Time to start wrapping things up at the Revo

MadBrad and I started the Revo in November of 2007 in a fit of anger over what was going on in a different forum that we both frequented. We didn’t really know what the goal was to be other than having a place to vent without interference. I vaguely remember the idea that it would be a cross between National Review and Maxim: Smart but irreverent. And so it was.

In November of 2007, I didn’t have a Facebook account, an Instagram account or a Twitter account and you probably didn’t either. It was a great time to launch a standalone blog. In fact, it was the heyday of blogs and we rode that wave.

When we launched, Barack Obama was a name most Americans had not yet heard. That quickly changed and the site was critical of his crypto-Marxist, socially transformative, the-state-is-everything brand of politics. In the days of the Tea Party, the Revo had wings. We grew at one point to a steady 15,000 hits per day.

Those were fun days. We made new friends. We had meet-ups and we were all of likeminds. We stood for free speech, free markets, free trade, free people and free minds. We had a blast.

Things kind of turned south for us in 2016. The Trump candidacy tore us apart. I am still processing all the ways it did so. There is no way to easily summarize that split.

Some of us liked Trump for his policy on immigration and building a wall on the southern border. Nothing else about that man mattered.

Some of us wanted to defeat the left and that was everything. One writer called the election of 2016 the “Flight 97 Election”. We had to storm the cockpit even if that meant flying the plane right into the bedrock. Defeating Clinton was all that mattered.

Others, me included, felt that we were being offered a no win choice. Neither Clinton nor Trump offered what we were looking for in government. Tails we lose, heads they win.

The result was that the band of brothers was torn apart. The blog became schizophrenic with a split personality both supporting and opposing Trump and his agenda.

Readership plummeted. Commentary withered. Many of us began to feel like strangers in our own home. For me at least, blogging is no longer any fun.

I suppose one solution would to pick a side and run with it. For example, I could just get on the Trump bandwagon and make this yet another site of Hannity-like Trump cheerleading. Yeah, I am not going to do that.

I could ask my co-bloggers to make posts more in line with my thinking but, no, I am not going to do that either.

We could continue on in this schizophrenic way as a house divided against itself but that is no fun and if this isn’t fun, it is pointless.

The reality is that our time is up. Whatever was the purpose of the Real Revo, it is no longer operative. It isn’t 2007 anymore. Facebook clubs and so forth let anyone rant on the Internet and we get pulled into smaller and smaller subgroups. The days of standalone blogs are getting short.

Combine that reality with the ideological divisions here and, well, we are reaching the end of the line. I think we jumped the shark last summer at the Republican convention. There was nothing happy about Happy Days after the Fonz jumped the shark.

Therefore, it is time to start wrapping things up here. I don’t want to just pull the plug, however. I want to give people a chance to discuss. One thought is that I archive the blog and replace it with a discussion forum where anyone can post.

Whatever the case, it is time for a change.

Thoughts?