The Atlantic Compares Walter Kirn to Donald Trump
The latest "What happened to you, man?" piece goes next-level
The Atlantic churned out a paint-by-numbers hit piece on my friend Walter Kirn this week, and yes, I’m pissed about it. Really, is there no end to this nastiness? The chief complaint of “The Blindness of Elites” is that Walter, formerly well-regarded smart person, spends too much time complaining about “elites” instead of Donald Trump:
He cares less about Trump’s rampage through American democracy, or even the lunacy and violence of January 6, than he does about the selfish and self-satisfied elites—all noblesse, no oblige—who sparked that anger and sustained it.
Much of the rest of the article strains in search of a narrative that just isn’t there. The strongest thing one could say about Walter Kirn’s attitude toward Donald Trump is that the man occupies such a tiny percentage of his thoughts as to be totally irrelevant to any effort to describe who Walter is. He doesn’t stay up nights thinking about Trump one way or another, which isn’t described as evidence of a healthy life outlook but treated with suspicion, like a kind of deception. God knows how many times author Thomas Chatterton Williams had to prod Walter about Trump before he said he doesn’t believe he is a “unique challenge in American history for which we should throw away all sorts of liberties and prerogatives that we are going to want back.”
Jackpot! With such an attitude, he might as well be Trump, which is what Williams suggested after Walter referenced a famed story that’s been told a million times — by the New York Times, NBC, ABC, the Washington Post, even NPR — about George Bush’s grandfather Prescott stealing the skull of the warrior Geronimo:
The story might be apocryphal (there’s no hard evidence that Geronimo’s grave was looted, though some historians consider it plausible). But it captures something essential about Kirn, who can seem, like Trump himself, less concerned with the strict facticity of the claims he makes than with the sins of the people he’s attacking.
There’s high comedy in a magazine edited by leading WMD proponent Jeffrey Goldberg fretting about anyone else’s “facticity,” but it gets worse:
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