Leaving the Washington Post, she is forming a Resistance-in-Exile somewhere else.
Leaving the Washington Post, she is forming a Resistance-in-Exile somewhere else.
T hese are dark times for the Resistance. Donald Trump is about to return to office. Elon Musk is the second-most powerful man in the world (or first, depending on whom you ask). Mark Zuckerberg just fired an entire industry’s worth of fact-checkers, then capped it off by appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience to quaff an entire jar of red pills. But all hope is not lost: Jennifer Rubin is now free to speak her mind again. Will anyone really care to listen?
When Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, cancelled his newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president in late October of last year, few in the media were more outraged at the purported betrayal of principle than Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s star “Resistance” columnist. Rubin’s entire output since the year 2015 has been devoted to hatred of Donald Trump and the slavishly rote defense of whatever the official Democratic Party line in D.C. is that day, and her incandescent disgust was such that she demanded the entire editorial staff of the Times resign immediately in protest.
Which meant that Rubin was hit square in the solar plexus with a delightful dose of cosmic irony when, literally one day later, the Washington Post announced that it, too, would not be endorsing a presidential candidate. After all that high dudgeon in which she had urged other people to quit their jobs on the spot, Rubin chose to do the courageous thing, and stayed right where she was. (She did quit Twitter/X, mostly to avoid mockery.) Now that she has lined her ducks up in a row — and cashed a few extra paychecks — she has resigned from the Post to announce a Substack start-up: a new collaborative venture with the bafflingly inapposite name The Contrarian. Her partner in this project is forgotten Obama-era hack Norm Eisen, whose impeccable “Resistance” résumé is too boring to recount here.
The appeal for potential readers? Now that Jeff Bezos has sold American freedom out to Trump’s impending autocracy — now that the Black Marias are gearing up to cart progressives off to the midnight execution cellars of Mar-a-Lago — where can proud Tyranny Resisters turn to for the most monotonously establishment-Democratic takes this side of Jen Psaki? The Contrarian. (I was in fact surprised that Psaki wasn’t named as a writer, given that the contributor list — including luminaries such as John Dean and Laurence Tribe — was seemingly drawn from a week spent in MSNBC’s greenroom.) Let’s all hum over to the buzzing hive mind of the Resistance-in-Exile, where we can find the same reliably reassuring anti-Trump content these writers have been churning out to disastrous political outcome and mass indifference for the past decade: The Contrarian. Let’s go to the one place on the internet where we know absolutely for sure that we will never be surprised: The Contrarian.
It’s a heck of a branding choice for people famed — by their peers in national media as well as much of their audience — for opinions so predictable that they can be produced via AI. (A much more well-respected media figure than me privately suggested that we could somehow send journalists to The Contrarian, “like a penal colony.”) Presumably Rubin and Eisen think of themselves as contrarians in the sense of their opposition to Trump’s next four years. In that case, I will repeat another joke I’ve heard across the media (both left and right) since Rubin’s announcement: This website already exists, and it’s called The Bulwark. But Eisen’s vision for The Contrarian is as a “full-service” Resistance website, declaring that “because laughter is one of the most powerful weapons against autocracy,” they’re hiring Andy Borowitz to write a humor column, which raises the question of why one would voluntarily go into battle unarmed.
The real takeaway, in my view, is that the market for this sort of content is shrinking nationally. After eight long years of relentless, unceasing shrieks, the anti-Trump “Resistance” has all but fallen silent in the wake of Trump’s reelection. The media ecosystem that sustained it has been slowly withering for years, but it suddenly died on the vine almost overnight with Trump’s easy defeat of Kamala Harris in November. And among my (surprisingly many) left-wing friends, even those who are treating the next four years like an extended visitation from Count Orlok tend to roll their eyes at the clueless “Resistance” types, be they “JoJoFromJerz” social media grifters or hapless old-guard columnists.
The hope for these people is that this sort of content can survive as a niche product, narrowcasting via a subscription service and low staff costs and logistical overhead to a small but loyal audience willing to pay a fee. It just might work — many people do remain unreconciled to Trump, after all. The problem is that in order for Substacks to survive and thrive they have to be interesting. Bari Weiss turned her own Substack into the Free Press, but Bari Weiss also had professional editorial experience, a coherent vision of what she wanted her outlet to stand for, and a gift for spotting talent.
I’m not sure if any of that applies here. Jennifer Rubin was famous for generating traffic with the institutional platform and backing of the Washington Post. And to give her her due, what she does best is generate content. (Say whatever else you will about the woman, she certainly doesn’t suffer from writer’s block.) But given the economics of Substack, generic content usually isn’t enough. Either way, as Ned Flanders once said: “Godspeed, li’l doodle.”