I was greatly honored yesterday to be selected as one of this year’s recipients of the Samizdat Prize, awarded by RealClearPolitics, a leading news site in the fight against censorship. I will receive the prize at the RCP conference on Wednesday, February 5, 2025, in Palm Beach, Florida.
I am deeply grateful to receive this recognition for my work in free speech and my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.
This is a tough time for the free speech community, but we must not forget that we have allies. Indeed, part of the effort to cancel and censor speakers and writers is to make them feel isolated and alone. It also chills the speech of others who do not want to be hounded or harassed. These events remind us that we are part of a larger movement of men and women who value free speech as a human right.
Thank you again for this recognition.
God Bless you Professor
You deserve this award !
Totally agree! Congratulations Prof Turley!
Congrats, well-deserved.
Congratulations to Professor Turley. I occasionally voice criticisms of the Professor here – no one is above that, and I think accurate criticism can be a good thing, but this is one of the few remaining web sites where one can come to find intelligent, well-reasoned, legal and political analysis, and it is greatly appreciated.
CONGRATULATIONS Professor Turley!
Congratulations, Professor Turley!
The only thing I’ve ever considered you incorrect on is “natural born citizen,” wherein your position is untenable. John Jay and George Washington codified a ranking higher than “citizen.” “Citizen” and “natural born citizen” are different, and they are not the same. They and the Framers required Congressmen and Senators to be merely “citizens” while imposing a higher, the highest, form of citizenship for President, “natural born citizen.” Your acquiescence on the issue implies that “citizen” and “natural born citizen” are the same and equal. The Constitution does not define “natural born citizen”; it requires readers to seek and find a definition, and the sole and only source of “natural born citizen” is Vattel, 1758, who required [two] parents and a father who were citizens at the time of birth of the candidate. History demonstrates abundantly that Jay, Washington et al. were eminently familiar with Vattel and the Law of Nations, so much so that it was a considerable contributor to the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Barack Hussein Obama and Kamala Harris will never be “natural born citizens” and will never be eligible for the presidency, understanding that Jay and Washington’s intent was to keep foreigners and those with foreign “allegiances,” ideologies, and politics separate from the office of the “Command in chief of the american army.” My God, man, Obama was so foreign, so opposed to America by his own admission, that he announced his campaign to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
Indeed, America was a new nation with new ideation, a new thesis, and a new Constitution; not the Olde World of Kings, Subjects, Great Britain, and Blackstone.
Please share when Professor Turley addressed these citizenship issues. A natural born citizen just means that you became at citizen at birth instead of becoming a citizen later on through the naturalization process. Obama and Harris became citizens at birth.
Natural Born Citizen is required for president.
Citizen is the lower requirement for Senator and Congressman.
The two are different; you may have noticed.
A greater requirement for the greater office.
How, you ask, are they different?
Vattel, Law of Nations, 1758 is your answer.
Congratulations, Professor Turley. Thank you for fighting the good fight against censorship, so that all of us have the basic human right to voice our opinions.
Congratulations. I am happily addicted to reading your posts on a daily basis. Keep up the good work
Turley’s book, The Indispensible Right is an excellent read, and a page turner. History, informative and right on.
Congrats Professor Turley!
There are trolls on this site that have never achieved anything in their lives. They are a failure at everything they do. As a consequence, they are extraordinarily jealous that Professor T won a prize, so like little children they try to denigrate that prize. Their IQ is so low they don’t even realize that in the process they only confirm to the world that they are blithering idiots. They are also abject cowards which is why they always comment anonymously.
OldManFromKS,
Well said. The good professor is highly successful, is being recognized along with others for their achievements, as he and they should be.
Congratulations Professor T. It is well deserved given your tireless efforts for the cause of liberty.
Congrats J T .
Congratulations Jonathan ! Well deserved. At the rate we’re going, Free Speech could be listed on the Endangered Species Act. Please keep up the good work and Happy New Year from New Mexico. Greg
OT; looks like the TikTok ban is having an unintended consequence. The app “RedNote” is becoming really popular now because it shows how much better things are in China. Food is cheaper, the standard of living is better when comparing equivalent income levels. Health care is free and medicine is way, WAY cheaper. It seems Americans are discovering that we may have been lied to by our own government.
It’s making China look more favorable. Infrastructure is decades ahead of us and we are still squabbling over who doesn’t deserve welfare. China is not perfect, BUT they are indeed doing some things right and better than us. They make better ev’s than Tesla and much cheaper. Congress may have made a huge mistake banning TikTok.
