OPINION:
The newspaper across town, which presumes to be a paper of record for the whole country, has a little problem: It is schizophrenic and sex-obsessed.
It needs a couch visit with Sigmund Freud, or at least Dr. Phil.
When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, he unaccountably let the inmates run the asylum, with progressive propaganda permeating every section, including sports.
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Last year, Mr. Bezos, a capitalist who made his billions in America’s free market system, had had enough. He reined in the editorial section, which had lurched so far left that it sounded like the Soviet Union’s Pravda or today’s Democratic Socialists of America.
On Feb. 26, 2025, The Post newsroom received a public memo from Mr. Bezos stating that the opinion section would henceforth defend “personal liberties and free markets.”
And so it has, at least in most editorials. The paper still has leftist columnists, but it has added conservative opinion content that would not be out of place in The Washington Times or The Wall Street Journal.
Oh, the horror. Editorial Page Editor David Shipley resigned immediately, followed by several other opinion staff members. It also cost The Post 75,000 online subscribers, on top of the exodus of 200,000 to 300,000 subscribers who canceled when The Post declined to endorse Kamala Harris for president in 2024.
Mr. Bezos did not seem to mind and continued bankrolling the paper, which has been losing as much as $100 million a year. The problem is that the housecleaning stopped too soon.
The paper’s feature and news sections still read today as if they were edited by Hasan Piker, Greta Thunberg and RuPaul. Here is a headline on a Foreign Policy magazine story The Post ran on Sept. 17: “By nearly every metric, the U.S. is losing the Iran war.”
Meanwhile, not a day passes without The Post pouring gasoline on the nation’s divisions. If there is no recent George Floyd, they reach back to remind readers about how awful America has always been, because, you know, straight White people.
You would think the food section would be safe, at least. You would be wrong.
On Sept. 2, food critic Tim Carmen did a two-page hit piece on Chick-fil-A and its chicken-and-waffle sandwich. He said the dish “became a staple on plantations, where enslaved cooks prepared what became known as a ’Virginia breakfast.’” He then asked, “Does this dish deserve to be on the menu of a chain with a history of intolerance?”
Say what? Oh, right. Chick-fil-A’s president defended marriage as the union of a man and a woman back in 2012, and the chain supports Christian charities.
Even The Post’s comics pages are woke. In February, “Six Chix” — a comic strip created by a rotating group of six female cartoonists — featured a panel showing a brick, with the words, “Iconic symbols of resistance.” Wow. They are a riot.
A couple of weeks ago, The Post’s chief arts critic, Philip Kennicott, wrote a scathing piece about the Trump administration’s efforts to get leftist propaganda out of the Smithsonian Institution.
“Never has the nation more urgently needed to focus on key issues, like climate change and its long history of racial, ethnic and class division,” he wrote.
Yes, keep pouring on the gasoline. Upon reading Mr. Kennicott’s screed, I easily imagined him out on a curb with other grizzled, privileged hippies, yelling, “No kings!”
On March 1, the Ask Sahaj column in the Style section fielded a question from a woman who wrote, “I have a deep fear my brown skin and hijab will make me unattractive to other people.”
Sahaj Kaur Kohli’s answer begins: “You need to accept that the messaging about beauty standards you’ve internalized is rooted in white supremacy and colonialism.”
The Post also carries a column by Shane O’Neill that appears devoted to evangelizing for sexual promiscuity. A newly divorced woman asks him how much sex she should have. He answers: “Keep on having as much sex as you want. … You’re no longer monogamous! Hooray!! As a gay guy, I’m used to getting tested every three months.”
He recommends using condoms or taking a daily pill to ward off HIV and says, “If you’re not interested in a committed monogamous relationship, finding one or two (or 16) ’regulars’ can significantly cut down on time spent looking for new partners.” How practical.
In another column, he counsels a 29-year-old woman who says she is a virgin but has decided she is a lesbian. He tells her to have sex and not worry because “Virginity is a construct. It has historically been used to control and extract monetary value from women’s bodies. … The concept has no value.”
The devil himself could not have put it better. It sounds a lot like a sermon by the wacky pastor of Texas Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico.
Moving on to films: A July 31 Tribune News Service review by Katie Walsh gave the movie “I Want Your Sex” 3½ stars — nearly a perfect score. Ms. Walsh lauds filmmaker Gregg Araki for his “message to Gen Z, which is to have some sex already. The kids could stand to be a little more kinky, a little more queer, to get out of their heads and into their bodies.”
I do not know about you, but I would not let anybody impressionable near The Washington Post until it gets over its schizophrenia.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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