When The Washington Post’s Jen Rubin feels one coming on, she assumes the position—nose to knees, like flight crew bracing for impact—and she lets it rip, snorts up every bit of the nasty effluvium, then whips back triumphantly—ahhhhh—like a high-roller doing a fat line off a stripper’s ass.
It’s not just Washington Post writers who have a deep affinity for the smell of their own farts. When Don Lemon, for example, feels the rumble of belly exhaust approaching the exit, he’s known to recline, politely release, and waft with cupped hand from lap to nostril, like ladling a hearty stew, or tasting something rare and fine.
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, it’s been said, is notorious for crop dusting the unsuspecting bystander—letting one squeak out at the Tiffany’s counter or timing it just as the sommelier greets her table at Micheal’s—then she marinates in the gathering humiliation. That came out of ME, she silently marvels. How subversive, how naughty.
Autoperdēmaphilia is a medical term I just invented for an unusual or obsessive interest in one’s own flatulence, a condition found in all corporate journalists. It’s probably what happens when the dignity has been beaten out of you so thoroughly you end up devolved into a gnarled and monstrous creature of pure self-fascination.
Not that dignity has ever been much associated with journalism. “The press is a gang of cruel faggots,” Hunter Thompson wrote in 1971. “Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”
If only it were still so romantic. Newsrooms today have the soul of an HR department. The chimps and winos roll out of NYU and masturbate from cushy recliners in national security briefings and corporate board rooms. (Kleenex, sir?) Yet they’ve taken a drudging in the last decade, a long march of humiliation that culminated in the last election with the imperial media’s resounding, shattering defeat. It’s left many in the press to question who they are, and where to go from here.
That’s not the case for autoperdemaphiliac Jen Rubin. On Monday, Rubin made a great spectacle of herself by announcing she’s quitting the Post to start a blog with some other septuagenarian freedom fighters. It’s called The Contrarian and in her grand proclamation, she pooted out a new term for herself, a “pro-democracy contrarian.” It’s a phrase that only makes sense in Rubin’s own insolent little sphere in which the word “democracy” has been redefined to mean the collective will of institutions, not of the people.
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Rubin’s hissy fit was sparked by a sense of betrayal she felt from her own institution. The Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, bucked convention when he prevented the paper from officially supporting Kamala Harris in 2024 while, of course, the implicit support could carry on as usual.
Bezos’s contrarian act inspired another oligarch to follow suit. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a pharma and healthcare titan who owns the Los Angeles Times, instructed his paper to withhold an endorsement of Kamala. The newsroom revolted and several editorial staff resigned in protest.
Such blow ups have become more common in the corporate media ahead of Trump’s next term, with organizations and personalities flipping the table and storming out when asked to sit with people they don’t like. In an attempt to shore up some street cred, those once responsible for cancel culture are now self-canceling. The Guardian, NPR, Taylor Lorenz, and Don Lemon were among those who dramatically announced departures from X after Elon Musk took over the platform.
Following the election, Bezos and Soon-Shiong, for whatever self-interested reason, both expressed a desire to bring on more conservative opinion writers. The problem is, they don’t know any. After all, that’s what Jen Rubin was supposed to be. Any writer to come along who did articulately understand the Trump base would be expelled from the hive in short order. We’ve seen this experiment fail before.
“It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal,” Tom Wolfe wrote in 1979, “an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a central nervous system, so that if one part were touched, the whole creature would tremble...”
When the Post quivered, Rubin the polyp dislodged herself, believing she could best propagate the interests of neoliberal internationalism by striking it out on her own, where she’ll be safely cocooned in a vesicle of her own stench.
I, sir, am a 64 year old woman in body. But the 12 year old boy in me couldn't stop laughing. Farts make the best laughlines of all time. TY for that!