More Mainstream Media Hacks Come To Substack.

Hack Washington Post Writer Jen Rubin Comes To Substack.

With the American Establishment collapsing in the public eye, it seems like everyone and anyone is now rebranding as anti-establishment. Security state-tied big tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and now Mark Zuckerberg have all undergone rebranding efforts to try to paint themselves as anti-establishment outsiders, while still being influential billionaires with deep state ties.

This same trend is also happening in the media, especially here on substack. Former New York Times contributor Bari Weiss now writes on Substack under an “anti-establishment” guise while doing endless propaganda for the American establishment’s backing of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Former CNN pundit Van Jones similarly came to substack just to push the same propaganda he was on CNN.

The latest addition to this list is former Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. CNN reports that Rubin is “partnering with former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen and launching something new: a startup publication called The Contrarian” (I guess “The Dissident” was already taken).

In the Substacks launch article, it claims to be “a central hub for unvarnished, unbowed, and uncompromising reported opinion and analysis that exists in opposition to the authoritarian threat.” The outlet claims that it wants to “pledge to live up to our credo: Not Owned by Anybody.”

The biggest problem with this is that Rubin has been guilty of spreading all the false claims that make people hate the mainstream media in the first place, and has no signs of changing. In this article, I will go over Robin's real history as a journalist and question if she actually believes in her motto “Not Owned By Anyone”.

Not Owned By Anybody?

“The Contrarian” claims to be a break from “corporate or billionaire media” with the motto “Not Owned By Anyone” giving the impression that it will not take corporate funding.

While the outlet may not take corporate funding directly, its publisher- former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen- certainly does. Eisen currently takes a paycheck from the think tank “Brookings Institute” where he currently serves as a “Senior Fellow in Governance Studies”

The Brookings Institute’s contributors list for the fiscal year of 2020 shows they are funded by a whole host of billionaire and corporate donors. Some notable contributors are:

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

• Facebook, Inc.

• Google, Inc.

• Northrop Grumman Corporation

• Amazon.com

• Microsoft Corporation

• Charles Koch Foundation

• The Rockefeller Foundation

• T-Mobile USA

• BlackRock Financial Management, Inc

• Lockheed Martin Corporation

• The Israel Institute

• The World Bank

• The Walton Family Foundation

The Think is not free from state funding either, some of its state backers include:

• Embassy of the State of Qatar

• Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs

• British Foreign & Commonwealth Office

• Government of Switzerland

• U.S. Coast Guard

• U.S. Department of the Air Force

• U.S. Department of the Army

• Japan Air Self-Defense Force

“The Contrarian” may itself be an independent outlet, but it is pretty difficult to sport the slogan “not owned by anyone” when its co-founder works for a Think Tank that not only takes state funding but is funded by almost every powerful corporate interest in America.

Jennifer Rubin’s Horrific Journalism Record From Iraq to Russiagate

Aside from the fact that its publisher is funded by a whos who of corporate interests, “The Contrarian’s” editor-in-chief Jennifer Rubin has about the worst track record a journalist can have.

If you ask anyone what the two biggest mainstream media fuck-ups in recent history are, most will likely answer either with the promotion of the Iraq war or Russiagate. Rubin not only pushed these deceptions but continued to push them long after they were debunked.

Rubin was one of the latest defenders of the Iraq war, supporting the war in the mid-2010s long after even most neocons had disavowed it. In 2013 Media Matters for America documented Rubin’s long support for the Iraq war, writing that she:

whines about the U.S. drawdown in Iraq, attacks anyone who dared question or criticize the Bush/Cheney leadership, and asks with a straight face, “How much did the emergence of a democratic Iraq have to do with this popular revolt in Tunisia?"

The Ron Paul Institute wrote in 2014 that Rubin was still defending the Iraq war even as “Most of her fellow neocons had the sense to keep a low profile”. And indeed she did publish an op-ed in 2013 titled “Where are the Iraq War Defenders”. In the piece, Rubin complained that supporters of the war “were unusually quiet as the 10th anniversary of the war came and went, as if in a defensive crouch while the “what a disastrous war” crowd had the field”.

In the piece, Rubin wrote that there was an “intelligence failure at the onset regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction” but still defended the war saying that Saddam Hussien was “a human rights criminal, a willing user of chemical weapons and a supporter of terrorism” ignoring the fact that America actually supported Saddam Hussien when he used chemical weapons in Iran, or the fact that it turned out he had no ties to al-Qaeda.

Being a staunch defender of the Iraq war in the early 2000s is bad enough, but being a defender of the Iraq war in the early to mid 2010s long after the WMD deception was debunked and the war was largely regarded as a disaster is another level of journalistic malpractice.

After making a name for herself as one of the media’s latest defenders of the criminal war in Iraq which the Lancet medical journal estimates killed 600,000 Iraqi civilians and displaced 3.9 million, she went on to push the Russiagate deception.

For example, in 2018 she wrote that “Trump's teams and Russia coordinated more closely than previously known” and that “Trump rarely, if ever, personally criticizes Vladimir Putin” asking “What did/is Trump getting out of the arrangement?”

