The Washington Post has not yet apologized for its false insinuations against me, which have resulted only in it embarrassing itself and validating me as a Massively Influential Conservative Influencer™. I don’t expect them to take responsibility; I fully understand that my enemy is too proud of the legacy it survives on, like maggots feeding on a corpse, ever to admit it was wrong to a trio of outlaw media guys. But we’ll still be here when Jeff Bezos finally pulls the plug on this terminal patient.
The fact is, this sordid story shows us the nature of, and how to fight, the regime media. That’s what our job is, at the end of the day. Almost 20 years ago, a guy named Andrew Breitbart came on the scene and showed us that these punks who think they are Mike Tyson have glass jaws. Like other institutions that were once strong and proud, the regime media is weak and proud. It is the living embodiment of the legendary 2015 @iowahawkblog tweet: 1. Identify a respected institution. 2. Kill it. 3. Gut it. 4. Wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect. #lefties
If you look behind the curtain, you will understand that these aren’t super competent superstars doing super-complex, super-competent work. The regime media is nothing more than a bunch of kids putting on a play in a barn, and nerdy kids nobody likes at that.
Let’s examine the lessons we can draw about regime media through the lens of how Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp of the Washington Post decided to write a story about what I, @RobManess, and Tom @CynicalPublius Anderson did for the Department of War. The problem for the Washington Post is that what we were doing for the Department of War was boring – three retired colonels with extensive civilian experience did a review of the military war college system to try to help modernize it and make it better at producing future senior officers. Yawn.
The story was sexy because we were all, as the Washington Post acknowledged, Massively Influential Conservative Influencers™, but that was it. So they had to jazz it up by insinuating that we were brought on board to “amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.” That was false. They had zero evidence of it because there was no evidence of it because it didn’t happen. But the headline “Pentagon brings on three decorated retired colonels with extensive relevant civilian experience to examine whether war colleges are doing what they need to do and making recommendations to improve them” just doesn’t get the pinko pulses racing. Or, as it turned out, raging online and making death threats against us.
It’s no secret that regime media is fighting for its life, especially since guys like Andrew Breitbart pulled down the walls, making them gatekeepers of nothing anymore. There are all sorts of alternative, outlaw media out there, including Townhall.com. The mandarins of the regime media are no longer in control. They no longer get to set the agenda. And since they can’t live off classified ads anymore in the age of the Internet, there’s no money coming in. They’re gliding down the hill on the momentum of the past, and at some point they’re going to crash. But they do retain some power, which they use for evil instead of good since they are overt leftist partisans.
The value proposition of the regime media is threefold. It is mostly based on its alleged skills, its alleged resources, and the alleged quality of its people. After all, it hires from all the best schools. Of course, you see the problem – the kind of schools they hire from, the Harvards, Yales, and NYUs, and such, are likewise institutions living off the legacy of the past. You end up not getting journalists who are hard-scrabble, take-no-prisoners reporters. Instead, you end up with a bunch of passive-aggressive graduates of gender studies seminars who buy into the whole woke agenda and think their job is social justice rather than simply reporting the facts.
The first regime media value proposition, as compared to the outlaw media, is that its product will be technically competent. You’re going to have readable text; it’s going to be edited for copy and content, and you’re generally going to have a solid article, whereas some random blog post might be a mess. The second value proposition is that the regime media will have the resources to do an in-depth story, to dig harder, to put more skilled and trained reporters with their deep Rolodexes on it to get to the truth, whereas one guy in his pajamas in the basement won’t be able to do that. The last value proposition is that the regime media has journalistic ethics, so you can trust it to give you the facts without hiding conflicts of interest or having an agenda.
Of course, the regime media no longer fulfills those value propositions. Remember, like the other infiltrated institutions, a leftist-infiltrated institution is no longer about fulfilling the traditional agenda of that institution, but rather the agenda of the leftist overlords. It’s not about the reporting; it’s about changing the paradigm. Call it “skin-suitism.”
The Washington Post failed on all three accounts in my situation. Where was the technical savvy we’re supposed to expect from a “real” newspaper? They didn’t even spell my name right at first and had to issue a correction. And where was the editor asking for a single fact validating the innuendo? They insinuated we were bought to spew propaganda but couldn’t even point to a single change in what we had said in our media capacity before we started examining the war colleges and after. A real editor would’ve caught that and told the reporters to either get some facts or get out of his office. This was less Woodward and Bernstein than Abbott and Costello.
