After billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos blocked an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris at the Washington Post, the venerable mainstream media outlet he owns, accusations were rampant that Bezos had re-aligned himself with more conservative viewpoints — or more specifically, that Bezos had gone MAGA.
That sense of Bezos and other American business titans — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, et al — aligning with Donald Trump’s movement was further evidenced, critics said, by the front-row presence of the so-called “broligarchy” at the president’s inauguration.
When Bezos recently retooled the Post’s editorial page mission, personally explaining that the pages would now be exclusively about “personal liberties” and “free markets”, liberals exclaimed that while those are largely commendable topics, the far-right had co-opted those terms to represent something other than personal freedom for many Americans.
[NOTE: MAGA and the GOP have been so effective at branding themselves the “liberty” party that when Democrats countered post-Roe anti-abortion activism on the right with claims it infringed on women’s rights and privacy — their “personal liberties” — a New York Times article reported that “Democrats Lean Into Liberty and the Language of Republicans.”]
I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
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…
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) February 26, 2025
Bezos said of the editorial change: “I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. 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.”
Former Post editor Marty Baron was widely quoted in the aftermath of Bezos’s declaration, saying “Bezos argues for personal liberties. But his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section.”
But based on an opinion piece in the Post this week, by the writer Jennifer Finney Boylan, Baron may have been too quick to dismiss Bezos’s idea of “personal liberty” as a matter of MAGA propaganda.
Boylan is a trans woman who explores her own experience — with triumphs and travails — as a trans woman in America on the Post’s pages. She even takes the time to pity Bezos’s fellow broligarchy member Elon Musk in the process, writing:
“The greatest obstacle to trans equality is not Donald Trump or even Elon Musk — whose inability to love his own transgender child may well be part of what has driven him to fight what he calls the ‘woke mind virus.’ Whenever I hear Musk berating trans people, my first thought is to have pity: This is a man, above all, with a broken heart, a man hurting because he wrongly thinks that something valuable — a son — has been taken from him.”
Notably, despite her claim above that Trump is not the “greatest obstacle to trans equality,” Boylan’s opinion very much confronts the current administration’s numerous anti-trans policies, as is succinctly expressed by her post below.
New admin policy toward trans people now in effect. pic.twitter.com/Qrx031nx0Y
— Jenny Boylan
(@JennyBoylan) March 8, 2025
And yet Boylan’s voice is prominently featured in Bezos’s pages just weeks after the billionaire described the change he was making at the Post.
Among the other titles featured prominently on Bezos’s editorial pages this week, it is not hard to find opinions that diverge from and hold to account MAGA doctrine and orthodoxy. A George F. Will piece is titled “A dismal scorecard after two months of the Musk-Trump administration,” while the Post editorial board weighs in with this: “Trump’s efforts to intimidate the legal profession cannot stand.”
These are accompanied by Karen Attiah‘s assertion that “We ignore the civil liberties boomerang at our peril” in a Post piece that explores the dangers of the Trump administration’s cutting funding to colleges for allegedly permitting anti-Semitism.