In Jonathan Capehart’s forthcoming memoir, Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home, the author explains why he left the editorial board of the Washington Post in 2023. “I decided to wait to tell this story until now,” Capehart writes. “I needed time and emotional distance to process what I went through.”

Sounds pretty bad. Yet as one delves into the details of why Capehart walked, it’s Capehart himself who looks pretty bad. Imperious, while at the same time hyper-sensitive; self-righteous while morally confused; resentful while equally obtuse; ideologically brainwashed and thus incapable of independent thought, Jonathan Capehart is everything wrong with journalism in 2025. No wonder Jeff Bezos is scrambling to sweep out the stables at The Washington Post.

To simplify, Jonathan Capehart left the editorial board of The Washington Post because the Post’s board called BS on Joe Biden’s fearmongering about laws defending election integrity: specifically, Georgia’s SB 202—a.k.a. the “Election Integrity Act of 2021.” It was signed into law following the 2020 presidential election. SB 202 placed new restrictions on early and absentee voting, imposed stricter ID verification requirements, curbed the chaotic mail-in ballot system, and shortened the window of time during which voters could request absentee ballots be sent to them.

The Biden administration sued over the law, a lawsuit that was just dismissed by Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Contrary to the Biden Administration’s false claims of suppression, Black voter turnout actually increased under SB 202,” Bondi said. “Georgians deserve secure elections, not fabricated claims of false voter suppression meant to divide us. Americans can be confident that this Department of Justice will protect their vote and never play politics with election integrity.” 

A statement from the Justice Department added that:

the Biden administration fabricated an untrue narrative following the passage of Senate Bill 202 and sued the state of Georgia, claiming without evidence that SB 202 was an intentional scheme to “depress the Black vote” and referring to the basic election legislation as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Some mainstream media outlets and corporate allies of the Biden Administration fueled this falsehood, demonizing Georgians for political gain and triggering boycotts—including Major League Baseball’s relocation of the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta—that, by some estimates, cost the state over $100 million in economic losses.

As Bodi noted, “black voter turnout actually increased under SB 202.” The Trump Justice Department explained how the statute’s provisions “spurred record voter turnout, including among Black Georgians.”

Even the far-left Washington Post admitted the truth: “How could it be voter suppression if all these people are coming out to vote?” editorial board member Karen Tumulty says “with a tone of amazement” in a meeting. Capehart objects. “The conversation at the meeting disturbed me,” he recalls. “So much so that I penned an email to everyone who was at the meeting.” 

Despite his objections, in December 2022 the paper published an editorial about the election results. It contained the following sentence: “And turnout remained high despite hyperbolic warnings by President Biden and other Democrats that updated voting rules amounted to Jim Crow 2.0.”

This is the sentence that caused Jonathan Capehart to flip out and leave the Post’s editorial board. “I was sitting at my desk in the den of my apartment when I read the editorial in the print edition on December 8. A fine, perfectly reasonable piece … Reasonable until I hit the third sentence of the fifth paragraph. I was a tornado of emotions, eye-popping rage, and disbelief. I couldn’t stay.”

Capehart then fired off an angry email announcing he would leave the editorial board. When not enough people bothered to take notice, his resentment became volcanic.

He contacted human resources, cried to friends, and in many other ways metaphorically stomped his feet. Of course, Capehart, a gay black man, played the gay black card.

No one who is not black can quite understand all the ways Jim Crow “morphs” depending on the age—in one way or another, it is always and forevermore Selma in 1965. To dismiss this, we are told, is to dismiss the very humanity of black people.

As Capehart put it:

I’m not unique in what I experienced. Black people up and down the socioeconomic ladder go through some form of it daily. No one is exempt, no matter how high on the ladder they are or might seem. But what I experienced was uniquely painful for me, given my job and how I viewed my role in it. I had the ultimate job for a kid who once fancied himself an ambassador to the race, an interlocutor between Blacks and whites. And once again, it felt like the whiter world let me know where it believed my place to be.

A brief digression. In Yet Here I Am, Capehart reveals that he had told the Post he was leaving the editorial board in August 2022. He told editor David Shipley he “wanted to leave the editorial board, that fifteen years was long enough. I wanted off the board not only because it was time, but also because the dynamic no longer felt right. For thirteen of those fifteen years, I had not written an editorial.”

Imagine an editorial job you hold for 15 years where you get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to not write for 13 of those years. Imagine any such job.

Finally, there is a contentious meeting with journalist and editorial board member Karen Tumulty:

“There have been multiple misunderstandings or whatever,” she began. She then said, “I’m sorry.” I don’t recall the words immediately after that because of what came in the next breath. “But I do think use of the word ‘hyperbolic’ is defensible.” In that moment, I thought for sure I was being punked. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Tumulty then made a pronouncement. “I have a rule: No one should be called a Nazi unless they were an actual Nazi,” she told me. “So for President Biden to call the Georgia voter law ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ well that’s an insult to people who lived through Jim Crow.” 

I sat frozen, gripping the armrests of my chair as I stared at her in disbelief. With that one comment, Tumulty took an incident where I felt ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity. She either couldn’t or wouldn’t see that I was Black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit it different from hers, was equally valid.

I sat in stunned, unblinking silence for what seemed like ten minutes after Tumulty removed herself from my office. My mind reeled with what had just happened. In a time when people, especially white people, are so careful not to make racial situations worse, Tumulty seemed to have done just that.

Karen Tumulty made the mistake of treating Jonathan Capehart like an adult. She made the mistake of assuming he could rationally follow facts to their proper conclusions, and that he could act like a grown man if he disagreed with an editorial. She refused to genuflect before the dapper black ambassador between the races, to bow and scrape before the Little Lord Fauntleroy of the Fourth Estate. 

Jeff Bezos is trying to save The Washington Post, which is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year and has lost all credibility. The departure of Jonathan Capehart can only help that process.