Three years ago, The Atlantic magazine published a longform article that took a lot of people by surprise. It was entitled, “THE GREAT (FAKE) CHILD-SEX-TRAFFICKING EPIDEMIC.” It dismissed the supposed “moral panic” among conservatives on the issue, saying it amounted to an “Internet conspiracy theory.”

The Atlantic published this piece just days after a CNN staffer was arrested for attempting to persuade minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity. It was also published while the Ghislaine Maxwell trial was going on. Maxwell, of course, conspired with Jeffrey Epstein to operate a sex-trafficking ring that exploited multiple children over the course of a decade. And the piece in The Atlantic came after several reports indicating that the United States, thanks largely to its open southern border, is one of the top destinations for child-sex trafficking in the world.

So why would The Atlantic run that article? That’s a question that still hasn’t been answered. Could it be, these “internet conspiracy theorists” wondered, that some of the wealthiest and powerful people in this country — like the people who run The Atlantic — might have some ulterior motive to downplay child-sex trafficking? If so, then we can be sure of one thing: a lot of very powerful and wealthy people are panicking right now. Donald Trump clearly has the momentum on his side. And this is the same Trump who, just a month ago, promised to release the full and unredacted list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. He said we would allow the public to know who exactly visited Epstein’s private island, which is a piece of information that the government has fought to conceal.

That brings us to yesterday’s alleged bombshell in The Atlantic magazine, which may be the single most desperate attempt at an “October Surprise” in the history of American politics. Here’s a summary:

So the article from Jeffrey Goldberg makes two central claims. First, Trump said he wanted generals like Hitler’s. And second, he complained about the funeral costs for a slain service member, saying he doesn’t like the idea of spending a lot of money on a Mexican. And then I guess he said, “This is MAGA country.”

It’s honestly not even worth going through the effort of debunking this — and not just because it sounds like a cliche that Jussie Smollett would come up with if you tell him to invent a way to smear Donald Trump. Maybe 20 years ago, in a different era when people actually trusted the news media, an article like this would convince some people. But we’ve been through so many high-profile media-driven hoaxes at this point that everyone already assumes this story is false, without even reading it or hearing anything else about it.

In fact, several of those high-profile media-driven hoaxes came from Jeffrey Goldberg. He was one of the leading propagandists pushing for the Iraq War. He was also a major source of Russiagate lies. More recently, you’ve probably heard about Goldberg’s article claiming that Trump called fallen soldiers “suckers and losers” when he visited a French cemetery, if only because every Democrat repeats that story as much as possible at every opportunity. 

That article cited an anonymous source that’s widely believed to be John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff at the time. Not a single person went on-the-record to confirm it. Instead, a lot of Trump officials — including people who hate Trump, like John Bolton — denied that Trump had said it. And John Bolton was on the trip to France with Trump, when the comment was supposedly made.

But none of that matters to smear merchants like Jeffrey Goldberg. His job is to serve the interests of the Defense Department and the security state, which are profoundly threatened by the possibility of another Trump presidency. So Goldberg launders these hoaxes relentlessly. And that’s what Jeffrey Goldberg is doing, once again, with this Hitler “October surprise.”

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Except in this case, it’s not really even a “surprise.” Two years ago, a book quoted John Kelly — the same guy who was probably behind the “suckers and losers” smear — saying that Trump wanted his generals to be like Hitler’s. A bunch of outlets wrote up stories about it, just in time for the midterms. 

NBC News, for example, reported:

Former President Donald Trump once complained to his White House chief of staff that his generals weren’t ‘totally loyal’ like Adolf Hitler’s during World War II, according to a book excerpt published Monday. ‘You f—-ing generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?’ Trump asked then-White House chief of staff John Kelly, according to an excerpt of ‘The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,’ co-written by New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser and New York Times correspondent Peter Baker.

That was back in 2022. So now we’re doing a re-run of this same exact hit job. This is the laziest “October Surprise” that’s ever been attempted. It doesn’t even qualify as a surprise. But predictably, Kamala Harris is pretending it is a surprise. Yesterday she spoke outside the vice president’s residence, in what can only be described as a completely deranged attempt to rile up as many lunatics as possible in an election year when two people have already tried to murder Trump. Watch:

On X, Kamala Harris’ account doubled down on this rhetoric. Whoever’s running the account wrote:

Donald Trump is out for unchecked power. He wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution. He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses.

There’s really no other way to look at this. Kamala Harris is laying the groundwork for preventing Trump from becoming president if he wins the election. She’s also inciting someone to assassinate him in the meantime. She’s openly saying he’s going to turn America into Nazi Germany. If she really believed that — and more importantly, if the deep state that controls Kamala Harris really believes that — then we can’t be surprised by anything they try to do. This is a very dangerous moment.

The entirety of the Biden-Harris administration is now pushing this rhetoric. Here’s the press secretary yesterday:

There’s just so much flagrant lying in that one clip. The “dictator on day one” quote, which we’ve heard about a million times, isn’t even close to what Trump said. He was asked, explicitly, to respond to claims he’d be a dictator. And then he joked that he wouldn’t be, “except for day one,” when he’d close the border and lift moratoriums on oil drilling. He’s referring to the executive orders he’d sign on his first day and of course, in context, he was joking around.

They’re pretending like he seriously announced that, beginning on day one and continuing throughout his entire presidency, he’d be a dictator. It’s not even close to what happened. And it’s especially outrageous considering this is coming from the party that plans to censor Americans to fight “misinformation”.

