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Dave Rubin Unites Left and Right – In Ruthlessly Mocking Him on Twitter

By Pluralist / June 11, 2019

Pundits on the left and right have finally found something they agree on, and his name is Dave Rubin. 

Rubin, a “classical liberal” podcaster and member of the “intellectual dark web,” has been taking a bipartisan beating for some time. He even has a subreddit devoted entirely to mocking how dumb he is.

The latest round of derision came Monday after Rubin appeared on Fox News to slam California’s planned extension of healthcare to undocumented immigrants. Speaking to host Tucker Carlson, he decried the Democratic bill as “just sort of what we’ve consistently seen the left doing over the last couple years” and “just an excuse to give the state more power.”

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Then, feigning outrage, Rubin brought up The New York Times’ recent use of his photo to illustrate a “cover” article about supposed alt-right radicalization on YouTube. He said it was yet another example of the media vilifying “decent people.”

While Rubin may have a point about the media, The Times only used his photo as part of a collage that appeared inside the newspaper, not on the front page. In the online addition, his face was cut off entirely. The only mention of his name in the report came in an uncontroversial infographic.

Dave Rubin hated by liberals and conservatives alike

Soon after Rubin’s interview aired, anonymous Twitter commentator uberfeminist called him out for pretending not to be conservative. She shared a screenshot of a back-and-forth between him and The Stranger’s Katie Herzog last November.

Rubin had objected to an article Herzog wrote urging her fellow disillusioned liberals not be like him.

“I’m not conservative nor have I ever told anyone to turn conservative,” he said at the time. “Enjoy the clicks.”

Cathy Young, a prominent critic of feminism and liberal culture, was among the commentators who appreciated uberfeminist’s retroactive call out. She scoffed at Rubin’s self-righteous retort to Herzog, saying: “Lucky for us that Dave is pure of any such intent!”

Young wasn’t Rubin’s first conservative critic of the day.

Only hours earlier, he had walked into yet another Twitter takedown by Claire Lehmann, the editor of the right-leaning online journal Quillette.

After Rubin took personally a tweet by Lehmann advising members of the “new media” not to take personally criticism from the “old media,” she replied: “I know this might come as a shock, but not everything is about you.”

Rubin then declared that he had only been joking and said he wanted to “bury the hatchet like my last tweet to you as well.”

He was apparently referring to his request last week that Lehmann come back on his podcast. The overture came after Rubin – a self-styled champion of free speech – complained for months about a series of Quillette articles that challenged the professed nonpartisanship of Rubin and the intellectual dark web, a loose network of commentators who question liberal orthodoxies.

Lehmann at one point told Rubin to “stop being a big baby.”

On Monday, though, she seemed to just want to move one.

“Ok my bad,” she said in response to Rubin’s proposed detente.” No hard feelings.”

Still, she continued to ignore his interview request.

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Pluralist

Andrew Tobin is Pluralist’s Editor-in-chief.

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