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What actual evidence is there that leftists are intelligent?

With every day that passes, I become more and more persuaded that our good friends on the left, who believe that they are just smarter than conservatives, are really not very bright. They see a guy like the late Robert Dorgan who shot his ex-wife and kids, who didn’t believe that a guy who looked like this could possibly be a woman, and want to blame the family for not accepting his ‘transition’ for his barbaric rage. We saw another mentally ill male who thought he was a girl shoot up a high school in British Columbia, and the Associated Press told us the shooting was committed by a “woman”, even though the fact he was ‘transgender’ was already public knowledge, as though no one would ever find out the truth.

The left were also blaming that idiot’s actions on the (assumed) fact that the people who knew him wouldn’t accept him as a girl.

Now there’s this, in which the pro-Palestinians try to make people feel sorry for the poor, poor Palestinians, for the idiots who started a stupid war that they could not win, thinking that people will forget or ignore just who started that war.

But, perhaps it’s unfair to call the fine gentleman who posted that a leftist. What he was assuming is that the people who would see his tweet and feel sympathy would be Western liberals, and that they would be stupid enough to feel sympathy for the Palestinians who started that war, and who celebrated the October 7th massacre in the streets of Gaza.

Then we have all of the stories about innocent Americans killed by illegal immigrants, immigrants who had no intention of assimilating into peaceful American culture, but brought the savagery from the [insert slang term for feces here]hole countries they fled, and what do we get? We get practically the entire Democratic Party resisting the efforts of President Trump to find and deport those people who are in the country illegally. There’s not even the nuance of the left saying, “OK, we’ll help you deport the bad guys, but let’s find a way to regularize the decent people,” but them going all out to defend even the thugs and scumbags.

Realistically, what evidence is there that liberals in the United States are intelligent at all?

Thinking, as in actual thinking, seems to be beyond them.

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This is what country people do!

From Miller’s Creek Fire and Rescue:

Stella moved to safety.

This morning (Monday, February 16, 2026) just before 10 AM MCFR received a request for assistants in reference to a cow that was down and could not get up. Unit 8 and Squad 8 responded with 3 firefghters trained in large animal rescue and several other firefighters assisted. Crews were able to setup a high point rope system and raised the cow, slid a stokes basket under and moved her to an open area to be cared for. We want to thank our partners with the Estill County Rescue Squad for assisting in making this a successful rescue.

We just finished our fundraiser to order our large animal equipment and will place that order soon. We are looking forward to adding this equipment to make our job easier.

We are happy to report that “Stella” is doing well and gaining energy.

Thank you 4hooves large animal services and Dr. Grimes for your advice today.

There are more photos at the original.

Miller’s Creek Fire and Rescue is a volunteer fire station, men doing what needs to be done on their own, helping people without getting paid for it. Chad, the station chief, helped out my family during the flood of 2021, when our HVAC system was underwater and the flood floated the propane tank, so we couldn’t use the fireplace for heating; our house itself did not flood. We still had electricity, so Chad brought over some electric space heaters to help keep the place livable. This was before the volunteer fire station was established, which started in 2024.

I stopped by the fire station last spring, because I had a piece of metal that had to be cut, and wanted to borrow a torch. Well, the fire station didn’t have a torch, but gave me the name and phone number of a neighbor who did. I called him, and he drove right down, cut the metal for me himself, and wouldn’t hear of me paying him; he was just being a good neighbor.

Out in the wilds of eastern Kentucky, I can’t just walk a couple of blocks and pick up freshly baked croissants from a French boulangerie, and our restaurant choices are few, basically diner food. We don’t have the luxuries that some of my Philadelphia and other ‘urbanist’ friends have, no high-class restaurants, no city nightlife, no Wawa coffee 🙁 but we do have one thing: we have great people around here!

While my wife and I grew up in the Bluegrass State, we aren’t from Estill County, yet the people here accepted us as if we were old, old friends. That’s something you just don’t get in the city.

