25 Years of Blogitude

Some thoughts on InstaPundit's 25th bloggiversary.

InstaPundit turned 25 on Saturday.

I didn’t mean for it to last this long. When I started InstaPundit, it was just the latest in a series of Internet ventures, ranging from Internet radio stations, and bands, on MP3.com, to RaveRights.com, an electronic music civil-rights site I set up because the DEA was at the time prosecuting raves under the so-called “crack house law,” which criminalizes owning or operating a building for the purpose of taking drugs. (The DEA took the position that no one would go to raves for the music, so they must be there for the drugs.) That site was quickly replaced by the Electronic Music Defense Fund, a nonprofit funded by musician Moby, but I did work with the ACLU on a friend-of-the-court brief in a New Orleans case, where I explained the nature and background and audience of electronic music.

So then I started a blog. I still remember following a link from Slate to Mickey Kaus’s then-new blog Kausfiles. I was struck by how seamless it was – one second you were on an expensive site funded by Microsoft, then with a single click you were on an independent journalism site funded by an individual – and it looked every bit as slick and professional. Still, my RaveRights experience involved web design and maintenance using a program called DreamWeaver, which wasn’t very user-friendly, to put it mildly, and that didn’t make me want to start a new site. (Anyone out there remember DreamWeaver?)

Then Slate was taken in by a minor hoax involving “monkeyfishing,” in which Cajuns allegedly caught wild monkeys living on an island in the Mississippi Delta using baited hooks cast into the trees. That lead to the creation of a short-lived blog of journalistic criticism called Monkeyfishing, and when I followed a link to the blog it was “powered by Blogger” and hosted on Blogger’s own site, Blogspot. An ad invited me to start my own blog in 15 minutes, and that’s literally how long it took to set up the initial version of InstaPundit. Instead of composing stuff in an unfriendly piece of software and then uploading to a server, the Blogger/Blogspot combination meant I could compose and publish on the Web. At the time, in the summer of 2001, that was revolutionary.

I had been a regular and prominent commentator on Slate’s discussion board, The Fray, for quite some time, and the Slate editors were quick to include InstaPundit in their “Me-Zine Central” directory, at which point I thought I had really made it. I remember by late August I was talking with a colleague about my traffic, at the time around 200-300 visits per day, and we both thought that was a lot.

Links from Slate, Virginia Postrel, and James Taranto’s Best of the Web feature at the Wall Street Journalboosted traffic, and by September 10, 2001, I had reached the heady heights of 1500+ visits per day. The next day was September 11, 2001, and everything changed. . . .

Well, we’ll soon hit the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and in many ways that will be the true 25th anniversary of InstaPundit. InstaPundit started out looking a lot like the “Notes” section at the front of The New Republic, or — and this column was a big influence on me in my youth, as one of the relatively few 14-year-olds who subscribed to Forbes — Malcolm S. Forbes’ “Fact and Comment” column in every issue of that magazine: Short one-or-two paragraph comments on things, but mine came with a link.

In the early days the blog was more focused on tech and pop culture. I remember linking to an article on who had the best abs at the Video Music Awards — I backed Alicia Keys — and similar stuff. However, some later InstaPundit themes appeared: I had a post titled “Blood and Iron” about donating blood and life expectancy, and there were numerous posts on FBI and Secret Service incompetence and wrongdoing, which are themes that persist to this day.

But after 9/11 InstaPundit became a “warblog,” as they were called then. (A term that had some cachet for a while, with Charlie Stross including a famous warblogger in his book Iron Sun.) In a way it still is; we’re not just in a war with Al Qaeda now, but a war for western civilization.

Along the way there were podcasts — the late, lamented Glenn and Helen Show, which I really enjoyed, several years with PJTV, and various columns for TechCentralStation, the Washington Examiner, USA Today, nearly a decade of columns in Popular Mechanics, and now the New York Post.

Me, covering the 2008 Republican National Convention for Pajamas TV (later PJTV).

But always there was the blog. Behind everything there was the blog. Most of my ideas came from the blog, even when they appeared in columns, podcasts or TV shows. Many of the ideas on the blog came from readers who emailed me, or, later, commented on posts. And it’s still here. As I said in my brief anniversary observation on Saturday, I never expected to do this for 25 years, and I can’t promise I’ll still be doing it in 25 more. But I can’t promise that I won’t be, either.

So what are some takeaways from my experience?

First, I love the readers. The comment section on InstaPundit today has gotten a bit . . . crotchety compared to the old days, but there are still lots of people whose comments I treasure, and who I feel like I know. (And a few that I actually do know in person). Over the years I’ve met a number of readers and that’s been universally a delight. This goes to #2:

Second, there are an awfully lot of smart people out there, and many of them are to be found outside of traditional “smart people” jobs. I get emails from over the road truckers (Gerald Dearing used to send me a lot of stuff, now he’s on X), farmers, soldiers, stay-at-home moms and more, filled with keen observations and insight. One of the big lessons of the past twenty five years is that the preening self-regard of the laptop class is largely unjustified. There’s a lot of ignored wisdom out there.

Third, speaking of the laptop class, the press is much, much worse than I thought it was at the beginning of this exercise, and I was pretty skeptical about the press then. (And old girlfriend switched from journalism to PR because, she said, PR was “more honest.”) But hoo boy today the amount of outright conscious agenda-based lying, not just “spin” or “bias,” is off the charts. This turned up with Rathergate, when CBS deliberately tried to pass off forged National Guard documents as a real smoking gun about George W. Bush’s Vietnam record, and who can forget when the Boston Globe ran alleged pictures of gang rape by U.S. soldiers in Iraq that actually came from a porno site? And it’s only gotten worse.

The Rathergate memo, allegedly from 1973, matched a default format in Microsoft Word.

One thing that has changed is that the press used to have some shame when it was caught. Nowadays it often either ignores the critics or doubles down.

But the truth comes out, nowadays usually on X.

And in some ways, InstaPundit has been obsoleted by X, though I prefer to think of the blog as “classic,” not old. The formats have a lot in common — people used to joke that InstaPundit was tweets before there were tweets, and that’s not crazy.

At any rate, what a long, strange trip it’s been. Many of you have been here for all or most of it, and I appreciate your company along the way. Thanks.

[And if you enjoy these essays, or classic InstaPundit, please either take out a paid Substack subscription, or make a one-time donation here. I appreciate your support.]