Kevin D. Williamson once recommended that women who get abortions be hanged. He once compared a black child to a primate and argued that we should strip rape victims of their legal anonymity. And last Thursday, it was announced that he is leaving his long-time platform at the conservative National Review, where such ideas are welcome, for The Atlantic, a venerable political magazine with a large audience.

Williamson’s elevation to mainstream credibility comes amidst a rolling debate over the role of conservative columnists in political discourse, one that has largely focused on the op-ed page of The New York Times, which is run by the former editor of The Atlantic, James Bennet. This debate normally revolves around an aging chestnut: ideological diversity. Williamson’s case, however, presents different questions: What is the line between provocation and genuine extremism? Between iconoclasm and mere trolling? And when it comes to conservative thinkers in the Trump era, is it possible to parse these differences?

Williamson’s ideas may be new to The Atlantic, but not to the conservative movement. He isn’t the first person to think abortion deserves capital punishment, or that rape culture is a fiction. He’s not the first white writer to compare a black human being to an ape. National Review’s founder, William Buckley, supported segregation. As recently as 2014, authors have praised Camp of the Saints, a white-supremacist book, in its pages. National Review didn’t fire John Derbyshire until 2012, despite his long, well-documented track record of spewing white-supremacist rhetoric. It regularly publishes Jason Richwine, who has argued that there are racial differences in intelligence.

On race, Williamson was a natural fit for the magazine. But it’s hard to imagine the following passage published in The Atlantic, which recently released a special edition on the legacy of Martin Luther King and boasts Ta-Nehisi Coates on its masthead:

East St. Louis, Ill. — “Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka! White devil! F*** you, white devil!” The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge. Luckily for me, he’s more like a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg, a few inches shy of four feet high, probably about nine years old, and his mom—I assume she’s his mom—is looking at me with an expression that is a complex blend of embarrassment, pity, and amusement, as though to say: “Kids say the darnedest things, do they not, white devil?”

Is this provocation? Or is this … something else? The use of African-American dialect, the stereotypical invocation of Snoop Dogg, the positioning of Williamson himself as the victim of racialized abuse, and, of course, the simian metaphor—these are designed to antagonize, to push buttons, surely, but does that mean the passage as a whole is any less racist? As much as Williamson might wish it, it is not ameliorated by his conclusion, which is that Democrats, not Republicans, have failed black voters by blocking school choice, among other sins. It’s an old inversion, the idea that Democrats are the real racists.