Instead of interviewing the subject of their pieces, they scanned my thousands of articles and found the tidbits that seemed most likely to provoke. I was half-amused by progressive activists’ claims to have “uncovered” things that were, after all, published. Goodness knows there’s lots to choose from: I have unpopular and contrarian views about what we used to call sex-reassignment surgery and are now expected to call “gender-confirmation surgery,” and I have argued that the much-remarked upon epidemic of sexual assault on American college campuses does not in fact exist (check the numbers).

But no, I didn’t call an African-American child a “monkey,” and, as should be clear by now, I’m not eager to be any sort of executioner. I am one of what I suspect is a very small number of American journalists to have seen a hanging (a lynching in India), and that kind of violence is worth taking seriously.

Having my views misrepresented is familiar territory for me. In 2014, I got a call from a friend who was disturbed by my public support for Donald Sterling, the owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, who had gotten himself into trouble for some racist remarks. I had, at that time, never heard of Mr. Sterling, but there was a quote from me right there on Twitter: “‘Looks like the antiracist gestapo are already lacing up their jackboots for Donald Sterling,’ National Review’s Kevin Williamson commented.”

I mention that one mainly because I know the source of it: It was invented by Matt Bruenig, a left-wing blogger and lawyer formerly associated with the progressive think tank Demos and a contributor to, among other publications, the Atlantic. That quote was not a distortion; it was not “taken out of context” or anything of the sort. It was a pure fabrication. (Mr. Bruenig says that the quote, produced in its entirety above, was intended as “satire.”)

You can find other tweets attributed to me that are pure invention. And while the claims against me during the course of the Atlantic fiasco were not created ex nihilo, the distortions and exaggerations represent a similar kind of intellectual dishonesty: indifference to the facts of the case in the service of narrow ideological goals.

It is easy to misrepresent and exaggerate views that are controversial to begin with. I have argued for years that the current U.S. model of capital punishment is defective and that the practice ought to be tightly restricted or eliminated entirely. I also have argued that if we are to have capital punishment, then it should be carried out by means that are forthrightly violent—firing squad, hanging, etc.—rather than the current pseudo-clinical method of lethal injection. We should always be honest about what it is we are doing, and the involvement of the medical profession in the willful imposition of death is a perversion of its creed, whether in the matter of abortion or in the matter of executing criminals.

Whatever you think of my views on this issue, I’d suggest that they’re more interesting than hearing someone repeat the same shopworn talking points on capital punishment for the thousandth time. The editors of the Atlantic thought so, too, until the mob started doing their thinking for them.

The Atlantic has often welcomed controversial writers. The magazine’s best-known contributor today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, arguably the nation’s foremost writer on race. He came in for criticism after writing, in his book “Between the World and Me,” that the first responders on 9/11 were “not human” to him, that he had come to regard such uniformed figures as menaces. I don’t share his view, but if that’s what he thought at the time, then I’m glad he wrote it. He could have pretended to have had thoughts and feelings other than the ones he did—but the truth is usually more interesting, and it is always more useful.

The late Christopher Hitchens was another frequent contributor to the Atlantic. He was routinely denounced by people on the left for his harshly critical views of Islam. He complained of the war in Afghanistan that “the death toll is not nearly high enough,” described the Jewish scriptures as “evil and mad” and directed shameful vitriol at Mother Teresa. Hitchens routinely and gleefully gave occasion for offense—and he was one of the invaluable essayists of our time.

“Yes,” Mr. Goldberg said when I reminded him of this precedent. “But Hitchens was in the family. You are not.”

And that, of course, is what this whole episode was really about. No one is very much interested in my actual views on abortion and capital punishment—I am hardly a household name. Anyone genuinely interested in my views would have done what journalists do and inquired about them. It isn’t hard to do.

I’m working on a piece right now touching on the way that my fellow conservatives sometimes misrepresent the views of the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Mr. Krugman is not the left-wing radical of the right-wing imagination but a moderately liberal Democrat with more traditional views on trade than the Trump administration; his critique of Republican tax policy is fundamentally a conservative one. I think Mr. Krugman would say that’s a fair accounting of his views. I am confident of this because I asked him, and he said so.

Where my writing appears is not a very important or interesting question. What matters more is the issue of how the rage-fueled tribalism of social media, especially Twitter, has infected the op-ed pages and, to some extent, the rest of journalism. Twitter is about offering markers of affiliation or markers of disaffiliation. The Left shouts RACIST!, and the Right shouts FAKE NEWS! There isn’t much that can be done about this other than treating social media with the low regard it deserves.

But when it comes to what appears in our newspapers and magazines, some of the old rules should still apply. By all means, let’s have advocacy journalism, but let’s make sure about the journalism part of it: Do the work, ask the questions, give readers a reason to assume that what’s published adheres to some basic standards of intellectual honesty. To do otherwise is to empower those who dismiss the media as a tangle of hopeless partisan opportunism.

Without credible journalism, all we have is the Twitter mob, which is a jealous god. Jealous and kind of stupid.