The Lefty-journo Twittersphere is all atwitter that Vox-kid Ezra Klein is jumping ship from the publication he founded to become an opinion writer for The New York Times.

Per @maxwelltani, The New York Times now employs the former EICs of Vox, Buzzfeed News, Gizmodo, Fusion, The Awl, and Gawker. https://t.co/wKZFCf9SaD

— Tom Bunting (@tomhbunting) November 20, 2020

Really bold move for Klein, and the New York Times, which is cementing its place as the paper of record for anti-Semitism, leftist ideology, and conspiracy theories.

The editorial section of the New York Times, now that Ezra Klein's unique perspective has been added… pic.twitter.com/v0Xwc15jkP

— Alex VanNess (@thealexvanness) November 20, 2020

Klein has been a darling of the left-wing journalist set since he published his barely readable screeds on The American Prospect. He wrote for the laundry list of liberal rags before landing at the Washington Post. He left WaPo in 2014 to found Vox with Matthew Yglesias (then of Slate). Yglesias was the first to announce his departure from Vox, after Klein essentially threw Yglesias under the bus when he became the target of the Woke mobs. Yglesias had the temerity to sign his name to a letter supporting JK Rowling and denouncing Cancel Culture, and the transgenders went on the attack, including one on the Vox staff, who called him a racist.

Speaks to Klein and his sense of loyalty, not to mention his views on free speech.

In honor of Klein’s illustrious promotion to the Gray Lady, here is a brief rundown of what makes Ezra, Ezra.

Gave the World Journolist:

Klein created Journolist in 2007, while he was still at The American Prospect. It was a members-only listserv of prominent journalists, mostly left of center, who dished dirt, and essentially plotted and conspired on how to protect the Obama campaign and subsequent administration, and how to thwart and kill stories that did not support that agenda. The group attempted to kill the Jeremiah Wright controversy because they felt it would hurt Obama’s chances at winning the White House, and were instrumental in the wholesale campaign to destroy then-Alaska Governor and John McCain’s 2008 running mate Sarah Palin. Such objectivity! Such collegiality! Such…. whatever.

The Daily Caller was instrumental in exposing the group and the emails that showed the lengths they were prepared to go to for the cause of making Republicans and conservatives look horrible, and making Democrats and Leftist look reasonable and triumphant.

Klein tried to play the existence of Journolist off as no big deal, and just an informal group of “friendly” journalists. The fallout from the exposure of their “journalistic integrity” or lack thereof, is that colleague Dave Weigel was fired from The Washington Post. See above, Yglesias, Matthew.

With friends like that….

Once the group was outed, Klein decided to close it out and after penning this farewell post, deleted the content.

“In any case, Journolist is done now. I’ll delete the group soon after this post goes live. That’s not because Journolist was a bad idea, or anyone on it did anything wrong. It was a wonderful, chaotic, educational discussion. I’m proud of having started it, grateful to have participated in it, and I have no doubt that someone else will reform it, with many of the same members, and keep it going. Hopefully, it will lose some of its mystique in the process, and be understood more for what it is: One of many e-mail lists where people talk about things they’re interested in. But insofar as the current version of Journolist has seen its archives become a weapon, and insofar as people’s careers are now at stake, it has to die.”

They are all probably on Slack, this time coordinating how to prop up a Biden-Harris presidency and finally destroy President Donald Trump.

Prove me wrong.

Fierce Champion of Obamacare

Probably three-quarters of the pieces on the Vox site are about the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Most of the writing is spent justifying how well the law was doing and how many people it was helping, when all the evidence on the ground showed it is a flaming dumpster fire.

Back in 2010, our own Streiff ripped Klein a new one on one of his hot takes about the Senate’s fight to defund Obamacare:

“In today’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein shows just how fresh and exciting the world can be if, for you, history began around 2000.

“Exuding that aura of patchouli and devil-may-care insouciance that is catnip to lefties and irresistible to truly stupid women, Klein writes on the subject of the imminent fight in the next Congress over the fate of Obamacare”

In one 2014 Vox piece, Klein tried to call out conservative outlets (like our sister site Hot Air) about their wrong take on the failure of Obamacare. He did his usual gaslighting and cheerleading to convince you otherwise:

“On the whole, though, costs are lower than expected, enrollment is higher than expected, the number of insurers participating in the exchanges is increasing, and more states are joining the Medicaid expansion. Millions of people have insurance who didn’t have it before. The law is working. But a lot of the people who are convinced Obamacare is a disaster will never know that, because the voices they trust will never tell them.”

Despite Klein using his website to champion and run interference for the law, 10 years later, we deal with the real result: The Affordable Care Act was anything but. While millions received coverage, millions more lost their coverage as premiums doubled. More people became uninsured, or had to pay astronomical premiums in order to maintain or obtain new coverage. The greedy insurance industry took an “L” from their gambit, but still got a government bailout. The American people are still waiting.

We will see what the Supreme Court does, if anything.

Fellated Obama Every Chance he Could Get

Klein was more than an Obama fanboy, he was a true believer—anyone who creates a listserv of journalists to run interference for you has to be madly in love. Klein was at the Washington Post for most of the Obama administration, and the majority of his op-eds were these half-cheerleading, half-“regretful that I have to write this” pieces on how then-President Obama handled policy. Once again, his favorite subject was:  Obamacare. Klein was intent on creating instant history for his favorite president and painting Obama as merely misunderstood. Klein was convinced that once Obama got done what he needed to do, and got past the poor approval ratings, his presidency would be as weighty and consequential as Reagan’s.

Yeah… right:

“I think that the labor market will eventually recover, and the health-care reform plan will cover 32 million people and make the system better and more secure for a lot of people beyond that, and Obama, like Reagan before him, will be considered an extremely successful president despite struggling with his popularity in the early years of his first term. But for now, that kind of popularity is, well, a pipe dream. And the Obama administration is left running on exactly the record it hoped and promised to have in 2008, but without the level of economic recovery and thus popularity that would’ve helped convince the American people to deliver a favorable initial review.”

History is Spelled with an F

Much of the attention Klein gets on Twitter is due to his staggering lack of historical knowledge, particularly about how the American political process actually works. For someone who is praised as a digital wunderkind, he sure doesn’t seem to know how to use Google.

Whoa. @imillhiser did some rough math and:

If Republicans win the GA specials, the Dem Senate *minority* will represent 20 million more people than the GOP majority.

If Dems win, the Senate will be 50-50, and Dems will represent 41 million more people. https://t.co/PmdHk5lu4q

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 6, 2020

Ezra Klein constantly discovering how the U.S. Senate works is the journalistic equivalent of Donald Trump's periodic announcements that people don't know some piece of American history he just learned. https://t.co/yeAK0tFpv1

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) November 7, 2020

Another of our sister sites, Twitchy, called out a now-deleted Tweet highlighting his stunning lack of historical knowledge, as well as self-awareness:

“Just when you think Ezra Klein can’t out-hack himself, he swoops in to prove you wrong:

Imagine you’re a small country charting a path between Chinese-style autocracy and American-style democracy — which many are right now. How appealing does our model look to you at the moment?

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) January 18, 2018

is this satire or stupidity?

— Billy Sanford (@sanfordbilly) January 18, 2018

”

No doubt we will have countless more years to tease this question.

Congratulations, Ezra!