Will Wilkinson

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Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson (born 1973) is an American writer. He was born in Independence, Missouri, and grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa. He graduated from the University of Northern Iowa in 1995, received an M.A. in philosophy from Northern Illinois University in 1998, and worked toward a Ph.D. at the University of Maryland.^{[citation needed]} In 2015, Wilkinson completed his MFA studies at the University of Houston.^[1] In 2009 Wilkinson gained Canadian citizenship via his father, a Canadian expatriate in America, whose Canadian citizenship was reinstated following a change in Canadian emigration law.^[2]

Wilkinson was vice president of policy at the Niskanen Center from 2015 to January 2021, when he was fired for a joke tweet referencing insurrectionist calls to hang former vice president Mike Pence during the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol as a way to mock Republicans who were criticizing president Joe Biden for being hypocritically divisive simply for supporting standard Democratic policies.^[3] Wilkinson's firing was controversial and widely criticized as an example of "cancel culture" run amok.^[4] Wilkinson launched a Substack newsletter titled Model Citizen following his firing. Wilkinson subsequently appeared on two New York Times podcasts, The Argument and the Ezra Klein Show podcast to discuss his experience.^[5][6]

Prior to joining the Niskanen Center in 2015, Wilkinson was U.S. politics correspondent for The Economist. From 2004 to 2010, he was a research fellow at the Cato Institute where he worked on a variety of issues including Social Security privatization and, most notably, the policy implications of happiness research.^[1] Wilkinson was also the managing editor of the Cato Institute's monthly web magazine, Cato Unbound.

His political philosophy has been described by The American Conservative magazine as "Rawlsekian"; that is, a mixture of John Rawls's principles and Friedrich von Hayek's methods.^[7] Wilkinson formerly described his political views as libertarian, but he now rejects that label.^[8]

Notes[]