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That thing that never happens has happened again

We’re just a week from the mass murders by a mentally ill boy who thought he was a girl, yet here we go again. From the New York Post:

Trans dad Robert Dorgan shoots wife, 3 kids in horrid ‘family dispute’ at crowded RI hockey arena as players and fans are seen scrambling to safety

By Chris Nesi and Caitlin McCormack | Monday, February 16, 2026 | 11:46 PM EST

A twisted trans father shot his wife, three kids and a family friend in the stands at a high school hockey tournament in Rhode Island on Monday — sending the panicked crowd screaming and fleeing for the exits.

Two people were killed and three others are in critical condition at a hospital after the gunfire erupted at Lynch Arena in Pawtucket around 2:30 p.m., according to cops, who described the incident as a targeted family dispute.

The shooter, identified as 56-year-old Robert Dorgan — who also went by Roberta Esposito — died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

Dorgan was the father of a senior at North Providence High School, one of the six schools participating in the co-op games, WPRI reported. He shot his son’s mother, their three children and a family friend who were all spectators at the game, according to reports.

Robert Dorgan, from Libs of TikTok, via the New York Post.

But don’t you dare think that being transgender, being a man male who thinks he’s a woman, is a mental illness, or you’re a h8er, a transphobe, a thoroughly mean person, and, of course, an evil reich-wing Donald Trump supporter!

And don’t you dare think that “Roberto Esposito,” pictured to the left, wasn’t obviously a woman, wasn’t the very flower of femineity. How could you ever doubt that he truly felt like a woman?

The Post continued to note that another man in the stands grabbed a gun away from Mr Dorgan, but “they” had a second weapon. Yes, the article used the plural pronoun.

The New York Times? Well, the Grey Lady, our nation’s most famous and respected newspaper, did cover the story, but simply said that a “motive for the shooting was not known, though it appeared to arise from a family dispute.” The newspaper stated further that the killer “went by two different names,” but did not report what those names were, nor the fact that the murderer was transgender. Way to bury the lede!

Why, it’s almost as though our nation’s foremost example if journalistic integrity wanted to hide the facts from it’s readers! I guess those things aren’t really News That’s Fit to Print!

The dead? That would be Mr Dorgan’s wife and one of his children. The survivors were reported to be in critical condition.

From the Post again:

A woman who was seen leaving the Pawtucket Police Department following the deadly rampage told reporters, “My father was the shooter” and claimed that he was plagued by “mental health issues.”

“He shot my family, and he’s dead now,” she said, adding that he was “very sick.”

There’s an old rag that New Yorkers buy the Times so people on the subway will think that’s what they are reading, when in actuality they’re using the Times to cover up the fact they’re reading the Post. Given the quality of reporting from the Grey Lady, perhaps they should use the Post to hide the fact that they’re reading the Times.

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A kerfuffle over Altar Girls

My Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — feed today has been filled with complaints because His Holiness Pope Leo XIV held Mass yesterday at a diocesan church in Rome with, Heaven forfend! altar girls as well as altar boys. Some of the complaints were trivial, that the altar server on the left was wearing tennis shoes, but most were that girls should not be allowed to serve at or near the altar, or anywhere in the chancel or sanctuary.

From Wikipedia:

During the Second Vatican Council. The Church discussed whether lay women could be servers at mass, although the matter would ultimately remain unchanged. Later in 1980 the Catholic Church would reaffirm the 1917 Code of Canon Law which stated: “A woman is not to be the server at Mass except when a man is unavailable and for a just reason and provided that she give the responses from a distance and in no way approach the altar.”

In 1994, Pope John Paul II changed canon law, removing the church wide ban on allowing women and girls to serve as altar servers. The decision was devolved to Bishops, who could choose whether to allow or disallow girls to serve as altar servers, but overall removed the Church wide ban.

Full disclosure: when we were parishioners at St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1990s, both of our daughters were altar servers. They were also in parochial school for part of that time.

As we moved around for my career, we have been members at St Mary of the Assumption in Hockessin, Delaware, and, from 2002 through 2017, St Joseph’s Church in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Though my daughters did not serve there, there were altar girls as well as altar boys.

St Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, where I attend Mass. Photo by D R Pico.

