imagine you’re a war correspondent for a major American newspaper. you’ve been assigned to cover the war in Ukraine. conditions totally fucking suck. there’s no heat, electricity or running water.
but you’re not bothered by any of that shit. you love your job — because it’s enthralling. there’s nothing else like it in the world.
now imagine you’re in the middle of doing all that, when out of the clear blue, you get an email telling you that your job’s gone fuckity-bye.
if you’re Washington Post reporter Lizzie Johnson, you don’t have to imagine — because that’s exactly what just happened.
“I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone. I have no words. I’m devastated.”
oh, lovely. how the fuck is Lizzie Johnson supposed to find her way home? what the hell?
and it wasn’t just Johnson who got told her job had been sent to a big farm upstate, where it will have lots of room to run around. over three hundred of her Post colleagues got shitcanned yesterday morning.
here’s just some of the carnage: metro DC news, cut way back. the sports section, gone. book and theater reviews, gone. podcasts, gone.
but perhaps most egregiously, they’re cutting their foreign bureaus. if you want to know what’s happening in places like Kyiv or the Middle East, don’t look at the Post. it’s no longer their responsibility.
how the fuck can you even call yourself a major newspaper if you’re not covering what’s going on in the world? this is the Washington Fucking Post we’re talking about, not the Podunk Pennysaver.
here’s how devastating the cuts were: Peter Finn, WaPo’s International Editor, demanded he be fired on the spot, rather than take any part in this fuckery.
Peter Finn, the section’s editor, requested that he be laid off rather than be involved in planning the cuts once he learned about their scope, according to two people with knowledge of his decision.
the Washington Post’s corporate overlords claim they had no choice but to make these cuts, because the paper lost over one hundred million dollars last year. but these same overlords want to make one thing perfectly clear: these mass firings are actually good news.
do you want to know the real reason the Post is doing this? it’s because they love you — the reader — so much!
I shit you not. check out this dollop of industrial-strength bullshit-speak.
“The Washington Post is taking a number of difficult but decisive actions today for our future, in what amounts to a significant restructuring across the company,” the Post said in a statement. “These steps are designed to strengthen our footing and sharpen our focus on delivering the distinctive journalism that sets The Post apart and, most importantly, engages our customers.”
oh, I see. the Post is gutting its staff and reducing its coverage in order to make it all better. sure, now that you’ve explained it, that makes perfect sense to me.
there are really only two words that come to mind when faced with this level of piss-on-your-head-and-tell-you-it’s-raining corporate-ese. the first one rhymes with fuck, and the second with you.
let’s lay the blame for this atrocity exactly where it belongs: at the feet of Jeff Bezos, the Donny-snuggling gazillionaire who laughs like some fucked-up cartoon villain.
it was Bezos’ own disastrous decisions that led to the Post bleeding money.
first, a week before the 2024 election, Bezos phoned up the editor of the Post and told him not to run their planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. Bezos didn’t want to make Donny mad, just in case he happened to win. hundreds of thousands of angry Post subscribers canceled their subscriptions in response.
then, in February 2025, Bezos announced the Post was no longer going to tolerate ‘left of center views’ on their editorial page. instead, they were going to focus on ‘personal liberties and free markets.’ once again, hundreds of thousands of subscribers canceled their subscriptions.
why would Bezos deliberately antagonize his readership? because doesn’t give a shit. he’d rather curry favor with his new despot snugglebunny, Donny Convict.
Jeffrey Beez is not a newspaper guy. he doesn’t bleed black ink, as the saying used to go. he’s a business honcho. the Post is a just line item on a spreadsheet.
listen to your Uncle Bernie Sanders.
“If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don’t tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.”
democracy dies up Jeff Bezos’ ass.
let’s be clear here. Bezos spends his money like a drunken sailor. he flushed $75 million down the shitter on that bogus ‘documentary’ about Dear Leader’s Slovenian rent-a-wife — and didn’t think twice about how much it cost. sixty million got pissed away on a wedding for his personal flotation device.
Jeff Bezos’ current net worth is TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY-ONE BILLION DOLLARS. think about this: Bezos could give every person on the planet a billion dollars each, and have $253 billion left over. that’s still more money than he could possibly spend in his lifetime.
the hundred mil that the Post lost is a rounding error to someone with that much moolah.
if he wanted to, he could personally fund the Post and give it away for free — and not even notice the money missing from his bank account.
fuck it, Bezos could sell the Post to someone who would care about putting out a quality product — but he won’t. he’d rather destroy it. owning some hallowed institution and clownfucking into irrelevance is the hip new thing. all the cool oligarchs are doing it.
I swear, these morbidly wealthy shit-kazoos are so easy to hate. and they wonder why people walk around wearing Eat The Rich t-shirts.
heroes, that’s what we’re in desperate need of right now.
no one ever went to bed with fascism and came up smelling like roses. no one ever said ‘gee, I’m so glad the Washington Post partnered with Nazis.’
fascist regimes come, and fascist regimes go. when this current nightmare finally runs its course, no one is going to say ‘wasn’t it awesome how Jeff Bezos slobbered all over Dear Leader’s ass?’
the people we’re going to look back on with admiration are the ones who stood up said ‘take your Nazi bullshit and stick it where the sun don’t shine.’
which bring us to today’s hero of the day: Jordan Perry, the manager of the Lake Theater & Cafe in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
Perry booked the Melania ‘documentary’ into his theater (as a bit of a joke, he explained in a blog post) — and he advertised it with a marquee that read ‘to defeat your enemy, you must know them. Melania starts Friday.’
apparently this caused heads to explode all over the Amazon corporate offices, and they angrily pulled the film from Perry’s theater.
undaunted, Perry changed his marquee to ‘Amazon called. our marquee made them mad. all Melania shows canceled. show your support at Whole Foods instead :(’
in a world of Jeff Bezoses, be someone who antagonizes the shit out of Jeff Bezos.
meanwhile, if any of you know of any war-correspondent jobs that are available right now, you’d really be doing Lizzie Johnson a solid.
this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