George, I do not support the tiktok ban it is just a bad idea, and now that it is on us nearly everyone who supported it now thinks it is a bad idea. Trump advocated for it, Biden signed it into law. Both are lamenting that they can not stop it.
If people are jumping to rednote – that points out the flaws in this nonsense of government trying to control things.
All that said – China has improved its standard of living dramatically since Mao’s death by embracing free market capitalism.
I would highly recomend one of the top 4 economists in the past century – Ronald Coases book “How China became capitalist”
https://www.amazon.com/How-China-Became-Capitalist-Coase/dp/1137351438
Not only is it an ecplaination of the rise of china, but also an excelent and easy to read primer on economics.
Coase is not only a great economist, but also an excellent communicator – far better than Hayek or Keynes.
But the book ends in 2013 – Coase died in 2013 at the age of 96 so this is his last work.
It is great though not he greatest work.
Coase addresses What China needs to do to move forward in the book.
2013 is the year Xi took power, That proved a massive shift in China. China’s standard of living has risen very little since then.
The left rants about fascism – Xi is an unabashed fascist and has transformed china into a fascist country.
China was not a great danger to the US or the world in 2013, They are now.
Worse china is a great danger to itself.
China’s standard of living rose from about $100/year when Mao died – the same as it was when “the last emporer” ruled to 11,000/year.
China rose from the bottom of the third world to the bottom of the first world.
But under Xi china has stagnated, It has piled up massive debt, It has chocked peoples freedom. china very large internal problems and we know they are somewhere between huge and catastrophic.
We are and should be worried about China invading Taiwan, or other neighbors – not because those are good strategies – significant military action by china would make it a global paria and destroy and already weak economy.
But because failing nations with failing leaders often do stupid things.
“Food is cheaper”
That is generaly true in poorer countries. But everything is not cheaper.
“the standard of living is better when comparing equivalent income levels.”
That is an idiotically stupid and self contradictory claim. Only a tiny portion of the Chinese people today have a standard of living comparable to the US working class.
” Health care is free”
Not exactly. China has a two tier system – if you opt into the free markets system you lose all the social safteynet but you gain the ability to rapidly raise your standard of living.
China also has a massice homeless problem – you just do not see it.
“medicine is way, WAY cheaper.”
Of course it is , chinese medicen is almost entirely unregulated and they have a market of 1.6B people.
China has a thoroughly corrupt legal system. It makes the lawfare of the left in the US look inconsequential.
Offend those in power and you end up in jail, or disappeared, or with your family paying for the bullet used to execute you.
Drug companies can do anything they want in china – but it they fall out of favor, those running the company may “disappear”.
Even people who are perfectly aligned with Xi may disappear if he thinks they are becoming too popular or a threat.
A FEWER of China’s problems:
They have nearly the lowest birth rate in the world, They have more than 100M too few people entering the working class – and the problem gets worse each year.
There is zero possibiity they can provide for their elderly as this bubble moves forward. They can not solve the problem through immigration – there is are not 100M people in the world who would immigrate to china if they wanted.
The US had a housing bubble in 2006 – the largest estimate of that bubble was about $250B in reality it was more like 50B of over production.
That ha sorted itself out and we now have a housing shortage of over 2M units growing to 3M in the next decade.
Instead of housing prices collapsing in the US they are ballooning – and they would be doing so more rapidly but for high interest rates.
China has ATLEAST a $16T housing bubble. One of the reasons is that the Chinese can not invest outside the country and most chinese are barred from other investment inside the country. So they put any savings they have in housing. Only with a declining population that is a really bad investment.
Nor is the housing bubble the worst of China’s problems. China is opaque in terms of government data. but most conservative estimates of chinese debt dwarf that of the US.
The US is worried about inflation – China has had a deflation problem for several years – that is why many things are so cheap. slow deflation is good, rapid deflation is absolutely disaterous.
I would note the Chinese economy is deflating DESPITE the fact that US inflation is driving inflation globaly. There is no nation in the world that could beliberately survive monetary policy at odds with they US today. Whatever the Fed does – the world follows. But China is not following – not out of conscious choice. But because their economy is in very serious trouble.
Official chinese figures claim China had about 5% growth in 2024, but unofficially most economists beleive China is in recession. and that it will get worse.
Worse still – Ci is more disconnected from reality than Putin. He has purged his govenrment long ago of anyone capable of the decisions to mitigate chinas problem.
So we have an ultra nationalist, fascist racist country – Xi has been fanning those, that has a collapsing economy that it blames on the rest of the world – particularly whites, and americans.
That is i n the midst of economic disaster.
