I Am Begging the Washington Post to Please Let Me Stop Mocking Them

    The Washington Post needs to stop. The paper has been destroyed at the hands of owner Jeff Bezos, who has fired half the staff and changed the editorial direction. The former employees of the paper have to stop demanding their jobs back, and former columnists and editors need to stop doing their performative I-Am-Special routines online. 

    I just can’t take much more of the pleasure of seeing this evil leviathan crumble, and seeing the former employees demand their worthless old jobs back. It’s like an affair with the world’s most beautiful woman – pure ecstasy, yet you may die of euphoria. 

    The latest: A group of former Washington Post employees arrived at their former place of employment this week, then expressed surprise when their key cards would not let them in the building. They were there to protest the cuts that had cost them their jobs, but couldn’t even get in the building. Instead, they took to X to deliver appeals like this:

“These cuts make no sense and don’t appear to have been made by anyone with any passing understanding of what our team did or does. You took a group that had real passion for the work and people they did it with and turned that into a group that feels betrayed, broken, confused.”

“What will the Post do the next time a gunman opens fire in a school classroom? Who is going to make the gut wrenching calls to the parents, friends and classmates of the students who are killed?”

“I didn’t want to be disconnected from my beloved colleagues. I wanted to be with them no matter what happened. If I was to be spared, I wanted to support those who were not. And if I was to be let go, I wanted to feel the unity of my colleagues.”

    These confessionals are reminiscent of a scene in the great movie Shattered Glass, about Stephen Glass, the serial liar who published a bunch of fake stories in The New Republic in the 1990s. Glass got caught, but even afterwards showed up at the office, gobsmacked that he was no longer an employee. “What does that mean?” He asked. “It means you’re fired,” came the reply from an editor. “You no longer work here. You lost your job.” Glass, shattered, cries hysterically and says he doesn’t feel safe. He is the model for what the Washington Post became over the last several decades. 

    And yet, after all of that, Rolling Stone magazine still decided to publish Glass. “Canada’s Pot Revolution” ran in September 2003.

    Hot Air readers know that I have hammered the Washington Post often, due to the paper trying to destroy my life during the Brett Kavanaugh SCOTUS nomination. Readers have indulged me, and with the end of the Washington Post, I assure them that I realize it is indeed time to move on. I had intended to do just that when I opened my computer today and saw the video of the Post employees appearing on K street, demanding access to the building that is no longer their workplace. 

    So friends, as the great Count Basie used to say, one more time. Because the truth is that had the Washington Post, or The New Republic, or Slate, or any of these Stasi bullhorns bothered to give me a job when I turned to the right in 1990, I could have saved them. They refused to hire conservatives, and conservatives have great BS detectors. 

    One of the notorious pieces Stephen Glass fabricated was “Spring Breakdown,” a 1997 article about the conservative C-PAC convention. Glass described a scene of drugs, booze, and sexual assault, none of which was true. I knew this at the time because I was at the 1997 C-PAC. I still remember a phone conversation I had at the time with Tucker Carlson, Carlson had read the Glass piece and wanted to know if I had seen anything that The New Republic had described. I had not.

    In 2001, a man named Jay Forman wrote an article called “Monkeyfishing” that was published in Slate. As Jack Shafer, the editor at Slate who edited and published the piece, would later write, “almost immediately, bloggers, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, and the New York Times gouged huge holes in the piece.”  The piece claimed that people were fishing for monkeys in the Florida Keys. I had written for Shafer for the Washington City Paper, a weekly he edited in the 1980s. Shafer had refused to hire me at Slate in the 1990s because my politics had changed. As with The New Republic, I could have saved Shafer’s reputation by simply stating the obvious before publication. There’s no such thing as monkeyfishing. Like most liberal journalists, Shafer failed upwards, becoming the media reporter for Politico. He was fired a few years ago and is now online weeping for the theater kids at the Washington Post.

    Another guy who got his start at the City Paper was Jake Tapper. Tapper and I have occasionally communicated over the last few years, especially when I was briefly in the media spotlight in 2018. At the time, I was taking care of my mother, who had dementia. Had Tapper once asked me about it, I would have said explicitly that President Biden had dementia. Tapper never asked. The last time we communicated was in a DM he sent me expressing his displeasure with my review of his last book.

    Worth noting: I recently called out what I believe is an obvious case of Glassian fraud by a journalist named Jamie Hood. Hood’s book Trauma Plot recounts a series of sexual assaults that Hood allegedly suffered over the course of two years. I found the stories unbelievable, and contacted NPR, The Atlantic, and other places that had interviewed Hood, flagging the questionable stories. No one responded. The modern media now gives the progeny of Stephen Glass a pass. They have ignored people like me for years. I was the lifeguard they pushed away.

    Finally, there is the Washington Post. In the past several years, I have written a book, several articles, and gone on television to debunk their atrocious 2018 coverage of Brett Kavanaugh and their attempt to destroy my life. I have written extensively about that and the disgraceful behavior of the Post at that time – how the paper left exonerating witnesses out of their stories, sent me misleading emails trying to catch me off-guard, doing ridiculous deep dives into how many beers I drank, the girls I dated, and our high school underground newspaper, the Unknown Hoya. The Post also did a profile of a guy named Mike Sacks, who talked trash about what Brett and I were like in high school. The problem? Mike Sacks, by his own admission, has never laid eyes on Brett Kavanaugh or me.

    This is why they fail. Readers at Hot Air and other right-leaning outlets have been patient, letting me work out this rage and this trauma while I hoped against hope that the Barad-dur on K Street would eventually crumble. It has. The Ring has been destroyed.

    So please, Washington Post, no more performances in the lobby or testimonials online.  I’m Irish, and we as a people are simply not built for this much happiness.

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