Time for Jeff Bezos to Clean House at the Post

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​Time for Jeff Bezos to Clean House at the Post
 
By Cliff Kincaid
 
I was a young journalist covering the Marxist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) when I heard Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post at the “think tank” teaching a “journalism” class and commenting that the leftist guerillas in Latin America were considered “the good guys.” Her coverage reflected that view, and she is now associate editor and senior national security correspondent for the Post.
 
To understand the significance of this fact, consider that Soviet spy Alger Hiss, the United Nations founder and a U.S. State Department official, spoke at the IPS on March 23, 1984. IPS regarded him as innocent and launched a series of “Alger Hiss lectures” in 2002, after receiving a bequest from the estate of Alger and Isabel Johnson Hiss.
 
DeYoung participated in the IPS “class” at a time when President Ronald Reagan was repelling a Soviet-Cuban invasion of the hemisphere.  President Trump is taking the Reagan policy forward in a big way, with the brilliant capture of the narco-terrorist Maduro. It could lead, finally, to the fall of the Cuban communist regime.
 
It is a welcome development for those of us who doubted Trump’s commitment to the anti-communist cause that Reagan embraced.
 
Reagan had commented, at the time, that the Democrats were becoming Marxist in orientation, and he urged Congress to investigate Marxist members of the Democratic Party. He was asked by Arnaud de Borchgrave, “What is to be done when two dozen pro-Marxists, with real political clout, can in our own Congress influence great issues of defense, arms control and international policy?” He replied: “Well, Arnaud, that is a problem that we have...”
 
Now the problem is much larger and one of their comrades has captured the mayor’s seat in New York City.
 
A caller on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program many years ago wondered where people such as Rep. Ilhan Omar came from. She is the Democratic Party Muslim who counts communist Angela Davis as her idol.
 
These people have not emerged “out of the woodwork,” as the caller said. One of my mentors, Reed Irvine, endorsed and helped publish the 1990 book, Communists in the Democratic Party.
 
Amazon tells you this paperback book is available for $49 or more. But we have a copy. We will be updating it in the weeks ahead.
 
The number of communists in the Democratic Party is now so large that books have been written about it. Anti-communist analyst Trevor Loudon has written a number of them.

Congressional Marxists were opposing Reagan’s successful effort to liberate Grenada and his campaign to arm the freedom fighters in Nicaragua. Today, under Trump, the problem is far worse, as we see in the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and the hysterical reaction to the liberation of Venezuela.

aren DeYoung had told that IPS class, attended and tape-recorded by this reporter, that "most journalists now, most Western journalists at least, are very eager to seek out guerrilla group leftist groups, because you assume they must be the good guys." DeYoung herself demonstrated the truth of that remark when she wrote a series of stories datelined "At a Sandinista Training Camp," during the Cuban-backed revolution in Nicaragua. "At that time, she reported that despite claims by Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza that the Sandinistas were Communist terrorists, the Sandinistas said they favored the establishment of a "pluralistic democracy," not a "new Cuba.
 
But look at the current coverage of the Washington Post, supposedly taking a new turn under owner Jeff Bezos. While the editorial board ran an editorial supporting President Trump’s action, its “news” coverage still shows a sympathy for the fate of the left-wing “good guys” in Latin America, as defined by Karen DeYoung.
 
The paper’s January 3 article tries to pick apart the capture of Maduro, calling it “audacious” rather than brilliant. 
 
Here’s an actual quote from the article:
 
“The audacious move makes good on Trump’s long-held desire to remove the Venezuelan strongman, but was done without congressional authorization, is in apparent violation of international law and leaves open questions about Venezuela’s future.”
 
By contrast, the Post editorial said, “Maduro’s removal sends an important message to tin-pot dictators in Latin America and the world: Trump follows through. President Joe Biden offered sanctions relief to Venezuela, and Maduro responded to that show of weakness by stealing an election.” It called Maduro “illegitimate.”
 
The “strongman?” Maduro is an indicted narco-terrorist and illegitimate leader. Even the Socialist International (SI)  “recalls that the international community, by and large, did not recognize the results of the elections held on 28 July 2024, as announced by the National Electoral Council controlled by the government of Nicolás Maduro.”
 
The SI also noted the death of Alfredo Diaz, former governor of Nueva Esparta state, “a courageous opposition leader from our Venezuelan member party Accion Democratica,” who “died while detained as a political prisoner at the headquarters of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service.”
 
It called this a facility “that has been repeatedly denounced by human rights organizations as a center of torture and human rights violations.”
 
It said, “The death of Alfredo is not an isolated incident. Following the July 28 elections in Venezuela seven people have died in custody. We strongly denounce the inhuman treatment of political prisoners in Venezuela and ask for their immediate release.”
 
