Thomas Chatterton Williams is still an awful right-wing political operative

It's the Bari Weiss expulsion meme!

Thomas Chatterton Williams takes money directly from the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, the same organization that has funded and supported the career of gutter racist Charles Murray for decades.

And so it is no surprise that Williams is promoting right-wing talking points about race.

Williams was behind the "Harper's Letter" - probably in association with Bari Weiss - which was part of the racist right's attempt to move the Overton window by presenting right-wing talking points as reasonable and even liberal, or "classical liberal."

In his latest effort to earn his wingnut welfare pay from AEI - and probably other right-wing plutocrat funders - Williams has published a book and his usual sleazy efforts to normalize right-wing talking points are perfectly described in the New York Times review:

He styles himself as casting a plague on both American political houses, bemoaning “the ill-conceived identity politics of the left” and “the spiteful populism of the right.” In fact, though, he fixates on mere blemishes dotting the house to his left and too often neglects the unmistakable stench of decay emanating from the house to his right. He portrays the reactionary mood in our politics as arising largely in response to the left’s supposed excesses, rather than also endeavoring to probe its independent animating forces.

His reductive analysis reaches its nadir when he suggests that the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol can helpfully be viewed as, in effect, the left’s chickens coming home to roost. Following in the wake of the post-Floyd protests, the Jan. 6 insurrection represented “a gross apotheosis of a kind of increasingly common tendency, visible on the social justice left for years now, to make the country’s politics in the street whenever feeling sufficiently unheard,” he maintains. Never mind that the thousands of post-Floyd protests were overwhelmingly nonviolent and that the protesters included among their number such notorious firebrands as Mitt Romney.

And Williams' courtier status with the racist right even seems to have impacted his prose style abilities, which I thought was all he had left of value as a career opinion-haver:

Williams’s book is impaired by slapdash prose. His writing abounds with interminable, convoluted sentences that teem with digressions and then awkwardly limp toward disorienting conclusions.

As far as I am concerned, any claim Williams might have had to intellectual seriousness was destroyed back in 2021, in his interview with Ian Chotiner. Chotiner also interviewed Williams' fellow AEI wingnut welfare recipient Danielle Pletka, and revealed her awfulness too.

Naturally Williams is a contributor to Bari Weiss's fascist Free Press.

Oh look, the Charles Murray-funding American Enterprise Institute is hosting an event for Williams' book.