Erick Erickson on RedState's 20th Anniversary

I am employee number one of RedState. I get credit as a site founder, but it was actually Ben (Domenech), Josh (Trevino), and Mike (Krempasky) (and anonymous super friend number four). The three of them put out an all-call for possible writers sometime around May of 2004. In June, I flew to D.C. with the infamous Mr. Tommy Crown. Mike picked me up at the airport and outlined the site vision at a dive bar over pitchers of Yuengling. Being from the South, I didn’t realize it was Pennsylvanian and was perplexed why we’d be drinking Asian beer. I was quickly disabused of the idea.

We all met at a Maggianos for dinner at Tyson’s Corner to see each other face to face. Initially, everyone had an area they focused on, but when the site went live, everything quickly morphed. The site was on a version of Drupal that was unstable. We were dot-org back them. If I can be credited with founding anything, it was convincing everyone we needed to move to dot-com, which we eventually did.

The site grew pretty quickly, designed to be a community blog on the right, like DailyKos on the left. With the rise of blogging, news sites needed sites on the right to cite to balance their citations from the left. We were the only game in town. By Labor Day, Rush Limbaugh had added us to his stack of stuff and daily sites he read. Traffic exploded.

In fact, traffic exploded so much so that we kept crashing. A random reader reached out. We had no idea if the guy was on the left or right. But he assured us that if we gave him access to the back of the site, server access, etc., he could fix us. The problems were so bad, without knowing the guy, we gave him everything. Clayton Wagar became the seventh key figure at the site. He still had access to his former employer as a consultant and put us on one of their servers through the election.

Tommy Crown, Josh, Ben, Mike, and Clayton all had real jobs, and I hated my law practice. I was traveling all over the country running political campaigns and doing election law to avoid most actual practice of law in Middle Georgia. Joe Trippi, then at MSNBC, decided to do a “blog the election” with liberal and conservative bloggers. I got picked to go up to New York for a week to cover the election from inside MSNBC, back when it pretended to be balanced. I was the only conservative with three liberals. I introduced myself to Pat Buchanan, who was still at MSNBC at the time. He chuckled and asked, “Did they know you were conservative?” I said yes, and he laughed, “Then I bet you were the only one.” Correct.

After the election, we knew we really were on to something when the Bush White House felt the need to set up an account to respond to our site criticisms of the administration. That only helped us grow further.

Over the years, RedState alumni have served as OMB Director (Russ Vought), Deputy National Security Advisor to the President (Victoria Coates), member of Congress (Chip Roy), and more. And we lost a few friends along the way too. God bless Mark Kilmer.

(Erick Erickson is RedState's former Managing Editor.)