Before You Mourn RedState, a Look Back at Its Worst Hits of All Time

The internet senselessly mourned the end of yet another era over at conservative blogging site RedState after the site’s owners fired a slew of writers on Friday, with the dismissed writers saying everyone who was let go was “insufficiently supportive” of Donald Trump.

This might be misunderstood as a free speech issue, but before we get too misty-eyed, it’s critical that we look back on just some of what the site has happily stood for—even if, until now, it provided a home for people aghast at the impoliteness of Trumpism.

RedState is a website that, while often critical of Trump, has published some truly vile content over the years, including during Conservative Thinker Erick Erickson’s tenure as editor in chief (he left the site for greener pastures in 2015).

Let’s take a trip back through time to look at just some of site’s back catalog:

• Using the Parkland school massacre to talk about how Planned Parenthood is actually worse than the NRA because abortion.
• Indulging the thought experiment that perhaps all the woman who came forward to accuse Roy Moore are lying.
• Giving credence to conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health.
• Charmingly calling the students protesting after racially-motivated incidents the University of Missouri “cowardly liberal lazy douchebags.”

And who could forget that top conservative battle: policing where trans people pee, which RedState described as a fight to save our women and children from “perverts and the mentally ill”?

And just a sampling of Erickson’s greatest hits:

• Remember Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remarks? Erickson saw no issue there.
• Just rampant Islamophobia after any terror attack on the national stage.
• His remarks during Occupy Wall Street—while working as a commentator for CNN!—that “watching a hippie protester get Tased just makes my day.”
• Accusing the “sinner Barack H. Obama” of “pervert[ing] God’s word”
• Wondering whether Obama (Erickson sure hates that guy for some reason!) was off “shagging hookers,” unbeknownst to his “Marxist harpy” wife
• Being insanely homophobic.
• Hawking the site’s “endorsement” as part of an ad package and spamming his valuable email list with get-rich-quick schemes.
• Warning, after yet another mass shooting, that in our rush to politicize mass killings, we might forget the real enemy: trans people.
• And, last but not least, this legendary tweet, in which Erickson shows his apparent confusion about exactly who the Greatest Generation fought against in World War II:

So, please, spare me any handwringing about the health of the discourse, the death of free speech, and the Serious Conservative Thinkers without a racist corner of the internet to call their own.