The second value proposition is the supposed resources that the regime media can aim at the alleged scandal. Let’s put aside that regime media newsrooms have been cut to the bone as the money dried up. The work on our story seemed to consist of talking to a couple of anonymous sources who evidently knew nothing – their specific facts were substantially wrong – and then asking us for comment. Yeah, Dan and Tara must’ve worn out a couple of pairs of shoes tracking down this scoop.
And that brings us to the regime media’s third value proposition, its alleged journalistic ethics. For example, the WaPo article claimed we didn’t disclose what we were doing to our readers, as if that was sinister, as if our patriotic readers expected us to talk about what we did for the Department of War. The idea is to support transparency to illuminate bias, but since we weren’t propagandizing, there was nothing to be transparent about. We didn’t write about what we were doing, so the issue never came up. They invented an obligation we did not have, then presented it as fact.
See, what the regime media does is assert that there’s this code of journalistic ethics, which is conveniently unwritten and to which they cannot cite. You’re not going to be able to point out where I put my John Hancock on the idea that if I did something for the Department of War, I would announce it to the world. Note that we talked to hundreds of people in the course of our work, and the article itself pointed out that we talked to others about it, meaning it wasn’t a secret at all. A real editor should’ve caught that instead of letting them run with the idea that this was some sort of covert op.
Remember, the code of journalistic ethics, like everything else with leftists, is really Calvinball. Rules get invented to limit and control us, but there are no rules for the regime media. Where is the rule requiring they be competent, fair, or objective? Maybe they got a waiver. Here, the premise of the WaPo article was that it was important that we expressly and publicly disclose exactly what we were doing in a minor outside endeavor because that reflects on whether we can be relied upon to tell the truth in our opinion pieces, which are not even supposed to be objective. But the Washington Post story, which was supposed to be objective, according to Journalism 101, is based entirely on anonymous sources. So how are the readers supposed to understand the biases of these anonymous sources? It isn’t like anybody at the Pentagon has a political agenda, right? So, it’s rules for us outlaw media guys, but none for the regime media? We’ll pass on that paradigm.
What we’ve learned is that the regime media’s value propositions are a nullity. You are supposed to be getting this bespoke, premium product, but it’s no better than what’s pumped out by some Internet rando. Yet some residual prestige still persists, and that manifests in two ways that keep the regime media residually powerful. The first is that other media outlets will immediately copy the story and reprint it as their own. Dozens of second-, third-, and 57th-tier media outlets essentially reprinted the Washington Post story all around the Internet. That’s how the left perpetuates its false narratives. I hope Jeff Bezos is thrilled that his massive subsidies to the Washington Post are actually subsidizing the entire journalist universe.
The second is the residual prestige that causes people who should damn well know better to immediately assume that there’s a nugget of accuracy somewhere inside a regime media story. Several conservatives immediately jumped onto this and started wagging their fingers about how Pete Hegseth was hiring Internet loudmouths to spew his propaganda. It never occurred to them that the story might be crap, but it was crap. Yet these guys, who should’ve understood that any time a regime media outlet talks about a conservative figure, the claims are almost certainly wholly, or at least substantially, false, credited the WaPo’s insinuations. One of them was Erick Erickson, who tweeted something along the lines of how the administration was way too online in response to the Post’s X post pushing the smear. I went back at him in DMs, told him it was false, and that he should correct it, and he did retweet my Townhall column. Still, why would anybody help the regime media perpetuate its narratives? The three of us appreciate the many, many people, both in the media and among our audience, who stood by us because they instinctively understood that anytime the regime media attacks a conservative, it’s probably baloney and always part of an agenda. Still, it’s really obnoxious that in 2026, people on our side would still give any credence to anything bad that the regime media writes about other conservatives.
We need to stop doing that. We need to stop believing that the regime media is what it pretends to be. We need to stop cooperating with it in any way — the New York Times sought us out for comment, and we wouldn’t comment, and it didn’t write any story at all. The same with other major outlets. Give them nothing. Don’t buy their product, don’t believe their product, and don’t help them. They’ve chosen not to be neutral truth-tellers who will step on anybody’s toes, Republican or Democrat, left or right. They’ve chosen to be advocates against us and America. Fine. Treat them that way. They picked a side, and it’s not ours. Andrew Breitbart, perceptively and profanely as usual, put it best: “War.”
BIG NEWS! Kurt’s next action-packed conservative novel, “American Warlord,” is out for presale now! Read Kurt’s Kelly Turnbull/People’s Republic series, including the latest "Panama Red," and follow Kurt on X @KurtSchlichter!