In spring 2014, barely weeks before GamerGate, 4chan trolls began masquerading as feminist women of color online. The targets were not fooled, obviously, and Shafiqah Hudson and others launched an education campaign against it. But conservative pundits were eager to play along, out of stupidity or malice, laundering the lies into their version of reality and engaging a supply chain of far-right bullshit that would soon be exploited at scale.

Shafiqah Hudson remembers the moment she realized something was off. She saw a tweet from an account she had never seen before: “#EndFathersDay because I’m tired of all these white women stealing our good black mens.” Something about the grammar—not to mention the idea that black women wanted to abolish Father’s Day because of interracial dating—just felt too cartoonish to be real.... Hudson found herself horrified by how easily people on social media could be lured into believing a stereotype of black women. While she watched a credulous rage build online, not just against these fake Twitter accounts but against the black feminists she called friends, her own anger grew as well: “No one is going to come into my house and start breaking shit,” she said.

The mockery #EndFathersDay made of an increasingly influential online feminist movement became predictable catnip to conservatives. Tucker Carlson devoted a segment to it. Ashe Schow in the Washington Examiner called it the latest “drivel” “from the feminist outrage machine.” Dan McLaughlin tweeted that the hashtag was “a neat illustration of the cultural trajectory of progressivism.” “#EndFathersDay Because it’s really just Second Caregiver of Unspecified Gender Identity Day, you cisnormative a**holes,” mocked Ben Shapiro.

The Eurovision Song Contest is Europe's pinnacle of absurdly politicized trashy fun. It also has a substantial and rather bizarre list of banned items that shall not be brought to it, including golf balls, pliers, and shopping carts.

Rope's banned, too, so Kevin Williamson will have to skip it. Read the rest

After World War Two, the balance of wealth shifted dramatically: the super-rich lost so much capital during the two wars and the interwar period that their grip on power slipped, creating the space for a welfare state and other reforms. Read the rest

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. Read the rest

The Atlantic sparked anger by hiring columnist Kevin Williamson, who likened a black child to a primate and wrote that women who have abortions should be hanged. His hiring was defended by Atlantic chief Jeffrey Goldberg, and various conservative colleagues of his, who all agreed that it was just a bad tweet that didn't reflect his true beliefs. In a contemporaneous audio interview, however, Williamson reiterated and explained why he thinks women who have abortions should be hanged.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON (CO-HOST): And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, “If you really thought it was a crime you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide.” And I do support that, in fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging....

Later in the same episode of the podcast, Williamson continued that when it came to punishment for those who had abortions, he “would totally go with treating it like any other crime up to and including hanging” -- going so far as to say that he had “a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital punishment” because “if the state is going to do violence, let’s make it violence. Let’s not pretend like we’re doing something else.”

Listening to him smack his lips, after saying that, it struck me that no U.S. state hangs its killers. It's a legal execution method in two or three, but no one's been hanged here in decades.

Critics have been making a mistake about Williamson's self-described "very serious animus" concerning women who have abortions. Read the rest

Last week, The Atlantic hired Kevin Williamson, a conservative famous for his flamboyant bigotry, a flair most famously exhibited when he wrote that women who have abortions should be hanged along with their nurses and doctors.

Online outrage was immediate, drawing attention to his other greatest hits: transgender women commit genital mutilation and are “effigies” of women; rape accusers should be publicly named; the poor are lazy and their communities should be abandoned; and a comically fabulated account of meeting a black child he compared to a primate and described as "three fifths" of a Snoop Dog. The Atlantic itself described him as "gratuitously nasty" way back in the mists of 2016.

"These are not views one would typically associate with the Atlantic," wrote Jordan Weissman at Slate. Sarah Jones, at The New Republic, wrote that it marks the mainstreaming of the reactionary right.

What I noticed, though, was the general assumption that The Atlantic's current brass simply didn't know about the things he'd written. Williamson deleted his Twitter account, after all, as if to hide his past from his new editors. (Compare to the New York Times, which recently hired a columnist only to fire her hours later over tweets it claimed it had never seen.)

But I had a hunch: I thought (and said as much) that Williamson was hired explicitly because of what he had written about women, black kids and the poor. To well-off center-leaning liberals, Williamson is the perfect post-Trump conservative: superficially literary, ostentatiously nasty, profoundly disgusted by the weak, yet (and this is super-duper important) opposed to the current president. Read the rest