I don’t think that taking a person’s worst tweets, or assertions, in isolation is the best journalistic practice. . . He’s an excellent reporter who covers parts of the country, and aspects of American life, that we don’t yet cover comprehensively. . . Diversity in all its forms makes us better journalists; it also opens us up to new audiences. I would love to have an Ideas section filled with libertarians, socialists, anarcho-pacifists and theocons, in addition to mainstream liberals and conservatives, all arguing with each other. If we are going to host debates, we have to host people who actually disagree with, and sometimes offend, the other side. Kevin will help this cause.
Last week, my former National Review colleague Victor Davis Hanson published an essay calling for a stronger regulatory hand over high-tech companies, fondly recalling the “cultural revolution of muckraking and trust-busting” of the 19th century, and ending with a plea for “some sort of bipartisan national commission that might dispassionately and in disinterested fashion offer guidelines to legislators” about more tightly regulating these companies, perhaps on the public-utility model. That from a magazine whose founders once dreamed of overturning the New Deal.
[That a man, a magazine, and the rest of the Planet Earth might, just might, change their view of the New Deal in the following three-quarters of a century goes unsaid by Kevvie.]
Sadly, I think Kevin Williamson will soon find that National Review was far more tolerant of his controversial views than will be true at The Atlantic. As I noted in the essay in question concerning progressivesâ situational regulation, so too the Left also embraces situational free speech. Indeed, well before Williamson had even written his inaugural column, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, had defended his hiring of Williamson on grounds that he preferred âall things being equal, to give people second chances and the opportunity to change,â and he further seemed delighted about Williamsonâs promise to cease tweeting given that it would be interpreted as âa positive development and a sign of growth.â
And the very next day it was “Door. Ass. Bang.” for Williamson.
I am a bad person. I enjoyed learning that the Atlantic sent that fat cuck into the basement room with the man in a rubber apron holding a Tokarev.
TenApril 7, 2018, 3:51 AM
Williamson writes well, but only about the typical hairshirt neocon posings that, in this case, run afoul of betters like Hanson on the subject of State corporatism. It is that usual rightist failing: The utter, smug myopia dismissing how things really work out of hand, dispensed with much vague furor about “free markets”, as if the thinnest of their philosophical whims about the “economy”, as they quaintly put it, has anything whatsoever to do with DC being a full-on corporatocracy. A tool and a machine.
A full-on corporate tool and machine? But we can’t say that, bloviates Williamson and hollers NR, because the left says that and what would we be if not kneejerk codependent with the left, us the reliable bastion of simple rhetorical opposition to it no matter the issue (and no matter the slant of our caricatures). Why, we’ve spent years on this shtick.
This is rightist purity speaking, ca. 2018. We’re so chaste that we don’t even wish “regulation” – as they also call it – upon our political opponents. Why, Amazon should ship on the USPS dime and the two telcoms should enjoy their free market monopolies, and Google, not being an arm of some official agency, has every right to scrape all the information in the world and use it for any Orwellian purpose, especially where the rightist’s most cherished principle holds eternally true: Government can’t possibly be influenced by anything not-government. See, it’s right there in the definition.
This bullshit comes from the same tribe of losers who refuse to so much as mention how lawmakers are lunching, golfing placeholders on two day a week schedules for the outright graft of the corporate lobby, the lobby that actually does the law-writing. Or how progressive fiat monetary policy works and is the actual, incontrovertible determinant of their political outcomes – it really is the economy, stupid.
The conventional right, meaning the tools at NR, are so blissed out on this sacred, conservative cant and dogma of theirs that they’ve yet to realize that it’s not been what they assume it was for decades. It’s why they’re just not pertinent to these noble standers athwart history yelling stop.
Williamson is a mistake: A great blown opportunity, the guy sucking all the air out of the issues, angrily beating that neocon sword into ever and ever finer edges, and blowing the best opportunity his purported right will ever have to actually reform maybe six percent of the problem they only think they’re on about before being displaced from office forever.
All the times guys like this shoot themselves in the foot wouldn’t bother me so much if it wasn’t always directly through mine.
MMinLamesaApril 7, 2018, 3:52 AM
Kevvvie is an unhinged asshole. Funny thing was about 5 or 6 years ago, I actually enjoyed some of his articles. Something knocked him into the weeds because I sure as hell didn’t change that much.
TenApril 7, 2018, 3:54 AM
Edit, fifth paragraph: Should read “…pertinent, these…”
TenApril 7, 2018, 4:06 AM
From Williamson’s piece:
“Senator Rand Paul is a man out of time. It was only a few years ago that the editors of Reason magazine held him up as the personification of what they imagined to be a “libertarian moment,” a term that enjoyed some momentary cachet in the pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Politico (where I offered a skeptical assessment), and elsewhere. But rather than embodying the future of the Republican Party, Paul embodies its past, the postwar conservative era…”
I haven’t seen framing like that since Salon or Slate or whoever it was paid some feminist to make up some crap about actual, breathing humans. Framing like that is politically borderline psychotic.
