, State of the Union address, United States, Washington 1 CommentIn case you missed it at NRO, or in our earlier post, it’s too good not to feature as a highlighed quote. Keep in mind, it’s a long time before the keyboard hits the period key. A bottle of Champagne goes to anyone who can memorize this and perform it, in one breath, at a cocktail party, in front of a roomful of humorless Democrats.
Without further ado, here’s Kevin D. Williamson‘s Award-winning, adjective-loaded (adjectives and qualifiers?) uninhibited description of a America’s most outdated tradition: The State of the Union Address.
“The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.”
Thanks again to Mr. Williamson (and his editors) for providing today’s Award-winning quote.
[Feast on Kevin D. Williamson’s fine book The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome]

‘Extortion’: DC ‘Just Like the Mob, Except It’s Legal’
Posted: October 26, 2013 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Economics, Law & Justice, Politics | Tags: Congress, Extortion, Kevin Williamson, Peter Schweizer, Political action committee, Protection racket, Schweizer, Washington Leave a commentWhere have I read this before? NRO‘s Kevin Williamson’s book has some great stuff on this, a chapter exploring how a governments and criminal organizations are functionally identical. It’s a protection racket. It’s the historical norm, not the exception. Institutionalized extortion is more commonplace than we like to believe. (If you haven’t read Williamson’s The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure, I recommend it. I’ve plugged it before, and will probably mention it again) Where were we? Oh yeah, here’s Breitbart.com item about Peter Schweizer‘s newly-relased Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets.
WYNTON HALL writes: Peter Schweizer argued that Washington’s political establishment creates threatening bills to scare wealthy interests into making big campaign donations and to hire favored lobbyists, similar to the mafia’s tactic of requiring “protection money” on Friday.
Schweizer, President of the Government Accountability Institute and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large, argued that point during a Friday Yahoo! Finance appearance discussing his new book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets.
Washington, D.C. runs “just like the mob, except it’s legal,” said Schweizer.
Our Partisan Bureaucracy and the End of the Civil Service
Posted: October 10, 2013 Filed under: Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Civil service, government, Internal Revenue Service, Kevin Williamson, Mark Steyn, National Mall, National Park Service, United States 1 Comment
The utopian goal of the civil service was to create something like a professional class of public servants, individuals dedicated to the public good regardless of the party in power — a final break from the spoils system and its attendant rampant corruption and cronyism.
David French writes: It had to happen eventually. The party of government and the government itself would start to merge into one seamless whole — capable of acting on their respective desires without even the necessity of explicit instructions. Kevin Williamson, Michael Walsh, and others sounded this alarm as the IRS scandal unfolded, and we were faced with two unsettling possibilities: Either the political branches of government were so craven they ordered a tea-party crackdown or the bureaucracy was so corrupt it cracked down on its own accord.
Bring on the Draconian Cuts
Posted: September 7, 2013 Filed under: Economics | Tags: DARPA, Kevin Williamson, Marsha Blackburn, National Science Foundation, Tim Walberg, United States Department of Energy, White House Leave a commentNRO’s Kevin Williamson writes: Hark, unless mine eyes are cheated, it appears that the House has passed a bill — on energy and water development — that would spend less money than we spent last year. Indeed, that is the case: The $30.4 billion bill is $2.9 billion less than was appropriated for 2013. If my always-suspect English-major math is correct, that $2.9 billion represents a full 0.08 percent of 2012 federal outlays.
The White House has threated to veto these “draconian cuts.” Seriously — OMB put out a statement calling these “draconian cuts.” Does anybody over there know what “draconian” means? Read the rest of this entry »