“It seems Americans are discovering that we may have been lied to by our own government.”
Of course we hve – that is what governments do.
“It’s making China look more favorable. Infrastructure is decades ahead of us”
If you think China is so great – emigrate. I can assure you it is not. Those who can are leaving.
China has a better passenger train system than the US – their freight system sucks. This is a serious problem for a country that depends massively on exports.
There are a few places they have “leepfrogged the US – having noting to do with government.
The Chiese were so far behind in telecom, and retail payment systems that they skipped phone systems and went straight to cell phones.
It is nearly impossible to get a landline in China and has been forever. China completely skipped credit and debit cards because they were so far behind and jumped right to smart phone based systems.
But overall China’s infrastucture is pretty much what you would expect for a country with a standard of living of 11,000/year – much better than it was and much worse than the US.
They were growing at near double digits from the death of Mao until Xi, their economy has slowed since and as I noted is likely in recession, and not likely to pull out.
“we are still squabbling over who doesn’t deserve welfare.”
A Man Said to the Universe
By Stephen Crane
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
“China is not perfect”
Correct – it is much better than it was when Mao died, but far short of the US or even the rest of the west.
“BUT they are indeed doing some things right and better than us.”
True,. every country does, we are not the best in the wrld in everything – just most things.
“They make better ev’s than Tesla and much cheaper”
No they do not make better ones, but they do make good cheap ones.
Further China is more heavily pushing hybrids while Tesla is fully comitted to fully electric vehicles.
Tesla makes a massive number of EV’s in China, they are the largest EV producer in the world.
Tesla is the 8th largest auto maker in the world with 50% more sales than BYD the chinese company with almost entirely domestic sales.
Tesla’s profits are 10 times that of BYD. And the 5th largest car company in the world by profits.
Tesla is the #1 electric car company in the world by Market capitalization.
and the 8th largest company in the world following
Apple, nvidia, microsoft, google, amazon, Saudi Aramaco, and Meta
“Congress may have made a huge mistake banning TikTok.”
Probably did, but that does not make the rest of your claims true.
China has been collapsing for >4+ years. Additionally, Chinese graduate PhD candidates training at my university and others do not want to return to China. Grim future
China’s Economy Is Burdened by Years of Excess. Here’s How Bad It Really Is.
China’s property meltdown has since 2021 destroyed around $18 trillion of Chinese household wealth, according to an estimate by Barclays, eclipsing the losses suffered by Americans in the financial crash of 2008-09. That hit, along with the trauma of Beijing’s heavy-handed response to the Covid-19 pandemic, helps explain why Chinese consumers aren’t spending freely.
TICKING TIME BOMB
China is also facing demographic headwinds that will make it harder to restore its economic vigor. China’s working-age population is shrinking, reversing the demographic dividend that powered its economic ascent.
Debt: Borrowing by government, households and corporations in China is approaching 300% of its annual GDP. “Hidden” borrowing by local governments—debt held off the books on their behalf by opaque investment companies known as local government financing vehicles—is a major problem. On some measures, the scale of those debts and the burden of servicing them in China is more severe than in the U.S. before the financial crisis or in Europe in the depths of its own debt crisis a decade ago.
Real estate: China’s real-estate boom was unprecedented—and so is the ongoing bust. New construction and sales have cratered since the government took steps to rein in the bubble in 2020. It has struggled to stabilize the market, despite measures to ease purchase restrictions and offer cheap credit to would-be buyers. One sign of the boom’s excesses: There are as many as around 80 million vacant units in China, according to the latest estimates at the end of November, equivalent to half the total housing stock of the entire U.S.
Industrial overcapacity: In response to the slowing economy, and to transform China into a technological colossus, leader Xi Jinping has been funneling investment into China’s already huge factory sector. The result has been a surge in industrial capacity and two years of falling prices for Chinese producers, which are increasingly looking overseas to find buyers for goods they can’t sell at home. That is sparking trade spats with the U.S.-led West and emerging markets such as Brazil and India.
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-excess-debt-gdp-46c69585
if only the Left in America moved to China. They could always use Hunter Biden as a reference given his daddy’s financial ties to CCP
🖕🏾
“Debt: Borrowing by government, households and corporations in China is approaching 300% of its annual GDP.”
The above statement is true and likely higher than stated. Total US debt is about the same, but the US is in a much better position than China.
Will this comprehensive debt increase under Trump? Possibly in the short term unless drastic reductions in debt occur immediately. Trump has pledged to bring manufacturing back, which will entail much more debt. I bring this up because I expect the left to start crying about all types of debt under Trump, but they do not understand that investment debt is good for the nation.
