Time To Snuff Out Atlantic Mag, Refugee Camp For Media’s Worst

The Atlantic reminded everyone of its miserable existence this week with a chipper press release stating it had enlisted MSNBC morning host and Grinch doppelganger Jonathan Lemire as a contributing writer, the latest in a spate of monstrosities retained by the publication.

Lemire, a former Associated Press and Politico reporter, is the quintessential Democrat propagandist, having lied for years about virtually everything, big and small. He spread the lie that Donald Trump had threatened Liz Cheney with violence. He spread lies to manipulate public support for Ukraine (admitting the lies didn’t matter if they served his political preference). He assisted Democrats in defaming Trump for supposedly having “echoed Hitler’s words.” And on and on.

Of course The Atlantic, led by relentless fabulist Jeffrey Goldberg, wanted Lemire. He’s a perfect fit for a magazine that now so routinely publishes laughably extreme, absurd pieces that twice in the same month last year it had to release formal statements denying that it had run articles with titles like “To Save Democracy [Kamala] Harris May Need To Steal An Election” and “Trump Is Literally Hitler.” When your “news and opinion” operation has become so hysterical, so incorrigible that normal people could believe it really would publish those headlines, there’s something of a legitimacy crisis taking place.

The whole magazine needs to be choked off, encased in lead, and tossed into some great body of water bearing a name that fits. That will happen in due time but not without the final push it’s currently engaging in to keep some grip on influence in Washington.

The Lemire announcement comes just a few days after the magazine hired Ashley Parker — a Washington Post alum who as recently as February of last year crafted an article headlined “Russia looms over yet another Trump presidential campaign” — and her former Post colleague Michael Scherer, who with heaping professionalism characterized Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign as “the same explosive mix of white grievance and anti-immigrant nativism that helped elect him.” More Russia and more bigotry accusations. Just what The Atlantic needs to shore up its credibility.

Added to the team a little before that was former New York magazine left-winger Jonathan Chait, an enthusiastic perpetrator of the ruinous if incredibly weak accusation that Justice Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape a woman in high school, despite overwhelming evidence that the claim was fake. And these remarkable hires come after Goldberg announced in October that it would print a dozen issues per year, instead of the 10 issues it had been doing. Goodie.

The Atlantic is led by a man who twice now has spread thoroughly debunked and, in fact, patently absurd stories that Trump has callously denigrated deceased American troops, admired Hitler, and privately belittled a murder victim in racial terms. Those who could corroborate the stories have all refuted them on record, other than Trump’s embittered former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who just a few days before the 2024 election decided it was a good time (several years after the fact) to claim that Trump was a secret Hitler fan.

This is the publication quickly offering shelter to the media’s most detestable people. Time for it to be fully neutered, like the rest of the old media.