While she wrote this before the Muller report came out debunking the collusion narrative, the idea that Trump was compromised by Russia was provabley false given the fact that his policies were almost entirely hawkish towards Russia.

As president, Trump sold lethal arms to Ukraine, pulled out of the INF nuclear treaty, sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, bombed Assad's forces in Syria (A Russian ally), and backed a coup in Venezuela (another Russian ally).

In another column, Rubin got even more conspiratorial with her Russiagate theories speculating that Trump was “blackmailed” by Putin and was possibly a “Russian agent” and may be “knowingly or unknowingly a Russian asset.”

She also called Russiagte- the story that is now proven to be a hoax cooked up by the Clinton campaign- “the biggest scandal in American presidential history.”

Just like with Iraq WMDs, Rubin continued to push the Russiagate hoax long after the Muller report found there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. In 2020 she wrote that “There really was collusion between Trump campaign and Russia” claiming that “alleged operative, Konstantin Kilimnik, may have been directly involved in the Russian plot to break into a Democratic Party computer network and provide plundered files to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.”

What Rubin is referring to here is the claim that Trump campaign official Paul Manafort passed on sensitive polling data to alleged Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, who then passed the data to Russia who in turn used it to interfere in the election and hack the DNC emails to disseminate them to Wikileaks.

Just like every other Russiagate story, every aspect of this deception pushed by Rubin is false.

• First, the data shared by Manafort with Kilimnik was not “sensitive polling data” as the New York Times admitted “most of the data was public”

• Second, is it highly unlikely that Kilimnik is actually a Russian agent, as journalist Matt Taibbi reported he worked for the CIA cutout NDI (National Democratic Institute) in the early 2000s and was a regular source for the US State Department. Taibbi contacted other members of the NDI who worked with Manafort who “found the idea that he might be a spy alternately ridiculous and baffling”.

• Third, there is no actual evidence that Russia stole the DNC emails. The claim comes from a private firm hired by the Hillary Clinton Campaign to analyze the DNC server called “crowd strike”. While the firm claimed it could prove that Russia stole the DNC emails, its founder Shawn Henry told a different story when under oath. In a secret 2017 testimony to Congress, Henry admitted that there is “no evidence that” the emails “were actually exfiltrated”.

• Finally, even if Russia did steal DNC emails, they were not the ones published on Wikileaks. The claim comes from the Muller Report that alleged Assange got the DNC emails for a supposed Russian cutout called “Guccifer 2.0” on June 14th of 2016. But as journalist Aaron Mate reported, Assange had already announced he was publishing the DNC on June 12th two days before that.

After pushing outrageous conspiracy theories that Trump was a Russian agent being blackmailed by the Kremlin, Rubin doubled down and pushed more theories which in the end turned out to be hoaxes as well.

Rubin Hasn’t Gotten Any Better

Some may think that while Rubin has a terrible record in journalism, maybe she has seen the light now that she has left the Washington Post but she does not seem to have changed at all.

In one of her final articles in the Washinton Post published on December 13th, she praised Joe Biden’s backing of the disastrous proxy war in Ukraine and support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza and invasion of Lebanon saying:

Biden will leave office with America in an enviable spot: Russia and Iran humiliated, Israel breaking the “ring of fire,” Hezbollah and Hamas in ruins, NATO stronger than ever, and the United States dominating the world diplomatically and economically.

This shows that Rubin is still the same bloodthirsty neocon she was when was defending Iraq, supporting the disastrous proxy war that destroyed Ukraine for the military-industrial complex, Israel’s bombardment of civilians in Gaza, and murderous invasion of Lebanon in the name of “the United States dominating the world”

Aside from being a bloodthirsty warmonger, Rubin is still an abysmal journalist. In November of last year, she repeated the ridiculous claim that Trump “threatened” Liz Cheney writing that “In a new low last week, Trump seemed to revel in the idea of Liz Cheney’s violent death”. In reality what Trump actually said was:

I mean, if we were up to her, we'd, we'd be in 50 different countries. And you know, number one, it's very dangerous. Number two, a lot of people get killed. And number three, I mean, it's very, very expensive.

(Liz Cheney) is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."

Trump was clearly saying that Cheney was a “chicken Hawk” who supports wars around the world but would never go fight in one herself, a comment that moronic mainstream Pundits like Rubin took out of context to make it seem like Trump was threatening her.

Rubin herself is an extreme warmonger, writing opinion pieces in the Washinton Post supporting the proxy war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon which she called “a game changer”.

Even in her first piece introducing the contrarian, she is offering moronic commentary pretending that Trump alone is responsible for deep-seated issues in American politics. In the piece, she wrote that because of Trump’s election, America “has already entered the era of oligarchy” a ridiculous statement given that a Princeton University study from 2014 (before Trump even entered the political scene) found that America is an Oligarchy.

Conclusion

As the mainstream media begins to lose more and more followers, expect to see more mainstream media commentators starting outlets on platforms like Substack to try to keep their propaganda in the conversation. The mainstream media may be dying, but the propagandists within it are finding new ways to spread their message.

Rubins's new outlet will undeniably get a big following given her mainstream media connections, which proves that even if the mainstream media is dying lying warmongers like her will unfortunately still have a voice.