If it's wrong to spend a week celebrating the misery of your opponents, like that of the scores of just-fired Washington Post hacks who are crying like teenage girls learning there are no more "Twilight" movies coming, then I'm incredibly, totally, enthusiastically wrong. The former journos/current drive-thru operators still have not shut up about the WaPo's mass layoffs, and I am taking unmitigated delight in their pain. Their suffering energizes me. Their tears nourish me. Their humiliation fuels my joy. Hey, maybe democracy dies in darkness, but as long as the WaPo dies, I'm good.
I would tell them to learn the code, but that's old and cliché. Instead, I've been on X, inviting them to earn a little money for their kombucha and rent by buffing out my sweet luxury ride, which I paid for with my writing jobs. I'm a professional writer, and they're not.
But hey, I'm sure that journalism degree from the University of College is going to get them another gigsoon. Say it with me – "Would you like to supersize that, sir?"
They haven't taken their involuntary career tangent particularly well. They are all over X moaning about it and about us being giddy about it. Some people have told me that, because of my hysterical laughter at their situation, I'm going to be the victim of karma, but I think I'm actually karma's enforcer. After all, these are the people who have done nothing but lie to us and about us for decades. From Russian collusion to Hunter's laptop to J6 pogrom cheerleading to every other fraud and scam, they've obediently held to the Democrat line and done everything they could to screw with us patriots. Now that they're being laid off en masse, we owe it to ourselves to take a moment and laugh at their pain.
Look, how about if I agree to care about them as much as they've cared about me for the last few decades? Agreed? Great. Now, back to reveling in their agony.
It's been a few days, and I'm still laughing, and there is a smorgasbord of facets of their misery to laugh at. Certainly, the fact that a bunch of people who wanted us to lose everything – like our ability to govern ourselves, to be secure from criminals, and to keep our jobs (which they wanted sacrificed on the altar of their angry weather goddess) – are themselves losing everything is funny. There's a glorious symmetry in their suffering, but there's so much more. There's their incessant whining about Jeff Bezos refusing to continue to subsidize their little bubble, like some bratty girl at Wellesley who graduates and finds that Daddy is cutting off her money and she's got to actually work. Did these people actually work? They told themselves consistently how important and vital their "work" was, but mostly searched the thesaurus for admiring adjectives for dead monsters and retyped Democrat talking points for their dwindling coterie of readers. I guess that's a kind of work, but it's kind of hilarious how proud of it they were. If they could monetize patting themselves on the back, they'd be richer than the guy who founded Amazon and owned their paper, and who just owned them.
Personally, I love their incessant whining that Jeff Bezos somehow owes them sinecures. Why, he's got so much money he could easily continue paying for them to provide zero value! It's his moral duty! One even referred to his "stewardship" of the Washington Post in a typically overwrought X post. Stewardship? He's a steward? What, like some sort of ink-stained Denethor? Well, they've got the funeral pyre part down.
No, the word they're looking for and not finding is "owner." Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. He can do what he wants with it. If he wants to turn it into a newsprint version of Maxim – is Maxim still a thing? – he can do it, although judging from the avatars of the canned reporters, they would need to seek out some outside talent. Most of the former writers look exactly like you think they would, SSRI-gobbling neuroticas and push-upaphobic soyboyz who, if they weren't scribbling for a dying tabloid, would probably be out yelling obscenities at the heroic middle-class men of ICE who protect them from the savages.
What was Jeff Bezos getting for his money? Did you know that they had 13 people on the climate change beat? They were paying over a dozen people to write about a giant hoax. I think I'm going to go approach Storm Paglia at Townhall to see if I can get a personal research assistant to put on the Unicorn beat. Just kidding. We have to earn our views because we don't have a zillionaire daddy subsidizing us.
You see, in the real world, you've got to make a profit. Obviously, the Washington Post was always kind of a vanity project, but also a way to get some influence in Capitol City. That still doesn't mean Jeff Bezos wants to flush a couple hundred million dollars a year down the toilet so a bunch of Kadens and Ashleighs can pursue their leftist fetishes without having to worry about whether or not people wanted the dreck they crapped out.
Its subscription base was shrinking as the boomers who read newspapers were dying. I grew up with newspapers. I look back fondly on papers, just like I look back fondly on rotary phones. It's part of the past. The Internet does the job more efficiently and effectively, but the regime media never changed its mindset. The Washington Post, and almost every other newspaper, has failed to evolve, and now it will die. The New York Times branched out into other things that were profitable. The same with The Wall Street Journal. Everybody else that is still trying to be a newspaper, as we once understood newspapers, is headed for the ash heap of history.
But even as the trend lines were headed downhill, they strapped a rocket to their back in their race to failure. They were always hard left, and they went harder left, not really understanding that the entire world is not a bunch of frustrated women, deviants, and neutered eunuchs searching for affirmation of their bizarre race-commie conceits. Even today, they're still assuring each other that none of this is their fault. In fact, it's all their fault.
Bezos tried to help them by refusing to allow them to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024, which really bothered them, as if the failure of the Washington Post to endorse Kamala Harris was the thing that put Trump over the top. And Bezos tried to push for an opinion section that contained voices that actually represent America, but that was way too much for them. The inhabitants of the Washington Post couldn't stand the idea of the 50 percent of America that voted for Donald Trump having representation on their sacred opinion page. They had house "conservatives" all right, in the sense that that's where you might've lumped Jennifer Rubin and George Will 30 years ago. But did they have anyone who was genuinely America First? Did they have anybody who was genuinely MAGA? We shouldn't really complain that what was once one of the major regime media outlets of the ruling class never bothered explaining the ruling class's opponents to its readers. One of our great advantages is that our enemies just don't understand us, which is why Trump is able to run circles around them and slip out of their snares time and time again. But even the most minor concession to the notion that there are people who might disagree with liberal received wisdom was too much for the WaPo's woke readership. The Washington Post had not earned the trust of the Right, and the Left was furious that the editorial page was not calling for conservative genocide. The Washington Post was all out of friends, and now the hacks on its masthead are almost all out of jobs.
Some people on the Right were kinder than I about the layoffs, cautioning that we shouldn't take pleasure in our enemies' suffering. This is so very wrong. I've never been a fan of the idea of conservatism without the concept of retribution. Too often, we are told that to be good people, we must forgo just consequences. But failing to pay back our enemies is only going to get us more reason to need vengeance. Our enemies aren't going to take our weakness for anything but weakness. Time to give pain a chance. Time to laugh our tails off at the suffering of the fired Democrat transcriptionists of the Washington Post.
Read Kurt Schlichter's JUST RELEASED new bestseller in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic conservative action novel series, "Panama Red," and follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter.