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 judges, you’ve also signed up for the racism, the misogyny, the amorality, the lawlessness, the deranged tweets, possibly even something close to treason. Trump supporters own it all,” he tweeted in December 2017.29
Boot, a Russian immigrant who came here as a child, claimed that because of Trump, he felt like he no longer belonged in America.30 Boot officially quit the Republican Party in 2018—“I don’t want to be identified with the party of the child-snatchers,” he sneered, referring to Trump’s family separation policy—even though there is scant evidence that, aside from his penchant for war, he ever was a Republican.
Once a climate change skeptic, Boot, like nearly every other NeverTrumper, converted to a wild-eyed climate prophet. Conservatives who reject anthropogenic global warming, according to Boot, are willing hostages of the fossil fuel industry. There is little daylight between Boot’s delusions of climate doom and those of the most egregious climate propagandists such as Michael Mann or Bernie Sanders. “It is a tragedy for the entire planet that the United States’ governing party is impervious to science and reason,” Boot lamented.31
The Second Amendment, Boot wrote after a tragic massacre at a Florida high school in February 2018, is a “suicide pact” with politicians, Republicans in particular.32 After Beto O’Rourke suggested an assault rifle buyback program a month before he dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential race, Boot thanked O’Rourke for his courage. Comparing “assault rifles” to military artillery, Boot again sneered at “Second Amendment absolutists” who defend the ownership of “weapons of war.”33
All this, of course, has been rewarded by his new allies on the Left; Boot, like Jennifer Rubin, is a regular columnist for the Washington Post and an MSNBC contributor.
NeverTrump expressed little, if any, support for Trump’s pro-life advocacy from
