T
he recent summary dismissal of the writer Kevin Williamson from the Atlantic has kicked up quite a media firestorm. Long a fixture at National Review with a well-earned reputation for his powerful, iconoclastic prose on politics and society, Williamson had been at the center-left Atlantic for barely two weeks when a heretic-hunting posse of left-wing journalists came after him.

They’d turned up a few long-ago remarks in which, true to form, Williamson had taken his opposition to abortion to its logical, albeit rather extreme, conclusion. After that, it was just a matter of time before Williamson’s fleeting tenure at the Atlantic was history.

KDW, as he’s known, was particularly threatening to the folks brandishing the rhetorical pitchforks. The independent-minded Williamson isn’t so easily written off as just another knuckle-dragging reactionary, what with his hardscrabble upbringing in rural Texas, unusual for the conservative pundit class, and his outspoken eviscerations of the current president. With his shaved head and overgrown goatee, KDW even looks like a lefty.

It was thus imperative for the inquisitors in the Church of thetxt Perpetual Snowflake to hound Williamson out, and his extreme utterances relating to abortion, the ultimate sacrament in the progressive catechism, served their purposes well.

Sonny Bunch, editor of the Washington Free Beacon, had his own reaction to l’affaire Williamson: “Ah well. Kevin will land on his feet. But looking over the dossier of material compiled by leftwing… schoolmarms in an effort to tear him down… it did get me thinking about my own character flaws. So to save the oppo researchers some time, I decided to compile my most controversial thoughts…”

Which, in turn, also got me to thinking: Now (to paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bentsen), I’m no KDW. For one thing, I lack that shaved-head-and-hipster-beard combo. For another, I wasn’t born in rural Texas (and yes, I know, for Boro Parkers, I might as well have been, hailing as I do from the Bronx). But since I do have my own rap sheet on various topics, the day may yet arrive when a PC-crazed mob comprised of the sort of fragile souls that abound on college campuses comes after yours truly, claiming some perceived violation of their ideological safe spaces. And ever-thoughtfully, I want to make it easier for them to follow my paper trail.

And so I’ve reached back into the archives of Text Messages™, looking for something guaranteed to provoke. How about this one, tearing into the American president?

What are the first characteristics that come to mind when thinking of our president? An overweening arrogance he’s so blissfully unaware of that he sometimes resembles a Sunday cartoon character come to life…. he possesses an almost impossibly thin skin for criticism, a hypersensitivity to even respectful, constructive disagreement…. all of this — the hubris, the inability to accept critique, the desperate need for the validation of tyrants — adds up to an unsettling portrait of a person with deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Thus has he inflicted his troubled self on our nation, with hundreds of millions of citizens bearing the consequences of one man’s personal burdens.

Yes, he was some piece of work, that Barack Obama. (TM, 4/15/2015)

Then there’s the topic of Eretz Yisrael, always a subject good for setting off fireworks:

Israel has a destiny, a mission, a world-transformational calling. Not the “Israel” that at its founding in 1948 lifted that venerable name from a Jewish history it largely repudiated, but Yisrael, as in “Bereishis — bishvil Yisrael shenikra reishis,” as in “Hamavdil… bein Yisrael la’amim.”

Rav Saadia Gaon’s statement that “Our nation is only a nation by virtue of its Torahs, Written and Oral” isn’t a bumper sticker. It expresses the most important truth in all of human history. Nothing other than our possession of the Torah plays any role in our national character… Not a common land, language, and culture. Not winning four games, or fifteen, in a baseball competition. Not ranking on some non-Jew’s list as the world’s eighth strongest power… (TM, 3/22/2017)

Could it be I stepped over the line when I picked on the Israeli national baseball team?

But how controversial can those words be when no less an eminence than Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks echoes them?

What then made [Jews] a nation? This was the question [to which] Rav Saadia Gaon… gave the famous answer: “Our nation is only a nation by virtue of its Torot.” …What makes Jews “a nation dwelling alone, not reckoned among the nations,” is that their nationhood is not a matter of geography, politics or ethnicity. (Covenant and Conversation, 7/2/2012)

It seems to me it just isn’t as easy being controversial as it used to be. You do your best to stir things up, quoting Rav Elchonon Wasserman and Rav Shach and the Chofetz Chaim and such, and the next thing you know, the British chief rabbi is right there with you.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 708. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com