Kevin Williamson is the best journalist writing today, anywhere. He is as good as Christopher Hitchens was—possibly even better. Just as we got the Quotable Hitchens, in time we will get the Quotable Kevin. And quotable he sure is. The Smallest Minority teems with juicily-phrased word bombardments. He slices, skewers, demolishes and mocks with aplomb. Yet he might exceed even the delicious talent of Hitchens because he has a sociological and psychological insight that Hitchens lacked. Hitchens was the atheist who admired the prose style of the King James Bible. Williamson is the Christian who admires Milton’s Lucifer. These are interesting characters.
Rearing up repeatedly through The Smallest Minority are dazzling counter-intuitive observations about the mind-set of the present age, its social drivers and historical antecedents. This is intellectual journalism at its finest. Ironically it comes at the moment when know-nothing opinion bombast has reached a crescendo of incandescent silliness. Williamson sets out to explain why this has happened and to offer a one-person (that is, the smallest minority’s) riposte to the collective mania that has grown over the last decade, noisily and absurdly. This has occurred most visibly in the tantrum-studded dummy-spitting domain of social media—which Williamson dissects devastatingly limb by limb. But it applies to all media and all opinion.
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