There is nothing inappropriate about Professor Jonathan Turley using his own blog to sell his recently published book. However, his recent posts are, as he would say in his restrained professorial way, “concerning.”
Turley has, along with former Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, notable in recent years for his estrangement from the political party almost all of his academic colleagues give their unconditional love. It is clear that Turley has been “red-pilled” by the gradual (and sometimes not so gradual) transformation of the Democratic Party into a “by any means possible” political descendants of the radical Weatherman of the Sixties, embracing violence, socialism, anti-American propaganda, control of the news media, and intolerance of opposing political views. Although he makes a consistent effort to try to criticize both extremes of the political spectrum (In a post condemning a politically motivated Democratic attack on acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanch, he writes, “It is fair to note that the Trump Administration has undermined its own position in denouncing lawfare by pursuing past critics, including dubious prosecutions over seashell threats against James Comey” for example), the drift of his blog to the right has been impossible to miss.
I am certainly sympathetic. It is difficult to find anything close to the anti-democratic statements and acts by members of the Democratic Party, “the resistance” and the unethical mainstream news media on the conservative side; I face this problem every day.
A digression: listen to this clip from retired New York Times columnist Paul Krugman…
He was repeatedly flagged as an Ethics Dunce and worse here at Ethics Alarms, but maintained a prominent platform on the Times op-ed pages all through the first Trump term and most of the Biden years. Has any prominent Republican pundit ever called for the “purging” of progressives? The Democrats keep claiming that President Trump has secret plans to do so, but that is their favored partisan defamation. The Democratic Party in deed and word had embraced totalitarianism as their favored approach to the “greater good.” Turley sees it, as do I. Moreover, Krugman isn’t alone by any means: former Clinton minion James Carville is regularly heard ranting about using extreme measures to ensure permanent domination by his party. MSNow’s hard left propagandists, who, depressingly enough, are favored by the current Democrat mainstream as if they were real journalists, repeat these aspirations hour by hour, day by day.
Back to the topic: Turley now promotes his book, “The Age of Rage” in post after post. He finds ways to link his blog post topics to his baby relentlessly. In today’s post about a bonkers woke church on Nantucket cancelling its traditional Fourth of July celebration to prompt an examination of “whiteness,” he writes, “This type of pandering and posturing has become the norm today. In a time when the American flag is denounced as a divisive and “triggering” symbol, a refusal to celebrate our Independence is yet another way of proving one’s bona fides to the perpetually enraged.” Yesterday, in a post about NYC’s Communist mayor threatening to take property from landlords and transfer them to tenants, he writes, “In my book Rage and the Republic, I discuss this trend in Western countries toward socialist policies. It is what I refer to as the “economic factionalism” that has been used in prior years by figures ranging from Huey Long to Bernie Sanders.”
I am an admirer of Professor Turley’s courage in bucking the cookie-cutter leftist scholarly community, and frequently find his blog posts a source of ethics news. However, he is undermining his credibility by appearing to choose topics that support his new book’s thesis, and tailoring his prose to point to “The Age of Rage.” It is self-defeating. Turley should certainly be able to recognize his own conflict of interest. Unfortunately, bias even makes the wisest and smartest of us stupid.
Ethics Alarms 
I read both of Turley’s recent books, I finished the second one a few weeks before my recent vacation. I will say that how Turley presented the vast historical and current event content in both books makes it easy to relate them to future current events. Let’s face it, it’s extremely easy to relate the nonsense that’s happening in the political left to his books because they keep doing the same things over and over again. The left is playing the long game, death of the United States as we know it, by inflicting thousands of subtle and not so subtle societal changes to steer the population towards their delusional Orwellian styled “utopia”.
Personally, I don’t care that Turley is referencing his books, I expect authors to promote their books. I have to say that I’m routinely referencing things Turley wrote in his books in my mind as I witness the outrageous absurdities coming from the political left in current events.
These types of sales pitches throw me right out of what I’m reading or listening to. They are akin to the soap and toothpaste conversations that would be read by the talent on air during a radio show. Nothing like listening to Gracie Allen’s ditzy self interrupted by Harry von Zell suddenly talking about the merits of Swan Soap.
for months now, terms such as “snake oil salesman,” “shilling,” and “huckster” come to mind when I read Turley’s posts which invariably contain “a plug” for, you guessed it, his book. If I had his attention I’d say, “Professor, it’s demeaning. Knock it off. Let your publicist market the book. Do book shows, appearances, whatever. But stop incessantly “hawking” the book. Are you that desperate for money? Just cool it.”
Off-topic of the cringy plugging for his book, which thanks to Steve’s review I will get both, he does note the following expectation from John Adamas about celebrating the 4th which throws a different light on the UFC spectacle on the White House lawn. Could it be that Adams and Trump share a similar sense of grandiosity?
John Adams, the great norm breaker. He probably envisioned bare knuckle fighting and bear baiting, shooting canons. I particularly like bonfires. Wouldn’t one be great on the mall or even the White House Lawn. Or maybe horse races.
Maybe Trump could have a NASCAR street race around D.C.
“Oh, the Camptown races are the best in the land,
Doodah. Doodah.”
Or, I guess we could ask, “What would Andy Jackson do?”
Nascar probably wouldn’t work. F1 probably not either. But Rally for sure.
Maybe good old midwestern dirt track car and even motorcycle racing on the mall.
C’mon…it starts-n-ends with The OFFYS!
PWS
I was actually thinking the same thing. Do they still run them on short tracks?
“Do they still run them on short tracks?”
Cattywampus sideways? They sure as heck fire do…at Angell Park, Sun Prairie WESconsin!
PWS
He has also frequently criticized Adams for having the most anti-free speech administration up until Joe Biden. That was where the Alien and Sedition Acts originated.
I’ll Devil’s advocate this, with the benefit that I actually believe this:
Turley often opens his posts by linking about a dozen times (only moderate hyperbole, and not always) where he’s written variations on a theme of the current topic. He constantly goes back to the same well of things he cares about and knows well. This is his niche. So it doesn’t surprise me that he can very easily tie current posts to parts of his book, because he’s written about the things that he knows and cares about, which makes the topics in his book and the topics of his postings almost a complete circle of a Venn diagram. I think that anyone who’s truly confused by that either haven’t thought it through, or hasn’t read him much. So the question isn’t “is he cherry picking topics to tie into his book”, because that’s a terminal misreading of his blog, which was already always about the topics that were in his book, and he’s been doing that selection for decades. If there’s a criticism here, it could have been that he’s always discussing a relatively narrow range of topics, but if you were going to make that argument, you could have done it 10 years ago.
The question really is “Is he plugging his book too much?”, and the answer there might be yes. I think he may be doing this because there may not be much of his readership that actually reads all his posts, and this may be a way to catch casual browsers, or maybe he just wants to remind people that the book exists, but it’s obviously gotten to the point where people have noticed and are commenting, and there’s obviously a sweet spot between promotion and ostracizing that’s been crossed here.
I think his appending, as he already does, Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.” is more than sufficient.
As you say, I don’t think this is a matter of his having a hammer and everything looks like a nail.
Perhaps it’s based on the biggest current threats. The left seems way more of a threat to open debate than the right does, at least at the moment. Most people on the right don’t want to censor arguments about universal health care; they just disagree with them. The left actively wants to censor conservatives.
I started reading his latest book on my flight back to the USA. His plug worked as I clicked the link on his website to by the book via Amazon.
I do not see anything unethical or bothersome about plugging your books on his own blog. There is nothing more American than selling stuff. Commerce is what the USA makes the USA, as Coolidge said “the business of the USA is business”.
There’s also: “The American right to gripe,” Cees. (One of my mother’s favorites.)
We are supposed to gripe here at EA, with all those pseudo-conservative curmudgeons, above all The Five.
There is nothing more American than selling stuff. This! From a Dutchman. Holland! The little country that single-handedly created the modern world economy!
By the way, I’ve always thought New York City was unique among American cities. It’s all trading, all the time. I’ve come to believe this traces back to its Dutch founding. New Amsterdam, not New York. It’s Dutch, not English.
By the way, I’ve always thought New York City was unique among American cities.
Willing to give NYC back to the Netherlands?
What are you offering? A container of nutmeg?
I did do a quick read of Jonathan Turley’s post. and was surprised that a decision by one church was worth a post.
A universalist church in Nantucket with 76 members has a tradition to read the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights aloud at the 4th of July, but decides to cancel this because of … reasons.
I do not think that having churches celebrate the 4th of July is standard practice, as this is a form of civil religion. The church that I am a member of only celebrates the days of the Church Calendar related to he main events in salvation history (Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day and Pentecost) and skips national holidays and the Hallmark holidays.
I am not going to comment on woke churches doing woke stuff, the decision of this church to cancel the 4th of July celebration to better understand our whiteness speaks for it self.
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/06/02/nuntucket-church-cancels-traditional-fourth-of-july-celebration-to-better-understand-our-own-whiteness/