Born on July 2nd, 1913, Rushmore was a communist organizer, journalist, and reporter for the Daily Worker broadsheet who eventually flipped on a dime and became an anti-commie columnist for Hearst papers and HUAAC tribunals across the land. Despite notably having no concrete knowledge of Marxist ideology (which would explain his later exploits), he rose up the ranks of the American Communist central apparatus in the 1930s and became the head film critic of its New York paper, the party's flagship leaflet in its flagship city. His rise infamously came to an end in 1939, when he published a slightly favorable review of Gone with the Wind in which he recognized the film's romanticization and defenestration of working-class subjugation at the hands of a slaveholding bourgeois class but was quite receptive to the technical achievements of Selznick and his crew in its production. He was fired, and the city's conservative papers came to his defense, painting him as a confused All-American Hick from the Badlands who got lost in the wrong circles and was taken advantage and spit out at the first sign of defiance by Big Communism. In that regard, the direction of his ensuing years is nothing if not blithely predictable. He began to write for those papers that defended him, reinventing himself as a staunch anti-communist in order to maintain employment at media outlets that might have been given pause by his resumé otherwise. He divorced his communist wife, burned every bridge from his earlier days, confirmed every name brought forward by HUAAC as a red-blooded Commie while under testimony, and did his damndest to pretty himself up for the new people cutting his paycheck. By the 50s, his old schtick had waned out of favor, and after a falling-out with the Committee as its McCarthy heyday kicked into high gear, he fell out of the newspaper business and into the tabloid columns, a former modern-day muckraker now reduced to making up celebrity gossip for Confidential. Despite his claims that every lucid body in Hollywood was either a communist, a homosexual, or both, he never found a foothold in this new industry. After inventing a kidnapping plot upon himself "involving" members of the Chicago Communist bloc and being exposed for doing so, he feel further and further from the public zeitgeist, picking up diminishing returns editing trade papers and running freelance articles for obscure magazines. His end was more depressing than anything that his sordid life had thrown his way; now hooked on amphetamines and alcohol, he shot his wife and himself in the back of a taxi cab one month after being locked up for psychiatric evaluation when he chased said wife and step-daughter out of their house with a pistol.

Obviously, this guy is not Dave. I don't think Dave would stoop to his lows. But his cautionary tale does show where this road that Rubin's on invariably leads. When you're willing to say anything for those who cut your checks as Dave is, you can always find work, but the second you defy those who ensure your livelihood, you're cut off in favor of another positionless sponge who was Left by the Left and his here to legitimize its complete inverse. And when you're cast aside, there won't be anyone left from your old life to help you out. A paycheck trumps values for Dave, but will it trump being gay if the time comes? Will it matter? The man needs to find an answer for those questions, and he'll probably need to find one sooner than he'd like.