Legal Insurrection is 7 years old

Legal Insurrection is 7 years old

I can’t believe I missed Legal Insurrection’s 7th anniversary on October 12, 2015.

I even had the date on my calendar, but I’ve been so distracted lately I didn’t pay attention.

The lights were turned on here on October 12, 2008. The first post was Obama is Door No. 2:

As in Let’s Make a Deal, choosing Door No. 2 carries great risks. So does choosing Obama.

Obama may be a post-racial healer, or he may be someone who carefully uses race and false accusations of racism to advance his political career. Obama may not have known about Jeremiah Wright’s political race-baiting, or he may have known but not cared. Obama may be someone who views this country as inherently good, or he may secretly share the views of his political enabler, William Ayers, that this country is inherently bad. We may know Obama better than Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers know Obama, or we may not know Obama at all.

And the fourth post was “Race” As Political Weapon:

We are on the verge of electing a president who built his political career on the backs of race-baiters and anti-american zealots, and we can’t talk about it out of fear of being called “racist.”

The suppression of legitimate political expression through false accusations of racism by the Obama campaign and its supporters is the defining theme of the 2008 campaign. This tactic, while it may be successful, is shameful and has damaged our society in ways we may not understand for years.

Sadly, within our first three days, I had correctly pegged what the Obama presidency would look like. The past 7 years have been an effort to hold back that foul tide.

In those early years, it was just me. For about two years.

Remember how you looked in Jr. High School? That’s how we looked in those early years on Google Blogger (November 18, 2008, via Wayback Machine):

Notice any familiar faces in those first 11 followers? “Our Lawyer” Ron Coleman was one; I don’t know how he found us. So was commenter 49erDweet.

As the screen capture below shows, at our one month mark we were rockin’ the blog traffic. Almost 7,000 page views in one month — I thought that was something:

I tend to get philosophical and introspective when I write these anniversary posts.

Those first couple of years were the most fun, in part because it was the first time in my adult life that I was openly political. Prior to that, I just kept my mouth shut, so the un-shutting of the mouth was liberating.

It also was an exciting time. The rise of the Tea Party movement was exhilarating, as was the growth of a vibrant individual conservative blogosphere.

The victories of 2010 gave us all hope that we actually could change things.  Unfortunately, that hope was soon dashed by the backstabbing of mainstream Republicans who saw the Tea Party movement as their true enemy.

I expected it from Democrats and the media, I didn’t expect it from Republicans. Boy, was I naive.

Over time, that has led to my greater disillusionment, which seems pretty pronounced at this moment. I’m just not excited about this election cycle. You probably noticed that.

But the blog kept on keeping on. Kathleen McCaffrey, at the time a Cornell Junior, was the first author here who was not me, and for another year or so it was just the two of us.  And then we moved away from Google Blogger to our own self-hosted website in June 2011, which was pretty similar to what we have now, though we have made some tweaks.

More and more of my time is spent on administrative and managerial issues that take me away from the type of deep research posts I enjoy the most, and have had the biggest impacts. Oh, and remember, this isn’t actually my job, so doing all this on top of all that is exhausting.

We do it all on a shoestring. If we had the resources to do more we would, but we don’t.

Traffic has grown slowly but steadily over the years, without any real sustained spikes. While it varies from day to day dramatically, our average over the past year has been a fairly consistent 45k page views a day. We’ve just not been able to break out of the range, for whatever the reason.

I don’t begrudge those who have been able to win the internet. Whatever it is the masses want, we’re apparently not selling it, and I’m not sure we ever will.

We are what we are.

I’ve trended away from covering domestic politics as much as I used to, mainly because of the rise of the anti-Israel boycott movement in the past two years.

I’ve never met a more malicious, lying, dishonest, manipulative group of people than the anti-Israel boycott crowd. They are propagandists with Ph.D’s. The fight against them is not just a “pro-Israel” fight, it’s a pro-freedom, pro-American fight — as much as they hate Israel, they hate western civilization.

Israel’s fight is all our fight. And I expect it to be a central focus of my writing and campus involvement for the coming years.

What keeps me going?

Meeting some random person who says — so YOU’RE Legal Insurrection, I love that website. Emails of support from strangers. Meeting readers during travels. Mentoring conservative and pro-Israel students, letting them know they are not alone. Fulfilling, in a much smaller way, Andrew Breitbart’s goal of being the person who draws the fire, so you don’t have to.

Thanks go to the great authors and contributors who work so hard to keep the content flowing. And to the readers and commenters who keep coming back. And of course, thanks to the Wife of 31 years of marriage (yes, I confirmed the math with her) who puts up with all this.

So, that’s where the State of the Legal Insurrection stands.

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