'Attacks on Knowledge' Are Coming From Inside The Atlantic

For reasons I'll never fully comprehend, the Left doesn't understand this simple law of the universe:

The other side gets to move and shoot, too.

The Left always believes they'll hold the levers of power and, absent that, that they'll use the bully pulpit of the courts to bypass the will of the people and continue to force their agenda on the rest of us. They can't conceive of a world where they don't lord over the rest of us, and they can't imagine being forced to live by their own rules.

More than that, the Left (as I said here) believes history began yesterday and ends tomorrow, so everything they do is done with their immediate goals and need for instant gratification in mind. The long-term consequences aren't even a consideration, because they can't see past the next news (or election) cycle.

The other thing about the Left is this: they are masters of the art of projection. Everything they accuse the Right of being and doing is actually who they are and what they're doing.

The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.
These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

This argument might hold weight if it weren't for the fact that the Left waged war on all of this for years.

We'll look at the Atlantic itself. On May 20th -- just a week ago -- Mark Leibovich penned an article titled 'Biden's Age Wasn't a Cover-Up. It Was Observable Fact.' But a year ago Leibovich himself was singing a very different tune, accusing people who pointed out that 'observable fact' of Biden's decline were lying.

Watch for yourself:

Wow that's interesting Mark, because last year you said that people questioning Biden's condition were "lying" https://t.co/cMQ7Wv47TM pic.twitter.com/USV4veEcng
— Bill D'Agostino (@Banned_Bill) May 21, 2025

Writer Yasmin Tayag wrote a piece defending Biden's 'cognitive fluctuations' in July 2024 - just days after the disastrous debate.

On May 7th, Tayag also told readers that breakfast as we know it was coming to an end, courtesy of climate change and Donald Trump:

Ordering eggs at a restaurant will put even more of a dent in your wallet. Earlier this year, the breakfast chain Waffle House imposed a temporary 50-cent “egg surcharge,” and Denny’s followed suit with a surcharge that varies by regio n. (Denny’s and Waffle House did not respond to a request for comment.) At restaurants, the price of eggs probably won’t return to pre-bird-flu levels anytime soon, even when outbreaks subside. “In general, stuff tends to not get cheaper,” Miller said. And any reprieve from egg shortages is likely to be short-lived: Scientists predict that bird-flu outbreaks will return year after year, unless the virus is brought under control. Until that changes, the tradition of centering eggs in the morning meal will be costly to uphold.
Another factor endangering the classic breakfast is climate change. The global coffee supply has fallen precipitously because of extreme weather in Brazil and Vietnam, which together produce more than half the world’s beans. Since January 2020, the shortages have driven up the retail price of ground coffee by 75 percent. So far, coffee importers have shouldered most of the rising costs to shield consumers, but “eventually something has to give,” Miller said. Orange juice is likewise drying up.

Then there was Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg publishing the Signal texts from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and others they claimed included top-secret 'war plans.'

That, too, was a lie.

In 2022, Atlantic writer Maggie Mertens insisted the problem with transgendered athletes was not boys playing against girls, but that we didn't help girls enough:

Decades of research have shown that sex is far more complex than we may think. And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential. “Science is increasingly showing how sex is dynamic; it has multiple aspects and also shifts; for example, social experiences can actually change levels of sex-related hormones like testosterone in our bodies in a second-to-second and month-to-month way!” Sari van Anders, the research chair in social neuroendocrinology at Queen’s University, in Ontario, told me by email.

None of this is accurate.

It was also the Atlantic that claimed Elon Musk turned X into a 'white supremacist site,' and let staff writer George Packer say the reason Black and Latino voters were supporting Trump was because they were 'uneducated.'

Two weeks before the 2024 election, the Atlantic ran an unsourced story in which they claimed President Trump was unhappy about the funeral costs for U.S. soldier Vanessa Guillen -- one that was refuted by Mark Meadows and Guillen's own sister. It also claimed Trump praised Hitler and the Nazis, and CBS News ran with the Atlantic's story as its evening news lead story on October 22.

They also came to the defense of Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who lied about Justice Brett Kavanaugh in an effort to derail his appointment to the Supreme Court:

The professor had prepared for the occasion as if it was a lecture, marshaling details and context, aiming for clarity. Kavanaugh spoke after Ford, and the gulf between the two testimonies was, in retrospect, an omen. She offered evidence. He offered grievance. She spoke science. He spoke politics. She was piecing together fragments of a story, parts of which she had forgotten. He was controlling the narrative.

Blasey Ford offered precisely zero evidence to back up the claims she leveled at Kavanaugh, of course. She was a tool the Left gladly used to undermine an eminently qualified man from the Supreme Court because they didn't like the politics of the person who nominated him.

So, after all of this, I have to ask this question: has Adam Serwer read the publlication he writes for? Have his editors?

Because if there's anyone waging an 'attack on knowledge itself' it's the Atlantic.

Which is why their bloviating about Trump isn't worth the paper it's written on.