Alan Dershowitz is one of the most famous legal minds of the last half-century. After graduating first in class from Yale Law School in 1962, Alan went on to become the youngest person at the time to ever become a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. He s also known for his defense of President Donald Trump during his impeachment trial in 2017, and for his book, Guilty by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocent in the Age of Me Too, as well as whether or not OJ did it. In this Sunday special, Alan and I discuss his rules on deciding which clients to represent, how the media deeply misrepresented his case against impeachment, his new book, Guilt by Accuseation, and why he believes everyone has a right to defend in a court of law, even Donald Trump. He also discusses why he s become a hero of the right and a villain of the left, and what it means to him that he s considered a hero by both sides of the political aisle. This is a Sunday special hosted by Ben Shapiro, who is a frequent guest on the Ben Shapiro Show on conservative radio and host of his own show, The Ben Shapiro Report on ABC Radio's "The View From The Hill." Ben Shapiro's Sunday Special with Ben Shapiro is a must-listen for all things conservative and liberal. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Ben Shapiro on The View from Ben Shapiro: The View From A Seat Subscribe on Podchaser and Subscribe on PODCAST Connect with him on Social Media: Learn More about him on PSA and PSA Connect with Him on His Podcasts on The Hill? PSA Transcripts on This Is Not Your Final Epilog on and His Story on This is Not Your Day on Outtro Music on His Story On This Is My Story On The Podcasts On The Other Side And His Video on This Is It On The Outtro Song on My Podcasts And Other Podcasts On His Outtro Video on His Insta Story On & His Story And More! Thank You For This And This Is That And This And His Reaction To This Is More? On This And That And His Outline On This & This And More Also His Outro on This And My Reaction To That And More On That And That On His Story On My Story And This
00:00:00.000The left knows the truth, with a capital T. The truth is if you're a white male, you're guilty.
00:00:06.000If you're a woman of color, you're a victim.
00:00:10.000Alan Dershowitz is one of the most famous legal minds of the last half century.
00:00:14.000After graduating first in class from Yale Law School in 1962, Dershowitz clerked for Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg.
00:00:20.000Just a few years later, at 28, he became the youngest person at the time to ever become a tenured professor at Harvard.
00:00:26.000He then went on to defend some of the most high-profile defendants in the history of the country.
00:00:30.000Simpson and Jeffrey Epstein to Harvey Weinstein and Mike Tyson, Alan Dershowitz has played a significant role in crafting the defenses of major figures accused of a litany of heinous crimes.
00:00:39.000But the one that has arguably drawn the most controversy is one in which his defendant was not accused of any actual crime.
00:00:46.000In January 2020, during the impeachment trial of President Trump, Alan took the stage to present the case against impeachment.
00:00:52.000Alan, being a lifelong liberal Democrat and a 2016 Hillary Clinton supporter, believes everyone has a right to defense in a court of law, even Donald Trump.
00:01:00.000Alan and I will discuss his rules on deciding which clients to represent, how the media deeply misrepresented his case against impeachment, his new book, Guilt by Accusation, The Challenge of Proving Innocent in the Age of Me Too, as well as whether or not OJ did it.
00:01:40.000Well, we start with the obvious question.
00:01:41.000How did you, a defense attorney best known for being a lifelong Democrat and defending who a lot of people would consider on the Republican side to be criminals, how do you end up a hero of the right?
00:01:52.000I shouldn't be a hero of the right any more than I should have been a hero of the left when I defended many people who were left-wingers.
00:01:58.000I've always been a neutral civil libertarian.
00:02:01.000Sometimes my civil liberties lands on the side of the left, and then they love me.
00:02:06.000And then sometimes my civil liberties lands on the side of the right, and they love me, and the other side hates me.
00:02:11.000For example, I started writing my book about impeachment when Hillary Clinton looked like she was going to be elected.
00:02:17.000And the name of the book was called, The Case Against Impeaching Hillary Clinton.
00:02:21.000I would have written the same book had she been elected except they would have built a statue to me on Martha's Vineyard and I'd be the hero of the left today.
00:02:39.000A civil libertarian shouldn't be loved or hated by anybody but people who deeply believe in civil liberties, due process, shoe on the other foot test, neutral principles.
00:02:48.000So, do you think that something has happened within the Democratic Party that has changed?
00:02:52.000Because, again, it wasn't just that you were a Democrat for most of your career.
00:03:46.000Bob Strum yesterday said it was disgraceful.
00:03:49.000That I would defend the worst president in the history of the country, as if that fact, even if I believed it to be so, would influence my decision.
00:03:58.000I defended the worst criminals, the worst people.
00:04:01.000I defended the right of Nazis to march through Skokie.
00:04:13.000But in any case, I want to ask you in one second about the about sort of the future of the Democratic Party, considering that they're casting out people like you.
00:04:20.000But first, even though we're talking with Alan Dershowitz, let me be real about this.
00:04:24.000There's lots of crime, lots of crime everywhere.
00:04:26.000And this is particularly true in Los Angeles, where governance is terrible.
00:04:30.000I know in my neighborhood, we've had a series of breaking, entering crimes.
00:05:22.000So, let's talk about the fact that, since you're now an outcast, you've said before that you have a house in Martha's Vineyard, but no one will talk to you over at Martha's Vineyard.
00:05:29.000Do you think that the Democratic Party has a future if they keep throwing out people who are middle-left or center?
00:05:37.000Or is it possible that their theory, which seems to be a burgeoning demographic majority based on various victim groups that they can sort of agglomerate together, that that is actually a strategy for electoral success?
00:05:48.000The worst thing would be for the Democratic Party to succeed As a hard left identity politics, intersectionality, party, a combination of people with grievances, that would be the worst thing.
00:06:01.000I would hope that the Democrats would recognize that the fate and the future of America lies with the center.
00:06:07.000I'm writing a new book now called Why I Left the Left but Couldn't Join the Right, The Case for a Vibrant Center.
00:06:14.000You know, in the old day, I would have conversations like I'm having with you with Bill Buckley.
00:06:18.000And he called me his favorite liberal.
00:06:45.000I wasn't a scholar in constitutional law, even though I taught constitutional criminal procedure for 50 years in constitutional litigation and wrote books on the subject.
00:06:54.000If I had been on Hillary Clinton's side, if she had been impeached, I'd be the greatest scholar in the history of constitutional law, according to the left.
00:07:00.000But they don't like where I came down in this case, so they attacked me personally.
00:07:06.000So let's talk about the case that you made in front of the Senate, which of course brought the full weight of the Democrats in the press, but I repeat myself, to bear on you.
00:07:15.000The case that you made in front of the Senate is not the case that CNN said you made in front of the Senate.
00:07:20.000The case that CNN said that you made in front of the Senate was effectively that if a politician of any sort does something in pursuit of their own re-election, then this is not impeachable activity.
00:07:28.000Now, I saw that clip of you, and I immediately knew it had been taken out of context, because first of all, it's an idiotic argument, and you're not an idiot.
00:07:34.000And second of all, because CNN was saying it, and CNN has some problems with taking people out of context, what is the argument that you were actually making, and how did they twist that argument?
00:07:41.000First of all, it wasn't taken out of context.
00:07:48.000It was as if I said the following, let me tell you now what I don't believe.
00:07:52.000I don't believe a president seeking re-election can do anything.
00:07:56.000And CNN ran, a president seeking re-election can do anything, excluding the fact that I said this is what I don't believe.
00:08:04.000In the paragraph before, the quote that they used, I said, if a president engages in anything illegal, if the quid pro quo is illegal, that is impeachable.
00:08:17.000I said in my whole hour and ten minute speech to the Senate, if the president commits anything which is criminal-like, akin to treason or bribery, he can be impeached.
00:08:27.000And so what CNN did is they took all of that out And they made it sound like I was saying, and then you had these idiots on CNN, people like Paul Begalia, who said, basically, what I said is a president can do anything illegal.
00:08:42.000Some said, I said a president could shoot his opponent.
00:08:45.000A president could lock up all the Democrats.
00:08:48.000A president could tamper with voting machines.
00:08:52.000And then, Joe Lockhart, again, another A liar said what I said is like what Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin would say, and I supported genocide.
00:09:05.000Look, either they didn't know what I said, I don't think that's the case.
00:09:09.000I suspect that what happened is, and it's more than a suspicion, it's based on information that I have, Is that Zucker, the head of CNN, made a willful, deliberate decision to have me say something that sounded idiotic in order to hurt my credibility on the an hour and ten speech that I made in front of the Senate.
00:09:26.000And they deliberately omitted what I had said about criminal conduct to make it sound like I was saying a president can do anything.
00:09:40.000I mean, the point that I immediately knew that you were making, because it's a point that I've made myself, and it is an obvious point, because the counterpoint is completely idiotic, which is that if a president does a thing that is within his legal power to do, and that is tainted by his own self-interest, but it is in his legal power to do this thing, but he also has a self-interest as either a combined motive or a secondary motive, that's not impeachable, because that's just called politics, and every politician does that.
00:10:04.000Every time Barack Obama did anything that was within his power to do, with an eye toward re-election, that was called his first term.
00:10:10.000And to pretend that that's impeachable activity, which is what the Democrats effectively were doing, is not impeachable.
00:10:40.000I said any elected official always has mixed motives.
00:10:43.000They care about the national interest, but they always have an eye on their political future.
00:10:47.000And all I said was, if a president has one eye on his re-electability, because he thinks his electability is in the national interest, that can turn innocent conduct within his power into an impeachable offense.
00:11:01.000There is nobody who would disagree with that.
00:11:03.000Yet Adam Schiff pretended to disagree with it.
00:11:20.000And as soon as this thing broke, the first reaction that I had was that the question in the end was going to be about President Trump's motives.
00:11:28.000If it came out that he had said to John Bolton, for example, that Bolton testified and then he had said openly, the reason that I did this specifically is because I want to knock Joe Biden out for purposes of the 2020 election, then that would have been impeachable conduct.
00:11:40.000But if he had an eye back toward 2016 and he was saying, I want everything in 2016 looked at because it bothers me and annoys me and I think it's in the national interest.
00:11:47.000And even if that was badly informed, as some of that stuff was, the crowd strike stuff and all the rest of it, then that is not impeachable.
00:11:53.000That's just what we call bad judgment.
00:12:32.000They looked me in the eye, they knew what I said, and then they deliberately lied about what I said.
00:12:36.000So, moving forward, when it comes to impeachment, given the fact that the Democrats didn't receive a single Republican vote on impeachment, well, they got Mitt Romney on one charge, but they didn't receive any other votes on impeachment, do you think that impeachment is still a viable power under the Constitution?
