not want to jeopardize her sweet spot at the Post yet again. In 2013, the paper’s former ombudsman advised Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder who had purchased the news organization, to fire Rubin. Disclosing that Rubin was the “#1 source of complaint mail” from Post readers, Patrick Pexton blasted Rubin’s poor writing skills, unoriginal analysis, and overall unprofessionalism. “Her analysis of the conservative movement, which is a worthwhile and important beat that the Post should treat more seriously on its national pages, is shallow and predictable,” Pexton wrote. “Her columns, at best, are political pornography; they get a quick but sure rise out of the right, but you feel bad afterward.”11
Rubin has employed that same playbook against Trump since late 2015. Stroking Trump foes from the Right would protect her sinecure; she eagerly enlisted in #TheResistance.
Comparing Rubin’s views before Trump’s election and after his inauguration causes a major case of whiplash. A pitfall of being a political pundit is that there exists an electronic record of your past opinions available for the world to see. As I pointed out in a December 2017 article, Rubin flipped and flopped on a number of issues solely based on their favorability to Trump and his knuckle-dragging base.12
An advocate of tax cuts way back in 2013, Rubin criticized Obama’s stagnant economy and insisted that the country would “not get robust economic growth and significant job creation with the world’s highest corporate tax rate.”13 Four years later, channeling Bernie Sanders rather than Milton Freidman, Rubin called Trump’s tax cut proposal a “moral and economic monstrosity” aimed at enriching “the wealthy and big corporations” at the expense of the most vulnerable.14
Rubin sympathized with out-of-work coal workers as late as 2014. Correctly concluding that the Democratic Party had been taken hostage by the climate change cabal, Rubin warned that the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which sought to significantly reduce carbon emissions, jeopardized the party’s Senate majority in that year’s election. “Unfortunately for mainstream Democrats, the president and their party are captives to elite, radical environmentalists. It is not only an economic issue, but also reveals the degree to which Democrats are compounding inequality and depressing economic growth.”15
That compassion disappeared like carbon vapor on November 8, 2016. “While they accuse ‘elites’ of being out of touch, the GOP climate-change deniers and non-college-educated voters—especially those who reside in poorer, rural and small-town America—are increasingly oblivious to the world outside their ideological bubble,” she sneered in June 2017. “Rather than level with voters, their GOP representatives cater to their ignorance and mislead them about the state of science and of our economy.”16
Her conversion to a disciple of climate science and promoter of the same radical environmental agenda she had slammed a few years earlier was complete with Trump’s announcement the US would withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. Rubin had written several columns condemning Obama’s signature international policy agreement; she even accused Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry of using the deal to distract from their failed attempts to defeat ISIS.
But Trump’s opposition would be enough to trigger Rubin’s epiphany on the issue. “The only difference between then and now is that Trump eventually endorsed Rubin’s take in its entirety,” Sean Davis wrote for the Federalist. “And because Rubin now calibrates her political compass to the opposite of whatever Trump is doing, she feels compelled to vociferously support a vapid agreement she at one time opposed on the merits.”17
Ditto for the Iran nuclear deal. Before Trump, Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) posed a significant threat to national security, according to Rubin, by paving the way for the terrorist-harboring nation to build nuclear weapons in the future.18 But after Trump announced he would “decertify” the JCPOA, Rubin fretted that the move would agitate the Islamic Republic, not to mention Russia and China.19 “Putting at risk that deal with really no sort of backup plan, they’re just going to kind of bluff their way through and see if the Iranians come back to the table,” Rubin commiserated with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell in October 2017. “Our allies are not on board with us, the Russians, the Chinese, so is that another storm that’s coming?”20
Rubin mocked prayer; urged stricter gun control laws; objected to a repeal of the estate tax; and defended abortion rights. After Rubin’s fierce opposition to Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, a group of conservative leaders sent a letter to the Post’s editorial board, demanding that the paper stop referring to her as a “conservative,” while offering to recommend a replacement “who can eloquently and effectively defend the positions held by our President, his party, and the millions of voters who elected him.”21 Rubin dropped the “conservative” descriptor but still occupies the Post’s “Right Turn” blog.
NEVERTRUMP FOLLOWS RUBIN TO STAGE LEFT
Bret Stephens has followed a similar route. In early 2017, Bret Stephens jumped ship from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times. His hiring sparked outrage among the Times’ readership; Stephens had been a longtime critic of anthropogenic global warming, now known generally as climate change. That blasphemy, according to the climate cabal, makes one a climate “denier.”
“Before he was hired at NYT, Stephens was a source of standard-issue right-wing hackery on climate change,” wrote David Roberts at Vox after the Times announced Stephens’s new gig.22 Leading climate scientists canceled their Times subscriptions.23 A petition drive to fire Stephens gathered more than 40,000 signatures.24
Stephens got the message loud and clear. The same commentator who once compared climate change to religion—“another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen,” he snickered in 2011—suddenly saw the solar-paneled light.25 In his debut column for the Times, Stephens called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s claims about the rise in global temperatures “indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming.” He tiptoed around much of the fuzziness of climate science but quickly added a pandering disclaimer: “None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences.”26
When pressed later by fellow Times columnist Gail Collins whether he believed global warming is happening and is mostly man-made, Stephens said yes. He hoped that his meetings with climate experts would result in “less ambivalence” on a subject on which he had expressed zero ambivalence for more than a decade.
Unfortunately, Stephens’s climate prostrating wouldn’t be enough to win converts at the Times. He needed something more drastic to preserve his spot there—so he dutifully did what any self-important New York Times columnist must do: He called for the repeal of the Second Amendment.
Following the horrific massacre of 58 people in Las Vegas by a mass shooter in June 2017, Stephens admitted that, as a conservative, he never understood the “conservative fetish” for the Second Amendment. Americans don’t need all these guns because they kill too many people and, by the way, the government will protect us when needed, he argued. “But [gun ownership] doesn’t need a blanket Constitutional protection, either,” Stephens opined. “The 46,445 murder victims killed by gunfire in the United States between 2012 and 2016 didn’t need to perish so that gun enthusiasts can go on fantasizing that ‘Red Dawn’ is the fate that soon awaits us.”27
But one would be hard-pressed to find a more embarrassing NeverTrump sycophant to the Left than Max Boot. Hardly a day passes that Boot doesn’t make a mockery of himself in service of blasting Trump, his family, his supporters, and the Republican Party in general.
Not only has Boot objected to every single “conservative” policy advanced by the president—including the appointment of constitutionalist judges to the federal bench, Trump’s exit from the Paris Climate Accord, and overdue immigration reform—he insisted that anyone who backed Trump’s conservative agenda “owned” the president’s alleged bigotry.28 “If you want the Trump tax cuts and the