The internet runs on outrage! Fighting the algorithms

Twenty-four years into Powerline, John Hinderaker still does the assiduous, painstaking, honest work the rest of the media has abandoned. John Hinderaker has been writing on Powerline Blog every day since Memorial Day weekend of 2002. He and Scott Johnson started it as lawyers with day jobs and no plan to monetize, and nearly a quarter century later, the arrangement has not changed.

There is no staff, no office, no investor deck. The site runs in the black on hosting fees. “We never had to worry about clickbait,” he said, and the consequence of that freedom is visible on every page: a man who can choose what to ignore.

Most of the internet cannot ignore anything. “One thing about the Internet is that it’s always hysterical,” Hinderaker said. “Every day it’s hysterical about something.” The left runs its hysteria, the right runs its own, and the bloggers and posters and podcasters chase whichever rabbit crossed the path that morning. Hinderaker’s method is older and stranger. He reads the source document. “If there’s a court decision that’s in the news, after forty-one years as a lawyer, I’ll read the court decision. And I’ll write what I think about the court decision, not what other people are writing about the court decision.” The discipline sounds modest until you realize how few practitioners actually do it.

We talked about the country sorting itself into informational tribes that no longer share a postal code. “Left and right are really living in different worlds. They have different sources of information. They know or think they know different things.” The Biden senility revelation in the 2024 debate, he pointed out, surprised no one on the right and devastated millions on the left, because those millions had been watching different videos for four years.

The tribalism shows up cleanly in donor data. Hinderaker cited Dan McLaughlin’s tally of campaign giving by occupation. The bluest jobs in America are “arts administrator, professor of English, film editor, psychotherapist, museum curator, yoga instructor, social worker, TV producer, talent agent, urban planner, screenwriter, nonprofit executive, filmmaker, librarian.” Ninety percent or better for Democrats. The reddest occupations, truck driver, farmer, contractor, and orthopedic surgeon, never reach the same monolithic ceiling. Half of the explanation, Hinderaker argued, is that “they’re more reality-based.” A bridge designed by a structural engineer who is wrong falls down. A film studies seminar built on a fashionable error does not. Reality sends invoices to some occupations and forgives others, and the politics follow accordingly.

The strangest territory in the conversation was the puzzle of why already-wealthy pundits drift into stranger and stranger territory. Tucker Carlson made millions at Fox and is making millions now. Candace Owens married into substantial money. Megyn Kelly walked away from NBC with a fortune. None of them needs the next dollar. “I just have a hard time understanding what the incentive is for these people to go off in the really sad direction that they have.”

Part of the answer may be that the audience itself has gone global, and global rewards material that domestic audiences would reject. Part of it may not even be a real audience. Hinderaker cited an analysis of Nick Fuentes’ traffic showing “a huge percentage of it was coming from bots originating in bot farms in places like Pakistan, Nigeria, and Malaysia,” often funded by Russia, China, and Iran. The Overton window in 2026 may be partly automated.

On Iran, his framing was unsentimental. “Iran is a huge, huge problem,” he said, and presidents from Carter forward have preferred to kick the can. The result is a militarized theocracy approaching ICBM range, with London and Paris already inside it. Easier, in commentary circles, to talk about Israel than about Tehran. The reluctance to deal with the actual large problem produces displacement onto smaller and more familiar targets, which is roughly the pathology of every age.

Hinderaker is not on television. He does not have a podcast empire. He has a daily page, a long memory, and the patience to read what other people summarize. In the current media economy, that constitutes a kind of dissent.