Thursday, March 23, 2023

America's Worst Humans

Jon Chait.
Chait may be the most unreconstructed of all (with the exception, perhaps, of Stephens), in his argumentative mode. In one of his recent trans-panic specials, he recreates his most notorious pro-war pieces almost frame-for-frame: He expresses his sympathy with the goals of the left (peace/protecting trans children), then accuses them of undermining their allegedly shared goal with extremism and bad manners (calling Bush a liar/writing angry letters to the New York Times). And he does this on the basis of mendacious, ideologically-driven intelligence, which he takes at face value: WMDs in the former case, an activist gender clinic “whistleblower” in the other.