Violation of international law?  The Post news pages quoted a “former State Department lawyer now with the International Crisis Group” as saying “It’s still an unlawful use of force against another state under international law.”
 
So that’s the basis for the article -- an opinion from someone plucked out of nowhere to dispute an operation that was brilliant in every respect and made Americans proud and Venezuelans happy.
 
The background is that, after Obama Secretary of State John Kerry had declared in 2013 that the Monroe Doctrine was dead, Vladimir Putin traveled to Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua and Cuba. This wasn’t an accident. The Obama administration was inviting aggression against the U.S. and the invasion through the southern border. Biden continued that policy.
 
Argentina has since been liberated by the people themselves through elections. The people of Venezuela and Cuba don’t have that option.
 
The Post editorial was correct about the brilliant operation to get Maduro: “This is a major victory for American interests. Just hours before, supportive Chinese officials held a chummy meeting with Maduro, who had also been propped up by Russia, Cuba and Iran. No doubt millions of Venezuelans will remember who backed their oppressor and who effected his removal. But the end of Maduro will be a failure if it doesn’t also corrode the influence of American adversaries in this hemisphere.”
 
The Monroe Doctrine was supposed to protect U.S. national security interests in the Western hemisphere by prohibiting foreign meddling in America’s backyard.
 
Since then, the situation has deteriorated. Colombia was just the latest Latin American country to go communist.
 
At his news conference announcing the capture of Maduro, Trump said that communist Colombian President Petro “has cocaine mills” and “factories where he makes cocaine,” adding that “they’re sending it into the United States.”
 
“So he does have to watch his ass,” Trump said.
 
Trump’s reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine is why the leftist reporters at the Post cited an insignificant figure to cast doubt on what Trump is doing.
 
Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that “All the guards that helped protect Maduro -- this is well known -- their whole spy agency, all of that, were full of Cubans. I mean, they basically, it’s amazing, this poor island took over Venezuela in some cases. One of the biggest problems the Venezuelans have is they have to declare independence from Cuba.”
 
But the reporters at the Post still seem to regard the communists as the “good guys.” Their names are Ellen Nakashima, Alex Horton, Warren P. Strobel, Tara Copp and Dan Lamothe.
 
By the way, Karen DeYoung is still at the Post. She is associate editor and senior national security correspondent.
 
Let’s take a hard look at one of the most prominent communist sympathizers at this paper.
 
I remember a Washington Post “journalist” by the name of Laurence Stern, who was then the national news editor of The Washington Post. When Laurence Stern died in 1979, I covered his memorial service, noting that among those who eulogized him at the memorial service presided over by Post executive editor Ben Bradlee was the Washington station chief of the Cuban intelligence service, Teofilo Acosta. I reported that he had praised Stern as a “friend.”
 
In fact, Acosta said, “I’m from Cuba, I am Marxist-Leninist. I am human. Larry Stern was my friend, one of my best friends. I loved him.” He said he taught Stern how to rhumba.
 
As Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine noted, "Rather than investigate Stern's ties to Cuban intelligence, The Washington Post set up a memorial fund to honor him." The paper even set up a “Laurence Stern fellowship” for British journalists at the paper.
 
It was Laurence Stern who used his key position at the Washington Post to try to whitewash rather than expose Orlando Letelier. Documents recovered from the briefcase of Letelier, a former ambassador and later cabinet officer in the government of Chile under the Marxist president, Salvador Allende, demonstrated that he was being financed out of Cuba. 
 
The Post dismissed the significance of the documents possibly because Letelier’s address book included Stern’s business and home phone numbers.
 
Post owner Jeff Bezos shifted the paper's editorial direction in early 2025, mandating that its opinion section defend “personal liberties and free markets.” He said that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
 
It turns out those contrary “viewpoints” are in the paper’s news coverage.
 
To rectify this problem, Bezos can revisit the case of Cuban intelligence operative Teofilo Acosta praising a prominent American journalist at the Post. It is not too late to tell the truth.
 
A good place to start is the book, The KGB And Soviet Disinformation, by communist defector Ladislav Bittman, who notes that Acosta functioned under diplomatic cover of First Secretary for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington and was also a member of the Cuban mission to the United Nations. In reality, he said, Acosta was “one of the top intelligence operatives in the Soviet bloc.”
 
Bittman wrote, “Since coming to the United States in 1970, Acosta had developed a wide circle of contacts among politicians, businessmen, scholars, and journalists, most of whom were apparently not concerned about his intelligence mission.”
 
If Bezos wants his paper to defend “personal liberties and free markets,” he must extend his mandate to the news pages, starting with those who consider leftist guerillas “good guys” and offer flimsy reasons to oppose the liberation of Venezuela.

• Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org

 
 
 

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