RealClear Is Here and We’re Not Going Away: Samizdat Prize Is a Defense of Free-Speech Courage
- Politic
ThePostMaster- 0
- 12 minutes read
There is a shared idea behind all prize programs, and here it is: We get the world we praise.
The arc of the future is bent by what we praise in the present.
Praise is an incentive. The human animal responds to incentives.
Why is it that with every passing year our movies get worse? The Oscars incentivize bad movies.
Why with every passing year does journalism get worse? You can thank the stable geniuses running the Pulitzer Prize for that.
The Samizdat Prize’s purpose – or the Samis, as we’re calling them on their third birthday – is to grow the mind’s share of free speech courage by honoring those with undeniable, outlier courage in the service of the truth.
The Sami winners are a needed type. They are connected by a First Amendment unum that allows for a pluribus of expressions.
Miranda Devine, Matt Taibbi, Alan Dershowitz, and Charlie Kirk are not of the same political persuasion, but are similar to the core of their commitments to their craft and the courage to tip over exchange tables posing as truth-tellers.
All are First Amendment champions, who have habitually stood athwart history, refusing to bend the knee.
We stand by our past and present choices.
Charlie Kirk is the 21st century’s free speech, American martyr. What Martin Luther King Jr. is to civil rights, Charlie is to free speech.
Erika Kirk’s courage and forgiveness touched and ennobled a grieving nation.
And “The Charlie Kirk Show” continues to go on. To the folks at Turning Point USA, congrats on standing up a Super Bowl half–time show that showed a better alternative to Bad Bunny’s demotic identity celebration. The only way to overturn a bad idea is to bring to market something better and let the people decide.
And then there is Alan Dershowitz – America’s quintessential legal professor, litigator, and free speech champion.
Like many who attended our gala this week, I came up in the Age of Dershowitz. His more absolutist expression was the mindset that I had the good fortune of being taught.
Once upon a time, the ACLU, the majority of faculty and student body of Harvard, and all the Ivies thought like Alan on the First Amendment. No more. They have changed sides, but Alan has remained a needed American constant.
Alan, of course, still maintains his left-of-center political persuasion, particularly on social issues. A smattering of attendees in the room responded to some of his more liberal remarks with audible boos (our friend Josh Hammer certainly didn’t hold back). But that’s okay. For what we saw on that night was a real-time exemplification of what RealClear is all about: civil disagreement and a challenging of ideas, not with ad hominem, but on the merits.
And then there’s our Irish cousin from across the pond – Graham Linehan – who now lives in witness protection in the United States.
I am not on X, but if I were, I would be in the King’s Tower if I lived in that Orwellian Dystopia.
Many of our friends, particularly Paul du Quenoy and Roger Kimball, would be on the rack sporting thumb screws, and their Wootten shoes would be burnt as their triggers.
Graham’s sin: He took to social media to defend common sense when his country, like ours, was losing their minds on transgenderism and children.
The mob ruined him. He paid a huge financial price. It is a truly awful story. And, sadly, they are growing in numbers in the UK, and it should be a grave concern for us here.
Graham has suffered great injustice, but stands tall and retains a sense of humor.
A mutual friend across the pond, who recently got an upgrade to Lord, Toby Young, captured the UK’s and Europe’s problem.
He said, David, this “mis,” “dis,” and “mal” information, Identity Mind Virus enveloping the free world is of American origin.
He argues, rightfully, that this disease came from our American universities and was exported to the UK and Europe. And he wanted to make it clear – and we need to hear it – that we did not export the First Amendment – that protection that we take for granted, and that protects us from us – along with it.
We need to help them reclaim free speech in Europe and with our English-speaking cousins.
They are worth fighting for, which in the present circumstance requires fighting with them.
It is our 250th birthday/Independence Day from them.
The effort will make us both better.
Our problem: Illiberalism is in everybody’s soul. We all think that what we say is true, and we all think that the other person is either dumb or evil. That’s the reason why we have the First Amendment. It’s so we protect ourselves from the proclivities that are natural to the instincts of human beings.
We need to stop this “free for me, but not for thee” hypocrisy that is tearing apart our country.
We need to make free speech and its free exercise without government interference a shared, bipartisan political value of shared common defense.
Whatever you think of Don Lemon, so far the evidence is that he was an embedded journalist and should be treated as such. The rest of the folks in his party don’t have the same protection.
To be sure, Lemon does not deserve a Sami. He also doesn’t deserve a prison sentence in the slammer, contra Josh Hammer.
As we celebrate our experiment in self-government’s 250th birthday, we are showing our age.
A recommitment to the free speech and the free exercise of viewpoint diversity is a fountain of political youth.
Let’s drink from it.
We also celebrated 25 years of RealClear.
The best thing that I can say about us is that we remain very recognizable in our 25th year.
Viewpoint diversity – by which we mean showing the rivalry of two or more positions making their case, and you, the reader deciding – remains our method.
As does our averaging out the dissonant characteristics of partisan polling.
The RealClearPolitics Poll Average has consistently shown the Election Day signal in the partisan noise – holding together a fractured politics that has lost trust in too many.
RealClear has stayed true to itself, which has not been easy.
Staying true to oneself – staying RealClear – has not been without its costs.
We have been censored through advertising and traffic starvation. But let’s not focus on the negative, but the positive.
We are here. And we are not going away.