“It’s making China look more favorable.”
Funny, I read today on The Epoch Times that China has begun to make RedNote less accessible to people using US-identified IP addresses, apparently to limit contact between US and Red Chinese. That seems to be strange behavior for a nation that is convinced that it has the superior society. I also wonder if you didn’t just answer the frequent speculation on this site about just who pays you to troll here…
Excellent news, well deserving to Professor Turley. The venue is spectacular: amazing fresh seafood and choice meat cuts, primo service and the ocean views are fabulous. Ive stayed there many times to attend medical meetings. You cant go wrong with the Palm Beach Breakers
Enjoy and congratulations to both you and Abigail Shrier, another excellent writer on current events.
https://realclearsamizdat.com/event/#honorees
Estovir,
I have read and listened to Abigail Shrier on The Free Press. The good professor is in good company.
She is a very accomplished writer. Publications include WSJ, City-Journal, Financial Times, and others as well as 2 best seller books. Her first book, on the trans cultists, was initially censored by the Left where Amazon refused to list it due the leftists pressure. Then they relented and made her and Amazon a ton of money. Ive said in the past, the Left are infertile. They do not reproduce, to not attract converts and promote death.
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
https://www.amazon.com/Irreversible-Damage-Transgender-Seducing-Daughters/dp/1684510317/
Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0593542924
The Zamizdat Prize was established in 2024. It is not intended to celebrate success; rather, it was created as a response to criticisms of the right-leaning bias of Real Clear Politics. It is amusing that the prize aims to be an alternative to the Pulitzer Prize.
The minimum ticket price to attend the Zamizdat gala is $1,000. Sponsorship levels include Platinum at $50,000, Gold at $25,000, and Silver at $10,000. The event is a fundraiser.
Interestingly, Real Clear Politics has complained about being blacklisted and ignored by more established organizations, claiming this constitutes censorship. It seems that when other organizations label RCP as unreliable or unworthy of mention, they are exercising their own free speech rights, yet RCP perceives it as censorship. Over time, RCP’s bias has shifted as its support from right-wing donors has increased, leading to its classification as an unreliable source by various rating groups. This is why they are now crying “censorship.” This situation mirrors the complaint made by Turley when his blog was also rated poorly.
George=Exhibit A!
An exhibit of what? Exercising free speech?
Rating a source “unreliable” and such is one of the hey weapons of such highly unreliable, inaccurate, biased and hateful organizations as Southern Poverty Law Center.
You should listen carefully to everything George has to say. He won the Nobel Prize for best peach pie at the State Fair!
Oh that is what everybody means when they say that George is the pits! There I was thinking that it was some kind of slur.
Dear Prof Turley,
Congratulations. .. well deserved.
Another couple of days in warm weather. Turley has this figured out.
Congratulations – well deserved!
Congratulations! (But I wonder what the Democrat shills will say when they figure out that a Samizdat is a Russian boiling hot water maker???)
That is a samovar.
I thought a samovar was a big, curvy sword???
Samizdat (Russian: самиздат, pronounced [səmɨzˈdat], lit. ’self-publishing’) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. ~ Wiki
Thank you!!!
I published a samizdat while living in Gainesville, FL which is located in the Diocese of Saint Augustine. Two of us wrote using pseudonyms on the heterodox teachings of the Bishop of the time, John Snyder, a far left Catholic prelate. I quoted extensively from Canon Law, Vatican II documents, Catechism of the Catholic Church and Early Church Patristics, and sent copies to all of the Bishops of Florida, Cardinals in the USA and Pope John Paul II. It caused quite a stir and shockingly, without requests, we started receiving financial donations to offset costs of publishing. In those days I used Pagemaker software and a dot matrix printer.
I was a thorn in his side and being a layman, he could do nothing to me once I was discovered. I kept publishing anyways and when it came time for his retirement due to his age, the Vatican requested his resignation via FAX. The Chancellor for the Archdiocese of Miami, given that the St Augustine Diocese was a suffragan of the Province of Miami, tapped me for a lay leadership position once I moved to Miami
Samizdats can be very powerful, provoke change and can cause the authors hardships. All worth it. I have no regrets of bringing Snyder down: a dose of his own medication. Those with writing skills should consider publishing a samizdat if warranted
There is a poem I sort of remember. It goes like this.
If I were King of Barbary
I’d don my robe and samovar
Something like that
Samizdat (Russian: самиздат, pronounced [səmɨzˈdat], lit. ’self-publishing’) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader.