It looks like the billionaire business mogul who owns the Los Angeles Times may have been red-pilled.

According to a report from the New York Post, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made his wealth in biotech, is in the process of transforming his media empire by shifting resources away from the LA Times, which he bought in 2018 for half-a-billion dollars, and pouring them into a new venture…a conservative press.

The same article reveals that Soon-Shiong was the man behind the decision to withhold an endorsement for Kamala Harris just as the editorial board was prepared to publish it shortly before the November 5th election, which set off a wave of cancelled subscriptions from progressive readers and preceded a handful of resignations in the office.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting (and vindicating), because if I had to guess, I’d say this was probably the “straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back” moment for Soon-Shiong; from an LA Times piece:

He [Soon-Shiong] said they [LA Times opinion writers] should ‘draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation.’

‘In addition, the Board was asked to provide their understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years,’ he [Soon-Shiong] added. ‘In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.’

‘The Editorial Board chose to remain silent,’ Soon-Shiong contended in his X post, ‘and I accepted their decision.’

When pressured to evenly present the facts in a “clear and non-partisan” way—you know, like the news is supposed to do—they just couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Robert Greene, one of the editors who resigned over the ordeal, found Soon-Shiong’s compromise unsuitable because that project was more for the “newsroom” and “not an editorial board, whose purpose is to take a stand and defend it persuasively.” But, here’s my issue with that, and this isn’t just a matter of my biased opinion: You might be a hopelessly stupid Democrat who planned to vote for Kamala Harris regardless of fact and reason (trust me I know, I’ve unfortunately got some of these in my family), but one cannot make a logical and persuasive case to support her, because the facts don’t support it. Democrat voters almost universally despised Harris until legacy media outlets told them it was time to pretend she was competent and cunning.

At that point, it was all just propaganda, and Soon-Shiong had apparently had enough of it. You want to spout a stupid opinion for everyone in the world to read? That’s what X is for, or a SubStack, or a personal blog. But you’re not entitled for the publication’s owner to run your silly and infantile “endorsement” to play off the ignorance of the left and manipulate your candidate into office with emotion and fake news. If you want to do that, go start your own newspaper and run all the fake news you want—at least until you get sued for libel. American Thinker openly reserves the right to present conservative commentary on news events, but we aren’t claiming to be an unbiased publication presenting news in the style of Walter Cronkite. Admittedly, AT is extremely biased against failed ideas, government corruption, and leftist criminality—positions we’ve chosen based on facts and reality.

It’s also especially offensive since even the “news” section of LA Times has seemed almost entirely opinion-based, again, without the facts to even present the opinions as compelling and reasonable positions.

As Dr. Lifson observed, it’s almost like there’s an emerging “red-pill” trend among self-made billionaires, and that it’s mostly the inheritors who go and stay woke—Soon-Shiong’s daughter is a radical, progressive activist.

There’s a lot of good news these days, and to steal a phrase from James Woods, watching the leftists melt down, whether they’re panicking over Elon and Doge, Tom Homan and his ICE agents, or Soon-Shiong’s decision to bring back objectivity, is a “sinfully delicious” treat.

Image: NHS Confederation, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.