In this case, readers who don’t care for Williamson’s writing or opinions did not simply flip past his stories to get to more-agreeable ones — the gee-whiz glories of technocratic neoliberalism, how some professor ran a chi-squared test that shows there is another mundane aspect of life that you should feel guilty about, the have-it-all-lean-in anxieties of upper-middle-class college-educated women in their late thirties, can’t-we-all-get-along political refereeing, a sermon on the subjugation of black bodies. Rather, MMFA and the rest of the take-industrial complex worked up The Atlantic’s core audience to see Williamson’s presence as an affront to the readers’ sensibilities and perhaps even to the physical safety or emotional well-being of his colleagues.

This is not, as has often been argued, anything specific to Williamson and the notion he casually floated as a just but unfeasible policy. For instance, Megan McArdle is generally a more genteel writer than Williamson, and one whose soft libertarian policy preferences are generally less offensive to the Left than social conservativism, but there was nonetheless much wailing and gnashing of teeth after the Washington Post hired her as an opinion writer in February. The usual Javerts dutifully recited the stock accusations against her, a mix of highlights from her writing and grossly exaggerated accusations of financial connections to Koch political patronage. Likewise, for the past few months there seem to have been few jobs in America less hectic than that of a customer-service representative at the New York Times, processing cancellation requests over everything from Ross Douthat suggesting that a durable immigration deal should address restrictionist concerns, to an opinion staffer’s sartorial opinions on pants, to straight-news profiles on neo-Nazis, to a Pavlovian response to the sound of Bret Stephens typing.