I half read the whole piece earlier so I may have missed it, but does Connor ever grapple with any of the pretty terrible stuff that Williamson wrote/said/believes or does he just completely elide it?
from my perspective, he kind of beat to death the point that he didn't agree with most of williamson's writings.
He also barely mentions that Williamson appeared to misrepresent the "hanging take" to Goldberg. Bret Stevens even went so far as to defend Williamson on these grounds only to be undercut by the fact that Williamson had apparently repeated this belief at length on a podcast (and perhaps in person to Goldberg?). People get fired quite often for misrepresenting their resume to their employers.
goldberg didn't make a big deal of any misrepresentation, i'd argue that friedersdorf made more of that possibility than goldberg did. i also find the notion that it's ok to tweet an opinion, but not ok to expound at greater length on the same theme in a podcast to be a rather arbitrary and foolish line in the sand.
I didn't read all of the other conservative writers he links in toward the end or read their defenses (other than Douthat's). I also have previously read a decent amount of Williamson's work and I have trouble reconciling what I have read with the amount of praise that was heaped on Williamson after the fact.
Obviously I've written a lot of stuff on here that I am not proud of and wouldn't appreciate getting thrown back in my face, but I am doing so on a message board not as a career. As for "free speech" I won't worry too much about Williamson as I'm sure he will have no problem falling right back in to a cushy career writing for a right-wing outfit that is subsidized by billionaire foundations and corporate sponsors and would never survive on the free market.
i don't particularly cotton to the idea that williamson is some martyr due to this experience. i also completely agree with the idea that the editorial board of a publication has the right (perhaps even the obligation) to curate the content they desire to represent their publication. they can exclude voices from the left or exclude voices from the right. if they wish to house a centrist view, they can publish nothing but milquetoast fencesitters or they can search out extremists from opposing camps.
to my mind it is more the jarring disconnect between goldberg's initial announcement of williamson's hiring and the rhetoric of his dismissal. if the atlantic truly wishes to house writers that espouse widely varied views and publish people that actually disagree with each other they've taken a step backwards.