Rick Moran's Right Wing Nut House opens with a surprise: the newest post, dated January 25, 2021, is not about politics. It is a humor essay weighing cats against dogs, with a nod toward PJ Media. That detail says a lot about the place. This is one writer's blog, and the writer follows his own interests wherever they wander, even when the masthead promises conservative political commentary.
Moran writes opinion pieces on U.S. politics and current events, and the prose carries a single voice through long-form argument. Posts on the government shutdown sit near pieces on national party politics, and every so often the subject drifts toward science or culture. There is no editorial board at Right Wing Nut House, no wire copy, no pretense of neutral reporting. A reader looking for straight news will not find it. A reader who wants one man's take, argued at length, will.
An archive shaped by its era
The category list is where the blog's age shows most plainly. Right Wing Nut House files its posts under named topics that double as a timeline of the last two decades of American political argument: "24" (the television show, by the look of it), Able Danger, American Issues Project, Arizona Massacre, Bailout, Bird Flu/Swine Flu, and on for many more entries. Some of those names will mean nothing to a reader who came of age after 2010. They were live controversies once, and the archive keeps them filed exactly where they landed at the time. Wayback Machine records trace the content back to the mid-2000s and forward through 2015, which puts Right Wing Nut House among the older surviving examples of the conservative blogosphere as it existed before social media swallowed most of that traffic.
The blogroll reinforces that placement. Right Wing Nut House links out to a set of peer blogs (Soccer Dad, The Education Wonks, The Glittering Eye, The Sundries Shack, and Watcher of Weasels) that belong to the same era and the same loose network. Blogrolls were how that world organized itself, a way of pointing readers toward writers you respected or argued with. Seeing one still in place is a piece of internet history, though it also raises the obvious question of how many of those linked sites are still standing. The list is a snapshot of a community that was active when the posts were being written.
Right Wing Nut House does not sell anything. There are no products, no services, no membership tiers, no paywalled premium essays. It is commentary, offered as commentary, and the value on offer is the writing itself. For someone studying how American conservative opinion was framed during the Bush and Obama years, that has genuine archival worth. The posts were written in the moment, by a participant, without the smoothing that hindsight applies. The personal-essay style means the politics come braided with cultural observation, which makes the older entries read less like talking points and more like a record of how one person was thinking week to week.
No contact page, no listed phone number, and no contact form appear anywhere on the site. A reader who wanted to reach Moran, correct something, or ask about reusing a piece would have no obvious route. For a working business this would be a real strike against it. For a long-running personal blog it is closer to the norm, since many independent writers never bothered with a formal contact setup, but it does leave the site feeling sealed off: a thing you read and cannot respond to.
A search for Right Wing Nut House on review platforms turns up nothing. No listings on Google, Trustpilot, Yelp, or the usual aggregators. What does surface is unrelated: an Amazon book titled "Obama's Detractors: In the Right Wing Nut House," which borrows the phrase but has no connection to the blog, and a brick-and-mortar shop called The Nut House in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which shares part of the name and nothing else. None of that helps gauge how the blog was received in its day. Opinion blogs of this vintage were rarely reviewed the way businesses are, so the absence of third-party ratings is unsurprising; it does mean a newcomer has to judge the writing on its own terms with no external scaffolding to lean on.
The picture that forms is consistent. Right Wing Nut House is a one-author conservative commentary blog with a deep, oddly catalogued archive, a network of period blogroll links, and a writing style that mixes politics with whatever else caught Moran's attention. The most recent activity appears to be that lone 2021 pet essay, which points to the political output having wound down long before the site went quiet.
The strong opinions, long memory, and idiosyncratic filing system are the draw at Right Wing Nut House. What is missing is any way to reach the author and any outside record of how the writing landed. The posts stand in their original categories, dated and complete, making a case for themselves without any help from the rest of the web.
