The Washington Post Bloodbath Shows The Essence of Being A Leftist Is Being Dismissed As Unserious for Being Correct Too Early
The left was right about Jeff Bezos, Venezuela, immigration, and a lot of other things.
In August of 2019, Bernie Sanders gave a speech at a campaign stop in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, that ruffled some feathers at Jeff Bezos’ Substack, The Washington Post. The Vermont Senator said the Post’s negative coverage of him was a result of his frequent criticism of Amazon’s labor practices, which irked Jeff Bezos, who owns both companies. Given what was known about Bezos and mainstream media, it was a reasonable claim. Still, executive editor Marty Baron derided Sanders’ statement, calling it a “conspiracy theory” that Bezos would personally influence the Post’s coverage.
“Sen. Sanders is a member of a large club of politicians — of every ideology — who complain about their coverage. Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor, Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.” — Marty Baron, August 13th, 2019
Flash forward to 2026. Earlier this week, Jeff Bezos personally instructed The Washington Post to lay off one-third of its staff. In what was described as a “bloodbath,” Bezos shuttered the signature podcast Post Reports and sections covering books, sports, and tech, with the largest cuts impacting foreign correspondents. The Ukrainian bureau chief was fired while she was inside a war zone, and the entire Middle East desk was let go. (It’s not like that’s an important region for Americans to know about or anything.) The Post’s beat reporter covering Amazon, Caroline O’Donovan, was also fired. Weird coincidence!
When announcing the layoffs, executive editor Matt Murray stated employee quality was not the issue. The message was clear: Bezos was pulling strings. Another executive editor took Murray’s further by explicitly blaming Jeff Bezos in a Facebook statement. The executive editor wrote:
“The Post’s challenges, however, were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top — from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity. Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands.”
The owner, in a note to readers, wrote that he aimed to boost trust in The Post. The effect was something else entirely: Subscribers lost trust in his stewardship and, notwithstanding the newsroom’s stellar journalism, The Post overall. Similarly, many leading journalists at The Post lost confidence in Bezos, and jumped to other news organizations. They also, in effect, were driven away. Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction."“
Those words were written by Marty Baron.
There is a popular saying in leftist circles: the essence of being a leftist is being dismissed as unserious for being correct too early. Time and time again, progressives, socialists, and every other “-ist” or “-ism” that make up the political left have their well-founded political analysis discarded as ridiculous by centrists and rightists, who consider themselves the only two forms of Very Serious Political People. Time and time again, reality vindicates the leftist position and leaves our haters and losers, of which there are many, with egg on their face. Blinded by ego and the comfortable world view that everything will magically work out (as it tends to do for wealthy media personalities and politicos), these figures only come to realize our analysis was correct far too late — in this case, Marty Baron, who once discarded Jeff Bezos influencing The Post as “a conspiracy theory,” and is now blaming Bezos for “one of the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.” (Baron’s words.)
While it’s not surprising that the left was 100% correct about how capitalist oligarchy would inevitably degrade important social institutions, our theories on American imperialism, immigration, and even the rise of authoritarianism have been confirmed. Yet, there is an institutional narcissism that drives anti-leftists to contort themselves into previously unimaginable shapes to find a way to confirm the left was correct without actually saying so. Let’s take a look.
Speaking of The Washington Post, last month I was reading the coverage of Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela when I came across this paragraph that stopped me in my tracks.
“For decades, many leftists in the Americas and elsewhere saw the United States as a plundering hegemon — a country that, in their view, wielded its peerless military might and diplomatic clout in the service of cynical political interests, undermining governments it didn’t favor while boosting the access of U.S. corporations. The specter of “imperialismo yanqui” long loomed over Latin American politics, steeped in histories of U.S. coup plots, interventions and domineering gunboat diplomacy. It was weaponized by Maduro’s regime and has animated criticism of U.S. foreign policy in all corners of the globe.
With its latest moves, “the U.S. administration of the wildest imagination of Latin American leftists has come to life,” Filipe Campante, a professor of international economics at Johns Hopkins University, told me. The White House is confronting its hemispheric neighbors with a world where “all bets are off” and where U.S. policy is “very hard to predict because it’s very personalistic and unconstrained,” he said.” — Trump’s anti-globalism looks like old-school Yankee imperialism
The author, award-winning commentator Ishaan Tharoor, wastes words saying what he can’t bring himself to admit: the left was correct. If something is proven true, in this case, the left-wing anti-imperialist argument that the United States of America plunders weaker nations to benefit capitalist expansion, then those who predicted it were not conjuring a “wild imagination” — they were analysing. Correctly, I might add. There is no world in which Donald Trump magically stumbled into creating a foreign policy that matched the supposed hallucinations of Latin American leftists. Rather, those leftists saw where American policy was heading and accurately predicted what would come to pass.
It is even more outlandish to say the Maduro regime “weaponized” the spectre of American imperialism when “coup plots, interventions, and domineering gunboat diplomacy” is a verbatim description of America’s hostility in the Caribbean. The United States invaded Venezuela, couped their government, and has anchored gunboats off the Venezuelan coast to force the nation to sell us its oil — a project led by America’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. After kidnapping the Venezuelan president, the United States told the vice president to comply with their demands, or she and her cabinet would be killed. Despite ousting the man the U.S. falsely claims conducted Venezuelan narco-trafficking, our Navy is still murdering innocent boaters in the Caribbean. The Venezuelan government didn’t “weaponize” American aggression. It correctly called out and responded to that very real aggression. Calling this a “weaponization” is like saying the NYC firedepartment “weaponized” the second plane flying to the Towers to clear people from Ground Zero. This is the kind of preposterous anti-logic you get when trying to avoid the truth: Latin American leftists were right to raise the alarm about imperialismo yanqui, and those who laughed them off were foolish.
If this practice were limited to a single Washington Post column, then it would hardly be worth our time. But as this sentiment has been uttered by multiple members of the Very Serious political commentariat, it seems there is a tactic at play. Here’s my best friend and idol, Matt Yglesias, offering a similar comment on Trump’s Venezuela operation.
By insinuating that Donald Trump is working backwards from the “bad leftist takes” on foreign policy, commentators such as Matthew Yglesias are attempting to paint Donald Trump as a unique political phenomenon, a lone madman ruining what they consider centuries of responsible American governance. While Trump is more brash, outwardly cruel, and impulsive than his predecessors, he is nothing new. Trump is simply the most violent and extreme leader of an already violent and extreme country. (The president between Trump’s two terms conducted a genocide, after all.) It’s undeniable that Trump killing almost two hundred Venezuelans and arresting their president on bogus firearms charges is extreme. But from the viewpoint of a Venezuelan, is it any less extreme than any of the other coups America has attempted against their nation, including the one Democratic Senator Chris Murphy admitted to plotting?
Too deep in the echo chamber of reactionary centrism, which sees the right as needing to be understood but never blamed and the left as blamed but never understood, Yglesias (and the many others like him) can only offer brain-numbing explanations for why the left was right, and he was wrong.
In addition to our proven track records on economic oligarchy and foreign policy, the left has also been undeniably correct about the fascist character of Trump and the Republican Party. For over a decade, leftists have accurately called Trump a fascist, drawing no shortage of criticism from Republicans and Democrats who urged us to “turn down the rhetoric.” But when John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, called him a fascist before the 2024 election, Pete Buttigieg gave us one of the funniest tweets of all time.
“When a leftist says X, it’s crazy. But when a Very Serious Republican agrees with the leftists, then we know it’s real.”
Then, of course, there are those on the right who championed Trump as the Working Man’s Candidate, and now want to stop being criticized for it without admitting they were wrong. Here’s a clip of comedian Andrew Schulz doing just that. Schulz, who hosted Trump on his podcast before the election and proudly voted for him, calls the administration’s response to the ICE killing of Alex Pretti a “turning point.” Notice how Schulz frames his statement, speaking as if the “most far-left critiques” happened to come true by pure coincidence.
“It all the sudden becomes not liberal catastrophic thinking, it starts to become reasonable, nuanced criticism of the administration. They have just made the most far-left critiques of the Trump administration, [the Trump administration’s reaction to this], has justified all of them.”
This is the same rhetorical device used by Ishaan Tharoor when he claimed Trump’s invasion of Venezuela made “the wildest imagination of Latin American leftists come to life.” Attempting to preserve his ego, Schulz frames his heel turn on Trump as Trump foolishly “making the far left critiques justified,” ignoring that those critiques were reasonable, nuanced, and justified to begin with. While Schulz is a bit of an outlier in that he’s one of Joe Rogan’s friends who all learned about politics in 2022 and immediately anointed themselves experts, I have a theory on why more established politicos can’t bring themselves to say “the left was correct,” even when they confirm our theories. Let’s take a look at the most salient political issue in America, immigration.
