Instapundit
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Instapundit is a United States political blog produced by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. It is one of the most widely read political blogs.[1] The blog, started in August 2001, began as an experiment and a part of Reynolds' class on Internet law. Because of his long-standing prominence in the political blogosphere and his efforts to encourage new bloggers, Reynolds is sometimes called the BlogFather.[2]
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Instapundit is sometimes considered a "warblog" because of its frequent supportive coverage of America's War on Terrorism and war in Iraq[citation needed]. Other common topics are technology (such as nanotechnology, space exploration, and digital photography), individual liberty, domestic politics, the media, and the blogosphere as a social phenomenon. Reynolds has recently lent his support to the Porkbusters campaign.
Much of InstaPundit's content consists of links to other sites, often with brief comments. (His frequent use of "heh," "indeed," and "read the whole thing" have been widely imitated and often parodied by other bloggers.) Reynolds encourages readers to explore the wider blogosphere and to fully read articles and posts to which he links. In 2005, Reynolds has at times added original video reports, shot documentary-style, to the site. He covered the 2005 BlogNashville convention using personally-shot video.
In January 2006, Reynolds began to host podcasts [3] from Instapundit, with his wife Helen Smith (who hosts discussion of the podcasts on her blog, "Dr. Helen"). Reynolds aggressively promotes the idea that bloggers, using now widely available tools such as digital audio and video, will eventually force more established news media to adapt a more agile approach to providing information [4].
Because of its popularity, an Instapundit link to another site can cause the traffic of that site to spike. Such an increase is often referred to as an "instalanche", a portmanteau for "Instapundit avalanche". (See the Slashdot effect for a similar phenomenon.)
[edit] Political stances
Reynolds describes himself as a libertarian [5], specifically a libertarian transhumanist [6]. He tends to favor free markets, although he sees endemic corruption in certain private-sector markets such as "Mainstream Media". He also distrusts bureaucratic action in both economic and personal affairs of American citizens, although he is more supportive in the realm of military affairs and actions that involve non-citizens. He strongly supports the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. He also strongly supports gun rights. The European Union, the United Nations, Islamic-world governments, American universities, and Mainstream Media are frequent targets of negative remarks or links. (On the other hand, he once described the New York Times as "the most important news source on or off the Net"[7].)
Reynolds, who "worked for Al Gore's 1988 campaign",[8] now largely agrees with mainstream Republican positions on major issues such as the war in Iraq, tax cuts, health care, illegal immigration, and the environment. He often dwells on accusations against Democrats and liberals and he disputes or sidesteps many of their accusations against Republicans and conservatives. He often criticizes Republicans, especially for betraying libertarian principles. His association with the conservative side of U.S. politics includes participantion at the 2006 Conservative Political Action Conference.[9] A favorite blog theme is that reasonable political discourse must be defended from liberal bias and from leftist tendencies such as "Bush Derangement Syndrome". However, Reynolds holds liberal positions on social issues when they are consistent with libertarianism. For example, he supports embryonic stem cell research, abortion rights and same-sex civil unions. He has written: [10]
- Personally, I'd be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons.
Reynolds often blogs in support of Porkbusters, which he helped create. He has vigorously criticized politicians from both parties for pork barrelling and earmarking.
[edit] Criticism and controversy
Reynolds and his blog are frequent targets of criticism, mainly from other bloggers. Reynolds has been accused of promoting violence[11] and demonstrably false information[12][13] by linking to others with such material, but by not explicitly endorsing it since his trademark short comments often fail to explicitly state an opinion on the matter[14]. Glenn Greenwald has written that "Reynolds' need to parade around as the moderate, reasonable libertarian - always promoting and applauding the grossest extremism while staying safe enough distance away from it to give plausible deniability - is inherently deceitful to its core".[15]
Other critics argue that the site has become increasingly partisan, in particular that it expansively defends the war in Iraq and minimizes negative developments there.[16] Given that the Libertarian Party opposes the war in Iraq [17], Reynolds' position can be interpreted as a drift away from libertarianism.
Like many prominent bloggers, Reynolds is a frequent target of various insults. For example James Wolcott has described Reynolds as "Instadunce"[18], "publicity-whory"[19] and a "rube"[20]. Reynolds was for a time called "Instacracker"[21] [22] [23] by some bloggers. Brian Leiter has called him "Glenn 'no bit of right-wing sliminess is beneath me' Reynolds" [24].
[edit] Blogs inspired by Instapundit
Instapundit's fame has led to the common adoption of the suffix "-pundit" in blog titles. Some of the more prominent ones are:
There are many other "-pundit" blogs of all political stripes. An extensive listing of blogs inspired to some degree by Instapundit may be found here.
