Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Brooks Hudson, a PhD candidate in history at Southern Illinois University.
The Atlantic, as one critic remarked, “perfectly captures…the puzzled dining club member’s approach to civic and political organizing, and the all-around obtuseness of elite discourse”; it is an “ideological compromised organ of beltway consensus.” Matt Christman, of Chapo Trap House fame, quipped in one episode that The Atlantic is “neoliberal Dabiq,” a death-cult of discredited ideas concealed in a glossy facade. Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic‘s editor-in-chief, was an early and enthusiastic promoter of the Iraq War, injecting into the bloodstream such fantasies as the collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. His journalistic style, as one watchdog organization put it, was “complete with cherry-picked evidence, dubious inferences, rejection of contradictory evidence and ideological blinders.”
Don’t get me wrong, The Atlantic isn’t total garbage, but, like a kitchen after Thanksgiving, garbage is involved.
By that I mean that the Atlantic has a tendency to generate two kinds of content: the inane and the disingenuous. An example of the former: attributing “bigotry on the right,” to the left. Another example: solving New York’s subway system à la hoverboards.
But Annie Lowrey’s recent article, “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts,” isn’t inane, just disingenuous.