Now we are members at St Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church in Ravenna, Kentucky. St Elizabeth’s is a very small parish, with only 24 families as parishioners. We have been extremely fortunate in that we have three new, serious catechumens this year, and this is where the service of girls as altar servers has become most important. Following the shutdown of the churches due to the COVID-19 panicdemic — not a typographical error, but spelled to reflect exactly how I saw it — we lost our previous altar kids, who left the parish and never returned, and were it not for one single girl, we’d have had exactly zero altar servers for two entire years.

Since then, we have added two more altar servers: her younger brother and even younger sister. All of our altar kids come from one devout family.

How devout? The father serves as a Eucharistic Minister, meaning he offers the chalice of sacramental wine for parishioners, and the mother serves as a lector, or the person who reads the first two readings of the Mass[1]Every normal Sunday Mass has a reading from, usually, the Old Testament, followed by a Responsorial Psalm, and then a second reading, normally one of the New Testament epistles or from Acts of the … Continue reading and the Responsorial Psalm.

The numbers are pretty simple: in our small parish, we have two male lectors, myself being one of them, and two male Eucharistic ministers, though a third was added just last Sunday. The others are ladies, and they do just as fine a job as anyone else.

With the kids having been at St Mark’s in Richmond while the two younger altar kids go through their Confirmation classes, adult men in our parish, usually me, though one of the Eucharistic ministers also takes a turn, have been the altar kids.

Some kid: I’m 72¾ years old!

Perhaps some larger parishes have a sufficient number of men and boys who volunteer for these positions, and actually I was kind of voluntold, but let me be blunt about things: without the ladies, we would not have the staff we need.

The Church has this problem all across the world: a shortage of men taking the positions they once held. And part of this is something that our separated brethren — our word for Protestant Christians — suffer as well: too many men, too many fathers, not coming to church. At St Elizabeth’s, it isn’t as noticeable, but we are too small to be statistically significant. Too many fathers staying at home on Sunday, letting the mother bring the kids to church. This sends a message to boys growing up: church isn’t all that important to men, and don’t think the boys don’t get that message. To my friends who don’t believe that girls should serve in the chancel, my message is simple: get more boys, more men, to serve at Mass. Otherwise don’t complain about a problem you aren’t helping to solve.

References

References
↑1 Every normal Sunday Mass has a reading from, usually, the Old Testament, followed by a Responsorial Psalm, and then a second reading, normally one of the New Testament epistles or from Acts of the Apostles. Following that comes the reading from one of the four Gospels, by the priest, prior to his homily.
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Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen Let’s help them Make Mexico Great Again!

CBS News has given us some very good news! It seems that illegal immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, are giving up efforts to stay in the United States in greater numbers. In a tweet on Thursday, February 12th, CBS tweeted:

As pathways to freedom have narrowed in immigration courts across the United States, a record number of detainees are giving up their cases and voluntarily leaving the country.

Last year, 28% of completed immigration removal cases among those in detention ended in voluntary departure, a higher share than in any year prior, a CBS News analysis of decades of court records found.

That figure only appears to be climbing as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown widens and detention populations swell. The percentage of voluntary departures among those detained grew nearly every month of 2025, reaching 38% in December.

This is a smart move on the part of the illegals; if they voluntarily leave, rather than being forcibly deported, they’ll have a better case if they eventually apply for legal readmission. And, with three years left in the Trump Administration — and hopefully four years after that under J D Vance — they’re hopes of legal readmission will be small. But, if they fight, and an order for deportation is issued, they’ll never be allowed legal re-entry.

Add to that, they get out of the detention centers more quickly. Call their friends, tell the friends to pack up their s(tuff), and call back later when they establish an address so their s(tuff) can be shipped to them. Easy peasy!

If they leave voluntarily, rather than being dumped someplace, they can return to their home barrios under some sense of control, someplace with which they might have some familiarity, be better able to use the next three years to establish a solid life there, and feel less need to try to re-enter the United States. Let’s help them Make Mexico Great Again!

