Jen Rubin exits Washington Post, joins Norm Eisen to launch new outlet countering ‘authoritarian threat’

Veteran opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin is becoming the latest in a long list of Washington Post figures to leave the troubled institution.

Veteran opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin is becoming the latest in a long list of Washington Post figures to leave the troubled institution. Rubin is partnering with former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen and launching something new: a startup publication called The Contrarian. The startup’s tagline, “Not owned by anybody,” is a pointed reference to billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and other moguls who, in Rubin’s view, have “bent the knee” to President-elect Donald Trump. “Our goal is to combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face,” Rubin told CNN in an interview ahead of the publication’s introduction. Rather than anti-Trump, the founders describe their venture as pro-democracy. They said they have already enlisted about 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. “The voices we’ll be featuring are diverse across parties and generations,” Eisen said in a statement, “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.”