Twenty years ago today, the lights turned on at RedState.
When it started, it was anything but a commercial project. Four guys – Ben Domenech, Mike Krempasky, Josh Trevino and another who is no longer politically energetic – had the idea of ​​inspiring the online right to activism, the way DailyKos inspired the anti-American left. Here’s how Wired.com described it:
IN RESPONSE to the online fundraising and incitement successes of liberal activists, conservative bloggers Michael Krempasky, Ben Domenech, and the pseudonymous Tacitus decided to fight the liberals with one of their own innovations: the activist site.
More than two weeks before the Democratic Party Convention, on July 12, the men – all in their twenties – RedState.org as an outlet for conservative bloggers and blog readers. Using tactics from progressive activist blogs like Daily costs And EschatonRed State encourages readers to support Republican candidates in hotly contested races.
The first two candidates on Red State’s list were in the U.S. Senate primary: former Rep. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and three-term Rep. Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Since Aug. 2, Red State has raised $1,000 for Coburn and will soon begin fundraising for DeMint. “Now that the primary we care about most is over, we’re going to focus on the general election,” Krempasky said. “DeMint is at the top of our list.”
I learned of the site’s launch from James Taranto’s “Best of the Web” article in the Wall Street Journal. The timing was perfect, because I had just been thrown out the window by the humorless drones who hosted Lucianne.com. It was an unfortunate incident involving Angelina Jolie and a nipple flash on a movie poster that fell into the category of “the cop never finds it as funny as you do.”
At the time, I had never written anything of length, and the RedState site had a “diaries” section where unknown people like me could write. If you wrote something good, your work might end up on the front page, and that experience was quite an ego boost. The site had a page of diary guidelines that inspired me. “Don’t be resentful,” it said. People don’t want to read your opinion on the same thing as everyone else. They want a fresh perspective. Shortly after I settled in as a commenter, the 9/11 Commission Report was released. Josh Trevino announced that the site would “read the report so you don’t have to,” and I immediately pounced on it. My very first diary RedState featured this story. In December 2004, Mike Krempasky invited me to be on the front page.
The masthead was a directory of right-wing and libertarian bloggers. Some were energetic, some less so. While the main content was good, the comments were a war zone. The site used DailyKos’s “Scoop” blogging platform. The platform allowed you to rate comments. Comment ratings were weighted. The lower the rating, the fewer people could see the comment. If you reached “0,” you were the only person who could read the comment. A conservative estimate of 90% of commenters were also DailyKos commenters, so I had to email the RedState admins almost every week and beg for my rating to be reset.
This problem was finally fixed when Robert Hahn of Free Republic came to us and instituted a very common sense policy of banning any liberal for any reason. His philosophy was crucial to RedState’s survival. “Any time spent arguing with leftists about their problems is time lost talking about your own problems,” he said. “The leftists will keep arguing about the same problems, and your readers will get tired of seeing that and move on.” So we cleaned up our comments section, and guess what? We attracted readers from other sites who were tired of reading the same left-right arguments every day. I’m elated to say that one of my accomplishments as managing editor was convincing Robert to come back to the site.
The site thrived. We ran “money bombs” for candidates and gave men like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio the exposure they needed to pull off upset election victories. We were seen as a direct competitor to DailyKos; some of their gigantic names were commenting and posting diaries on RedState when they weren’t beating their wives, even though we had only a fraction of their traffic.
We were at the forefront of debunking many left-wing narratives in the early Bush years. RedState was a focal point of the online research that brought to lithe Dan Rather’s phony Texas Air National Guard documents. I was one of the first to arrest a guy from Stolen Valor who claimed to have been involved in war crimes in Iraq.
For the site to grow, it needed two things: capital and full-time leadership. Erick Erickson, then a lawyer and city councilman in Macon, GA, took the leap of faith and became our full-time editor-in-chief. That same year, 2006, we were acquired by Eagle Publishing. At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, we went from RedState.org to RedState.com.
Over the years, we’ve helped elect candidates. We’ve exerted a little bit of control in the ranks. RedState’s “Operation Leper” after John McCain’s disastrous, terrible presidential run helped end the careers of Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt as campaign consultants by exposing to the media their role in smearing Sarah Palin, which they were paid to support by the McCain-Palin campaign team. The RedState Gathering became a thing. Rick Perry announced his presidential candidacy at the 2011 Gathering… but instead we got Mitt Romney. In 2015, every Republican presidential candidate attended the event.
We launched the careers of several candidates, and several of our writers have gone on to other careers. Our front page and journal alumni include a university chancellor, an appellate judge and a congressman. We have always fought well beyond our means and had much more influence than our audience numbers suggest. That was because of our astute writing and insights into what was going on in conservative politics.
In 2015, Erick, who had become almost synonymous with RedState, moved on to other endeavors. Around the same time, we were acquired by Salem Media Group. With the resources and supportive leadership of Salem and Townhall Media, RedState has grown exponentially. Of course there have been changes, but nothing that is alive is immobile.
Our exposé of former California Congresswoman Katie Hill brought us back to the forefront of conservative media, and many readers who had drifted away in the years after Erick and during Trump’s primary and presidential campaigns rediscovered RedState. We brought some great writers from the diaries to the front page, and I got to take on the role of editor-in-chief for a few years. Of course, not everything went smoothly. Behind the scenes, we adapted to an increasingly monopolistic and hostile online media environment.
Now entering its third decade, RedState boasts some of the best right-wing writers in the country and a tremendous reach among conservative activists who work daily to make America a better place.
Happy 20th, @Red State. Just a little longer and you’ll be of legal drinking age. Cc @bdomenechJoshua Trevino, @EWErickson @streifredstate (and so many others!) RIP Jay’s Saloon in Arlington, VA.
— Michael Krempasky (@krempasky) July 12, 2024
