1. This Kevin Williamson account of his firing in the Atlantic is, from top to bottom, bullshit. Bear with me while I explain why. wsj.com/articles/when-…
2. Williamson specializes in a dance move I like to call the Troll Three-Step. One: Say something vile Two: When challenged, say that wasn't what you meant, only joking etc. Step three: Go back to saying something vile.
3. An example: Williamson writes: "I didn’t call an African-American child a 'monkey,'" That is narrowly true but Williams did in fact write that black child was a primate, a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg & had questionable parentage 
4. So to summarize. Williamson: black child is "primate" etc. Other people: WTF dude! Williamson: Hey I didn't call him a "monkey"! Stop being a twitter mob lynching my free speech.
5. The same disingenuousness characterizes Williamson's views (if we want to call it that) on punishing abortion. According to Williamson whole controversy hangs on "a six-word, four-year-old tweet" & one podcast.
6. Here's what Williamson's account leaves out. After his first tweet, he was repeatedly challenged on twitter & he stuck fast to his position that abortion was an offence worthy of execution. storify.com/AngryBlackLady…
7. Moreover, by Jeffrey Goldberg's account, when he first discussed abortion tweet with Williamson he was told it was a one off but subsequently (upon listening to podcast & talking to Williamson) concluded this was Williamson's view.
8. Goldberg's account (which Williamson neither addresses nor refutes) makes clear that the cause for firing was wrong impression created that tweet was merely "an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post, as Kevin had explained it." I.e. lying.
9. Williamson is also very mad that people wrote articles criticizing him without interviewing him. I find this a baffling objection.
10. Williamson is a public writer, so people can reasonable judge him by his wriitng. It's normal to judge writers, even controversial ones (say Ta-Nehisi Coates or Noam Chomsky) based on their writing without interviewing them.
11. Even a lesser light like myself gets criticized (as it happens in the pages of Williamson's old magazine National Review) without anyone bothering to interview me. Which is ok. It's fair to judge me by my words. Williamson as well.
12. But, as it happens, after Williamson was fired from Atlantic (and hence newsworthy) I wrote to him and asked for a Q&A in New Republic to discuss his view. He rejected me in vehement terms, insulting both me & TNR.
13. My favorite part of the exchange where I politely offered a Q&A where Williamson could explain his views at length in TNR is when he called me and the magazine "mosquitos"
14. As it happens, the stout-hearted @ed_kilgore was able to interview Williamson for New York, but not with fruitful results: nymag.com/daily/intellig…
15. @ed_kilgore repeatedly asks Williamson a simple & fair question: what do you think punishment for abortion should be. Williamson repeatedly refuses to answer. That's very strange from a man who also has talked about hanging as a fit punishment for abortion
16. To recap.
Williamson: women who have abortions should be hanged.
Sane people: WTF dude.
W: It was just a provocation.
SP. Um, ok.
W on friendly podcast: Yeah, hanging is just logical but I don't like capital punishment
SP: What should punishment be?
W: I won't say.
Williamson: women who have abortions should be hanged.
Sane people: WTF dude.
W: It was just a provocation.
SP. Um, ok.
W on friendly podcast: Yeah, hanging is just logical but I don't like capital punishment
SP: What should punishment be?
W: I won't say.
17. It's very strange. Williamson actually says abortion is "in some ways it's worse than your typical murder." If so, shouldn't he be willing to spell out (not just as a "trollish and hostile" tweet) how something worse than murder should be punished.
18. Williamson says his suggestion of hanging not "a public-policy recommendation." That's true. It's not an idea or a policy, but an expression of an emotion and not a credible one: a desire to punish women.
19. Cards on the table: I am strongly pro-choice. But I accept that many anti-abortion people are motivated by a genuine concern for fetal personhood & rights. Not Williamson, though. Something else is at work.
20. If you go by Williamson's writings on abortion in National Review & words of his friends, this is a personal issue because Williamson sees himself as abortion survivor:
21. Here's the basic argument from Williamson's friends: Williamson is a former fetus & abortion survivor so he feels passionate about issue. It's self-defence! That's why he talks about hanging women.
22. I have to confess, I find the argument about being an abortion survivor puzzling on a metaphysical level. It doesn't account for the radical contingency of being.
23. I mean anyone who understands biology should realize that the fact that any of us are here is a immense miracle.We all survived abortion, or miscarriage or premature ejaculation. Why get mad at hypotheticals?
24. It's true that if Kevin Williamson's mom had aborted him he wouldn't exist. Also true that if his dad had prematurely ejaculated he wouldn't exist. Should we hang men who prematurely ejaculate? Where does this anger come from?
25. To clarify My point is that if Williamson's dad had prematurely ejaculated another sperm, not Williamson-homunculi, have impregnated egg.
26. I mentioned this before but Williamson's anger at his mom (who, for the record, did NOT abort him) often calls to mind Jack Kirby's weirdest creation, Paranex, The Fighting Fetus.
27. The point of all this is that, as he admits, Williamson doesn't have a "public policy" position on abortion. He has a visceral feeling: that women need to be punished. That's psychologically interesting but something that Atlantic was rightly wary of.
28. One last thing: in keeping with Trollish Three-step, whenever Williamson is in safe-space of right-wing media, he reverts to fantasizing about hanging women:
