After owner Jeff Bezos published an op-ed in The Washington Post in late October last year, several employees have left in protest over the direction he wants to take the publication.
The latest high-profile Post writer to leave the publication is Jen Rubin, after writing for the opinion section for 14 years.
Rubin will be joining former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen to start a new publication, called The Contrarian. Rubin will be editor-in-chief, and Eisen will be publisher.
The pair will publish "written material, podcasts, interviews, social media, all in defense of democracy," to Substack, Rubin explained in the site’s intro video.
Monday morning, Rubin made the announcement on X.
Rubin ‘refuse[s] to enable the Elon-Trump presidency’
“BIG NEWS,” she wrote. “I have left the Post. Corporate and billionaire media are failing to meet the moment. Please subscribe and join the fight. And because I want to be true to my values I am leaving X. I refuse to enable the Elon-Trump presidency.”
As The Washington Post makes moves to shift the publication more toward the center, The Contrarian is likely to follow Rubin’s public dislike for President-elect Donald Trump.
Eisen explained more on the new publication’s mission: “We’re gonna do politics, we’re gonna do law, but we know that any successful pro-democracy movement also has to be very vocal about culture. We’ll have a humor column, we’ll even have cooking column, but we’re going to sprinkle in a little pro-democracy flavor.”
CNN reported that The Contrarian already has around 24 contributors, including people “who played prominent roles in debunking 2020 election denialism and investigating the January 6, 2021, attack at the US Capitol.”
Rubin wrote on X in late December, “A depressingly high number of elected Democrats are declaring their intent to find ‘common ground’ with President-elect Donald Trump and his crackpot Cabinet picks."
She continued, “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.”
Rubin’s resignation came shortly after political cartoonist Ann Telnaes’ resignation, which resulted from The Washington Post refusing to publish a satirical cartoon of Bezos and others on bended knee, handing money up to a large version of Trump.
“Our goal is to combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face,” she told CNN.
Rubin has called for a more “robust, aggressive free press,” saying, “I fear that things are going from bad to worse at The Post.”
Are many people leaving X over Musk’s politics?
Rubin’s impending departure from X begs the question of whether many X users who disagree with Musk’s politics are leaving the app in protest.
Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and soon rebranded it to X. Search Logistics reported that X “has lost 32 million users since the takeover but still has managed to generate $4.4 billion in 2022."
Statista reported that users of the the social media giant have decreased 5% since 2022.
However, in mid-July last year, Musk announced in an X post that the app’s usage “hit another all-time high yesterday with 417 billion user-seconds globally! In the US, user-seconds reached 93B, 23% higher than the previous record of 76B. In a single day.”