Rubin specializes in the kind of partisan fear-mongering that helped create the low-trust world she now laments.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we mark the end of Jennifer Rubin’s tenure at the Washington Post with a recap of some of her worst remarks, and we cover more media misses.
The Washington Post Fails Jen Rubin’s Purity Test
A Forgotten Fact Checks regular has resigned from the Washington Post.
Opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin announced Monday she is leaving the paper after 14 years to launch a startup publication with former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen. The new outfit, The Contrarian, aims to “combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat we face,” Rubin told CNN.
For Rubin, any individual or institution that is not committed to attacking Donald Trump with the same level of partisan furor that she brings to her analysis has betrayed their country. That ever-expanding group now includes her former workplace, the Washington Post, and its owner, Jeff Bezos, whose checks she has cashed since 2013, when he bought the paper. But now, Bezos and his paper are simply beyond the pale.
“The Post, along with most mainstream news outlets, has failed spectacularly at a moment that we most need a robust, aggressive free press,” she claims, insisting that her new publication will not be so much anti-Trump as it will be pro-democracy.
“The voices we’ll be featuring are diverse across parties and generations, connected by the shared belief that we need an unshackled media in order to meet this moment, as we face an existential threat to American democracy,” Eisen said in a statement.
The Washington Post lost all credibility, you see, when the editorial board declined to endorse Kamala Harris. Apparently unable to grasp Bezos’s argument that presidential endorsements simply exacerbate the paper’s partisan reputation and reduce dwindling trust, Rubin has an answer for our polarized times: another rabidly anti-Trump outlet.
But if Rubin’s work product over the past decade is indicative of what we can expect from the new outlet, she and Eisen will likely end up contributing to the atmosphere of distrust and rank partisanship that they lament.
This is how Rubin described a group that comprises roughly half the country she hopes to cover with her new outlet: “They plainly do not understand patriotism in the way many of us do. Many are driven by the zeal to defend America as a White, Christian country.”
Convinced she is surrounded by unrepentant racists and fascists, Rubin committed herself to fighting Trump and his movement at every turn. That total commitment required that Rubin twist the facts to fit her all-consuming narrative. Over the years since Trump came down the escalator, the circumstances would change, but the premise stayed the same: If Republicans prevailed, on any front, democracy was threatened.
In December 2021, the end of democracy was near because then–Senator Joe Manchin was considering voting no on Biden’s original $3.5 trillion Build Back Better package. “If Manchin is no on both BBB and voting, Biden is done. Democracy is hanging by a thread. Hard to think of anyone more destructive,” she wrote. And yet, here we are three years later with democracy still standing even though Manchin voted against the bill in its initial form.
What began as a special hostility to Trump transformed over the years to an all-purpose aversion to Republicans, facts be damned.
When Business Insider reported on outbound migration from Florida, Rubin saw the perfect opportunity to dunk on Ron DeSantis. But she didn’t let the fact that Business Insider had corrected its reporting days earlier keep her from using the incorrect data to fit her narrative.
“Florida might pay for MAGA cruelty and know-nothingism,” she warned in July 2023, citing data that allegedly show Florida had more outbound migration in 2021 than even California or New York. But Business Insider had accidentally swapped the number of people who moved out of the state with the number of people who moved into the state, later amending its headline to read: “We got it wrong: More people moved out of New York and California than Florida in 2021.”
Rubin made a similarly dubious case when she suggested a “GOP nightmare” was coming to fruition: “Biden’s handlings of war, Ukraine and democracy are popular” she wrote, while citing a poll that showed 49 percent of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Just 43 percent of respondents to the survey – conducted by Navigator, which calls itself a “trusted resource for developing and distributing winning progressive messages and polling” – said they approved.
Then there was her helpful idea for Democrats’ messaging after their November election loss: tell voters “Republicans want to kill your kids.”
“If you’re gonna oppose vaccinations, if you’re gonna stop breakthrough medical research, if you’re gonna allow minors and all sorts of people to get semi-automatic weapons, which they use to shoot up schools, well, then you are responsible for kids’ health and death, unfortunately. It has to be that simple and that direct, and it has to be over, and over, and over again,” Rubin said.
