The Saddest Place In America Is Wherever The Washington Post Films This Podcast

The Washington Post remains in the midst of its weird, cheap transformation into the world's most boring conservative newsletter. This is happening at the behest of owner Jeff Bezos, who decided that he was tired of owning one of the most storied newspapers in America, and instead wanted to publish something much dumber and worse. You can see Bezos's priorities most clearly in his gutting of the paper's workforce and the revamping of its opinion section, which has proclaimed that its mission is to celebrate and defend "personal liberties and free markets," which is something like the opposite of "stuff you can't get anywhere else." As a result of that pivot, the section routinely publishes some of the worst writing in the country—dull, lazy, artless, and familiar. That section now also has a podcast, which really aims to test that format's ability to create parasocial bonds with the audience.

The podcast is called Make It Make Sense, and it appears to have been born out of the following pitch: What if we put three losers in a room and recorded them complaining about things nobody else cares about? Plenty of representative clips can be found on the show's official Bluesky account, which has 27 followers as of this writing. Here's one where the hosts, in 2026, sit around and get kind of worked up about school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic:

Here's another, in which one of the hosts has a fit about the Dutch placing restrictions on advertisements for meat. It ends with him staring into the camera, saying, "Shaming people for trying to enjoy a hamburger? That's smug, and elitist" and then taking a big bite of a burger:

Aside from the hosts' powerful anti-charisma, these clips are noteworthy only for what they illustrate about broader trends in media and politics. It's clear now that what powerful media operators like Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison want from the blue-chip properties they own is their own personalized versions of The Free Press. That is, they want to rule over little fiefdoms, and want nothing more from that experience than to have a space of their own in which they will always be told that they're right. They are not really alone in that desire, and the broader effect of this wave of elite neediness, at scale, is to lower the horizons on the entire media business until all that's left is a constellation of podcasts and opinion articles that aim to do nothing but gratify the feelings of the people in charge. Everyone, from the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal, is trying to find their own Olivia Reingold.

(To which I have to say: You pretenders make me sick. Oh, you think it's humiliating to slouch in a chair and eat a burger? Try recording a skin-crawling John Oliver parody in your own kitchen, you amateur. You think you can just hire any howlingly friendless woman, have her grouse into a phone camera, and call that a media strategy? Her glasses aren't even that weird! Get back to me when you're ready to take this seriously.)

That explains the motivations of the bosses, but what about the talent? James Hohmann, the aforementioned hamburger dipshit, provides some useful clarity here. This guy first joined the Post in 2008, then went to work at Politico for six years, and returned to the Post in 2015. You wouldn't have been able to guess how weird and antisocial he is based on that résumé, but it's clear now that he's one of those guys who has spent the last decade silently stewing over the fact that, even as the country's politics have shifted steadily rightward, it has never become cool to be a guy like him. But the Bari Weissification of mainstream media has created an opportunity for guys like this—people whose personalities and value systems have been replaced by a long catalog of vapid gripes—to finally do some strutting in public, and they are seizing it with all the grace of a dog smashing into the rear bumper of a car it's been chasing for a decade.

Tragically, it's obvious that even with this new opportunity to self-actualize as "talent," Hohmann and his co-hosts remain imprisoned by their grievances. The title of the podcast is a dead giveaway: Make It Make Sense sounds exactly like the kind of podcast The New York Times would have launched in 2019, hosted by three liberal millennials who have strong opinions on Charli XCX. These drips are driven by the same self-destructive impulse that led to Ben Shapiro's stupid media company destroying itself by spending millions of dollars making a boring prestige fantasy TV show because they thought Game Of Thrones was too woke. Presented, at long last, with the opportunity to replace the pieces of the culture they have been hating for years, all these guys can do is create lifeless facsimiles of what they despise. This is what's funniest about this stuff, and about its failure to find any kind of audience—the worldview that's entirely about hating the stuff they hate was too narrow and sour to produce anything but a washed-out replica of it.

Anyway, that's how you end up with a guy who looks like someone JD Vance would have bullied in college convincing himself that it's actually cool and smart to munch a burger on camera.