Homeland Stupidity began in November 2004 as the personal weblog of Michael Hampton, its primary author. Since then it has grown into a highly ranked critic of government stupidity, offering news analysis, opinion and original reporting on U.S. political issues.
Michael Hampton, 35, currently resides in Manchester, N.H. He splits his time between writing for Homeland Stupidity and offering technical services to small and medium businesses which use the WordPress weblog platform. He also offers a selection of open source software to the Internet community.
Hampton worked for various telephone companies since 1998 in a variety of roles, including customer service, repair, order provisioning, Internet technical support and fraud prevention. He is familiar with the internals of the telephone network, especially the interconnections between CLECs and traditional phone companies. He also has worked in UNIX and Linux system administration and uses Linux regularly.
He occasionally wrote for Hammer of Truth (now defunct) on political issues, and has written for Newsforge (now merged with Linux.com) and 2600 Magazine.
Hampton is a member of the Free State Project and moved to New Hampshire in March, 2007. “We as Americans have become apathetic,” he wrote. “That must change.”
Homeland Stupidity currently has five regular writers and is actively recruiting guest writers and columnists.
Homeland Stupidity’s focus is reflected in its tagline: “Government gaffes, bureaucratic blunders and incumbent incompetence.” While the site focuses primarily on analysis and editorial, it also publishes original reporting and occasional breaking news stories.
Homeland Stupidity highlights stories of government incompetence, bungling and stupidity, and offers suggestions on how to improve the situations thus highlighted.
Homeland Stupidity averages 1,200 regular subscribers as of November 2009, and over 6,000 daily readers, about 5% of whom are in the U.S. government or military, according to server logs. Homeland Stupidity has readers in the Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence community, the Pentagon, both houses of Congress, and the White House, according to server logs. Sometimes they even leave comments.
Homeland Stupidity is also a favorite of many mainstream journalists and editors, who find background information, story ideas and unique perspectives here. (Selected press clippings are listed below.)
Homeland Stupidity began November 6, 2004, four days after the U.S. general election. Over its lifetime it has averaged two posts per day. Because the government has gotten so large, Homeland Stupidity expects to have a rich source of material for new stories for many years to come.
“With the Internet, where doesn’t matter,” says Hampton. He has written from his laptop from Iowa, Wisconsin, New York, New England and various Southern states. He traveled to areas hit by Hurricane Katrina in September and October of 2005, an experience his laptop did not survive. He has since replaced the laptop and travels irregularly.
“Far from being lovers of liberty dedicated to keeping America the land of the free,” Hampton says, “we have become a nation of couch potatoes who only become upset enough to do something when FOX cancels our favorite TV program.”
Hampton conceived Homeland Stupidity as a way to bring a libertarian political message to the millions of Americans who have never heard it before, or who have only heard popular misconceptions about it. Homeland Stupidity regularly publishes stories on government incompetence, illustrating how a more free market can deliver the same services better and at lower cost, and showing how government interference in markets and in personal lives is detrimental to society.
Being an experienced UNIX/Linux system administrator, Hampton maintains the servers on which Homeland Stupidity runs himself, saving thousands of dollars a year in the process. The site began on his personal computer in 2004, moved to a shared Web hosting service in 2005, and finally moved to dedicated servers in 2006. The site itself, along with related services such as e-mail, now take up two dedicated servers on disparate networks.
The Homeland Stupidity web site runs on the WordPress platform, to which Hampton has contributed code and plugins, on a Linux server. E-mail is handled using Citadel, to which Hampton has also contributed code.
Hampton was quoted on Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s foreign policy in a USA TODAY story on Ron Paul’s support in New Hampshire on January 3, 2008.
Hampton was interviewed by top-rated talk radio host Darrell Ankarlo of radio station KTAR in Phoenix, Ariz., on May 15, 2007, regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation and domestic terrorism.
Homeland Stupidity is cited occasionally in Congressional Quarterly, though they have so far failed to respond to requests for a subscription.
Hampton was mentioned in a May 3, 2007, Dark Reading article on the Internet Spyware Prevention Act of 2007.
Homeland Stupidity was cited in an August 9, 2006, CBS News story on the Department of Homeland Security’s web site, Ready.gov. Hampton was also quoted in an October 20, 2006, report by Washington Technology on the redesign of DHS’s main web site.
He was interviewed by talk radio legend Brad Messer of radio station KTSA in San Antonio, Texas, on July 12, 2006, regarding the Department of Homeland Security’s National Asset Database.
New Standard News interviewed him for a March 10, 2006 article on the Online Freedom of Speech Act of 2005, and United Press International quoted him in a March 14 article on the same topic.
Homeland Stupidity writes on U.S. political issues with an openly declared libertarian bias. The Liberty 101 series of posts reintroduces Americans to the libertarian principles on which the country was founded. The series on Hurricane Katrina highlights the largest government failure in American history and suggests how the free market might have provided relief far better than FEMA did. And the first anniversary retrospective and second anniversary retrospective highlight some of the best posts from the first two years of Homeland Stupidity.
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