John H. Hinderaker

John H. Hinderaker (born September 1950) (the name is pronounced hinder-rocker) is a conservative American lawyer and a blogger at the Power Line weblog, as well as a fellow at the Claremont Institute. He is a 1971 graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Harvard Law School in 1974. Power Line has promoted outsiders as candidates to be Dartmouth alumni trustees, such as T.J. Rodgers, founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor.

Weblog

Hinderaker has claimed that some "scientists [have] pointed out the absence of evidence for human-caused global warming"[1] and that "In fact, scientific support for that theory [anthropogenic global warming] is weak."[2] He has also stated that "Darwin's theory of macroevolution is plainly wrong, on strictly scientific grounds" and "is, in my view, a rather obvious fraud, which cannot withstand the mildest scrutiny" [3] and that "benefits of embryonic stem cell research have been vastly oversold".[4]

He has been a consistent supporter and frequent admirer of George W. Bush and once wrote of his work in creating the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate:[5]

A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile. Hyperbolic? Well, maybe.

When Time magazine named Power Line as their inaugural "Blog of the year" award in 2004, they wrote that:[6]

Hinderaker, a.k.a. Hindrocket, is the ranter, always willing to go over the top with a big speech and flights of fancy. He's also the mediagenic one. He's a clear and forceful speaker—he's a litigator by day, after all.

Challenging mainstream media reporting

A consistent theme in Hinderaker's blogging is that the major US news outlets suffer from incompetence and a tendency to slant the news to favor the political left.

He was one of the first on the blogosphere to suggest that the Bush National Guard document included in a '60 Minutes' report are a hoax.[7] CBS later apologized for the story,[8] and reported that "the Killian documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle ... the Killian documents were not produced on a typewriter in the early 1970s and therefore were not authentic."[9]

Hinderaker also took the lead in attacking some national newspapers' and networks' reporting on the Schiavo "talking points memo", speculating on his blog and in The Weekly Standard that it was a Democratic Party dirty trick: "What, then, was the evidence for the claim that it was created and distributed by Republicans? As far as the public record shows: There is none. On the contrary, the only published report identifying the purveyors of the memo on March 17 states that they were Democrats."[10] When the memo turned out to be written by a Republican aide, Brian Darling, Hinderaker acknowledged this fact, but continued to criticize the mainstream media for suggesting the memo was a "a product of the party's leadership or had an official status."[11]

Vulgar email

On February 20, 2005, Minnesota anonoblogger "minnpolitics" published a profanity-laced email John Hinderaker wrote in response to an email comment about Jeff Gannon:[12]

You dumb shit, he didn't get access using a fake name, he used his real name. You lefties' concern for White House security is really touching, but you know what, you stupid asshole, I think the Secret Service has it covered. Go crawl back into your hole, you stupid left-wing shithead. And don't bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don't qualify, you stupid shit.

Hinderaker offered an apology, explaining that after a flood of "inexpressibly vulgar and vile" emails and phone calls:[13]

I read about ten [emails] in a row that were vulgar and abusive in varying degrees; most were unprintable. At that point I snapped and lost my temper. I sent irate and intemperate replies to the last couple of emails I read—unfortunately, not the most abusive ones, but the ones I read after losing my temper.

The next day, one of these emailers responded that he thought my reply was disproportionate to the offensiveness of his email; I agreed and apologized for having reacted inappropriately. I would have done the same with the "Minnesota Politics" guy if he had contacted me rather than posting my email—which obviously wasn't intended for publication—on his site.

City Pages gave Hinderaker a "Best Meltdown" Award [14] for this in their 2005 "Best of the Twin Cities" Issue.

External links

• The Power Line blog
• Faegre and Benson Official bio
• North Star Legal Center