Nobody with one eyeball can possibly not conclude that the Accidental Candidate, one D. Trump, has, without apparent political affiliation – or even a dictionary – done more to reform Leviathan than anything the entire rhetorical NR cabal has been able to influence since its inception.
Williamson has less on the small government stick than – and I kid you now – the Alt Right. Than a Reddit sub forum. Than 4Chan, whatever that is. Judged by this tripe (and by NR’s trajectory) Williamson is such an unmitigated failure the mind reels to categorize it.
This guy wouldn’t know an issue if it bit him. You gotta wonder what he’s so terrified of, this vaunted spiller of barrels of ink.
TenApril 7, 2018, 6:54 AM
^ Another edit: “…and I kid you not” – not now. So cranky about these guys I can’t type straight…
Clayton in MississippiApril 7, 2018, 7:19 AM
Well, let’s add one more nit to pick: please correct the spelling of “Schdenfreunde” (sic); should be “schadenfreude”
😉
VanderleunApril 7, 2018, 8:50 AM
Oops. Thanks. Fixed.
VanderleunApril 7, 2018, 8:54 AM
Carry on. I am shocked,SHOCKED, to find out there’s criticism of the cuckright going on in here.
TenApril 7, 2018, 9:43 AM
The putative right is so far behind the eight ball, host, that it stands about a 5% chance of surviving culturally. And by culturally we know we mean as a people; as civilization. So much better to rail against the apparent left than actually identify issues, where they arise, who promoted them, and for what specific cause, ideal, and outcome.
It’s especially humorous – or tragic – to find the great sucking sound of NR “conservatism” co-opting “classical liberalism” and tossing the term around like they do. Ah, no, that would be founding structural principle, friend, and that you haven’t dealt with because you haven’t even bothered to identify it, much less establish a single reliable, visible, historical, functional edifice to it, it being the 200+ year, foundational, hidden-in-plain-sight backstop of your entire political focus, such as you’d believe it to be.
What these guys are, more literally, are a neoliberals – more than anything else the unwitting embodiment of uniparty establishmentarian modern liberalism a good half-century on, the turgid, passive, rhetorical, social, slightly philosophical, reverent pillars of fifty or seventy years of statism, globalism, monetarism, militarism, corporatism, soft racialism, various melting pot and inclusion myths, and a dozen other constitutionally-suspect elements hung this time not in the church of progressivism but from their modified, culturally-attuned, “Judaeo-Christian values”, as they euphemistically claim them on odd occasion, that component whose most evident external influence could include your audience simply airing FOX six hours an evening instead of MSNBC. Or diligently consuming NR because The Republic or The Atlantic or whatever is Satan.
Except that no matter your position on any of it, unless you grasp what’s actively, consciously replacing Western civilization you’re evidently and literally no classical liberal, dude, and the pursuant fact that you’d find any of these fundamental points untenable to raise over in your pleasant, Georgetown circles instead of your usual radical, conservativepleasantries about trimming taxes a few percent, the middle east a country or two, NFL attendance a lot, and the budget not one cent – will you just look at that stock market?! – just make the point.
NR did it to itself – they rolled the damn thing right inside the gates. The left had nothing to do with it, structurally. But rhetorically they had all there ever was to NR to do with it.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
I am a bad person. I enjoyed learning that the Atlantic sent that fat cuck into the basement room with the man in a rubber apron holding a Tokarev.
Williamson writes well, but only about the typical hairshirt neocon posings that, in this case, run afoul of betters like Hanson on the subject of State corporatism. It is that usual rightist failing: The utter, smug myopia dismissing how things really work out of hand, dispensed with much vague furor about “free markets”, as if the thinnest of their philosophical whims about the “economy”, as they quaintly put it, has anything whatsoever to do with DC being a full-on corporatocracy. A tool and a machine.
A full-on corporate tool and machine? But we can’t say that, bloviates Williamson and hollers NR, because the left says that and what would we be if not kneejerk codependent with the left, us the reliable bastion of simple rhetorical opposition to it no matter the issue (and no matter the slant of our caricatures). Why, we’ve spent years on this shtick.
This is rightist purity speaking, ca. 2018. We’re so chaste that we don’t even wish “regulation” – as they also call it – upon our political opponents. Why, Amazon should ship on the USPS dime and the two telcoms should enjoy their free market monopolies, and Google, not being an arm of some official agency, has every right to scrape all the information in the world and use it for any Orwellian purpose, especially where the rightist’s most cherished principle holds eternally true: Government can’t possibly be influenced by anything not-government. See, it’s right there in the definition.
This bullshit comes from the same tribe of losers who refuse to so much as mention how lawmakers are lunching, golfing placeholders on two day a week schedules for the outright graft of the corporate lobby, the lobby that actually does the law-writing. Or how progressive fiat monetary policy works and is the actual, incontrovertible determinant of their political outcomes – it really is the economy, stupid.
The conventional right, meaning the tools at NR, are so blissed out on this sacred, conservative cant and dogma of theirs that they’ve yet to realize that it’s not been what they assume it was for decades. It’s why they’re just not pertinent to these noble standers athwart history yelling stop.
Williamson is a mistake: A great blown opportunity, the guy sucking all the air out of the issues, angrily beating that neocon sword into ever and ever finer edges, and blowing the best opportunity his purported right will ever have to actually reform maybe six percent of the problem they only think they’re on about before being displaced from office forever.
All the times guys like this shoot themselves in the foot wouldn’t bother me so much if it wasn’t always directly through mine.
Kevvvie is an unhinged asshole. Funny thing was about 5 or 6 years ago, I actually enjoyed some of his articles. Something knocked him into the weeds because I sure as hell didn’t change that much.
Edit, fifth paragraph: Should read “…pertinent, these…”
From Williamson’s piece:
“Senator Rand Paul is a man out of time. It was only a few years ago that the editors of Reason magazine held him up as the personification of what they imagined to be a “libertarian moment,” a term that enjoyed some momentary cachet in the pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Politico (where I offered a skeptical assessment), and elsewhere. But rather than embodying the future of the Republican Party, Paul embodies its past, the postwar conservative era…”
I haven’t seen framing like that since Salon or Slate or whoever it was paid some feminist to make up some crap about actual, breathing humans. Framing like that is politically borderline psychotic.
Nobody with one eyeball can possibly not conclude that the Accidental Candidate, one D. Trump, has, without apparent political affiliation – or even a dictionary – done more to reform Leviathan than anything the entire rhetorical NR cabal has been able to influence since its inception.
Williamson has less on the small government stick than – and I kid you now – the Alt Right. Than a Reddit sub forum. Than 4Chan, whatever that is. Judged by this tripe (and by NR’s trajectory) Williamson is such an unmitigated failure the mind reels to categorize it.
This guy wouldn’t know an issue if it bit him. You gotta wonder what he’s so terrified of, this vaunted spiller of barrels of ink.
^ Another edit: “…and I kid you not” – not now. So cranky about these guys I can’t type straight…
Well, let’s add one more nit to pick: please correct the spelling of “Schdenfreunde” (sic); should be “schadenfreude”
😉
Oops. Thanks. Fixed.
Carry on. I am shocked,SHOCKED, to find out there’s criticism of the cuckright going on in here.
The putative right is so far behind the eight ball, host, that it stands about a 5% chance of surviving culturally. And by culturally we know we mean as a people; as civilization. So much better to rail against the apparent left than actually identify issues, where they arise, who promoted them, and for what specific cause, ideal, and outcome.
It’s especially humorous – or tragic – to find the great sucking sound of NR “conservatism” co-opting “classical liberalism” and tossing the term around like they do. Ah, no, that would be founding structural principle, friend, and that you haven’t dealt with because you haven’t even bothered to identify it, much less establish a single reliable, visible, historical, functional edifice to it, it being the 200+ year, foundational, hidden-in-plain-sight backstop of your entire political focus, such as you’d believe it to be.
What these guys are, more literally, are a neoliberals – more than anything else the unwitting embodiment of uniparty establishmentarian modern liberalism a good half-century on, the turgid, passive, rhetorical, social, slightly philosophical, reverent pillars of fifty or seventy years of statism, globalism, monetarism, militarism, corporatism, soft racialism, various melting pot and inclusion myths, and a dozen other constitutionally-suspect elements hung this time not in the church of progressivism but from their modified, culturally-attuned, “Judaeo-Christian values”, as they euphemistically claim them on odd occasion, that component whose most evident external influence could include your audience simply airing FOX six hours an evening instead of MSNBC. Or diligently consuming NR because The Republic or The Atlantic or whatever is Satan.
Except that no matter your position on any of it, unless you grasp what’s actively, consciously replacing Western civilization you’re evidently and literally no classical liberal, dude, and the pursuant fact that you’d find any of these fundamental points untenable to raise over in your pleasant, Georgetown circles instead of your usual radical, conservativepleasantries about trimming taxes a few percent, the middle east a country or two, NFL attendance a lot, and the budget not one cent – will you just look at that stock market?! – just make the point.
NR did it to itself – they rolled the damn thing right inside the gates. The left had nothing to do with it, structurally. But rhetorically they had all there ever was to NR to do with it.