Compassionate immigration, or, more specifically, the need to abolish ICE, is another long-standing leftist position that has been proven correct beyond a doubt. Putting aside the need to protect Americans from violent blackshirts sent to destroy neighborhoods that voted against the president, opposing Trump’s fascist “immigration” policy is a political winner. Poll after poll shows that Americans want ICE to be abolished. However, the Democratic establishment is hesitant to attack ICE, whether that be “defunding” or “abolishing” it. There are multiple reasons for this reluctance. Likely the largest is that some Democrats are much more conservative than their voters, and are more comfortable with Trump’s violent immigration regime than the desired immigration policies of their base. However, I can’t help but feel the personal and institutional narcissism of the Democratic establishment refuses to admit that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and The Squad, who have been calling to abolish ICE since 2018, have been correct all along. For over a year, the centrist blogging army has lectured that Democrats needed to move rightward on immigration and adopt some of Trump’s draconian policies. Matt Yglesias infamously stood on the Welcome Fest stage and claimed it was bad politics for Democrats to visit Abrego Garcia in El Salvador (it wasn’t), and Josh Barro wrote in The New York Times last September that Democrats need to support ICE deportations. Barro even offers the Abundance version of J.D. Vance’s claim that illegal immigrants are taking up all the housing, saying ICE deportations will decrease housing demand (they won’t).
“But if we build a system where people very often get to stay here simply because they made it in — the system that prevailed during most of Mr. Biden’s term — then we don’t really have an immigration policy, and voters won’t have any reason to believe us when we say our new policy will produce different results about who comes here.
Liberals also note, accurately, that there are negative economic consequences to a stepped-up program of interior enforcement that doesn’t focus narrowly on criminals. Unauthorized immigrants play an important role in our work force, especially in agriculture and construction. More deportations will make it more expensive to grow fruits and vegetables and reduce the number of housing units we can add. (On the other hand, it will also reduce demand for housing.) But these near-term economic costs need to be weighed against the way that stepped-up interior enforcement makes any future immigration policy more credible and more effective by sending migrants the message that they need a valid visa to stay in the United States.
Notice how Barro explicitly states that if Democrats create a system in which “people get to stay here because they’re already here,” voters will lose trust. But according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, Americans greatly prefer a pathway to citizenship over the deportation regime Barro encourages. Barro, Yglesias, and the other reactionary centrists were exactly wrong. Polls show voters want ICE abolished and prefer a system in which people who live here and contribute are allowed to stay and become naturalized citizens.
Nearly 6 in 10 voters (59 percent) say they would prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the United States a pathway to legal status, while 34 percent say they would prefer deporting most undocumented immigrants in the United States.
If you’ve read JoeWrote before, you know the moderate/centrist/whatever faction that Barro and Yglesias represent is in full-on survival mode after delivering the Democratic Party one of the most embarrassing losses in a generation. They do so by pretending they are not ideologues, but neutral truth tellers. But that marketing only works if they discard the entire leftist project as unserious. The moment they admit, “Hey, Bernie Sanders was right,” their entire project collapses. They’re no longer the “reasonable centrists,” but revealed as partisan ideologues fighting against the left, within and outside the Democratic Party. I can’t imagine being that cynical, but honestly, it doesn’t matter.
The American people see the right and center as evil and useless, and they’re much smarter than these political factions give them credit for. When they read a paragraph that absurdly characterizes the left’s correct analysis as happenstance, or derides something as obvious as a billionaire putting his finger on the media scale, they see that the left is correct and others are trying to hide it. Our credibility increases while our foe’s decreases. So if you’re someone who is reluctant to admit that the progressives are right, please, by all means, keep doing it.
And if you’re just a typical American wondering which political faction is going to improve your life and help get the country out of this mess, you might as well bet on the horse with a proven track record.
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In Solidarity — Joe
America’s problem has always been hating hippies worse than Nazis.
This is a great piece. You illustrate how, when imperialists do what imperialists are gonna do, in the US the media blames leftist analysis for giving the imperialists the idea in the first place!
As if there were no economic forces, no profit motives, no burning desire for American hegemony on the part of its rulers, just bad ideas that would go away if only those annoying leftists would stop thinking bad thoughts.
Which is just one step away from "Feel the Joy!" It's one reason Kamala lost to Trump.