The Charlie Kirk Show - Unpacking an Unconstitutional Impeachment with Alan Dershowitz

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Very special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show today.

00:00:03.000 My conversation with Professor Alan Dershowitz.

00:00:06.000 He's a liberal.

00:00:07.000 We don't agree on everything, but boy, do we agree on First Amendment rights, free speech, the Constitution, and the need to protect civil liberties.

00:00:16.000 We have a conversation about Trump's impeachment.

00:00:19.000 What is incitement?

00:00:21.000 What is sedition?

00:00:22.000 Treason?

00:00:22.000 Was the Capitol riot a terrorist attack?

00:00:26.000 We talk about Israel, social media, and so much more.

00:00:28.000 It's a pretty comprehensive discussion.

00:00:30.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:33.000 And this bonus episode brought to you on the Charlie Kirk Show podcast feed is thanks to those of you that support us at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:42.000 That's charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:46.000 It helps our research team, our booking team, our editing team do what they do when you guys support us at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:54.000 Professor Alan Dershowitz is here.

00:00:56.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:57.000 Here we go.

00:00:59.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:00.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:01:03.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:06.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:09.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:10.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:11.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:01:20.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:28.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:32.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:33.000 Welcome to this special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:35.000 With us today is the legendary Professor Alan Dershowitz.

00:01:40.000 Honored to have him with us.

00:01:41.000 And I have been a follower and a fan of his for quite some time.

00:01:45.000 We might disagree on certain political issues.

00:01:47.000 I actually think we agree on the big ones, though.

00:01:49.000 So it's an honor to have him with us today.

00:01:51.000 Professor, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:53.000 Well, thank you.

00:01:54.000 It's my pleasure to be on with you.

00:01:56.000 Thank you.

00:01:57.000 So I'd like to start with the obvious news of the day.

00:02:01.000 It seems as if the House impeachment managers are requesting President Trump to testify in the upcoming Senate trial.

00:02:09.000 I'd like your opinion on whether or not you think that is a good idea.

00:02:12.000 Should the president testify?

00:02:13.000 And if you were advising him, would you recommend he do that?

00:02:17.000 Well, first, it's a clever ploy by Jamie Raskin, my former student in the House managers.

00:02:22.000 It's just a public relations stunt.

00:02:24.000 They know he's not going to testify, and they want to be able to say, see, aha, we asked him to testify.

00:02:29.000 He said, no, he must have something to hide.

00:02:32.000 No responsible lawyer would allow the president to testify and walk into a perjury trap in front of hostile senators and hostile house managers.

00:02:41.000 So you can be sure he's not going to testify.

00:02:43.000 You can be sure Jamie Raskin is going to make a big deal out of it.

00:02:46.000 And legally, it has no effect at all.

00:02:50.000 I agree.

00:02:50.000 It seems like a PR stunt more than anything else.

00:02:52.000 And I don't think the president will show up.

00:02:55.000 And so I've read some of your articles recently pushing back the idea of this second impeachment.

00:03:01.000 Can you walk some of our viewers and listeners through why you think this entire idea of impeaching a private citizen does not follow the founders' original intent of what impeachment was supposed to be used for?

00:03:12.000 Well, you don't have to listen to me, listen to James Madison, who's the father of the Constitution, who he said that impeachment is only for somebody who's still sitting in office.

00:03:21.000 He said it quite clearly in the Federalist Papers, and there's no way around that.

00:03:26.000 The text of the Constitution is clear as well.

00:03:28.000 It says impeachment is for purposes of removing a president.

00:03:31.000 Once a president is removed, you can also vote to disqualify him, but disqualification doesn't stand alone as a remedy.

00:03:39.000 If it did, then the Congress would have a roving commission to go through the entire United States and decide who to impeach, who not to impeach, and who to prevent from running for office.

00:03:48.000 Say the Republicans come up with a young, vibrant candidate to run against Biden four years from now.

00:03:54.000 All the Democrats have to do is impeach him, even though he's never held office, and just disqualify him from running for office or find somebody who ran for a who had a smaller office, an earlier office, and they can impeach him.

00:04:08.000 That's not what the framers had in mind.

00:04:10.000 What the framers had in mind is not allowing the Senate to put people on trial.

00:04:15.000 That's called a bill of attainer.

00:04:16.000 And a bill of attainer is specifically prohibited by the Constitution.

00:04:19.000 So there are so many things wrong with this impeachment.

00:04:22.000 Number one, they have no jurisdiction.

00:04:23.000 Number two, it's a bill of attainer.

00:04:25.000 Number three, they're impeaching him for a constitutionally protected speech.

00:04:29.000 And the impeachment itself is doing a tremendous amount of damage to our Constitution.

00:04:36.000 There's a lot there I want to unpack.

00:04:39.000 And the one point you just made that I hadn't thought of is: you're right, it could be used as a political ploy to prevent future political opponents from entering into elections in general, if that's now the precedent, which I think is a really, really interesting point.

00:04:54.000 It means that several hundred members of Congress determine who runs for president rather than primaries and elections.

00:05:00.000 It would deprive hundreds, millions of people of the right to vote.

00:05:04.000 It's just so ultimately undemocratic.

00:05:06.000 It's not what the framers had in mind.

00:05:08.000 And so, without getting into the intentions or the motives of the people pushing this impeachment, I think politics obviously plays a role.

00:05:14.000 Is this impeachment constitutional?

00:05:17.000 You say no.

00:05:17.000 Can you help explain why the Supreme Court justice is not showing up?

00:05:23.000 Since he's not showing up, does that render it unconstitutional just from the beginning?

00:05:27.000 And does the Chief Justice have a decision here of whether or not he can take maybe a challenge to this in the Supreme Court in the future?

00:05:38.000 Well, the Chief Justice has made a decision.

00:05:40.000 He made a decision that it would be inappropriate for him to sit because the impeachment is not of a sitting president.

00:05:46.000 It's of a former president.

00:05:47.000 And the Constitution says that the Chief Justice sits when a president is impeached.

00:05:53.000 So the Chief Justice made the right decision.

00:05:55.000 I predicted he would make that decision.

00:05:56.000 So far, all of my predictions have turned out to be valid because I don't make predictions based on wishful thinking.

00:06:02.000 I make them based on a constitutional analysis.

00:06:06.000 And I think that has to be given some weight.

00:06:08.000 Whether or not the Supreme Court, as an institution, would get involved in this decision remains to be seen.

00:06:14.000 If the president were to be disqualified, he could then challenge that in court, or he could ignore it and simply run for president again if that's what he chose to do and leave it to the other side to bring a lawsuit to disqualify him.

00:06:27.000 So stay tuned.

00:06:29.000 So one of the charges that they are putting against the president, both in the impeachment papers and also in the court of public opinion, is that the president incited the mob.

00:06:42.000 You mentioned that this is constitutionally protected speech.

00:06:44.000 You wrote a very interesting piece where you said the president did not yell fire, obviously using the example that people oftentimes cite of yelling fire in a theater.

00:06:55.000 Can you tell us why the president was well within his First Amendment rights to say what he said and the speech that he gave and why that is not incitement?

00:07:04.000 Well, you wouldn't know from listening to CNN, you wouldn't know from listening to PBS that the president used the words peaceful and patriotic, just like you wouldn't know when the president spoke in Charlottesville that he said, I'm excluding Nazis and white supremacists and white nationalists from my statement.

00:07:22.000 There are good people on both sides.

00:07:24.000 So you can't believe what you see in much of the partisan media, certainly not on CNN and certainly not on PBS.

00:07:30.000 So the president said peaceful and patriotic.

00:07:33.000 That's not incitement.

00:07:35.000 Moreover, incitement has a technical meaning.

00:07:37.000 It has to call for immediate, imminent violence.

00:07:40.000 If he had stood in front of the Capitol and said, now break in and destroy and steal Pelosi's laptop and kill policemen, that would be incitement.

00:07:50.000 But advocacy is protected by the Constitution.

00:07:53.000 You can even advocate violence.

00:07:55.000 There are cases involving communists who advocated the violent overthrow of the government, and that was held to be constitutionally protected speech.

00:08:03.000 Or the Brandenburg case, where a neo-Nazi Klansman called for violence, and he was surrounded by people with guns and with crosses and with Ku Klux Klan paraphernalia.

00:08:16.000 And the Supreme Court nine to nothing found that to be constitutionally protected.

00:08:20.000 Even the ACLU, which favors the impeachment, has said that the speech itself was constitutionally protected.

00:08:28.000 That's very interesting.

00:08:29.000 Is there a set of cases, maybe you just mentioned them, that might be precedent to show that there is a speech and then something that came after that speech that goes to show that the actions of the people that might have participated in the speech were done on their own volition.

00:08:45.000 Do you understand?

00:08:45.000 Oh, sure.

00:08:46.000 Yeah.

00:08:46.000 Okay.

00:08:48.000 Lots of such cases, and I litigated some of them myself.

00:08:51.000 I was one of the lawyers in the Chicago 7 case.

00:08:53.000 And in the Chicago 7 case, people stood and screamed and yelled for blood and for violence and everything.

00:08:59.000 And yet the courts held that that was constitutionally protected.

00:09:02.000 And the ACLU said that was constitutionally protected.

00:09:06.000 You get speakers, radical speakers, all the time on the left and on the right calling for action.

00:09:12.000 One of the cases I had back years ago, I represented a Stanford University professor who stood a few hundred yards away from the Stanford Computation Center and said the computation center is a source of war in Vietnam. 0.75

00:09:26.000 It's aiding the war, the immoral war.

00:09:28.000 I think it would be a good idea for some of you to take over the computation center.

00:09:33.000 And then they did.

00:09:35.000 And the people who took over the computation center were, of course, disciplined.

00:09:38.000 And they also went after Bruce Franklin.

00:09:41.000 And the ACLU defended Bruce Franklin, and I defended Bruce Franklin against those charges.

00:09:47.000 And so there's a long history of constitutionally protected speech that uses strong words, strong language, fighting words.

00:09:55.000 Oliver Wendell Holmes talked about fighting faiths.

00:09:58.000 He also said every idea is an incitement, but we don't want to compromise our First Amendment rights.

00:10:03.000 We work too hard to achieve them.

00:10:06.000 It's so refreshing, Professor, to hear you say that, because there seems to have been a non-stop barrage that is making the argument that anyone that used typical political speech, even as simple as go fight for your values, as if that is directly inciting violence, which is something that is used quite often.

00:10:26.000 Oh, yeah.

00:10:27.000 Look, labor leaders have used that, suffragettes have used that, civil rights leaders have used that.

00:10:33.000 People on the radical left have used that.

00:10:35.000 People on the radical right have used that.

00:10:37.000 It's part of political speech.

00:10:39.000 In fact, President Trump's speech, which I disapprove of personally, I think he shouldn't have done it, was pablum compared to some of the speeches I've defended and some of the speeches that I've seen people make in the Capitol itself and certainly in other venues as well.

00:10:55.000 So I'm curious, you mentioned the ACLU approved of not approved of the speech, but they thought it was constitutional, but they approve of the impeachment.

00:11:02.000 I'm just curious, what reasoning do they have for that?

00:11:07.000 Well, they regard impeachment as an employment decision.

00:11:10.000 Their argument is as follows: that since a federal employee can be fired by the president, and this is in the brief also of the House managers, since the president can fire a cabinet member for statements he made that are part of constitutionally protected statements, then it follows that Congress can impeach the president for that.

00:11:31.000 But there's not a correct analogy.

00:11:33.000 President has the power to fire anybody for any reason.

00:11:36.000 He can even fire somebody to strike an appropriate racial balance. 0.96

00:11:40.000 He can say, you're fired because you're white, or you're fired because you're black. 0.99

00:11:44.000 You're fired because you're Jewish. 1.00

00:11:46.000 We have too many Jews in the cabinet. 1.00

00:11:47.000 We have too many this in the cabinet, too many that. 1.00

00:11:49.000 We want more women. 1.00

00:11:51.000 President can do anything he wants when it comes to deciding who's in his cabinet. 1.00

00:11:55.000 But Congress can't impeach a president unless the constitutional criteria are established.

00:12:02.000 And so one of the constitutional criteria has to be that it must not violate the First Amendment.

00:12:08.000 Give me an example. 0.68

00:12:09.000 What if Congress impeached a president because that president was Muslim? 0.63

00:12:14.000 And the defense was: no, the Constitution says no religious tests shall ever be required.

00:12:19.000 The ACLU and the House managers would say that's irrelevant to impeachment.

00:12:23.000 Of course, it's not irrelevant to impeachment.

00:12:25.000 Impeachment must be based on constitutional grounds.

00:12:28.000 And the First Amendment prohibits any consequences by Congress for a constitutionally protected speech.

00:12:35.000 And so, therefore, the entire charge of impeachment surrounds the speech.

00:12:40.000 It's all about the speech then and whether or not it was constitutionally protected or not, which is the case you've made from the beginning.

00:12:47.000 So, some of the people that have been indicted who have stormed the Capitol, there's some new stories that are coming out that they might be charged for sedition.

00:12:59.000 Quite honestly, I don't really know what that legally means.

00:13:03.000 Have you ever been involved in a case around sedition?

00:13:07.000 How does one get charged for sedition?

00:13:10.000 Of course not.

00:13:11.000 And of course, I haven't been involved in it because there have been no sedition cases.

00:13:14.000 You know, sedition is something that happens when you have a revolution.

00:13:18.000 Sedition is an anachronism.

00:13:20.000 It's just never used anymore.

00:13:22.000 This was not sedition.

00:13:23.000 This was not a revolution.

00:13:25.000 This was a violent riot, a violent protest, an illegal, violent riot and protest.

00:13:31.000 But it wasn't sedition and it wasn't any of those things.

00:13:34.000 And it wasn't terrorism.

00:13:36.000 You know, when Democrats started calling this terrorism, I got calls from friends in Israel saying, are you kidding?

00:13:43.000 We know what terrorism is.

00:13:44.000 Going to a school in Maloten, murdering 32 children, going on a bus and blowing it up.

00:13:50.000 That's terrorism.

00:13:51.000 This is not terrorism.

00:13:52.000 This is a violent riot.

00:13:54.000 Terrorism is designed to kill as many civilians as possible.

00:13:57.000 So words like terrorism, sedition, revolution, all of those are inappropriate.

00:14:02.000 This was just a riot, a terrible riot.

00:14:05.000 It got out of hand.

00:14:06.000 It shouldn't have.

00:14:07.000 And some of these people are now going to defend on the ground the president made me do it.

00:14:11.000 The devil made me do it.

00:14:12.000 Twinkie made me do it. 0.99

00:14:14.000 You know, criminal defense lawyers can be very creative in their defenses.

00:14:17.000 But anybody who participated in this riot is responsible for their own.

00:14:21.000 The person who killed the policeman should go to jail for the rest of his or her life.

00:14:26.000 The people who stole Pelosi's computer ought to be punished.

00:14:32.000 The people who broke down walls ought to be punished.

00:14:35.000 But you don't punish the speaker.

00:14:36.000 Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter about that in 1801, in which he's asked that question.

00:14:43.000 And he said, under the American approach, you go after the actors, not the speakers.

00:14:47.000 The speakers can speak, and the actors should be punished because at the first breaking of the law, the law steps in and punishes the illegal actors.

00:14:56.000 The Constitution distinguishes between illegal actions and speech and it protects speech.

00:15:02.000 And so what is now unfolding, it seems, is a sequence of investigations and indictments to see whether or not there was conspiracy.

00:15:12.000 Now, conspiracy is obviously different than sedition.

00:15:16.000 So conspiracy would be, and you would obviously know it better, two or more people working together to commit a crime or to do something.

00:15:26.000 They have to agree.

00:15:27.000 They have to agree.

00:15:28.000 There has to be an agreement for there to be a conspiracy.

00:15:31.000 And obviously, the president didn't agree.

00:15:33.000 He told people to engage in peaceful and patriotic protests.

00:15:36.000 He didn't tell them to break into the house and to kill a policeman or do anything like that.

00:15:41.000 So there's no way in which the president could be charged as part of a conspiracy.

