New outlet ‘The Contrarian’ vows to ‘confront’ Trump voters ‘with the consequences of their presidential pick’
Jennifer 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.
“Unlike most corporate or billionaire media, The Contrarian will not offer Trump the benefit of the doubt,” Rubin explained. “We will not normalize him. We will not engage in false equivalence. We will not excuse enablers in the media, government or business. We will not infantilize his supporters nor treat them as victims; we will confront them with the consequences of their presidential pick.” Just to clarify, Rubin is taking the “contrarian” view that mainstream journalists aren’t working hard enough to convince Americans that Trump is bad.
The new website has a nifty catchphrase (“Not owned by anybody”), an inspiring logo (the Statue of Liberty with a pencil rising out of her torch instead of a flame), and a roster of “brilliant” contributors including Lincoln Project cofounder and Ozempic addict George Conway, former New Yorker “satire” columnist Andy Borowitz, and Asha Rangappa, the Yale lecturer and ABC News analyst best known for bullying a 22-year-old Washington Free Beacon intern after falsely accusing Nikki Haley of changing her name because of white supremacy. A subscription costs $7 per month.
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?
Borowitz was once a semi-renowned figure among mentally unstable liberals who adored his devastating “satire” articles in the New Yorker. (He apparently left to start his own Substack in 2023. Who knew?) Contrarian subscribers will enjoy endless giggles reading cerebral humor columns such as “Republicans Release Gaetz Report After Realizing Their Voters Don’t Read,” “Elon Musk Tops Forbes List of Most Exhausting Men,” and “Trump Demands To See Taylor Swift’s Birth Certificate.”
The Contrarian‘s publisher, former Obama ethics adviser Norm Eisen, said very excitedly on Monday that the new website would be “very vocal about culture” in order to thrive. “We’ll have a humor column!” he explained. “We’ll even have a cooking column, but we’re going to sprinkle in a little bit of pro-democracy flavor.” Eisen served as a special counsel to House Democrats in the final years of the first Trump administration. He was praised (by Rubin) as “a critical force in building the case for impeachment.”
Rubin’s announcement did not come as a surprise. Many expected her to leave the paper in October amid the flurry of resignations and angsty statements from Post employees after Bezos barred the editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris, the losing candidate in the 2024 election. Rubin had publicly urged Los Angeles Times employees to resign after that paper’s owner, immigrant billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, also decided not to publish a presidential endorsement. Nevertheless, Rubin opted to collect a few more paychecks while publishing an array of insightful columns, such as “Are Republicans To Blame for Low-Info Voters?” and “Surprise! The Media Just Discovered Bidenomics Works.”
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The columnist’s behavior in the aftermath of the election caused some observers to wonder whether she was trying to get fired from the Post or had simply gone insane. Rubin appeared to preview the sort of “vibrant” and “independent” content she aims to provide at the Contrarian during a November 2024 episode of her podcast, in which she offered Democrats some advice on how to craft persuasive messaging. “You can’t talk broad themes. You have to boil it down to nuts and bolts, and you have to be pithy. What do I mean by pithy? How about this? Republicans want to kill your kids. It’s actually true,” she said. “It has to be that simple and that direct, and it has to be over and over and over again.”
I Forced a Bot To Read 1,000 Jennifer Rubin Columns and Write a Jennifer Rubin Column of Its Own
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