Fact-Checking Nazi Lobs Grenade at 'Personal Liberties and Free Markets'

Author’s note: this post was scheduled to publish at 8:30 a.m. but I thought it wasn’t good enough and started editing again at 8:10. Somehow, an incomplete version got posted. Here is the final version.

A recent conversation between former Washington Post employees Jennifer Rubin and “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler is worth watching all the way through, if only to bolster your understanding that they are enemies of truth, justice, and the American way. The cognitive dissonance is pretty tasty, too, so do give it a try.

What did these proud Progressive journalists whine about? Why, the collapse of “the traditional news environment,” of course! Thus proving Robert Conquest’s first law of politics: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”

A few years ago, journalists were comparing themselves to D-Day soldiers storming Normandy, where Americans suffered 135,000 casualties protecting personal liberties and free markets from the Nazi horde.

So far in 2025, some 60 reporters have rage-quit the Post because their boss announced a greater focus on “personal liberties and free markets.”

Associate Editor David Maraniss, employed there since 1977, said the “old Washington Post is gone” and “I’ll never write for it again as long as [Jeff Bezos is] the owner.” Columnist Philip Bump reacted with the indiscretion of a Hitler Youth seeing the allied invasion fleet for the first time: “What the actual f-k.”

The newspaper also lost 250,000 subscribers in 2024 when it decided not to endorse the Progressive candidate for president, Kamala Harris.

The simplest explanation of this rebellion is that the Post is trying to return to its traditional American roots and Progressives are having none of it. We might even say it’s the best recent example of Conquest’s third law: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”

As for our two headliners, Rubin resigned from her job as a “conservative” columnist. Before her journalism career she was a Hollywood labor lawyer who — according to trade union leader Steve Hulett — “supported [John] Kerry in 2004 and worked closely with [Jeffrey] Katzenberg, who is a big time Democratic donor.”

She retreated from Hollywood in 2005, reinvented herself as writer, and, said Hulett, “started blogging like mad as a conservative. I don’t know if it’s a marketing pose, or if she really believes it, or what. But it is odd.”

Today, Rubin commands The Contrarian on Substack with leftist lawyer Norm Eisen, who worked for the Obama campaign and became Obama’s ambassador to the Czech Republic. Today, Eisen makes his living trying to organize a color revolution in the USA.

Kessler resigned from his position as The Fact Checker for the Post — where he famously concluded that Trump 1.0 made over 30,000 false or misleading claims. He, too, now runs his own Substack.

Both of our Resistance fighters moaned in involuntary submission to Trump’s “post-truth world” and both yearned for the return of “the normal discourse” — aka the dead body of “truth” that Hitler threw down the escalator in 2015.

Both Rubin and Kessler used words of war to describe their fight for “traditional journalism.” From his entrenched position on the Atlantic Wall, Kessler lobbed the phrase “asymmetric news landscape” into the conversation like a grenade.

Asymmetric warfare is defined as “armed conflict between belligerents having different strengths and weaknesses,” and Kessler clearly sees himself as the weaker combatant. Which is why he appealed to the authority of Walter Cronkite and the Huntley-Brinkley Report, hoping “the voice of truth” might launch a devastating counterattack against free-market journalism.

For her part, Rubin believes Trump is literally Hitler. On November 7, 2024, she wrote, “It is 1933. Hitler is in power.” If that’s true, then “traditional journalists” have been waging a Phoney War in the mistaken belief that their Maginot Line will stop the Nazi blitzkrieg.

But even Kessler knows the game is up: “the whole traditional news environment is collapsing,” he said. And now “you are able to look at whatever news sites you want.”

Hitler’s plan for worldwide domination, apparently, is to encourage personal liberties and free markets and let people make their own choices about journalism. His enemies, meanwhile, have other plans.

Twenty years after Rubin supported John Kerry for President, Jean-François Kerry came out against the idea of a free people reading a free press. “Our First Amendment,” Kerry told the World Economic Forum last year, “stands as a major block to the ability to, you know, just hammer it out of existence.”

Perhaps more than anyone else, Kerry represents the sclerotic Progressives who believe in “traditional” government and “traditional” journalism — as defined by Progressives who not only took a flamethrower to traditional America but also staged a literal foreign invasion across the southern border.

As for Kessler, he wrote in his last article for the Post that The Fact Checker, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org “reached the same conclusion on similar statements at least 95 percent of the time.”

That, in a nutshell, is “the traditional news environment” Kessler pines for. An environment where everybody with a platform says the same thing, anyone who disagrees with the 95% gets debanked, and the very idea of free speech disappears into the fog of war.

To the suggestion that Americans must surrender to Kessler, I have a one-word reply.

NUTS.