Jonathan Turley says the darnedest things. He fully embraced the “hot take” economy, mortgaging his credibility as a law professor to parrot whatever half-baked talking points might earn him a 5-minute hit as a cable news talking head for the night. Election law attorney Marc Elias dubbed Turley “Mike Lindell with tenure,” which is funny, but always seemed a tad unfair. Turley’s takes oscillate between ragebait cynicism and comical dullardry. Even his most conspiratorial takes — like swallowing hook, line, and sinker the wingnut theories about Hunter Biden’s laptop — carried a faux intellectual energy, that separated him from the frothing conspiracy theory vibe that the MyPillow guy brings to everything.
But that tenuous grip on reality seems to be slipping, as the professor delivers his contrarian love letter to the recently deposed Viktor Orban. Sure, Orban had ties to Putin and a reputation for “authoritarianism and corruption,” Turley concedes, but the Hungarian prime minister formed the last firewall against “global governance,” a term Turley invokes with all the tin foil, black helicopter baggage you’d expect from Alex Jones, not a GW Law professor.
Maybe he really is as cooked as Lindell.
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The defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary last weekend was celebrated by many who saw the former president as establishing single-party rule in his central European nation. The irony is that this claimed victory for democracy may fuel the establishment of a global governance system that is neither democratic nor accountable to citizens.
Orban was the prime minister, not the president.
Turley is no stranger to publishing articles with basic factual errors. He once penned a New York Post article accusing Joe Biden of abusing his office as Vice President… in 2018. But kudos to Turley for properly setting the audience’s expectations for the intellectual rigor to follow.
However, the unintended consequence of this election could be the removal of a single autocrat in favor of a global bureaucracy.
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Now by “global,” Turley means the European Union. If you’re a student of the English language, you’ve probably clocked that Europe is not “the globe,” and a regional intergovernmental body regulating member nations in Europe is very specifically not a global bureaucracy.
In “Rage and the Republic,” I discuss the dangers posed to the American republic this century by the rise of global governance systems like the EU. The book explores how globalists planned to gradually get nations to yield their authority to the EU — destroying national identity and sovereignty in favor of an EU bureaucracy in Brussels.
He’s citing his book about America’s founding without a hint of irony. The path the United States took to becoming a world superpower was charted by “destroying state identity and sovereignty in favor of a federal bureaucracy in Washington.” The EU isn’t a globalist government, it’s an attempt to turn the historically fractured continent into a modern economic power by borrowing the same federalist principles that made America successful.
As the EU moves to kill off national sovereignty, EU commissioners are calling for a single European military command, completing a longstanding globalist goal.
Like the Holy Roman Empire, this is neither longstanding, nor globalist, nor a goal. To the extent Europe is flirting with military coordination, it’s a recent development brought on by the Dementia-Patient-in-Chief that Turley has spent the last decade fluffling. That’s the guy who publicly threatens to cut off Europe’s military support, abandon the continent to Russian imperialism, and — and, this is a real sentence one has to type in the year 2026 — invade Greenland. Europe never needed a single military command because NATO worked. Cause, meet effect.
The 250th anniversary of our republic is occurring as we face an unprecedented EU threat. Our revolution was fought against a foreign empire. It now faces an even greater threat from a global government asserting the right to compel American companies to censor Americans and comply with environmental, social and governance or ESG policies.
ESG policies pose “an even greater threat” to America than the British Empire. This is not a serious person.
Newsflash about this terrifying “global” threat: American companies don’t have to do business in Europe! If Meta and X or any of the other persecuted trillion-dollar companies don’t want to comply with European rules while operating inside Europe, they are free to not operate inside Europe. That is how sovereignty — the thing Turley claims he’s worried about — actually works. You can’t simultaneously argue that sovereign nations shouldn’t have to follow EU rules and that sovereign European nations shouldn’t be allowed to make rules for the companies doing business within their borders. Pick a lane, bro.
The EU has worked very hard to dismantle national sovereignty and identity in its member states. Historically, such collapses have been followed by different forms of tyranny.
Well, we’re at 250 years and running.
Turley’s thirsty quest for attention has long centered on the Fox News, NY Post, and The Hill axis of conservative politics, where he postures as a “Democrat” who happens to validate Republican talking points by wholly agreeing with them. It’s a right-wing audience, but not really a QAnon audience. But this “global governance” kick — he uses some version of “global” 10 times in this piece — is chemtrails and one-world government stuff. So the question is: has Turley gone full loon or has the Fox audience become so indistinguishable from Infowars (pre-Onion) that Turley has just accepted that this is now price he has to pay to keep in that spotlight?
Post-Orban, the EU poses an even greater threat to US sovereignty [The Hill]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.