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Now you know why I call it Journolism! ** Updated! 9:05 PM EST ** #FreedomOfThePress includes the right not to publish what you don't want to publish, but concealing uncomfortable facts hurts the media's reputation

In the wake of the roughly 300 layoffs at The Washington Post, there has been a lot of blame spread, both among the subscribers who quit for owner Jeff Bezos refusing to endorse Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024, and the paper itself for it’s very liberal leanings. The Post managed to piss off both the conservatives who might have been willing to subscribe, and the liberals who cancelled their subscriptions. Mr Bezos, in trying to fix a long-ongoing problem, fouled up.

But let me be clear here: the Freedom of the Press includes the freedom not to publish something. That should be obvious: there are only so many pages a newspaper can print, though with digital publishing these days, those limits have expanded.

And now we see just what isn’t being published, when it doesn’t fit Teh Narrative. When the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in a small town in northeast British Columbia occurred, the Associated Press told us, at 8:59 AM EST, that the (alleged) killer was a “woman” and a “female suspect.” At 9:32 AM EST, CNN simply identified the killer as “they,” being careful to not use a pronoun to specify the killer’s sex. At 9:32 AM EST, The New York Times told us nothing about the shooter.

But, as early as 6:48 AM EST, Matt Van Swol was telling us on Twitter the news which was not politically correct, that the killer was a mentally ill boy who thought he was a girl. I checked the credentialed media, and found several instances of the media concealing the knowledge that the (alleged) killer was transgender.

The killer’s name is Jesse Van Rootselaar, though initially identified as Jesse Strang, 18 years old, and yes, he’s transgender.

I don’t get it. The credentialed media want to build trust in their accuracy, so why conceal information that they know will come out soon enough?

My spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. And now you know why I spell it that way.

Well, eventually even The New York Times had to admit what had previously been revealed, that young Mr Van Rootselaar was the killer, and that the “suspect” was born as biologically male and chose to identify as a female about six years ago. That acknowledgement was time-stamped at 2:45 PM EST, just three minutes short of eight hours after Mr Van Swol’s tweet. The Times also revealed that the “suspect” had quit school four years earlier, which would have meant he wasn’t in school since age 14.

From the Times at 3:19 PM EST:

“Police had attended that residence on a number of occasions over the last several years dealing with concerns of mental health with our suspect,” Dwayne McDonald, the deputy commissioner, said, referring to the home where the suspect’s mother and stepbrother were found dead. On one of those occasions, “firearms were seized.” The most recent police call to the residence was in the spring of last year.

So, the local police already knew that young Mr Van Rootselaar was just plain nuts. Isn’t being biologically one sex but believing you are the other one definition of just plain nuts?

Of course, the newspaper continued to use the feminine pronouns to refer to the killer, as did local officials, because for some stupid reason they think a guy calling himself a girl really is a girl; are the editors and writers at the Times just as nuts as Mr Van Rootselaar?

Yeah, I think that they are!

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Will Bunch and due process of law

This site’s favorite whipping boy, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far, far, far left columnist Will Bunch, who’s even crazier than Amanda Marcotte if such a thing is possible, has told us how important it is to enforce the law. We have previously noted how The Philadelphia Inquirer’s radical left columnist Will Bunch was adamant in his support for legality, railing against President Trump’s pardon of the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers, even though the vast majority of them had already been punished, already served their sentences, his indignation over the United States sinking drug trafficking boats rather than arresting the drug traffickers, and, as we reported last June, his support for illegal immigrant and accused wife beater Kilmar Abrego Garcia, insisting that this illegal immigrant be given the full protection of the laws. He was all about the law when President Trump was eliminating drug trafficking boats coming from Venezuela, an action that Philadelphians should at least somewhat understand given the Hellhole that the Kensington neighborhood has become with strung out junkies sleeping on the sidewalks, in alleys and the Allegheny Avenue SEPTA station.

Mr Bunch even said that he did not “like” President Biden’s final flurry of pardons “at all,” though he claimed that “they were understandable” to protect critics of then-incoming President Trump. Clearly, Mr Bunch believed the Democrats mantra of “no one is above the law,” used when they were trying to throw Mr Trump in prison.