00:15:45.000 If other people arranged in advance to do this, even in advance of the president's speech, that also undercuts the theory that it was the president who incited people to do it.

00:15:55.000 They would have done it anyway, even if the president had never spoken, which I wish he had not.

00:15:59.000 And there's more and more evidence pointing to that, such as the pipe bombs that were placed the night before, people that came with military gear and walkie-talkies and with text messages that showed the intent to engage in that, which would go to show this was not just an event gone wrong.

00:16:17.000 There might have been elements of that, but it might be actually more complicated than that.

00:16:21.000 And so, something, Professor, I want to talk about, and you've been amazing on the issue of civil liberties for years.

00:16:27.000 In fact, I think you've been the most consistent voice on this, is where this might lead us in regards to domestic surveillance.

00:16:34.000 It seems as if that there are more and more calls because of what happened on January the 6th for almost a new, more robust, modern era Patriot Act.

00:16:43.000 Is this something that we should be concerned about?

00:16:45.000 Do we have enough laws on the books to already fight domestic terrorism?

00:16:49.000 We have too many laws on the books, and we don't need more laws on the books.

00:16:53.000 We have all the authority we need to fight against both domestic terrorism and international terrorism.

00:16:59.000 We need more coordination between branches of the government, and I think we'll see that now.

00:17:04.000 But the last thing we need is more FISA court warrants, more FBI misstatements about facts so that American citizens are subject to unconstitutional surveillance.

00:17:21.000 Civil liberties comes first.

00:17:22.000 Free speech is first among the civil liberties.

00:17:25.000 And the idea that so many people on the left and so many liberals and so many Democrats are prepared to sacrifice civil liberties in the long run in order to pile on and get Trump in the short run.

00:17:37.000 Look, we won.

00:17:38.000 Trump was defeated at the polls.

00:17:40.000 That's what elections are about.

00:17:42.000 That's where presidents are supposed to be held accountable.

00:17:46.000 He was held accountable, and he is now a private citizen.

00:17:50.000 And the idea of piling on now and compromising our First Amendment rights and other rights is a terrible mistake.

00:17:57.000 Can you talk about how such a Patriot Act such as that might actually be used against liberal activists in the future?

00:18:04.000 We have lots of liberal liberties.

00:18:04.000 It always has been.

00:18:05.000 Yeah, please.

00:18:06.000 Remember that.

00:18:07.000 Yeah, denial of civil liberties has always been used more against the left than against the right.

00:18:12.000 You go back to the Alien and Sedition Acts.

00:18:15.000 You go to the Palmer raids.

00:18:16.000 You go to McCarthyism.

00:18:18.000 It's the left that has always been victimized by government over action.

00:18:24.000 I grew up during McCarthyism, where it was the left that was attacked.

00:18:29.000 Today we're seeing the left with very short memories being willing to forfeit their own civil liberties.

00:18:37.000 A great philosopher once said, he or she who forgets the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

00:18:42.000 And if they are going to repeat them, it will be turned mostly against the left, not against the right.

00:18:47.000 And so I think many on the left are shooting themselves in the foot and they're forgetting about long-term implications of what they are doing.

00:18:56.000 They're creating loaded weapons lying around to be used against them in years to come.

00:19:02.000 Yeah, it's puzzling, quite honestly, Professor, because I remember in the early debates of the Patriot Act, it was people on the left that were the ones that were challenging it.

00:19:11.000 You were challenging it from a civil liberties standpoint, but even people such as Senator Bernie Sanders was against the Patriot Act because he was afraid it was going to be used against socialist groups or left-wing advocacy groups.

00:19:23.000 And he was right.

00:19:24.000 That's right.

00:19:26.000 Totally.

00:19:27.000 And that whenever you give that kind of force to government and any sort of disagreeable group might pop up, don't be surprised when that force might be used against that disagreeable movement.

00:19:39.000 And that's...

00:19:40.000 Well, we all remember the great German Lutheran philosopher who said, when they came for the trade unionists, I didn't complain because I was not a trade unionist. 0.66

00:19:51.000 When they came for the Jews, I didn't complain. 0.58

00:19:53.000 Then when they came for me, there was no one left to complain.

00:19:56.000 So civil liberties is for everybody.

