On the Washington Post

Jeff Bezos made a big announcement yesterday.

Image: https://x.com/besttrousers/status/1894779644726886677

Specifically, Bezos says:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

This is a significant editorial change, but it's important to be clear what this is. This isn’t an anti-liberal move, it’s an anti-populist move. We knew from Bezo’s October editorial and post-election meetings that he was realigning to Trump. But we didn’t know what form that realignment would take.

By adopting the libertarian editorial line, Bezos is less cutting off Trump criticism and more redirecting it towards the populist faction.

Of course, any additional editorial control would put pressure on the Washington Post subscriber base. Surely, this isn’t a profitable decision. But when looking at the future trajectory of the Washington Post, Bezos is directing Trump criticism in the long term, not shutting it.

Many commentators got this one wrong. Maybe they’re just not informed about the current tensions within the Right. Two people who got it right are Richard Hanania and Sohrab Ahmari , who probably hate each other.

Sohrab writes:

While the story has a dog-bites-man quality — breaking: tycoon prefers low taxes and weak unions — it’s still a dismaying turn. Since the Wall Street Journal comment pages (where I cut my teeth) are also strictly committed to free-market libertarianism, it leaves the New York Times opinion page as the only national print outlet where writers can argue for greater union density and more robust antitrust enforcement, say, or against Wall Street’s hollowing out of the real economy.

And here is Richard:

We just don’t have institutions that aren’t either leftist or MAGAfied. [Places] that will give the pro-market perspective without ruining it by wrapping it up in a package of lies. DOGE is “pro-market” but also a dishonest project, which makes claims that anyone with the least bit of knowledge about how government works can see are ridiculous.