Rubin, like many other mainstream pundits, could not keep herself together in the wake of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. She dishonestly claimed that overturning Roe was equivalent to bringing about forced births in the U.S.
When not dishonestly attacking Republicans, Rubin has spent the last few years writing glowing press releases for Biden and his allies. That Rubin’s resignation comes during the last week of the Biden administration comes as little surprise; her work as the president’s No. 1 cheerleader has come to an end.
After Biden begrudgingly decided to drop out of the presidential race over the summer — because he was given little other choice by his party — she likened the elderly president to George Washington.
“If you cannot appreciate the dignity, the grace, the selflessness, the patriotism of that speech – akin to Washington’s farewell – but instead feel compelled to denigrate him, nitpick or return to petty partisan politics I pity you,” Rubin wrote in a post on X. “You’re denying yourself the majesty, the inspiration of America and of a great president. Go self-reflect.”
When our modern day George Washington decided to pardon his own son, Rubin defended the nakedly self-interested move as a reasonable response to the threat posed by a Trump Justice Department.
She called Americans who blamed Biden for rising gas prices — an overly simplistic if not common way of viewing a president’s performance handling the economy — “stupid.”
And of course, Rubin also defended Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, claiming the idea that “we abandoned the Afghans. We failed to get people out,” was “false.” She wrote at the time that “the airport in Kabul is up and running flights to evacuate U.S. citizens, third-party nationals, interpreters and other Afghan partners.” At the time, it has been reported over and over again that Afghans were being turned away from the gates of the airport, as well as hunted down around the country.
Surveying the media landscape after decades in the industry, Rubin has concluded that what’s really needed is more virulent anti-Trump commentary.
Setting aside all the fascism allegations and Hitler comparisons, Rubin is convinced the mainstream media’s true failing is that journalists have tried to make Trump seem “not so bad.”
“And I think because they have done such a bad job, because they have made an effort to treat the Republican Party like the Democratic Party, this notion that he’s not so bad, that he’s just kind of a cartoon character has set in. And that’s on the mainstream media, that’s on the failure to be honest and to side with truth rather than having this false balance,” she said in January 2024, months before the assassination attempts. She went on to claim Trump’s supporters are part of a “fascist cult.”
“Let’s be honest, there are a lot of them, but a lot of them does not mean that they are behaving logically or rationally,” she said.
Jen Rubin, champion of rationality.
Headline Fail of the Week
“Mark Zuckerberg’s MAGA makeover will reshape the entire internet,” reports CNN’s Brian Stelter.
Stelter wrote in a post on X that the company’s framing in a PR blog post was “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes,” but he claims it should be “More Lies and More Confusion.”
Stelter is seemingly upset about Meta’s decision to switch to a community notes style of fact-checking, abandoning its existing third-party fact checking program, which the social media giant now acknowledges was plagued by political bias.
Washington Free Beacon reporter Chuck Ross quickly put CNN in its place. “CNN is currently in court in Florida in a defamation case, had to settle with Nicholas Sandmann for defaming him, was the leading purveyor of the Russia collusion hoax, and hired the reporter who peddled the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was disinfo,” he wrote in a post on X replying to Stelter.
Media Misses
• Keith Olbermann was at it again last week, this time insinuating conservatives deserve to be devastated by the wildfires in Southern California merely because of their political affiliation. He responded to a user on X who was defending conservative actor James Woods after Woods was forced to evacuate his home because of the fires.
“This is the attitude that lost the election. They will not compromise they will not convert they will not be human. They must be defeated – and any chance to bruise or batter them psychologically must be exploited,” Olbermann said to the Woods defender.
• A newly unearthed video is raising questions about whether Los Angeles Fire Department deputy chief Kristine Larson is fit for her role as the department fights several devastating wildfires at once. “Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out,” she’s heard saying in the video, which first aired as a commercial break for the show 9-1-1 but was recently resurfaced as wildfires rage across LA.