Jennifer Rubin Should Chill

Jennifer Rubin is a columnist for The Washington Post and commentator for MSNBC. Once upon a time she was considered a conservative writer—indeed, her hiring by The Post in 2010 was met with controversy specifically because the establishment liberal paper had hired a right-leaning blogger. In 2013, WaPo’s former ombudsman wrote an open letter calling on Jeff Bezos, who had then just bought the newspaper, to fire her for being too pro-Romney and anti-Obama.

Times have certainly changed. Ever since Donald Trump burst onto the scene, Rubin has become a prolific Never Trump writer and commentator; if the dictionary had an entry for Never Trump, her picture would appear next to it. She inveighs constantly against Trump, along with everyone and everything that helps to normalize him. She recently called for people to boycott MSNBC, one of her employers, as a result of Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski deciding to meet with Trump. Needless to say, she no longer identifies as a conservative.

In a recent episode of her podcast, she offered some provocative—some would say alarming—advice to Democrats to improve their messaging. She instructed them to make pithy statements like “Republicans want to kill your kids.”

“Republicans want to kill your kids. It’s actually true.” – Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post columnist

Absolutely unhinged. ????

pic.twitter.com/k2YIkdxcsx

— Tiffany Fong (@TiffanyFong_) November 19, 2024

That clip went viral on social media for obvious reasons. It’s never wise to place automatic faith in short, viral video clips, and so I went looking for the rest of the video. It’s available here; the “Republicans want to kill your kids” part starts at around the 4:20 mark.

It sounds like she really means it!

Rubin provides two examples to justify her blanket statement that “Republicans want to kill your kids”: conservative views on funding for medical research and gun control. On that latter front, she flatly states that Republicans want to “allow minors and all sorts of people to get semi-automatic weapons that they use to shoot up schools.”

It is flatly untrue that supporters of gun rights want minors to get their hands on semiautomatic weapons. Moreover, gun control advocates have to grapple with a number of complicating details: Easily obtainable handguns rather than semiautomatics are the cause of most gun deaths in the U.S., and mass disarmament would involve vastly increasing the number of police interactions with citizens. Is every individual who balks at the idea of police stopping, detaining, and arresting many more people complicit in child murder? Obviously not.

When far-right commentators make blanket, hyperbolic statements that Democrats are all trying to kill, mutilate, or otherwise harm children, they usually earn mockery from the mainstream media. Rubin operates as a Mirror Universe version of this same phenomenon, and does so from a plum perch at The Washington Post. She shouldn’t be fired or otherwise disciplined—but she should, please, chill out.

This Week on Free Media

I’m joined by Amber Duke to discuss Morning Joe‘s trip to Trump world, the president-elect’s views on the media, Democrats agreeing with Elon Musk to eliminate government waste, and the latest meltdown on The View.

Worth Watching

I have finally finished The Boys, which I started watching three months ago. While I was initially enthralled by the premise—a squad of vigilantes teams up to take down a bunch of secretly evil superheroes—the show goes considerably off the rails in its later seasons. And while The Boys‘ moral compass was always somewhat left-leaning, the fourth season is over-the-top in terms of the level of contempt for nonliberal viewpoints. There’s parody, and then there’s this (Jennifer Rubin would fit right in.) Even so, Antony Starr’s portrayal of the main antagonist, Homelander, deserves unending praise.

Next up: I plan to watch either Penguin, Dune: Prophecy, or Agatha All Along.

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