But, when it comes to our immigration laws, all of a sudden he doesn’t want those enforced. Apprehending and deporting illegals he told us is indistinguishable from the Geheime Staatspolizei rounding up Jews to send them to the concentration camps and their deaths.

Now we have this:

Europe is holding its Epstein creeps accountable. Why can’t we?

Europeans are pushing to hold Jeffrey Epstein’s creepy pals, including billionaires like Elon Musk, accountable. The U.S.? Not so much.

by Will Bunch | Sunday, February 8, 2026 |12:56 PM EST

The slow drip of the U.S. government’s still grossly incomplete release of its files on late financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has nonetheless become a who’s who of Planet Earth’s rich and famous — from billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk to cultural icons like filmmaker Woody Allen and, of course, two presidents.

You can see what the distinguished Mr Bunch did. He wants us to associate Messrs Gates, Allen, Musk, Bill Clinton, and, of course Donald Trump with Mr Epstein’s sex trafficking, because that’s for which the late financier is spectacularly infamous.

The average American paying any attention to this global bonfire of the vanities probably barely noticed this name: longtime British politico Peter Mandelson, who most recently served as the U.K.’s ambassador to the United States.

Across the pond, it was another story. The Fleet Street tabloid press went wild over revelations that Mandelson — a key insider in the ruling Labor Party, long known to have been one of Epstein’s globetrotting pals — maintained his close ties even after the American’s 2008 child-prostitution conviction, writing Epstein in 2009 to hail his release from jail as “liberation day.”

But unlike the fallout in the United States, Mandelson’s Epstein problem didn’t end with some embarrassing headlines. Back in September, when an initial batch of Epstein’s emails went public, Prime Minister Keir Starmer — Mandelson’s longtime ally — immediately fired his friend from his ambassador’s post in D.C., and the scandal has only intensified.

Mr Bunch wants Americans named in the Epstein files ‘held .  .  . accountable,’ as he sees Mr Mandelson so being. But how was the now former Ambassador held accountable? He was fired from his appointed post by the man who appointed him, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, after the British tabloids had a field day going “wild” over the revelations.

Yet, through several subsequent paragraphs, Mr Bunch mentions only resignations by prominent people mentioned in the Epstein files. Oddly enough, the columnist who so vociferously wanted due process of law and a presumption of evidence for Mr Abrego Garcia seems totally uninterested in such for the Americans he hates, which means, of course, President Trump and Mr Musk.

The time-lapsed released of the Epstein files hasn’t yet produced a smoking gun concerning his close friendship with Trump, but the fact that lurid tips to federal authorities about the two-time president don’t seem to have been really investigated speaks volumes about the utter lack of elite accountability on this side of the Atlantic.

“(D)on’t seem to have been really investigated”, huh? The Epstein files have been under the control of President Trump and his subordinates for one year and 19 days so far, but they were under the control of then-President Joe Biden and his Attorney General, Merrick Garland, who absolutely hates Republicans for denying him a seat on the Supreme Court for four full years. It could reasonably be argued that the Biden Administration could not do much with them until the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell was concluded, but she was convicted on December 29, 2021, leaving the previous administration, an administration determined to do all it could to put Mr Trump in prison and prevent him from ever becoming President again, all of 2022, 2023, and 2024 to pore through those files. The Democrats would like us to believe that yes, there really is incriminating evidence against Mr Trump in those files, but somehow, some way, they never went through the files.

How stupid would you have to believe something like that?

Even Mr Bunch described Mr Epstein as a “late financier and sex trafficker,” which means that at least some of his contacts were about finance rather than young girls; contact with Mr Epstein simply proves contact with him, not sexual offenses. Mr Bunch, like the rest of the #TrumpDerangementSyndrome-afflicted, want to assume that contact must mean knowledge of and cooperation with Mr Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, but that’s not the case. More, for Mr Bunch, who was so very concerned that Mr Abrego Garcia receive due process of law, wants to see punished anyone who spoke with Mr Epstein, even if such contact had nothing to do with trafficking young girls.

