Newsmax’s Top 50 Conservative Blogs Of 2015
Although we would classify a fair amount of these blogs as libertarian rather than “conservative” the choices are sound and united in their anti-statism . Not bad for a bunch of pajama-clad basement dwellers .
” Newsmax is out with our 2015 list of the 50 top conservative blogs.
The Internet now allows anyone who cares to invest the time and trouble to become a political commentator with, potentially, many times the readership of the most long-established syndicated columnists. The media elite, from the Big Three Networks to the local newspaper, have suffered a collapse in influence and a hemorrhage of revenues as Americans simply click on their favorite bookmarks for informed opinions about the events around them.
Is it any wonder that an executive branch dominated by the big-government left is determined to let nothing stop it from converting the Internet into a regulated public utility whose ultimate destination apparently involves United Nations oversight?
Obama administration scandals like those involving the IRS and Benghazi may not have reached critical mass — yet. But if this were the old days of near-total liberal dominance of information transmission, it would be near-impossible to bring new developments before the eyes of the public if it contradicted the wishes of newspaper editors and network anchormen.
It would also be impossible to prevent the mainstream media from snowballing an artificial scandal like Rathergate a decade ago, which easily could have jeopardized George W. Bush’s re-election, and which Power Line and other conservative websites had a substantial role in debunking.”
London’s Hyde Park Corner has, for nearly a century and a half, been famed for the colorful characters who stand atop soapboxes on Sundays and speak their minds, with extremists from the organized right and left well-represented, and most of the speakers solemnly serious about what they tell the assembled throngs. A good few, however, have always been entertainers, sometimes feigning political passions that the crowd eventually discovers to be disguised jokes.
It is no exaggeration, considering the multitudes of people many of them reach, to say that the conservative blogs listed below have more greatly influenced political events than all the Hyde Park diatribes ever delivered. Personality abounds. Some of the sites feature graphics that are feasts for the eyes; many deliver laughs rivaling a P.G. Wodehouse yarn. And almost all let any reader join in and comment to his or her heart’s content.
Conservative blogs have electrified our 223-year old First Amendment like nothing the Founding Fathers could ever have foreseen. Here are the top 50 conservative blogs:
1. Instapundit – University of Tennessee law professor and hawkish libertarian Glenn Reynolds’ nearly decade-and-a-half-old powerhouse often causes “Instalanches” of Web traffic to sites to which it links articles. Reynolds posts relentlessly and the brevity and wryness of his often all-caps comments are famous, like a recent link to a Popular Mechanics report on Iran exploding a fake U.S. aircraft carrier to flex its muscles during nuclear talks. Blogged Reynolds, “WHY DON’T WE ONE-UP THEM BY BLOWING UP A REAL IRANIAN NUCLEAR RESEARCH FACILITY?”
2. Hot Air – Founded originally by firebrand columnist and TV commentator Michelle Malkin, Hot Air persuaded veteran blogger Ed Morrissey to archive his own well-established Captain’s Quarters blog and write for Hot Air. Its other stars are American Conservative Union blogger of the year Mary Katharine Ham, and the mysterious and eloquent AllahPundit, who recently posted his skeptical take on Jeb Bush’s less-than-comfortable CPAC appearance, which he theorized wasn’t to attract votes on the right, but “to prove to people who aren’t at CPAC that he’s one of them and not afraid to broadcast that fact at ground zero of the conservative movement.”
3. RedState – Some of editor-in-chief and Fox commentator Erick Erickson’s recent headlines provide a sample of Red State’s pungent flavor: “Can We Impeach Now?” “Eunuch Mitch McConnell Squeals Like a Pig,” and “All the President’s Boot Lickers Still Pretend Obama is a Christian.” But the Eagle Publishing-owned site features plenty of substantive analysis for cyberspace’s hardcore right, much of it by volunteer contributors, like “Streiff” concluding that “Boehner and McConnell are negotiating with themselves over the terms of their own surrender” on Homeland Security funding and President Obama’s executive amnesty. Pointing out that a DHS shutdown endangers no one, Streiff warned that if Congress “won’t refuse to appropriate money to fund non-essential functions of DHS, it has become irrelevant and we are a dictatorship, not a constitutional republic.”
