Twenty years ago today, the journey began with a quote from Jonathan Swift and a promise to “keep your head, check your assumptions, and expose yourselves to differing points of view.” And what a road it has been for yours truly! The adventure has taken me from caucuses to debates, from one-on-ones with newsmakers to national conventions, and from Waterloo (Iowa, not the other one or ABBA) to the Vatican. Twice!

It also took me from my own blog, Captain’s Quarters, to Hot Air, and all of you … and what a blessing that has been as well. Truly, from the bottom of my heart, thank you all for making this dream possible.

Normally, I don’t spend too much time reflecting on these workplace milestones, but the 20th anniversary of blogging seems worth a reflection or two. Rather than focus on the people and places I’ve experienced over two decades of independent political and cultural analysis, however, I’d like to focus on the motivations that drove me and countless others to enter the arena, and why our future seems more grim than anyone would have guessed.

When I began blogging with that epigram from Swift and a desire to enter the marketplace of ideas, blogging had already been around for a while. Friends and then-mentors such as Glenn Reynolds and everyone at Power Line had begun blogging a couple of years before me; Mickey Kaus started in 1999. The Internet had reduced the cost threshold of publication to zero, at least on the most popular platforms, although the entrepreneurs had already built more robust platforms for paid service. (I started Captain’s Quarters on Typepad, and only later got my own domain and platform for a Movable Type blog.)

Those really were the salad days of independent blogging — where the market was wide open to those who worked hard, networked well, and offered compelling and interesting analyses and arguments on the issues of the day. Much of the political blogosphere, especially on the Right but not exclusively so, created a critical feedback loop to the mainstream media, exposing bias and narrative journalism and forcing accountability on the giants in that industry. 2004’s Rathergate is the most famous of these efforts, but there are plenty of other successful instances of forcing media outlets into telling the truth — or at least an approximation thereof.

That’s true even in the era of professionalized (or corporatized) blogging and commentary. That era began almost immediately after I began, as newspapers and other outlets hired and absorbed bloggers into their ranks. Hot Air, of course, is part of Townhall Media, a subsidiary of Salem Media Group, but other bloggers made that same transition while still maintaining their own unique voices and perspectives.

The real crisis didn’t come from professionalization. It came from Big Tech platforms, which first partnered with bloggers and independent voices — and then worked to curtail or even silence them. The first iteration of this came with Facebook, whose vast audience attracted many independents and some corporate bloggers to commit to that platform, only to see the rules and requirements change in ways that dried up revenue.

The last few years have been even worse, however, as all of the Big Tech platforms have participated in speech policing. To be fair, Congress began driving them into those practices after the Russia-collusion hysteria of 2016. And to be even more fair, Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey initially resisted those calls, but got beaten down by the unrelenting pressure and threats to regulate the platforms. Now we know the extent of the interventions by the CDC, HHS, the FBI, and other government agencies, but we only know that because Elon Musk bought Twitter and published all the correspondence — and the FTC is now targeting Twitter/X.

If you believe that’s a coincidence, you haven’t paid enough attention. If you think that other Big Tech platforms aren’t watching that, think again. Just in the past week, Google has demonetized two posts of ours dealing COVID-related studies, and another about illegal immigrants outnumbering residents on an Italian island. Why? It doesn’t fit the official narrative, and they want to pressure us to stop writing about those subjects.

It’s not just government and Big Tech, either. The mainstream media has ramped up the hysteria over “misinformation,” previously known more prosaically as “being wrong on the Internet” —  a failing that the MSM commits as well, and often maliciously. They actively suppressed the evidence of Hunter Biden’s nexus to influence-peddling in 2020 along with the now-compliant Big Tech platforms. They promote censorship projects like the State Department-funded Global Disinformation Index and other such ‘fact checking’ orgs that bully advertisers.

Why? It’s not for altruistic reasons. The rise of the blogosphere exposed their bias and manipulation, and they want the field all to themselves again. They don’t want independent voices drilling into their claims and holding them up to public scrutiny any more than the bureaucratic state does. Instead of defending free speech, the Fourth Estate is trying its best to starve independent voices and are aligning with the government’s unconstitutional efforts to deplatform their competition. And unfortunately, the fruits of cultural-Marxist education have blossomed into popular support for Big Brother.

If you had told me twenty years ago that government law-enforcement and regulatory agencies would combine with monopolistic tech titans to produce a Big Brother censorship complex, I would have scoffed. The rise of the blogosphere itself should have made that impossible, I would have argued. The decentralized publication environment and direct reader connections it provided seemed like a First Amendment dream come true: a real democratization of debate, and a market where the most interesting and compelling arguments rise to the top.

It certainly was at that time, and remained so until the opponents of free speech and unfettered debate organized fully. But …. it still is possible!

Twenty years later, I am still optimistic about the prospects of American liberty in the public square — but I am no longer under the delusion that it will simply survive on its own without lots of support and vigilance. To reverse the authoritarian encroachment on speech and dissent, elections will have to be fought and won, but we have to keep those platforms and voices alive while we fight and defeat the censors and their collaborators.

This brings me to how we can support free and independent voices and exercise such vigilance. Many of our readers have joined the fight as part of our VIP and VIP Gold membership, and they have been crucial to our operations as an independent platform and the ability to debate all of the issues honestly. We also produce some great exclusive content for our members:

• The Amiable Skeptics featuring Adam Baldwin
• Off the Beaten Path with Larry O’Connor
• The Week in Review with Duane Patterson
• Exclusive columns from Tom Jackson, Duane “Generalissimo” Patterson, and Matt Vespa
• Members-only content from our HotAir team – David Strom, Jazz Shaw, and myself
• Live chats and interactive engagement on all platforms with VIP Gold
• Exclusive access to the comments sections on each post, so that you can join the conversation at HotAir
• And more yet to come!

Join us in the fight. Become a HotAir VIP member today and use promo code SAVEAMERICA to receive a 50% discount on your membership.

This has been an amazing journey, and I’m still a little stunned that I’ve been blessed to have been on it for twenty years. I am even more blessed by those who have walked that journey with me — particularly my co-workers here at Hot Air and Townhall, friends all, the mentors and colleagues I have had in the blogosphere, and the support of my family and friends.

Most of all, we all have been blessed to have you, our readers.

Here’s to the next twenty!

Ed Morrissey
Blogospheric journeyer and determined optimist

Thus every blogger, in his kind,
Is bit by him who comes behind.

The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today’s show features:

• What lessons can we learn from twenty years in the free-speech battleground? The first lesson is that we’re losing ground on it, as Andrew Malcolm and I discuss.
• What started off as a free market has rapidly turned into an exercise in government/Big Tech control and intimidation.
• We also discuss the GOP debate, the five-alarm fire that wasn’t on Capitol Hill, the GOP’s circular firing squad, and more!

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!