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A half-hearted defense of Jeff Bezos

I have frequently said that I appreciated billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for buying The Washington Post from the Graham family in 2013. The family didn’t really want to sell the newspaper, but the Post was losing money every year, and they just couldn’t afford to keep it going. We don’t know when the Grahams would have had to declare bankruptcy, but it couldn’t have been much longer.

Mr Bezos, for his part, mostly kept his hands off the newspaper. But losses continued to mount, reportedly $100 million in 2023, $77 million in 2024, and $100 million again in 2025. The owner could afford to keep things going the way they were, but finally decided that enough is enough.

Naturally Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — was full of sob stories about the poor, poor laid off journalists, and I have sympathy for them as well: I hate to see anyone who hasn’t broken the law lose his job. But then I saw this from WUSA CBS Channel 9:

The situation we are in right now is entirely up to the abysmal mismanagement by The Washington Post leaders,” said Sarah Kaplan, a climate reporter with The Washington Post.

Kaplan says she takes issue with the positioning that the publication is losing subscribers because of the quality of work of her colleagues. She says the layoffs are going to have a profound impact on the already empty newsrooms. “I don’t know how I go back to work and do my job without all the people who were laid off yesterday,” she added.

To judge from the way she phrased it, Miss Kaplan is one of those who was not laid off. But this brought to mind another story, from my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach:

From that Climate Colored Goggles link in the first tweet

The Washington Post produced some of America’s finest climate journalism over the last decade, aggressively covering President Trump’s regulatory rollbacks and winning a Pulitzer Prize for a series about Earth’s fastest-warming places. Alongside the New York Times and the Associated Press, I don’t think any U.S. news outlet published a greater volume of urgent, high-quality climate and clean energy coverage.

Everything changed on Wednesday morning.

The Post sent layoff notices to at least 14 climate journalists, newsroom sources told me, part of a massive round of cost-cutting that will see more than 300 journalists lose their jobs — about 30% of all employees at the Jeff Bezos-owned company.

The climate team layoffs include eight writer/reporters, an editor and several video, data and graphics journalists, I’m told. I’m not publishing their names, since many of them haven’t discussed their situations publicly. But to see the invaluable work they and their colleagues have been doing, check out the Post’s climate page here.

But, what are they really producing? How many articles? Anything of consequence? I rarely use the WP for my climate posts, and I rarely see any other Skeptics using their articles. Sounds like they are cutting a lot of bloat and dead weight. The WP is a business meant to make money, but are losing a ton because the product is bad.

If Phil Kerpen’s chart is correct, between 2020 and 2022, the Post’s global warming climate change reportorial staff increased six-fold in size. The department was cut back to 19 by 2025, so I suppose Miss Kaplan had plenty of friends, and is understandably distraught that 14 of them are now unemployed.

From Miss Kaplan’s biography:

Sarah Kaplan is a climate reporter covering humanity’s response to a warming world. Her job has taken her to a research camp atop the Greenland ice sheet, a shrinking glacier in the Peruvian Andes, Indian Ocean islands threatened by sea level rise and disaster-struck communities across the United States. She was part of the team of Post journalists recognized as a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for coverage of Hurricane Helene’s human and environmental toll. She previously reported on Earth science and the universe at The Post.

Greenland, the Peruvian Andes, islands in the Indian Ocean? That sounds like a lot of money spent by a company which has lost $277 million over the last three years. Perhaps, just perhaps, Mr Bezos hasn’t really seen much of a return on the newspaper’s spending on this.

Then I saw this thanks to the tweet shown at the left by Streiff from RedState.

Just seventeen bylines — I assume that’s how Streiff researched it — in three months does not exactly seem like top productivity to me. If you were looking to cut costs, wouldn’t the least productive employees be the ones you’d lay off first?

There was my good friend Heather Long, who got out when the getting was good thanks to getting other job offers, who was sent several times to the cover the hoitiest and the toitiest at the World Economic Forum in the ski resort town of Davos in Switzerland. That’s the kind of thing you’d expect the newspaper to cover, but it was still an expensive trip to an expensive event. Perhaps the new Post will rely on Associated Press coverage?

