Shortly after Donald Trump's second inauguration, in 2025, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos drew condemnation when he overhauled the Post's opinion section.
"We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others," Bezos wrote in a company-wide email. Several top editors resigned immediately in response.
This month, Bezos' interference with the independent operation of the nation's third-largest newspaper yielded a glow-up piece about San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, in which the "defense of personal liberties" takes the form of Lurie giving the Post's Kate Andrews a tour of SFPD's Real Time Investigation Center, the mass surveillance hub funded by crypto-billionaire Chris Larsen and headquartered in Larsen's office space in a Financial District building owned by Donald Trump. ("Lurie seems to know everyone on staff, and they appear delighted that he’s stopped by," Andrews writes.)
Andrews is an opinion columnist, which means she didn't have to pretend to verify any of the Mayor's talking points. They're all there, presented without scrutiny: The homelessness reduction that is mostly the result of a change in how the city counts homeless people. The claim that "Thirty percent of the people who have been brought into the RESET Center in the first couple months are being connected to care," even though the RESET Center staff and City officials admit they have no way to follow up with people they release to confirm whether they actually pursue the care they are "connected" to. (The RESET Center being Lurie's signature $14M/year privately-operated drunk tank on 6th St.)
Andrews fawns over Lurie's balanced budget, opposition to taxes for the wealthy, and unique style of City governance by public-private partnership. And that makes perfect sense, because Andrews is a lifelong Republican, a veteran of Mitt Romney's campaign for President and Linda McMahon's campaign for Senate, and she spent the last decade bouncing between conservative news outlets and libertarian think tanks before joining the Washington Post.
It's easy to understand why the world's second-richest person and a career conservative operative who works for him would champion Daniel Lurie. The wealthiest and most powerful people in the world are being made deeply uneasy by the success of Zohran Mamdani and the growing popularity of socialism across the country. In Lurie, the nation's elites think they may have found the answer.
"The foil to the rising socialists might be found in a red state with conservative values. But perhaps he’s a Democrat in San Francisco, quietly and determinedly cleaning up his city," Andrews concludes, transparently wish-casting. Can Daniel Lurie save the oligarchs from taxes and democracy? They sure hope so!
