One of the most alarming parts of media in the Trump era is the increasing normalization of extreme conservatives and white supremacists. Not only do we get Nazi puff pieces, but we also get large, influential media outlets like the New York Times hiring people who have said racist things on the record and think Nazis are just not that bad.
The latest piece of that trend comes from The Atlantic, which recently announced the hiring Kevin Williamson as one of their new columnists. Williamson wrote for the National Review for a decade and has left a lot of hateful rhetoric in his wake.
One of the more notable things he’s done is advocate for hanging every person who has an abortion—Oh, and the doctor, too! Considering that one in four women have an abortion by the age of 45, he’s advocating for a lot of women to be killed. This isn’t just a suggestion to be taken lightly considering the very real history of domestic terrorism and rising threats of violence against abortion providers and people who need them.
In response to the backlash to news of the hire, editor Jeffrey Goldberg tried to defend the decision, but people aren’t buying it—especially when he insists in the same memo they want to “outdo” the industry in gender equality. As Jordan Weissman wrote at Slate:
In addition to making the thought leader’s now-familiar case for ideological diversity, Goldberg wrote that he likes to “give people second chances and the opportunity to change.” This is an odd justification for a terrible and high-profile hire at one of the country’s most venerable political magazines.
A longtime correspondent for the National Review, Williamson is, at his best, a right-wing provocateur who writes enjoyable, if slightly retro, prose. At his worst, he’s a verbose and hateful troll
Hateful troll indeed! I’m not sure how hiring someone who publicly discussed a desire to kill a big chunk of our population over a medical procedure that is currently legal is supposed to help the publication move ahead of its peers.
It’s interesting how white male privilege works. A man can have a whole history of writing bigoted, hateful content and yet gets his “second chance” by writing for one of the most influential political magazines in the country? Many people of color never even get a first chance, considering the pervasive racism in employment. The Cut summed up some of his other awful writing.
Well, besides the abortion thing — which would apply to one in four women in the United States — let’s see. He compared a 9-year-old black child to a “primate” in the lede of a 2014 story. That same year, in an anti-trans essay titled “Laverne Cox Is Not a Woman,” he wrote, “regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman.”
I’m not saying that all conservative discourse should be banned, but his past rhetoric is beyond anything that should be normalized. By hiring Williamson, The Atlantic is implicitly endorsing his past work. His history of writing transphobic, sexist, and racist content didn’t disqualify him from the job. That fact alone says a lot right there, especially when hate crimes are at escalating rates and our administration is full of white supremacists pushing policies punishing the same people Williamson has made a living off of publicly dehumanizing.
Not only will someone with a hateful history have the power to spread their thoughts to a wide audience with the backing of The Atlantic, but now coworkers—women, people of color, trans people—have a colleague with pretty hostile beliefs. As feminist author Jessica Valenti recently pointed out:
Because while this is about politics, it is even more so about women’s ability to work, exist and flourish in this world. I keep thinking about the female staffers at The Atlantic who have had abortions who now must work with a man who believes they should be painfully executed.
How can you say that you want a workplace that values women when you hire someone who wants 25% of those women dead? How can you lead in a newsroom when your female subordinates now know that you consider their lives worth less than the clicks you’ll generate from a handful of articles?
Obviously, The Atlantic can and will do what it wants, but I, too, am troubled by how Williamson’s history has been seen as acceptable. Giving people who undermine the humanity of the marginalized a microphone is a serious decision that has consequences. Those consequences will reverberate far beyond this media company’s private space.