Does Writing for The Atlantic Make You Stupid?

Graeme Wood is not a stupid man. At least, I didn’t think so until now. 

But apparently, having a job writing for The Atlantic requires getting a lobotomy or being hypnotized into a stupor, Or, perhaps, just being OK with lying to your audience. 

Yeah it’s a huge mystery why they all did that. Somebody dig up Robert Stack and get him on the case. We may never know the answer to this one. pic.twitter.com/fy3vBWKxPJ

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) January 24, 2025

Wood writes a piece perfect for the Laurene Powell-Jobs version of The Atlantic. It combines a surface erudition with an idiotic premise: intelligence officials should have known they were misleading people by putting the imprimatur of “intelligence” on a deeply flawed analysis when they claimed the Hunter Biden laptop and violating all the norms of their profession–and yet we will never know why they chose to do it. 

It is a total mystery. 

Wood describes why this matters:

The intelligence professionals who signed the letter (which was drafted by former CIA Acting Director Michael Morrell) warned readers that they did not know whether the laptop’s contents were “genuine or not,” and said they had no “evidence of Russian involvement,” only suspicions. The signatories included former directors of the NSA, CIA, and the Office of National Intelligence, and many others with long and distinguished service to the United States. These figures provided intelligence and analysis to presidents, generals, congressmen, and others. The core of their job—the reason anyone listens to them—is devotion to an almost priestly ethos of analytical rigor. They speak only after marshaling all available resources to find all the facts that can be known; they deliver briefings based on everything they know—not just the facts they like—and without political tilt or opinion. The public never gets classified briefings. Those who have clearance to get them are meant to be confident that when the briefers speak, they speak with authority, clarity, and dispassion. The experience should be like listening to a great trial lawyer. You should wonder why anyone would bother disagreeing.

Why these titans of intelligence were willing to risk their hard-won credibility on the possibility that Hunter Biden might not be a slimeball is deeply mysterious. Even considering their caveats, somehow they signed and published their letter without due diligence and without the slightest consideration that Hunter was, in fact, prone to shady behavior. No doubt they felt that the laptop story was urgent, because it could affect the election in a few weeks. But their job was to seek facts and judge them with restraint. In this case, minimal fact-seeking would entail asking the Bidens if the sordid laptop was real, and restraint would entail not venturing wild accusations. The letter does not suggest that the authors asked the Bidens—although they certainly could have, since (according to a 2023 House Intelligence report) the letter originated with a call to them from Antony Blinken, then a Biden-campaign official and later secretary of state. Did the Biden team lie about the laptop, or claim Hunter had no memory of it? Or did the authors never even bother to inquire if it belonged to Hunter? In either case, the letter exhibited extremely shoddy analytic craftsmanship. Some signers of the letter had access to classified briefings, and could have asked their old colleagues in the intelligence community whether the laptop was a Russian hoax. In 2023, House investigators asked James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence and one of the drafters of the letter, why he did not ask for a briefing. “Because I didn’t want to be tainted by access to classified information,” he told them.

That won’t be a problem anymore. Because they were excessively generous to one candidate over the other, the letter signers left the impression that they were on the Democratic team—and, moreover, that they would lower their standards in order to influence an American election. Connoisseurs of irony will note that the CIA has, historically, had few scruples about influencing foreign elections, and will ask why they would hesitate to influence an American one. But to influence even a foreign election takes approval from the White House, and to influence a domestic one is flagrantly illegal. Like Bolton, these signers should have known that they were violating a deeply ingrained taboo. If they did not know that Trump, a man too petty and unrestrained to realize that vindictiveness is a sign of weakness, would punish them as soon as he could, then they too are not as intelligent as I thought.

Wood’s analysis is mostly sound–what these men did was betray the standards of their profession. Wood clearly understands that and dances around the point, but he can’t actually SAY it. 

Why not? Because Trump. 80% of the article is actually about how petty, nasty, and vindictive Trump is. He can’t write an article that simply says: “Hey! These guys deserved what they got and more because they maliciously interfered with a domestic election with the same abandon they did in foreign elections, just as Trump said they did.”

Wood even kinda-sorta admits that the Hunter Biden laptop wasn’t just repulsive–but implicated Biden in real corruption. He refuses to outright say the obvious, but he at least admits it looks pretty damning. 

t contained images of him in states of undress, apparently doped up, and in acts of sexual congress. The contents were so sleazy that even if the laptop were a Russian hoax, which it was not, the hard drives should have been power-washed, submerged in isopropyl alcohol, and thrown into an active volcano purely as a sanitary measure. The former president’s son also appeared in emails to be seeking to profit off his father’s office.

Why can’t Wood just say what he means? The point of the article is clear once you strip away the vast amounts of attacks on Trump (none of which I bothered to quote here because, well, you have heard it all a thousand times before): the “51 Intelligence Officials” letter was a deep state/Intelligence Community Operation to corrupt a U.S. election, and these guys deserved to have their security clearances stripped. 

Instead, he says, “Why these titans of intelligence were willing to risk their hard-won credibility on the possibility that Hunter Biden might not be a slimeball is deeply mysterious.”

No, it isn’t. And since I assume that Wood is not actually stupid, lobotomized, or hypnotized, I must conclude that writing for The Atlantic requires a willingness to lie even when you are desperate to tell the truth. Laurene Powell-Jobs’ Atlantic must never acknowledge anything that makes Trump look like anything other than always the bad guy. 

It’s sad, really. Over the years, the magazine has published some wonderful work, and many of its writers today have the potential to be worth reading because they have sharp minds. Wood could have written what he meant, and it would have been a worthy contribution to a matter of national importance. 

But Trump. Never say a good word about Trump or indict his opponents for wrongdoing. 

Sad.