Alan Dershowitz is a leading voice in the anti-anti-Zionist movement. He's also a friend of the ADL and a professor of law at the University of Toronto. But what does that have to do with Elon Musk? And why does he call himself a Jew?
00:01:40.820And that is pretty interesting, although not definitive.
00:01:45.880And then he mentioned that his father sent him to Hebrew school when he was growing up in South Africa.
00:01:52.920So I would ask the question, you know, you don't just casually go to Hebrew school.
00:02:01.640I mean, maybe you might in some circumstance, like I've heard of plenty of people, including Jews, who, you know, they went to a Catholic school for whatever reason.
00:02:12.240And it's better, it's close to their home, the public school sucks, etc.
00:02:16.900So, I mean, there's some plausible deniability about it.
00:02:20.540However, it just seems curious to be going to Hebrew school when you're young.
00:02:26.840He also said that his father took him to Israel when he was 13 and he saw the wall.
00:02:32.360So I presume he's referring to the Wailing Wall, all this kind of stuff.
00:02:37.480Now, again, like maybe his father had great dreams for him.
00:02:43.380He knew that one day he would be a politician who would go and touch the wall with his hand while wearing a yarmulke or something.
00:02:54.460Now, Elon's estranged from his father.
00:02:57.040So I don't quite know what to make of it.
00:03:00.180There are all these curious suggestions about Elon's background, that he's part Asian.
00:03:07.200I mean, to be honest, in terms of his physiognomy and even comparing it to his brothers, if you see some of those early childhood photos, there was a lot of these being passed around after the release of the recent book by Walter Isaacson.
00:03:25.860And if someone said that he is half Asian or a quarter Asian, I would believe them.
00:04:24.120So I don't know, just saying it was rather odd.
00:04:30.180I think it also would throw a lot of cold water on what seemed to be happening about two weeks ago, which was that, you know, there was this notion that Elon is just outright attacking the ADL.
00:04:47.400And, yeah, I think it throws some cold water on that, or it kind of turns a fastball into a curveball, so to speak.
00:04:56.520I think it's worth looking into these things.
00:05:01.760At the very least, just to understand where he's coming from.
00:05:05.160Because Elon says a lot of different things, and they're contradictory.
00:05:10.300There's, you know, I'm a free speech absolutist.
00:05:13.480And then there's also, oh, you have freedom of speech, but not freedom of breach.
00:05:16.940As Alan Dershowitz correctly pointed out, that is already, like, sliding rather fast, quickly into censorship land.
00:05:27.340Just saying that, it rhymes, it sounds better, I guess, but you're already kind of, like, surrendering the past before the battle takes place.
00:05:36.700And I think it's worthwhile just knowing who he is.
00:05:40.300And I'm not sure Walter Isaacson would be the right person to reveal that, to be honest.
00:05:48.820But to go back, I'll just jump around a little bit and throw out some of my ideas.
00:05:54.820You guys can pick up on them, and we can have a conversation.
00:05:58.320Alan Dershowitz, to his credit, did not engage in platitudes.
00:06:04.580He did engage in kind of memorable visual metaphors, but I think those are actually really helpful.
00:06:15.700And he objected to something that I think Elon might have said or someone else on the call when they said, oh, we need to draw a line.
00:06:24.080And he's like, look, we're not drawing lines, because a line, you're on either side of that.
00:06:32.380And instead, you should draw a circle, which is legal speech under the U.S. Constitution.
00:06:38.120And I guess in this case, this is a very American-centric discussion.
00:06:42.140Obviously, different lands have different laws.
00:06:47.100But he said, so there's what is legal, of course, and then there's what's permissible in a U.S. country that should, at the very least, be kind of inspired by the ideals of the U.S. Constitution and should reflect them and certainly be coherently connected to them.
00:07:10.100And so everything is inside, every ism is inside.
00:07:15.560So Zionism is in there, anti-Zionism, presumably white supremacism is in there, Buddhism, Islam, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:25.020It's all in there outside of things that are quite obvious abrogations of law, things that where speech turns into crime, because speech is an absolute, of course.
00:07:40.640And that is, who knows, sex trafficking, explicit death threats, selling illegal items on a platform, et cetera, et cetera.
00:08:48.580And he offered the only thing that was tangible that could lead to some sort of policy.
00:08:58.040And I know a lot of people probably don't take him seriously because Dershowitz is as much a Zionist as Jonathan Greenblatt.
00:09:06.580He's more of a Zionist than most liberals in Congress, et cetera.
00:09:12.380I mean, he has a dog in the fight, but he said this.
00:09:18.200And it's a tangible policy that would seem to work.
00:09:21.280He also noticed that this freedom of speech but not freedom of reach, it is choosing sides.
00:09:27.920And it kind of reminds me of the famous line by Antonin Scalia.
00:09:33.680I think he might have written this about the Westboro Baptist Church or he might have written it.
00:09:38.880I think it might have been St. Paul, that Supreme Court case, which is you can't declare that one side plays boxes according to the Marquis of Queensbury rules and the other side goes freestyle.
00:09:51.380So you can't, and I think if I'm correct, I mean, perhaps Chris can correct me here, but I think I'm right on this.
00:09:59.220You can't like, you know, burning a cross in someone's front lawn.
00:10:04.940You are absolutely harassing them, but you can't create laws that make a differentiation between, say, burning someone's house down and burning a cross in their lawn in the sense that just engaging in arson is obviously criminal, but there's no kind of symbolism to it.
00:10:27.660You can't create a law prohibiting burning of crosses.
00:10:31.780Now, it might very well be illegal, but in the words of Scalia, just because it is illegal does not mean that it is invisible to the Constitution.