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.