Thread by @VABVOX

I admit to being stunned that there are still men shaking their fists on the white-males-only lawn over #KevinWilliamson.This piece is even more egregious for its casual claim that Williamson is cruel yet that's somehow intellectually pure.

It is not.
1/ politico.com/magazine/amp/s…

There is no world where it is mere envelope-pushing to call for the lynching--let's call it what it is--of women for exercising their legal rights over their own bodies, nor is it intellectually acceptable to assert the supremacy of whiteness nor claim refute LGBT identities. 2/

Since people from the center to the left casually refer to everyone as Nazis these days, when a man whose ideology & intellectual pursuit is aligned with the more brilliant minds of the Third Reich, its acknowledgement is ignored, its reality occluded.
Williamson is one such.
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We have the @ACLU to stand for the free speech rights of the most vile among us. In a free society as ours purports to be that is essential, if personally repugnant.

That said, the role of intellectual platforms like @TheAtlantic is not to give safe harbor to such extremism.
4/

When Tiki torch bearers march through a college campus chanting "Jews will not replace us," we know who they are.

But just as evangelicals can't recognize Christ in an immigrant, left men don't recognize a Nazi when he's given a place at our intellectual table to spew cant.
5/

It is not a "difference of opinion" to fail utterly to acknowledge the autonomy and personhood of women, LGBT and others Williamson and his ilk eschew. (Add NRO's Cooke to this list.)

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The same minds that continue to embrace The Bell Curve and other intellectually suspect Nazism reframe the discourse on women and LGBT as mere politik.

Our lives are not up for review. Stop thinking that they are.

7/

The blot on @TheAtlantic & @JeffreyGoldberg is not the firing of #KevinWilliamson, but the hiring.

In our clickbait culture we are reminded always (particularly those of us who write for a living) to push for edginess.

It's not an intellectual exercise to deny personhood.
8/

I'd suggest these impassioned commentaries on behalf of Williamson find replication in the ugliest annals of our collective history. Failure to recognize that what it is you are arguing for is not broader discourse, but a clear path to the ovens is disturbing beyond measure.
9/

Schafer's piece on @politico was the most extreme yet. I'd argue that none of these men has had the polemical cojones to switch out women for blacks nor gays & trans for Jews, but there's no putative difference except in not recognizing the slipperiness of their slope.
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There may be a collective gasp at that last statement, but it's reality. If we were talking about anyone BUT women & LGBT, none of this would have happened.

Women have been called the n word of the world. Williamson and his cadre of apologists think that's as it should be.
11/

That there have been no white male takedowns of #KevinWilliamson nor a single notation of Cooke except by me is telling.

We will know them by their allyship,MLK said of white moderates.

Women learned a lot this week about our purported allies.Don't be too quick to forgive.
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