00:12:50.000What would a president really have to do and be caught doing in order to be impeached?
00:13:00.000Even when he was being impeached, and I favored his impeachment, I was on the National Board of the ACLU, and I asked the ACLU to oppose the way he was being treated.
00:13:08.000They named him as an unindicted co-conspirator.
00:13:21.000You can argue about anything about me, but one thing you can't argue about is my consistency.
00:13:26.000I've been absolutely consistent since the day I started To be an adult, when I fought against censorship of communism at Brooklyn College, and I fought against censorship during the Vietnam War.
00:13:38.000I never care which side it comes down on.
00:13:40.000Right, left, center, Republican, Democrat.
00:14:02.000And people don't tend to use that phrase too much anymore.
00:14:04.000There's a lot of talk about things that you shouldn't say.
00:14:07.000Maybe you should be pushed into saying them or things that you or the other factors that are supposed to attend to justice beyond your own individual case.
00:14:14.000You talk about a lot of this in guilt by accusation, but this came out most famously during the Kavanaugh hearings when it seemed as though the evidentiary necessity to prove a case against Justice Kavanaugh was completely thrown by the wayside by the media.
00:14:26.000The mere accusation was enough to slime him because obviously he was a white man in a position of privilege and power as opposed to a woman who apparently he who alleged that he had abused her without not only no evidence, But every single piece of evidence that she tried to stack up immediately fell apart, including people she said were at the party in which he somehow wronged her, saying that they weren't at that party and the party never took place.
00:14:48.000And still we're told that Kavanaugh is some sort of racist.
00:14:51.000Well, you know, when the Columbia School of Journalism had me interviewed for the Journal of Columbia Journalism, supposed to be the, you know, the paradigm, the interviewer said, well, you can't be a victim of a false accusation.
00:15:14.000It doesn't matter what the evidence is.
00:15:16.000It matters who you are, not who you are, what you are, what your identity is.
00:15:21.000That determines whether you get free speech.
00:15:23.000Whether you have trigger warnings, whether you are silenced, whether you're allowed to speak on campus, like the two of us have all kinds of difficulties speaking on campus.
00:15:39.000How dare you exercise your white privilege by coming on campus and telling us what you think.
00:15:45.000So, what do you think the future is for, for due process?
00:15:48.000I mean, that's the most basic right that we have, is this right to due process, the right to be treated according to the circumstance of our case, and be judged on the merits of the case, as opposed to what you think of me as a human being, or more importantly, what you think of my group identity as a human being.
00:16:00.000That seems like it's going completely by the wayside.
00:16:03.000As I say about Kavanaugh, there were full articles written about how because he was a powerful white male, he should not be given due process.
00:16:09.000And you've seen the definition of racism itself morph and change formally.
00:16:13.000People who used to say racism was discrimination on the basis of race will now say that it's discriminatory intent on the basis of race combined with power, which, of course, immediately suggests that if you're a member of a victimized group, you can't be a racist.
00:16:34.000Look, deep down, not very many people care about due process.
00:16:38.000People use due process and free speech for me, but not for thee.
00:16:42.000They generally tend to support it when it helps their side.
00:16:45.000When I was growing up, it was the liberals who wanted free speech because the conservatives, the right-wingers, were suppressing free speech on campus, particularly among communists.
00:16:54.000Today, it's the conservatives who want free speech because their rights are being violated.
00:16:58.000What we need are a core of people who support due process and free speech regardless of who benefits and who loses.
00:17:06.000The number of those people are very small.
00:17:09.000Now, I have to tell you, thank God for conservatives, because I think conservatives now have come to appreciate, more than in the past, the virtues of due process, fairness, free speech, dialogue, and all the rest of the catalog of liberties and civil liberties that I grew up taking for granted.
00:17:27.000So in a second, I want to ask you about guilt by accusation and the extent of the pushing aside of due process, particularly in the Me Too movement.
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00:19:08.000You know, we didn't have learner's permits for marriage license.
00:19:11.000You had to learn the night you were married.
00:19:15.000So, with that said, you know, the kind of general take of the MeToo movement, which is that women ought to be treated like human beings and not pieces of meat, is something for which I was, of course, very sympathetic.
00:19:24.000But then, as I watched the standards of what MeToo constituted move radically, and the lines move radically, and the attempt to remove all gradations of misconduct.
00:19:32.000So, making a sexist remark in the office was now considered akin to rape, or an accusation was considered pure evidence that this thing happened because, of course, women don't lie.
00:19:42.000There's a genetic rule that women are born with a predisposition genetically always to tell the truth, and men, particularly white men, are born with a genetic predisposition to lie.
00:19:55.000Yeah, I mean, the Believe All Women movement, it's like this is not just first-year criminal law, that Believe All Anybody is the stupidest thing in the world, but it's basic logic.
00:20:05.000Of course you would never believe all anybody based on their group identity.
00:20:07.000You wouldn't even believe all rabbis or believe all priests.
00:20:10.000Why in the world would you believe all anybody?
00:20:11.000But that has become the basis of the Me Too movement, and it's led to this idea, again, That based on your victim group status, in this case, the victims being women particularly, that you ought to be believed on the basis of an accusation alone.
00:20:23.000And obviously, since you are the expert in criminal law, this is incredibly dangerous.
00:20:27.000And when people suggest that there are no bad accusations of rape or evidence-free accusations of rape or sexual assault or sexual misconduct, that obviously is not true.
