Jennifer Rubin is not an ideologue. She is an emotive teenager.

A Marxist, for instance, is someone with a deadly serious worldview. Rubin, the Washington Post columnist, is a middle-schooler picking her favorite and most hated boy bands. She cheers for the left and hates the right with a tone and simplicity that echoes YouTube comments about teen heart-throbs BTS.

From Americans killed and left hostage in Afghanistan to the COVID pandemic, the wobbling and weary and mentally not-there President Biden has personally caused the worst opening act of any president in memory. Faced with the reality of Calamity Joe, Rubin’s response on Twitter was that of a fan-girl: “Biden is projecting confidence in the rescue operation, elevating the work of military and civilian officials.”
 
 

A Fan-Girl in a Combox

North Korean journalists might have blushed. As Politico recently pointed out, Rubin’s zealotry has even begun to embarrass her colleagues at the Post. Rubin’s new book, Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump, read like a piece of teenage fan fiction. Donald Trump is Voldemort, his fans are Dementors, and the activist left are light-filled angels of hope. Even The Exorcist gave the demonic antagonist more nuance.

The irony of Resistance is that Rubin attempts to celebrate women while depicting them as emotive, irrational and dangerous to democracy. One example should do, because to read and study Rubin at any length is to subject oneself to 300-plus pages of breathless, hectoring, and endless diatribes and cheerleading.

The Blasey Ford Perjury Party

The example involves something I have some personal experience with. In fall 2018 the political left and the media tried to destroy Brett Kavanaugh, a high school friend of mine. They used opposition research, extortion threats and an attempted honey trap. A woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when we were all in high school. Ford claimed that I was in the room when it happened. Our Stasi media told the public that I’d presided over ten gang rapes and bought and sold cocaine. They used as sources people I’ve never met. Oppo research garbage was fed directly to the media, who passed it on to millions without scrutiny.

There was a lot of vicious and appalling behavior, which I am documenting in a book. In it I note something that was, among many other things, overlooked: There were actually liberals and progressives who did not believe Christine Blasey Ford. You read that right. There were people on the left who knew Blasey Ford’s story was garbage, and were reluctant to destroy Kavanaugh over it.

Not All Democrats Are Gullible Zealots

I recently wrote about this in The Stream. On October 3, 2018, liberal blowhard Joe Scarborough revealed that he had been to some recent social events, where he heard people expressing doubt about the stories told by Ford:

Quite a few people, that we talked to, and I think a lot of them were registered Democrats, raised questions about Dr. Ford’s story. Now that’s something in 24/7 news coverage, at least in mainstream media, you never hear anybody talk about. They won’t talk about it. They feel that if anybody sticks their neck out and says they disbelieve any part of her story or talk about how there are no corroborating witnesses, well, they’ll get absolutely slammed.

He went on:

There has been the assumption that every single allegation was true … . Nobody had dared say, even the Republicans, that part of Dr. Ford’s story might just not add up … I turned on all networks at all times and Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of being a serial rapist by columnists in national newspapers … the media has dropped the ball on this from the very beginning.

Many on the Left Knew Better

The fact that the charges against Kavanaugh were false penetrated deeply into the left. Even Ilyse Hogue, who at the time was the president of Planned Parenthood, heard the doubts. Here is what Rubin writes (italics in the original):

Hogue found skepticism even among progressive donors. Did they really want to put all their eggs in one basket held by a single woman accuser? Despite skittishness among her donors and allies, Hogue had no option but to fight for every Senate vote. She kept up a steady drumbeat against Kavanaugh in the media and encouraged NARAL forces on the ground to make their voices heard.

This is a remarkable passage. As Scarborough revealed, by early October 2018 even those in the chattering classes and the cocktail party circuit in Georgetown suspected that Blasey Ford’s story was a fraud. Those with any conscience left, like Morning Joe, spoke up.

Those who are water carriers and fools, like Jennifer Rubin, did not.

Should Women Be Trusted with Pointy Objects, Like Pens?

Rubin’s passage above does not do women any favors. It makes Rubin and people like Ilyse Hogue look like irrational actors, motivated purely by resentment and emotion. In short, it reinforces age-old stereotypes about the female sex. (For instance, the claim that they are incapable of reason.) Rubin writes that Hogue found skepticism about Ford’s tale even in the crazier reaches of the hard-core left. Who were the skeptics? How had they reached their conclusions? Why did they doubt?

To investigate those questions would be to commit journalism, and Jennifer Rubin is a DNC groupie, not a journalist. Rubin writes that “despite skittishness among her donors and allies,” Hogue “had no option but to fight for every Senate vote.” But of course Hogue did have a choice. She had the option to listen to the people in her own camp who were telling her that the Ford story was bunk — to say nothing of the planted stories about drugs, gang rape, and other crimes.

But of course, to question a handy narrative would be to act with reason, and fairness, and curiosity about the truth. And Jennifer Rubin digging for the truth would be like the president of the BTS fan club walking out of one of their concerts.

Mark Judge is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C.