In the grand scheme of things, columnist Kevin Williamson being fired by The Atlantic isn’t exactly earth shattering. But it does signal yet another marker in a critical war on free speech.

First, the brief backstory. Last week, Williamson left National Review to take a job at The Atlantic. His departure was amicable, and he was merely taking another opportunity. A few days later, however, he was fired for old and long-since deleted tweets and a podcast years ago. Nonetheless, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg blamed the firing on Williamson’s “carefully considered views” on abortion — specifically, that abortion is murder and, therefore, doctors and perhaps even mothers who kill babies before birth should face punishment up to and including capital punishment.

Williamson’s views, born of his own experience of having not been aborted but given up for adoption, are not the subject here; the intolerant mob of leftists is. But, ironically, if Williamson had championed stabbing a partially born infant in the neck, dismembering it and maybe selling a few organs — as rabidly pro-abortion leftists do in not so many words — he’d still have a job.

Instead, he was fired because one of the sacraments of the leftist religion is abortion, and that religion’s first commandment is “Thou shalt not ever criticize a woman for making that choice.” Thus Williamson’s views were not only far beyond the pale but evidence that we really are living in the dystopian “Handmaid’s Tale.”

And that exemplifies the larger problem. As Ben Shapiro puts it, “First, the Left separates discourse into two categories: the acceptable and the unacceptable. Not three — the acceptable, the unacceptable, and that with which they disagree. Two. You are either acceptable or unacceptable. Next, the Left shrinks the acceptable down to the opinions located between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.” Virtually no conservative thought will be tolerated — all the “coexist” bumper stickers in the world not withstanding. Bake the cake.

So if any of your liberal friends still wonder why Donald Trump was elected president, it’s because his voters were sick and tired of this type of punishment of certain views and malicious slander of half the American population.