America boasts the world’s largest media market, and even in this age of shrinking attention spans, strained ad budgets, and declining circulation, it offers something for everyone. But does this diversity extend to the nation’s prestige outlets? On the surface, the answer would seem to be yes. The New York Times plays to the post-woke-but-still-kinda-woke establishment Left, while The Washington Post editorial page, under Jeff Bezos’s increasingly heavy-handed leadership, is going for Trump-friendly free-market conservatism.
The contrast is exemplified by two of the papers’ most prominent writers: the Times’ Russian-born columnist Masha Gessen, who just won the Pulitzer for commentary, couldn’t be more different from the Post’s Marc Thiessen, who’s gaining a lot of attention these days as President Trump’s favorite print columnist. Gessen is a cosmopolitan progressive; Thiessen is a conservative Catholic and former Bush administration official.
The two should be at odds, and in some ways, they are. But when it comes to foreign policy, they sing almost exactly the same hawkish, pro-empire song, albeit in slightly different keys.
Start with Gessen. There’s a pattern of immigrants coming to America, then asking the US government to start wars with their native lands. In 2022, for example, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov called on the West to throw Russia “back into the Stone Age.” Or take Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-born human-rights defender who spent recent years calling for a Western military attack on her homeland — only to retract her endorsement once that happened and produced predictably disastrous outcomes.
Standing at the summit of this genre is Masha Gessen — or “M. Gessen,” as she now prefers to be called. (Gessen, who was born female, identifies as both non-binary and trans — I won’t explain how that works because I really don’t know.) Her Pulitzer citation this week lauds her for an “illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.”
Four of Gessen’s seven prize-winning essays compare the Trump administration to Russia and Vladimir Putin. In these “illuminating” essays, Gessen argues that the Supreme Court ruling allowing Trump’s executive order to only list two sexes on US passports is just like a Russian bureaucrat who wouldn’t allow her to reclassify her ethnicity from Jewish. In another, she alleges that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s overzealous targeting of Jimmy Kimmel was parallel to Putin’s seizure of power in Russia. And in still another, she asserts that we are entering a specific authoritarian “moment” in America that recalls Putin’s abolition of elected governorships of oblasts, the war in Georgia, and killing of Alexei Navalny. Finally, Gessen compares Soviet Russia to today’s United States, contending that “it was, apparently, possible to maintain a sense of facts and values — not only not to obey in advance but not to obey at all. If that was possible in the Soviet Union half a century ago, then it is certainly possible in the United States today.”
It is true that Russia is not the most “inclusive” country in the world for LGBT people like Gessen. It’s a society operating on a totally different set of mores — a reminder of the vaunted “cultural differences” respected by liberals in the case of nations they like, and only anathematized for nations they don’t like. Add to this Gessen’s fearmongering that the United States is becoming totalitarian, like Russia, and she is offering classic, 2016-style Trump Derangement Syndrome, rallying the liberal base to fight absolute evil in order to vindicate absolute good. Ironically, this bankrupt, hate-baiting approach comes at a time when there are legitimate and even bipartisan reasons to be disappointed with President Trump — the economy, the war in Iran.
Gessen-ism, then, goes something like this: Russia is terrible because it denies that I’m trans; America and liberal democracy are great because they let me be trans; Trump is turning America into Russia; so we should arm Kiev and send more Ukrainian men into a meat grinder so that I can be trans.
Such an approach ignores the plentiful evidence of Western provocation of Russia, not to mention a pre-Trump consensus to do so: NATO’s official stance since 2008 that Ukraine will join the alliance; the fact that the late Sen. John McCain traveled to Ukraine during the 2014 Maidan Revolution and promised that Ukraine’s future would be with Europe and thus the West; Obama diplomat Victoria Nuland’s infamous leaked phone call boasting that Washington would be in charge of the Ukrainian transition and “fuck the EU.” There has always been a clear Washington objective to turn Ukraine, a neutral buffer state, into an American client. For Gessen, this is not relevant. The world is a big battle between Putin-style authoritarianism and Democratic Party-style social progressivism, and the latter must triumph — popular will and the realities of foreign policy be damned.
Gessen’s is a pro-war flavor that appeals to the progressive, trans-rights absolutist, still woke-ish readership of the Times. But the incredible power of the American media’s system for “manufacturing consent” — if Epstein-obsessives will forgive the Noam Chomsky reference — is that it does so in ways that are appealing to partisan sensibilities, while enforcing the same bottom line: an expansive American empire is good; war is necessary; the economic status quo should go unquestioned and unchallenged.
Which brings us to The Washington Post — a paper that is now markedly different from The New York Times. Since Bezos took active interest in the paper he bought years ago, and influenced by his alliance with the Trump White House, the Post has become noticeably Right-coded. In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Feb. 26, 2025, Bezos announced that “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.” Since then, the Post has staffed its editorial-page with lots of establishment conservatives, while more progressive-minded staff have quit or been ousted.
Yet notwithstanding these partisan and ideological differences, the foreign-policy bottom line at the new Washington Post is remarkably similar to the one at the Times.
Behold Marc Thiessen. Unlike Gessen, Thiessen is a native-born American, a devout Catholic, and a rock-ribbed conservative: he served as George W. Bush’s director of speechwriting between 2007 and 2009 and joined The Post as a columnist shortly thereafter. Put another way: while Bezos has made the aims of the publication narrower and more explicit, the Post was pushing a hawkish line even before Bezos’s acquisition in 2013 and his editorial interference beginning in 2025.
In 2014, Thiessen argued that the United States should not have pulled out of Iraq. Recently, he went on Fox News to recycle Iraq War talking points for use in Iran, insisting that America should just kill any leaders who don’t want to make a deal. Even more bizarrely, in early March, Thiessen wrote an op-ed stating that the “Trump Doctrine” — expressed via the war in Iran — somehow ends forever wars, perhaps in a vain attempt to sell this war to a New Right that has grown skeptical of foreign entanglements.
But Thiessen is not against forever wars — he loves them, and he’s even defended torture by the CIA. He’s obviously overjoyed that Trump, who ran on a largely antiwar and populist platform, has ended up reverting to the old ways of the Republican Party and effectively destroyed, at least for the time being, any New Right governing agenda embracing restraint abroad. For instance, Thiessen declared in a Trump-lauding piece that Ukraine was one of the president’s great accomplishments in 2025. He had in mind not Trump’s early attempts to achieve a negotiated settlement to the conflict, mind you, but the president’s willingness to maintain and even expand arms transfers: “He is doing more to help Ukraine than Biden ever did.”
Browse Thiessen’s Post profile, and you will find that almost every single article is about how Trump took a hawkish stance and why it was so great. While engaged in a journalistic enterprise that looks like the diametrical opposite of Gessen’s — not Trump-bashing, but Trump-praising — he is, in fact, reinforcing the same policy agenda. Unfortunately, the Thiessens of the world have understood just how well Trump responds to flattery.
Because of that, Thiessen is now a frequent mention on the president’s Truth Social posts. On April 23, Trump commented on a Thiessen op-ed about how he didn’t need a deal with the Iranians: “Very true!!! President DJT.”
Thiessen and Gessen represent opposing American political ideologies, and wholly different reads on Trump. But to the hawkish uniparty, that doesn’t matter. The goal has always been a Pride Parade, whether in Tehran or Moscow (preferably both). That, we are told, is freedom. It’s why you must shut up about gas prices. Heads they win, tails you lose.
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