But, as I said, this would be a half-hearted defense of Mr Bezos. Where, I have to ask, were the editors and managers who should have been seeing the less productive employees all along, the bosses who should have known, after the long series of business losses, that the fat needed to be trimmed, that economy and efficiency measures needed to be taken? That such wasn’t happening all along is directly on Mr Bezos, and the people he put in place to do that very thing.

Then there was the idiocy of canceling the endorsement of Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024. Upon resuming editorial endorsements of Presidential candidates in 1976, the newspaper had always endorsed the Democratic candidate if they endorsed anyone at all, and the endorsement editorial was (supposedly) already written when Mr Bezos spiked it. Yes, Mrs Emhoff was as big a doofus as Mike Dukakis, the last Democratic presidential nominee the newspaper didn’t endorse — no endorsement was made in 1988 — but in the #TrumpDerangementSyndrome atmosphere in Washington and among the newspaper’s subscribers, it should have been allowed to go ahead, because it would have made exactly no difference in the outcome of the election, and the Post would not have lost a quarter million subscribers over the endorsement being spiked. Had Mr Bezos taken that decision in May, using as he did a return to the tradition of the newspaper not making any such endorsements, it would have been accepted, or after the election, in which it could have been easily accepted.

Then came the announcement of a change in editorial positions, to a more libertarian philosophy, and another 75,000 digital subscribers said, “See ya!” The change could have been made without the announcement, and without running off 75,000 subscribers.

At my old digital subscription rate of $129.00 per year, losing 325,000 subscribers means a loss of $41,925,000 in revenue. That’s a fairly substantial part of the reported $100 million loss for 2025.

So the newspaper is now offering new digital subscribers a first year for $40, which renews at $140 a year subsequently. I even made the “subscribe” button active for readers. But the newspaper would have lost a lot less money if Jeff Bezos hadn’t run off a bunch of current subscribers.

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The subscription losses at The Washington Post say more about the subscribers than the newspaper itself

As would be expected, the whole of the professional media have been reacting to the significant layoffs at The Washington Post. I do not normally read Frank Luntz, but, lazing in bed this frosty morning, and scrolling through Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — I clicked on the linked article from the BBC. It was not particularly different from dozens of others, until I got to the very last paragraph:

The Post’s financial woes and falling subscriber base stand in contrast to The New York Times, which reported on Wednesday that it added about 450,000 digital-only subscribers in the last quarter of 2025.

Thud!

Clearly, the Times had been doing something right, while the Post has been doing things wrong.

We have previously reported on how owner Jeff Bezos’ decision that The Washington Post not make any endorsement for President in 2024 cost the newspaper hundreds of thousand of subscriptions.

Since the newspaper started making presidential candidate endorsements in the 1970s, every time they have made one, it was an endorsement of the Democratic candidate. That includes Walter Mondale in 1984, who went on to lose every state except Minnesota, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and so on and so on. In 2016, while the Post listed her many failures, the editors expressed enthusiasm for the odious Hillary Clinton. The newspaper endorsed the semi-comatose Joe Biden in 2020; if conservative bloggers could see that Mr Biden was in serious decline even before the election, surely the reporters who covered him could see it up close, but they all kept it quiet. And while owner Jeff Bezos spiked it, there was an apparently already written endorsement of the inept Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024.

The Post’s subscribers simply expected an endorsement of Mrs Emhoff, and 250,000+ cancelled subscriptions later, everyone knew it.

Another 75,000 digital subscriptions were cancelled following an announced change to the opinion section to a more libertarian leaning.

To me, this says more about the subscribers the newspaper lost than it does about the Post. Over 325,000 now former subscribers wanted to read pablum that matched their political beliefs than the actual news. Mr Bezos apparently believed that the newspaper could stem its losses by becoming more appealing to normal people, but it has apparently not worked.

So, what has the Times been doing right? Part of it stems from their tremendous reputation as the newspaper of record for the United States. And part stems from the fact that while the newspaper editorially supports liberals, the news sections are mostly balanced.

While I regret that the Post lost so many subscribers, I take some schadenfreude satisfaction that the 325,000+ former subscribers were gnashing their teeth and screaming in apoplexy on the morning of Wednesday, November 6, 2024.