The latest Jeffrey Goldberg smear isn’t any better. The claim is that Trump praised Hitler as a role model and yet John Kelly, the source of this story, did not resign, did not reveal this publicly, did not say anything about it for years. He left the White House in January 2019. The book where he makes the Hitler claim came out in 2022. Why didn’t Kelly think to mention something like that sooner? Why does he only mention it right before elections?

Of course, the bigger problem with making “Trump is Hitler” into your closing argument is that we all experienced four years of Trump in office. Even if the guy had a shrine to Hitler where he burned incense and offered sacrifices every night, the fact would still remain that he did not govern in an authoritarian way at all. As I’ve pointed out many times, his flaw was the opposite. He was, if anything, too hesitant to wield power. That’s a mistake I’m hoping he doesn’t make if he gets a second chance.

Trump ran the most restrained presidential administration in modern American history. And they still call him a fascist dictator. If that’s the case, he may as well go in and wield power ruthlessly (yet constitutionally). As many of our parents used to say back in the old days: he should give them something to cry about.

Beyond the Hitler allegation, there are about a million other holes in this Atlantic story. Each one of these problems, independently, was reason enough to kill the story. Specifically, Jeffrey Goldberg also claims that Trump offered to pay the funeral expenses for Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private who was murdered by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas. Later, when Trump was told that the expenses totaled $60,000, the Atlantic reports that Trump said, ‘It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f—— Mexican!'”

So there’s no on-the-record source for this claim. But there are a lot of people who are going on the record denying it.

Mayra Guillén, the sister of the victim, wrote:

Wow. I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics- hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members. President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.

A translator who was in the room with Trump and the family, along with the family’s attorney, said the same thing:

After having dealt with hundreds of reporters in my legal career, this is unfortunately the first time I have to go on record and call out Jeffrey Goldberg@the Atlantic: not only did he misrepresent our conversation but he outright LIED in HIS sensational story.

MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ COMING TO DAILYWIRE+ OCT. 28

And it gets worse. Ben Williamson, who served as a communications adviser in the Trump White House, posted screenshots of his text messages with The Atlantic. He says they deliberately misrepresented what he told them in the article:

I sent Atlantic a comment saying President Trump ‘absolutely did not say that,’ referring to the alleged comments about Ms. Guillén they printed. [The] Atlantic translated that comment to ‘didn’t hear Trump say it.’ Treat this dishonest piece accordingly.

It goes on and on. Yesterday Jeffrey Goldberg was asked about the family’s reaction to his piece. And he basically said they don’t know what they’re talking about. Watch:

So the smoking gun is apparently that Trump didn’t personally pay for the funeral. That’s supposed to convince us that Trump called this woman an “f—ing Mexican.” But those two accusations aren’t remotely related. And the accusation that Trump didn’t pay for the funeral loses a lot of its impact when the family repeatedly says that Trump treated them extremely graciously, throughout all of their interactions. 

None of these smears make any sense. They are clearly convinced that they’re going to lose this election, and they’re throwing everything at the wall, hoping that it will stick. That explains why the Guardian just ran with another desperate hack job:

A former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993, in what she believed was a ‘twisted game’ between the two men. … [Stacey] Williams, who is 56 and a native of Pennsylvania, has shared parts of her allegation on social media posts in the past, but revealed details about the alleged encounter on a call on Monday organized by a group called Survivors for Kamala, which supports Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

So this is an alleged episode that happened more than 30 years ago. It never came up either of the two previous times Trump ran for president. Instead, this is just coming out now, with less than two weeks to go until the election — an election Trump looks like he’s going to win. It’s from a woman who, according to the Trump campaign and various reports, was a former Obama activist. And the allegation was first revealed during a pro-Kamala Harris event that was organized by a campaign group that’s currently taking out anti-Trump advertisements in the New York Times.

Additionally, there’s no actual proof of any of these allegations in the article. There’s a postcard and a note that suggests Trump at one point spoke to this woman. Strangely, though, the note is signed with a signature that looks very different from Trump’s other signatures from that time period. It looks more like Trump’s signature today.

And there are other problems, too. Here’s a clip of a portion of the accuser’s statement:

One of the big issues here is that, as Zerohedge pointed out, Jeffrey Epstein didn’t move into that particular mansion until 1996. That’s documented all over the place, including in The New York Times and Vanity Fair. So how was Epstein leaving his brownstone apartment there, three years earlier? I guess that’s something for the fact-checkers to look into.

With all these red flags, obviously this allegation isn’t going to convince anyone of anything. But it does highlight one of the many differences between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, which is that Trump is the only candidate who has promised to provide transparency about Jeffrey Epstein and his clients. He’s made it one of his core campaign promises. And that makes you wonder: Is Donald Trump trying to incriminate himself by releasing the Epstein client list? Or is it more likely that Trump’s political opponents are accusing him — with increasing panic — of exactly the thing they’re guilty of?

What we do know for sure is that these people are going to get increasingly desperate and deranged between now and Election Day. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the next two weeks will be unlike any other in American history. No one can possibly be prepared for the sheer amount of unhinged lying and panic that’s about to unfold. After two impeachments, two assassination attempts, and hundreds of hoaxes, Donald Trump appears to be on the verge of retaking the White House. And right now — unfortunately for hacks like Jeffrey Goldberg and the deep state that Trump has vowed to dismantle — it looks increasingly like nothing they say can stop it.

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This article has been edited for clarity.