4. Power Line – The law school-educated weightiness comes through in this polished, eclectic political site founded by three Dartmouth-grad attorneys. An example: A recent post from John Hinderaker diving into the technical details of the Obama administration’s new bullet regulations and demonstrating that Second Amendment fears regarding them are “not irrational; liberals have openly argued for attacks on ammunition as an indirect means of achieving gun control.”
5. Free Republic – “Working to roll back decades of governmental largesse, to root out political fraud and corruption,” and “always have fun doing it. Hoo-yah!” Free Republic might just be the national bulletin board for the Tea Party, among serving other functions. Thousands of “Freepers,” with handles like Alamo Girl and cripplecreek, link to articles other sites usually miss, then post endless pithy commentaries. Typical is a recent post by GreyFriar on the FCC turning the Internet into a public utility: “The Democrat version of democracy means three unelected bureaucrats voting for something that none of us is allowed to see.”6. The Corner – With National Review’s full arsenal represented, like the forceful mind of terrorist prosecutor Andrew McCarthy and the incisive reporting of Joel Gehrke, conservative political junkies fly to “the one and only” Corner for anything-but-amateur rapid response analysis on just about anything that’s happening. Washington Editor Eliana Johnson (whose father, Scott, co-founded Power Line), for instance, crashed the garden party for the latest “anti-Jeb” with her recent “Two Scott Walkers” post, reporting that hundreds of donors at the Club for Growth’s winter conference in West Palm Beach were eager to see “the man who has slayed Wisconsin’s public-unions and delivered a boffo performance” at CPAC. “Instead, they got the Walker who is shaky, unsure of himself, and hazy on policy details.”
7. Avik Roy – Forbes magazine opinion editor and Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Avik Roy’s knowledge of the maze of legislative language that makes up ObamaCare is unrivaled, and as it inevitably declines in effectiveness, the blog written by Roy, former House Budget Committee Chairman Bill Frenzel, and a half dozen other experts is the place to check in often and watch its slow death.
8. NewsBusters.org – With all the resources of Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center at its disposal, NewsBusters watches the mainstream media’s every move and skewers its chronic bias, sloppiness, inaccuracies, and even outright deceit. A Matthew Balan post recently pointed out how the evening news shows of all the Big Three networks ignored the Treasury Department’s new “active investigation” into IRS “potential criminal activity,” yet “all devoted full segments to the viral photograph of a dress that appears to be either black and blue or gold and white.”
9. Café Hayek – “The Road to Serfdom” author F.A. Hayek would be delighted with the undiluted capitalism served at the blog bearing his name. One recent post by Don Boudreaux linked to a YouTube clip of the “Price is Right” game show from 1972 to demonstrate that the conventional wisdom about stagnant living standards is wrong. One of the show’s prizes was a “30-inch electric kitchen range priced at $385.” Boudreaux pointed out: In 1972, the average hourly earnings of a production or nonsupervisory private-sector worker in America was $3.90. So, such a worker in 1972 had to toil for 99 hours to earn enough income to buy that range.” But today, Home Depot sells a 30-inch range for $349, with the average hourly wage $20.80. “So, today’s ‘ordinary’ worker can earn enough income to buy a 30-inch electric kitchen range in just 16.8 hours — a mere 17 percent of the work time required in 1972.”
10. Big Government – It’s undoubtedly insulting to call the best-known section of the multi-faceted Breitbart website a blog; the late and legendary Internet pioneer Andrew Breitbart’s baby is fast growing into a professional journalistic global empire, opening bureaus everywhere from Texas to London to the Mideast. But the whole massive operation, launched to destroy the “old media guard” dominated by the left, has always had a blogger’s rebellious soul. The trademark Breitbart cheekiness was on full display in a recent post by C-FAM president Austin Ruse, who asked the head of American Atheists if the president is faking being a Christian and got this agnostic response: “Obama was raised by an atheist and a skeptic, so he at least knows the arguments.” “
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