Jen Rubin quits the Washington Post to join ‘pro-democracy’ outlet ‘The Contrarian’ with Norm Eisen

That new outlet from Rubin and Eisen, who worked on the 1st Trump impeachment in 2020, will be called The Contrarian, and the tagline for the media enterprise will be "not owned by anybody." Apparently, they didn't like tech billionaire Bezos getting into the newspaper game. Rubin believes he's "bent the knee" to Trump. Rubin will be editor-in-chief and apparently neither Rubin nor the outlet will have a home on Elon Musk's X.

"Our goal," Rubin told CNN, "is to combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face." This is a similar spirit to the "resist" mantra that was the mainstay of Democrats and leftist in the lead up to and throughout Trump's first term in office. The plan was to put up resistance to anything and everything brought forth by the Trump administration, and it appears that this is the goal now. The Washington Post's tagline has long been "democracy dies in darkness."

On X, she wrote "BIG NEWS. I have left the Post. Corporate and billionaire media are failing to meet the moment. With @normeisen.bsky.social I'm launching @contrariannews.bsky.social. We'll have politics but also cooking, humor, film and even pets. Please subscribe and join the fight. http://contrarian.substack.com. And because I want to be true to my values I am leaving X. I refuse to enable the Elon-Trump presidency."

"The voices we'll be featuring are diverse across parties and generations connected by a 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.

However, The Contrarian claims to be "pro-democracy" and is launching with two dozen contributors "including people who played prominent roles in debunking 2020 election denialism and investigating the January 6, 2021, attack at the US Capitol," CNN writes.

In a recent column for the Washington Post, Rubin said that "Democrats shouldn’t try to find ‘common ground’ with Trump." Of those Democrats who signalled that they are ready to reach across the aisle and work with Trump, she said that their "naive, tone-deaf declarations epitomize an infatuation with bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake. Sometimes, it’s better not to bend the knee before the bidding even gets underway."

She said Trump's Cabinet picks are "crackpots" and that "Democrats strain credulity if they imagine they can find common ground with someone who vows, among other mind-boggling schemes, to imprison opponents, deploy the military against immigrants, snatch the power of the purse from Congress and pay for tax cuts for billionaires with cuts to entitlements and other programs that serve ordinary Americans."

"The fruitless search for nonexistent common ground instantaneously normalizes Trump," she said, echoing a sentiment from many Democrats and leftists that Trump should not be "normalized," despite him having been elected by the American people to serve a second term, something that is entirely normal. "Democrats should not propound the dubious assertion that Trump can operate rationally and in good faith. Mouthing this platitude makes Democrats look weak, foolish and unprepared to stand up to an authoritarian agenda," she said.

Undoubtedly, these are among the reasons she decided to leave the Post. Additionally, Bezos has signaled that the era of unfettered leftism at the Washington Post has come to an end. After his refusal to allow a Harris endorsement, many staffers resigned from the paper in protest. He also indicated that it's time to bring conservative columnists to the paper.

Bezos isn't the only newspaper owner to make these kinds of changes. The LA Times has seen similar circumstances after the publisher refused to allow that paper to publish an unequivocal endorsement of Harris and he's said he's planning to bring in a new editorial board. That board, so far, includes CNN's conservative voice Scott Jennings. Staffers have quit that outlet, as well.

Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that the platforms he runs, notably Instagram and Facebook, will be veering back toward free speech. He pulled the third-party fact-checkers from the sites so that they could not continue to censor and suppress users' speech and is moving the content moderation teams to Texas, out of the toxic woke sludge that exists in Silicon Valley.