The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics - Hardcover

"He's not one of the most talented conservative writers in America. He's one of the most talented writers in America.
--Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief, The Atlantic

"... and that's why he can't work here."--Also Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief, The Atlantic

"Shocking and brutal... also intellectually honest."--Ruth Marcus, Washington Post

"Kevin Williamson can be a total jackass. He has also written some of the sharpest, most insightful work I've read. Some folks are complicated that way."--Will Saletan, Slate

"Kevin Williamson's gonzo merger of polemic, autobiography, and bats--t craziness is totally brilliant."--John Podhoretz, Commentary

"Disrespectful, impertinent, snide, insulting, and hurtful--in short, everything I look for in a writer."--Nick Searcy, actor

"Truly reprehensible."--Paul Krugman, New York Times

"An ogre."--Jack Shafer, Politico

"Unemployable."--Rich Lowry, National Review

"If anyone picks up this book under the mistaken impression that it will flatter him or his political allies, he will be quickly disabused of that notion. In that sense, The Smallest Minority is the perfect antidote to our heedless age of populist politics. It is a book unafraid to tell the people that they're awful. The Smallest Minority is ostensibly a book about politics in the age of social media, but it is at root a timeless exploration of group dynamics and mass psychology. Williamson provides an intellectual road map to navigate the social-media landscape -- a thoughtless morass of pessimism, of vitriol, and of cynicism masquerading as wisdom. And he does so with plenty of wit and off-color commentary. Williamson does not disappoint for those who are attracted to this work to get the inside scoop on his own brush with the censorious mob that ejected him from a brief tenure at The Atlantic over a ginned-up, intellectually dishonest contretemps. The occasionally juicy anecdotes involving the swarm of Millennial cultural revolutionaries who convinced their elders to serve him up in sacrifice to the hivemind are absorbing, but they are relegated to the prologue. And for good reason. They simply reinforce the veracity of the narrative Williamson weaves throughout the book."--National Review book review

Reader beware: Kevin D. Williamson—the lively, literary firebrand from National Review who was too hot for The Atlantic to handle—comes to bury democracy, not to praise it. With electrifying honesty and spirit, Williamson takes a flamethrower to mob politics, the “beast with many heads” that haunts social media and what currently passes for real life. It’s destroying our capacity for individualism and dragging us down “the Road to Smurfdom, the place where the deracinated demos of the Twitter age finds itself feeling small and blue.”

The Smallest Minority is by no means a memoir, though Williamson does reflect on that “tawdry little episode” with The Atlantic in which he became all-too-intimately acquainted with mob outrage and the forces of tribalism.

Rather, this book is a dizzying tour through a world you’ll be horrified to recognize as your own. With biting appraisals of social media (“an economy of Willy Lomans,” political hustlers (“that certain kind of man or woman...who will kiss the collective ass of the mob”), journalists (“a contemptible union of neediness and arrogance”) and identity politics (“identity is more accessible than policy, which requires effort”), The Smallest Minority is a defiant, funny, and terrifyingly insightful book about what we human beings have done to ourselves.