00:20:36.000I never met the woman, ever, under any circumstances, who accused me.
00:20:40.000We discovered hidden emails that she tried to hide with her lawyers, in which she admits she never met me.
00:20:47.000A hidden manuscript, which was sealed, in which she said she saw me once, speaking to Jeffrey Epstein about business, but never met me.
00:20:55.000Told the FBI she never had sex with me.
00:20:59.000Told her best friends she never met me or knew me.
00:21:03.000Her lawyer, on tape, Recorded, says, she's wrong, simply wrong.
00:21:08.000She couldn't possibly have met you in the places she said she met you.
00:21:12.000An FBI report concluded by the former director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, that the whole story was made up, and it all went away.
00:21:19.000The judge struck it, the lawyers withdrew it, admitted they were wrong in filing it, and then along came the Me Too movement.
00:21:26.000And suddenly, the false accusation, known to be false, is enough to get me cancelled speaking at the 92nd Street Y. The 92nd Street Y, where I've spoken at more than anybody but Elie Wiesel, suddenly said I can't speak about my book, Defending Israel, at the 92nd Street Y, because although they know I didn't do anything wrong, there's an accusation.
00:23:23.000- Right, that attitude, it doesn't have First Amendment consequences in the sense it's not a legal thing, but it obviously has widespread societal consequences.
00:23:32.000The left wishes to ignore those because it of course likes cancel culture 'cause it can be applied to people it disagrees with, but what do we have to do about that as a society? - Well, first we have to stand up and fight.
00:23:41.000Most people can't fight back 'cause most people have something to hide.
00:23:44.000Even if you're falsely accused of this, if you have something that you are ashamed of, it will come out at a trial.
00:23:50.000So the vast majority of people who are falsely accused can't fight back.
00:25:43.000But she's victimized me, and I'm going to fight back.
00:25:45.000So, I've asked already, sort of, what do we do about this?
00:25:48.000But one of the things that seems so threatening is that, as I say, a lot of this is social sphere oriented.
00:25:53.000It's pressure that de Tocqueville talked about back in Democracy in America, specifically talking about the idea that social pressure could be brought to bear to basically make a human being into a dead man walking, forbidden from all public company and all of this, going back to the 1830s.
00:26:07.000What is new is that there seems to be a push, and it's already happened in places like Britain and Canada, to actually change the laws to reflect this sort of societal attitude.
00:26:45.000That's not protected by the First Amendment and it shouldn't be protected.
00:26:49.000If Zucker, the head of CNN, sat down with his people and said, let's now try to destroy Dershowitz's credibility because he made a good speech in front of the Senate.
00:26:59.000Let's take out what he said about criminal conduct.
00:27:01.000Let's make him say something he didn't say deliberately and willfully.
00:27:06.000I don't think that's protected by the First Amendment.
00:27:08.000And for that reason, as a First Amendment person who cares deeply about the First Amendment, I am seriously considering the possibility of taking legal action against CNN in order to try to level the playing field so that the media can't turn truth-tellers into liars in a willful and deliberate way.
00:27:28.000So what exactly would the First Amendment standard then look like?
00:27:30.000So under current law, obviously, the First Amendment standard, particularly public figures, is extraordinarily burdensome.
00:27:35.000You have to prove willful and malicious.
00:27:37.000You have to demonstrate that the person knew that they were saying something that was fully untrue.
00:27:50.000What they did is they showed me saying certain things, and I did say those things.
00:27:55.000It's like I said, here's what I don't believe, and then they said what I said.
00:28:00.000The leading case in the Supreme Court involves the New Yorker magazine, where somebody was accused of taking words out of a quote, and the Supreme Court said that isn't covered by the First Amendment, but we'd have to make new law By saying that, basically, if you use the words that were actually spoken, but you purposely, willfully, and with malice, leave out words just before and just after, that totally and completely changed the meaning, that's not protected by the First Amendment.
00:28:30.000Okay, so that seems like a fairly minor change that has already basically been pre-approved by the Supreme Court.
00:28:36.000You're not talking about widespread changes of the kind that President Trump has referred to on Twitter when he's talking about changing the full-on standards of defamation?
00:28:42.000I think we start small by looking at people who willfully and deliberately abuse the First Amendment for partisan or personal or financial benefit.
00:28:54.000Okay, so the other changes that I was talking about when it comes to sort of the pushing of social sanction into the matters of law are these moves that have been made in places like Canada and United Kingdom with regard to things like hate speech.
00:29:09.000They're trying to actually criminalize forms of speech that supposedly victimize a protected class.
00:29:14.000And that I'm deeply worried about happening in the United States.
00:29:16.000It seems like a lot of the Democratic Party would do that.
00:29:20.000Don't know how many justices on the Supreme Court would stand against that in its current iteration.
00:29:25.000Obviously, I think that the ones who were appointed by Bush and Trump likely would stand against that.
00:29:34.000I have a fairly decent idea about Justice Ginsburg, and I think it may go the wrong way there, but I don't know where that stands.
00:29:39.000Do you think that the Supreme Court would actually allow, without a constitutional amendment, hate speech regulations to be promulgated in the United States?
00:29:45.000Depends on the regulation, but I think an outright banning of something called hate speech would not survive Supreme Court review.
00:30:22.000Defending the rights of, well the ACLU, forget about the ACLU on free speech.
