RealClear Media Fund presses its mission to celebrate and defend viewpoint diversity.
The popular news and opinion aggregating/curating website, RealClearPolitics, is a media anomaly. At a time when there is pressure and an expectation to take harsh sides—to bow to the question “Are you for us or against us?”—the non-partisan Internet must-visit site, to its own financial detriment, refuses to answer, or genuflect. RealClear, which, quips David DesRosiers, RealClear Media Fund’s president, “is the watering hole where Donkeys and Elephants go to drink and feed their minds without fighting.”
Some people, including those of influence, have a problem with that. Nevertheless, the watering hole is busy: Every month, millions of RCP readers have made a habit of visiting and clicking the site’s abundant, constantly updated links, many for the purpose of learning how the other political half thinks. That makes RCP an exemplar of free speech—a thing very much under assault today. The relentless elite pressure—often directed at media sites—to dictate side-taking and cancellation has prompted RCP to demonstrably expand its original aggregator-journalism mission by spotlighting courageous public figures who can be found atop the First Amendment barricades.
Founded in 2000, RCP’s simple, transparent, and winning model is Viewpoint Diversity. Fundamentally indifferent to ideological monolithism, unchallenged narratives, and media monologues, RCP instead veers Socratic: The site is a plethora of countervailing articles, disparate perspectives, and dialogues, and its leadership finds that consumers of RCP fare are thoughtful and discerning readers.
What’s not to like about that? Per RCP’s painful business experience, plenty: Access to “both sides” is frequently hampered by a de facto “Censorship Industrial Complex” which seeks to stamp out heterodox voices—the kind that run afoul of mainstream orthodoxies and elite sensibilities. The kind that won’t take ideological or partisan sides.
In March of 2025, RealClear Investigations contributor Benjamin Weingarten testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding myriad attacks on free speech in America, and in particular aggressive efforts to censor RCP. Weingarten told the panel “Overwhelming evidence indicates the feds have deputized academic institutions, think-tanks, NGOs, ‘fact-checkers,’ risk-raters, and for-profits as plainclothes speech police.”
In 2023, one NGO, the Global Disinformation Index, categorized RealClear as a “high-risk” site for mis- and dis-information, and placed RCP on an advertising blacklist.
While this deliberate effort to shadowban RealClear did impact the site’s advertising revenue, the anticipated business-model cowing and forgiveness-begging by RCP’s leadership never materialized. Indeed, RealClear became even more steadfast in its resolve to defend and protect the First Amendment, and has launched an impressive, public effort to spotlight profiles in free speech courage.
That effort is manifested in the prestigious Samizdat Prize.
Named for “the underground literary network in the Soviet Union that distributed Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago,” the Samizdat Prize is presented at an annual gala organized by the RealClear Media Fund. The nonprofit’s third such gala will happen in Florida this February.
The “Prize” is really prizes. At the ceremony, RealClear spotlights three exemplars of free speech courage who, despite powerful illiberal forces in academia, the government, and other institutions, have stood true to their principles, even when it was inconvenient to do so.
Being honored this February 11th at the third annual Samizdat Prize Gala—which takes place at The Breakers in Palm Beach—are Graham Linehan, the Irish comedy writer who was very publicly and infamously arrested for transgender “wrongthink” joke-telling; Alan Dershowitz, the famous Harvard Law School professor and prominent civil libertarian; and the late Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA who gave his life for the cause of free speech.
Past Samizdat awardees include author Abigail Shrier, New York Post writer Miranda Devine; “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi, Covid-policy critic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, former CEO of X Linda Yaccarino, and law professor and columnist Jonathan Turley.
Considered America’s premier go-to site for polling information, RCP understands that—in the face of troubling data—demonstrable praise for free-speech heroes is imperative, as younger Americans are increasingly hostile to this bedrock liberty. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2022 found that “a majority of teens ages 13 to 17 say a welcoming, safe online environment is more important than people being able to speak their minds freely online.”
DesRosiers contends that this increasing Gen-Z “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.”
RealClear Media Fund is engaged in no passive undertaking—it is determined to expand its active, very public effort to promote courageous free speech. Principled allies—people who believe an American Republic will fail to exist without free speech and viewpoint diversity—are encouraged to attend the gala, and can find complete information about the Samizdat Prize here.
