TRUMP’S WORST NIGHTMARE: Jennifer Rubin Leaves Washington Post To Launch ‘Pro-Democracy’ Website.
Rubin, widely regarded as the most courageous and intellectually dynamic opinion columnist in the history of American journalism, finally “resigned” from the Washington Post on Monday and launched a “pro-democracy” website, the Contrarian, on Substack. In a note announcing her alleged resignation, less than a week after the Post laid off roughly 100 employees in an effort to stop losing $77 million a year, Rubin accused the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, of sabotaging journalism’s “sacred mission” of “defending, protecting and advancing democracy.”
The Contrarian is built on a premise some would describe as delusional. In Rubin’s view, the mainstream media have been too soft on Donald Trump, if not openly supportive of his MAGA agenda. Mainstream journalists have been too afraid to criticize him and alert the public to the existential threat he poses to American democracy. They’ve been too polite to fight back by lashing out Trump’s voters for ignoring the experts and making the wrong decisions.
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A press release circulated by the Dewey Square Group, a political consultancy founded by former Democratic operatives, heralded the list of contributors as “a broad range of respected voices in law, politics, foreign policy, and culture.” It’s actually a bunch of people you’ve never heard of with utterly predictable opinions about everything:
Esosa Osa, a former adviser to Stacey Abrams. David Litt, a former speechwriter and “comic muse” for Barack Obama. Ilan Goldenberg, a Middle East expert who helped John Kerry negotiate the Iran nuclear deal. Karen Agnifilo, defense counsel for Luigi Mangione. Mike Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a fascism expert from New York University. Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton professor at the University Center for Human Values. Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor and author of the book In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate.
And more! Are you not impressed?
In a VIP post at RedState, Brandon Morse adds: Jen Rubin’s Independent Move Is Living in the Future, But Her Mind’s in the Past.
Rubin’s anti-Trump nature is so rabid that she’s willing to flat-out say some crazy things that can make even people on the left cringe. In order to keep up the rage bait, she’s going to have to flat-out go so extreme that she ends up lying about situations or people. Back when Rubin was on top of the world and WaPo was a top player in the narrative game, she could get away this.
But as I wrote in my aforementioned article, that age is dead. Now, anything extreme Rubin or her people put out can immediately be debunked, and that debunking will be very, very public. The embarrassment will be constant, and this won’t be good for subs.
So while, Rubin is living in the future in terms of her craft, she’s operating on an old set of rules that don’t apply anymore. Rubin’s only hope is that Trump’s second term is a monumental failure, but it’s not shaping up to be. Time will tell, of course, but the odds aren’t exactly on Rubin’s side.
The anti-Trump audience is actually very small, and Rubin is trying to tap into a sentiment that not a lot of people share. Moreover, once Trump is gone, organizations like Rubin’s will have to find ways of tapping into a leftist base that will effectively be “anti-Republican” at all costs.
See also: the WaPo after Trump was on the losing side of the 2020 election: Washington Post traffic craters, loses $100M amid identity crisis as talent, readers flee: reports.