00:30:27.000The ACLU is free speech for the left but not for the right except once every ten years we'll defend the Nazi because that's easy and that gives us a little bit of credibility but due process on campus?
00:30:38.000The ACLU is now the problem, not the solution, to due process and free speech.
00:30:44.000So I sort of want to shift topics here, and I want to ask you about your career before everything Trump-related and modern politics-related.
00:30:51.000And I want to ask you about your criminal law career, because obviously before any of this happened, that's what you were famous for.
00:30:55.000I mean, that was the thing that made you a household name, was the Von Buelow case, or the O.J.
00:31:03.000I've always wanted to ask you about sort of the criminal justice system, the adversarial nature of the criminal justice system.
00:31:08.000So from the outside, to somebody like me, I look at it and it seems like, you know, the accusation was constantly made, whoever can find the best lawyers wins.
00:31:16.000That if you're an impoverished defendant and you can't find a great lawyer, you're basically screwed.
00:31:21.000But if you're a very wealthy defendant and you've committed egregious crimes and you can find a good lawyer, that person can squirrel you out of the charges.
00:31:29.000And does that make the case for a sort of European inquisitorial system as opposed to the U.S.
00:31:33.000justice system which is adversarial in nature?
00:31:35.000The United States system is not adversarial at all.
00:31:37.000Ninety-seven percent of cases in the federal courts end in guilty pleas because of what's called the trial penalty.
00:31:46.000And the job of the criminal lawyer today is to explain the gun that's being held to the head of the defendant, saying if you don't plead guilty, you're going to get ten times the amount of jail time that you would have gotten if you plead guilty.
00:31:59.000So what I have to do is now recommend to clients all the time, look, If you go to trial, you'll get 10 years if you lose.
00:32:06.000If you plead guilty, I think I can get you a year.
00:32:10.000Now, what's the chances of me winning?
00:32:43.000And those cases I've had actually more success, because you can have more success sometimes with low visibility cases, than with famous cases.
00:32:52.000Famous cases, you have to win in court.
00:32:54.000Now we did win Von Bulow, we did win O.J.
00:32:56.000Simpson, we did win... I didn't win Michael Milken, who just got a pardon.
00:33:01.000So, maybe we did win, ultimately, in the end.
00:33:04.000But, you know, I've lost cases with rich people and I've won cases for poor people, but Having money is a knife that cuts both ways.
00:33:12.000It makes it more likely that you'll be prosecuted if you're very rich and if you're a big prize, but it also makes it more likely you'll have a chance to win the case.
00:33:21.000So, in one second I want to ask you, as a criminal defense attorney acting in that capacity, How do you sort of square that with your perspective on morality?
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00:34:56.000So yeah, I'm not going to ask you whether O.J.
00:34:58.000Simpson was guilty because attorney-client privilege, but with that said, Yeah, you defend clients and criminal defense attorneys have defended clients knowing, presumably, or at least thinking that they're guilty.
00:35:08.000How do you swear that, believing that your own client has done something deeply evil or immoral, and then going into defending them on it?
00:35:16.000I think much the same way a Catholic priest defends not turning in A penitent who is admitted committing a terrible crime.
00:35:24.000The big difference between a Catholic priest and a lawyer is if a lawyer, if a client tells me I've killed somebody and I'm going to go do it again or I've beaten my wife and I'm going to go back and beat her, I'm obligated to turn him in because it's a future crime.
00:36:46.000So yeah, you did grow up in a Jewish school.
00:36:47.000So with regard to that sort of stuff, this is the reason I ask whether an inquisitorial system would be better, one where it doesn't seem to pit one person whose now job it is to defend the criminal conduct of somebody who they believe committed a criminal act.
00:37:01.000Inquisitorial system, do you think that the U.S. is the best system or do you think that a different system would be better?
00:37:05.000I think it's the best system for the United States.
00:37:07.000I wouldn't ever try to impose our system on foreign countries.
00:37:11.000By the way, many of the countries that have become free after the breakdown of the Soviet Union have had an option of going with the American system, with the European system, and many have gone with the American system.
00:37:23.000You know, as Churchill said about democracy, I could say about the adversary system, the worst ever invented except for all the others that have been tried over time.
00:37:31.000I think There is an adversarial relationship between a person accused of crime and the state.
00:37:37.000And you can't bury that adversarial relationship in paternalism or any other kind of euphemism.
00:37:53.000If I had done anything less than get him the best deal I possibly could, I would have been doing something in violation of my oath of office.
00:38:31.000I don't represent professional terrorists or people like that.
00:38:34.000But I will represent Anybody wants, regardless of how serious the crime is, now obviously, would I represent a Nazi who killed members of my family?
00:38:42.000There'd be a conflict of interest there.
00:38:45.000You know, I'd want so much to see him convicted, but if I have no personal emotional conflict of interest, I don't let the seriousness of the crime influence my decision whether to take it.
00:38:54.000So another area where you've obviously become very well known, I mean there are a bunch of different areas because you're sort of a master of several different trades, is in the pro-Israel space.
00:39:11.000People don't know about that because people who don't follow the pro-Israel space don't actually follow the pro-Israel space.
00:39:15.000But as soon as you wrote the case for Israel, it seemed like the left turned on you, or at least a segment of the left turned on you in fairly vicious fashion.
00:39:25.000Noam Chomsky commissioned Norman Finkelstein to try to find problems in the book, and he found a quote from Mark Twain, which I quoted and attributed to Mark Twain.
00:39:36.000And he said, I didn't find it in Mark Twain, I found it in a book by a woman named... Joan Peters.
00:39:41.000Joan Peters, whose book had been criticized.
00:39:46.000I mean, first of all, we both found it in the same place.
00:39:48.000We found it in a little pamphlet called Facts and Something or Other, which was put out by some pro-Israel organization, which you couldn't cite, obviously, because it's not in libraries.
00:39:58.000But we both found it in the same place.
00:40:00.000But, you know, he accused me of plagiarism.
00:40:02.000I immediately went to Harvard University, the president, and said, So, why do you think it is that the hard left has turned so far against Israel?
00:40:09.000Why do you think that's being mainstreamed into the Democratic Party?
00:40:49.000I write about this in my book called Defending Israel.
00:40:52.000Berrigan, who is a Paragon of the left during the Vietnam War calls Israel a criminal community, a Jewish criminal community.
00:41:00.000So you get Berrigan, Chomsky, Finkelstein, Gilad Atzmone, the hard, hard left turn against Israel, and then it creeps into the center left.
00:41:08.000And you get people like Peter Beinhart who become enemies of Israel, though they proclaim that they're really Zionists.
00:41:17.000J Street, which has never said anything positive about Israel in any of its press releases and and supported the Goldstone report.
00:41:25.000And they've now made it possible for Democrats to say, we're not going to go to AIPAC.
00:41:31.000Liz Warren says, I'm not going to AIPAC.
00:41:34.000So I think the Democratic Party, we're in danger of seeing the bipartisan support for Israel weakened as the result of the left of the Democratic Party.
00:41:42.000I think this is one of the things people are missing.
00:41:44.000So I hear this a lot from Democrats who are Jews, which is the vast majority of Jews are Democrats, is that the reason that the Democrats are turning against Israel is because of Trump.
00:41:52.000And that's completely neglecting the history of the Democratic Party, which was wildly pro-Israel throughout at least the early 1990s.
00:42:00.000You can see this in the opinion polls.
00:42:02.000And by the time Barack Obama was president, it had moved fairly Fairly solidly into the Palestinian camp, at least in terms of being on parity with Israel in terms of popularity inside the Democratic Party.
00:42:13.000This is particularly true among young Democrats, and Obama obviously facilitated that.
00:42:17.000I mean, President Obama was not a fan of the state of Israel.
00:42:20.000He hated Prime Minister Netanyahu, obviously.
00:42:23.000The attempt to pin that on President Trump is pretty astonishing, again, considering that the mainstream Democratic Party had been moving in this direction for quite a while, labeling Israel an apartheid state.
00:42:43.000He called me into the Oval Office and he said, I have Israel's back.
00:42:47.000And I didn't realize what he meant is to put a target on it and stab them.
00:42:50.000As he was leaving office, he ordered his Representative to the UN to not veto a resolution which declared the Kotel, the Western Wall, the holiest place of Judaism, to be occupied territory along with the access roads to Hebrew University and the Hadassah Hospital and the Jewish Quarter.
00:43:11.000And it just legitimated more and more people in the Democratic Party saying, well, we should have a balance of Palestinians who have turned down statehood since 38, 48, 67, 90, 2000, 2001, 2007, 2008.
00:43:25.000So I think the Democratic Party now, there's a real danger of losing the bipartisan support.
00:43:32.000I think there are some many centrist Democrats who still support Israel, but people on the left and younger people to a far, far lesser extent.
00:43:41.000This is why it's driving me up a wall to watch Bernie Sanders try and play on the fact that he's ethnically Jewish, as though he's some sort of patriot on behalf of either Israel or Jews.
00:43:49.000I mean, it's just, it's maddening to watch, considering, again, that the man campaigns openly with open anti-Semitic Linda Sarsour and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
00:43:58.000He went to England and campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn, who facilitated, turned the Labour Party into a party that welcomed anti-Semites, and Bernie Sanders went there and campaigned for him.
00:44:11.000Let me take one oath here as a Democrat.
00:44:13.000Under no circumstances will I ever vote for Bernie Sanders.
00:44:18.000I will never vote for Bernie Sanders and I would hope that other Democrats would join me in that pledge because he would hurt America terribly and I think in the end he would foment some anti-semitism because he would hurt America so badly and for the first Jewish president to hurt our economy and hurt our standing in the world I think would be just a terrible terrible thing.
00:44:43.000I'm not gonna vote against him because he's Jewish Obviously.
00:44:46.000I am going to vote against him because his policies are so deleterious to what has made America great.
00:45:05.000Roosevelt in the 30s created a kind of social capitalism which allowed for us to preserve centrist democracy, centrist democratic party, and I think we're seeing that hurt.
00:45:19.000My new book that I'm working on, Why I Left the Left but Couldn't Join the Right, The Case for the Vibrant Center, I try to bring us back To centerist politics, centerist conservative, centerist liberal, and avoid, marginalize the extremes on both sides.
00:45:34.000But Sanders is the extreme on the left side.
00:45:37.000So because of my own personal politics, we spend a lot of time here sort of bashing the Democratic Party and the left.
00:45:41.000But what do you think the right gets wrong?
00:45:42.000Because obviously the title of the new book is that you're not joining the right.
00:45:44.000So what do you think the right gets wrong?
00:45:52.000I support gay marriage and gay rights.
00:45:55.000I'm a strong supporter of following the science on the environment, of reasonable gun control, of health care, as broad as possible, consistent with our economic welfare.
00:46:08.000So I pretty much go down the liberal agenda when it comes to social issues.
00:46:14.000On the other hand, when it comes to foreign policy, if I were in Britain, I'd be a conservative.
00:46:19.000It'd be easy for me, because the Conservative Party in Britain follows many of the social policies that we talked about.
00:46:52.000I don't feel, I feel welcome in the conservative Republican Party, but I don't feel comfortable with the social conservatism of so many Republicans.
00:47:02.000I'd love to see a return to kind of Eisenhower Republicanism, Rockefeller Republicanism, but we're not seeing it.
00:47:08.000So I want to ask you about sort of your system of values.
00:47:11.000So you grew up Orthodox, but obviously you're not Orthodox now.
00:47:13.000So what is your sort of religious belief system?
00:47:15.000Because obviously you're very, not only identifiably Jewish, but obviously you speak in terms of Judaism a lot.
00:47:52.000I'm going to die not knowing the answers to all these questions, but I hope I'm still healthy enough and wise enough to keep asking the questions.
00:48:48.000And so I think my theory of rights grows out of my understanding of how to avoid wrongs in the world.
00:48:55.000But I'm not an absolutist, so I got into a lot of trouble when I suggested That under certain circumstances, a torture warrant might be permissible if, for example, we had a terrorist who had planted a nuclear bomb in New York or Los Angeles that could kill 10 million people, and we had the terrorist, and we could, by use of extreme measures, prevent that from happening.
00:49:20.000I suggested the possibility of a torture warrant, which got me into a lot of trouble with all my liberal friends.
00:49:25.000Many of them said, we agree with you privately, but don't ever say that.
00:49:29.000So I'm not an absolutist, but I have a strong presumption against torture, against censorship, against a range of other denials of civil liberties.
00:49:38.000So in a second, I want to ask you about sort of that perspective on rights versus wrongs, especially because I want to know how you don't slip into a sort of historicism.
00:49:46.000If the idea is that we're constantly developing and learning from our wrongs, does that mean inevitably we're going to get better?
00:49:51.000Because human history seems to say, no, I want to ask you about that in one second.
00:49:53.000First, let's talk about protecting your internet data.
00:49:56.000So the reality is you wouldn't leave your front door unlocked at night because somebody might break in and you wouldn't leave your car unlocked on the street.
00:50:55.000So I'm going to ask you about the basis of a positive morality because obviously in order to identify the wrong you do have to actually identify the wrong based on something.
00:51:02.000We see bad things happen around the world and people justify them routinely.
00:51:05.000I mean there's been thousands of years of bad things happening in most places on the globe and there were thousands more for, thousands more for virtually all places on the globe before that.
00:51:15.000So what is the moral system based on other than, there have to be some fundamental precepts in other words that undergird how we decide when a thing is wrong.
00:51:23.000So, Robert Nozick was one of my closest friends on the faculty, a great philosopher of libertarianism, and I gave him a draft, shortly before he died, of my book on rights from wrongs, and he pointed out, as you pointed out, can you really know what wrongs are without knowing what rights are?
00:51:40.000I think there is a human instinct that really teaches us when something is wrong, and everybody agrees that now, of course they didn't over time, slavery was wrong, the Holocaust was wrong, anti-gay bashing is wrong, but you'll never get agreement about what's right.
00:51:55.000It's much easier to find agreement on what's a dystopia than a utopia.
00:52:00.000Take, for example, a utopia from a labor and economic point of view.
00:52:04.000You couldn't get 10 people sitting in a room deciding what the best system of economic regulation is, but I think most of us today would agree that socialism and communism has proved that it's the wrong approach.
00:52:17.000So, So we get a much wider consensus on what's wrong than what's right.
00:52:41.000And I think my system may be better than the others, but it's not perfect.
00:52:45.000Well, what's interesting about your system is that it actually, when we're talking about rights versus wrongs, you're actually not talking about individual rights versus wrongs.
00:52:52.000You're talking about morally correct versus morally wrong.
00:52:55.000And it seems that the American system, the Enlightenment-based system, is based on not moral right versus moral wrong, it's based on individual rights.
00:53:03.000So where does the regime of individual rights come in, and do you think that individuals have rights, or is it basically sort of a Burkean experientialism?
00:53:10.000Well, you know, I think there are elements of both.
00:53:15.000You know, you had my class with Steve Pinker.
00:53:17.000Steve Pinker really believes that we are moving in the right direction.
00:53:21.000He's written this brilliant book on how everything has gotten better.
00:53:34.000In fact, the Jewish experience has always been things get better, and then they get much worse, and then they get a little better, and then they get much worse.
00:53:41.000You know, the Jewish definition of a pessimist is, oh, things are so bad they can't possibly get worse.
00:54:17.000And one of my favorite books was Joe Lieberman's book about Shabbos, how the Jews haven't kept the Sabbath, but the Sabbath has kept the Jews.
00:54:25.000I think the Sabbath is a fantastic invention.
00:54:27.000I just was in the synagogue reading from the Ten Commandments.
00:54:31.000And whoever heard of a commandment that says you have to rest one day a week?
00:54:35.000It sounds like a labor organization, you know, platform program.
00:54:40.000But it is a commandment, and it's a very wise commandment.
00:54:43.000So you've taught at the law school for decades.
00:54:47.000Have you seen a change in the nature of the students who are coming through?
00:54:51.000Because one of the great questions is, I've been speaking on campuses now for probably 20 years at this point, somewhere in that neighborhood, 15, 20 years.
00:54:57.000And even I in the last 15 years have seen a massive change in sort of how treatment on campus has been.
00:55:04.000I used to be able to speak on campus, no security whatsoever, back in like 2010, 2011.
00:55:07.000I remember I spoke at Berkeley in 2015 and it was fine.
00:55:14.000I came back in 2016, we required 600 police officers and a $600,000 security expenditure by the city of Berkeley in order to prevent riots.
00:56:21.000And it seems to me that when it comes to what's happening on campus, so much of it is focused on undermining exactly the sort of rights that you've spent your life defending.
00:56:29.000Those rights are now seen as a bulwark of a hierarchical system.
00:56:32.000You see people arguing against freedom of speech on sort of a Marcusean principle, Herbert Marcuse, the famous Frankfurt School philosopher, arguing that free speech itself was a reinforcement of the hierarchy because the people who took best advantage of it were the privileged.
00:56:45.000He taught at Brandeis when I started teaching at Harvard, and he was propagandizing the students back then against free speech and And now you have professors who are saying that free speech is a male, hierarchical, you know, all of the words.
00:57:02.000You can just make them up as you go along because that's what they do.
00:57:22.000So what do you think is the future of higher education then?
00:57:24.000Because I know that we're trying to shovel everybody into higher education, seemingly to less and less effect.
00:57:29.000But do you think that eventually people are going to wake up and realize that this is largely a waste of time unless you're majoring in maths and sciences?
00:58:04.000You could just walk through Harvard and get B's and B+, and A's, and everything, and then come out with your Harvard degree and learn absolutely nothing.
00:58:13.000If you're a Jewish kid, you can major in Jewish studies and just repeat what you learned in elementary school and high school.
00:58:21.000If you're a woman, you can major in women's studies and have all your professors say, wow, isn't that great?
00:58:28.000And these kind of ethnic studies programs are so dangerous.
00:58:34.000I mean, I would practically have a rule saying, all right, you can have ethnic studies, but if you're Jewish, you can't take Jewish studies.
00:58:41.000If you're black, you can't take black studies.
00:58:43.000If you're a woman, you can't take women's studies.
00:58:45.000That's available for other people to learn about you.
00:58:48.000Now, that's nonsense, of course, because obviously if you're an African-American, you have a right to learn about your culture and your history.
00:58:54.000But you also have an obligation to learn about other things.
00:58:58.000Well, you know, when-- When I was in UCLA, that's how you met the Jewish girls.
00:59:00.000You went to Jewish studies class, right?
00:59:58.000The process that is due is an invitation to change what due process means over the years.
01:00:05.000For example, the framers of the 14th Amendment, none of them would have said that that means black and white children can go to school together.
01:01:00.000Forty of our presidents have been accused of abusing their power.
01:01:03.000They want to normalize impeachment, turn it into a partisan weapon to become part of our political system.
01:01:10.000Exactly what Madison and Hamilton rejected.
01:01:14.000They said, we don't want to turn into a British parliamentary system where a president serves at the pleasure of the legislature.
01:01:22.000And yet that's exactly what the Democrats try to introduce.
01:01:25.000I mean, I really was amazed by the weakness of the charges that they brought forth in the House, because I figured that if they were going to actually charge the president with, I mean, they kept saying bribery over and over.
01:01:57.000And so those were two vague General Madison Hamilton would be turning over in their graves.
01:02:03.000Moreover, Hamilton said, the greatest danger is that impeachment will become partisan.
01:02:08.000They both wanted, all of them wanted, impeachment to occur only when there was a bipartisan support, that's why you need two-thirds in the Senate, and overwhelming national support for impeachment.
01:02:18.000The only case for impeachment that ever should have gone forward was Richard Nixon.
01:02:22.000So, in the future, do you think that impeachment is going to happen every couple of years?
01:02:25.000Not every couple of years, but every decade.
01:02:27.000Whenever you get a president of one party, and a house of another party, and the president's controversial, there's going to be a move to impeach.
01:02:37.000Remember, they were going to impeach Hillary Clinton.
01:02:39.000On day one, the Republicans were yelling, lock her up.
01:02:42.000This started, in some ways, with the impeachment of Clinton.
01:02:46.000Now, Clinton was accused of a crime, perjury, but it wasn't a high crime.
01:03:05.000I think we'll see the pendulum swing slowly in America.
01:03:09.000And I think the rest of my life will be living in a divisive country.
01:03:14.000Look, when I turned 75 six years ago, I thought I was going to have such a nice retirement.
01:03:19.000And then I get accused falsely, and then Trump gets elected, and now my family doesn't talk to me, people on the vineyard don't talk to me, my wife was mad at me for taking the case.
01:03:34.000You know, one of the chapters in my new book is the cost of trying to live a principled life, and it's very, very hard to do, but I'm too old to change.
01:03:43.000Well, again, since apparently this episode is devoted to me trying to get to... I'm going to frum you up before the end.
01:04:12.000Well, I do want to ask you one more question.
01:04:14.000I want to ask you, since you have all of these various legacies in various areas, what do you want the chief legacy of Alan Dershowitz to be?
01:04:21.000But if you want to hear Alan Dershowitz's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
01:04:23.000So to become a member, head on over to dailywire.com.