WaPo journalists should learn to code

I’m sorry you were fired, but it’s because you suck and you were making The Washington Post suck. Grow up.

This column was first published by The Washington Examiner.

This week, some of our best and brightest journalists in the field of left-wing propaganda faced something even more terrifying than front-row seats to the Melania documentary followed by a meet-and-greet with Donald Trump himself: they were fired from their jobs, with The Washington Post announcing it would be laying off one-third of its workforce as part of its ridiculously selfish bid to stay afloat.

Now, if you were to look at other left-wing propaganda journalists who (for now) remain employed, you’d think this was the worst news in the world. “The Murder of The Washington Post,” wrote The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker, “Jeff Bezos Killed the Washington Post,” declared Slate’s Alex Kirshner, while MS NOW — formerly MSNBC — published Zeeshan Aleem’s opinion column titled: “The Washington Post bloodletting symbolizes our great media crisis.”

But these responses seem to exemplify the essence of calm compared to former employees who now find themselves jobless, including launching protests outside their former office chanting “Who makes the Post? We do!” while a former Ukraine correspondent tweeted, “I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone. I have no words. I’m devastated.”

You think being a Ukrainian civilian is bad? Try being a journalist!

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Look, you should never mock an entire group of people for losing their job. Many of these now out-of-work journalists have families, bills, and mortgages. But here’s the thing: so do millions of Americans whom this very journalistic class didn’t give two damns about during, for example, the widespread loss of jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic or Joe Biden’s voluntary destruction of the economy. Because when millions of non-journalist Americans lose their jobs, it’s just an economic readjustment, or a statistical blip, or an opportunity for those dumb blue-collar knuckle-draggers to “learn to code.”

While I am sorry for those who just lost their job, my sympathy is not just limited by their collective disdain for other Americans who have faced far worse situations than being fired from a failing newspaper. No, it cuts to the heart of what is wrong with the elitism of the pseudo-intellectual journo-activist class itself, because these people actually think they have a right to a job, that no matter the fate of their employers, they have a God-given right to receive a paycheck for their services.

Sorry, that’s not how any of this works.

I’ve been fired before. Most of us have. This is America. People are fired all the time. Sometimes it’s because the company is struggling, sometimes it’s because of a malicious co-worker, sometimes it’s because your manager was an inept megalomaniac, and sometimes, people are fired because they’re not good at their job.

Adults respond to this by putting their nose to the grindstone and finding employment elsewhere. Children respond by having a tantrum for losing their allowance while blaming the owner of their former company for having the audacity to not drive their business into the ground.

Let alone employing the same journalists who brought us the gem-to-end-all-gems: “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.”

I’m sorry you were fired, but it’s because you suck and you were making The Washington Post suck. Grow up.