00:19:58.000 You know, we can have civil liberties for me, but not for thee.

00:20:02.000 Because when you deny anybody civil liberties, it establishes a precedent that will come back and be used against you.

00:20:07.000 And that's what's so, so dangerous about what short-sighted liberal Democrats and people on the left are doing today.

00:20:14.000 And why I, as a civil libertarian who has always associated myself with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, feel so strongly against what the Democrats are doing today because they're so short-sighted.

00:20:25.000 I understand their desire to get rid of Trump and to pile on, but I don't understand why they're prepared to compromise civil liberties, which will eventually be used against them.

00:20:36.000 So, Professor, an argument that some of the liberals will use that I encounter is they say, well, this is just one exception.

00:20:42.000 It's not about setting a precedent.

00:20:44.000 Trump is that bad.

00:20:45.000 We must use the tools necessary.

00:20:47.000 I'm sure you encounter this argument from some of your liberal friends where this is what's the best way to respond to that for the liberals that are watching this because they're saying we've never seen anything like it.

00:20:59.000 Now's the time to use every tool at our disposal.

00:21:02.000 Well, you've heard that throughout our history.

00:21:04.000 We've never seen anything like communism.

00:21:06.000 It's only an exception. 0.85

00:21:07.000 Let's introduce McCarthyism. 0.91

00:21:08.000 We've never seen anything like radical immigrants upsetting our country. 0.99

00:21:12.000 So let's have the palmer raise. 1.00

00:21:13.000 We've never seen anything like World War II. 1.00

00:21:15.000 Let's lock up 110,000 Japanese Americans in detention centers. 1.00

00:21:20.000 It's always this is special. 1.00

00:21:22.000 When you add up all the things that are special, you end up losing all of our liberties.

00:21:27.000 That's really well said.

00:21:28.000 And for the Democrats and the liberals, I think some of them have very good intentions, Professor.

00:21:34.000 I do.

00:21:35.000 I think some of them are.

00:21:37.000 And I've talked to some of these reporters privately.

00:21:39.000 They really are scared that if we don't do more, that there could be uprisings throughout the country.

00:21:45.000 I also think that they don't look at unintended consequences, that if you continue to use terms like terrorist or try to label half the country as the worst thing imaginable, it might actually create more radicalism, not less.

00:21:59.000 You know, you're someone that defends freedom of speech in every form or fashion, regardless of whether or not you agree with it.

00:22:07.000 Can you talk about how speech is actually the remedy to some of the rising radicalism in our country, that radicalism might actually be growing because we're talking to each other less?

00:22:16.000 Oh, I think that's right.

00:22:18.000 I think we're becoming a nation of extremists and we're having fewer conversations.

00:22:23.000 I'm writing a book now about the golden age of freedom of speech, which was from the end of McCarthyism, say 1960, to the beginning of the 21st century, where the vast majority of expansions of freedom of speech occurred.

00:22:35.000 It was also the golden age for civil liberties, for civil rights, for women's rights, for gay rights.

00:22:41.000 So I don't think there's any inconsistency between a fulsome approach to free speech and a fulsome approach to other rights, including environmental rights.

00:22:50.000 I think when you start taking away free speech rights, you're going to see a diminution in other important values.

00:22:56.000 So people who say, well, we support free speech, but we prioritize the environment over free speech.

00:23:01.000 We prioritize gay rights, women's rights.

00:23:04.000 They're wrong, as a matter of fact. 1.00

00:23:07.000 When you diminish free speech, you also diminish the ability to advocate on behalf of these good and important values.

00:23:14.000 I agree with you.

00:23:15.000 Many of the people who are our new censors are good people.

00:23:18.000 They're decent people.

00:23:19.000 But it was Justice Brandeis who warned us 100 years ago that the greatest danger to liberty lurks in well-meaning people, people with good intentions, with zeal, but without understanding.

00:23:31.000 And that's, I think, what we're seeing today.

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00:24:43.000 Professor, can you help respond to something a lot of the students we deal with hear a lot of, which is that speech is violence?

00:24:50.000 You touched on this a little bit, but this is something that's growing in the university.

00:24:54.000 And it almost as if this university narrative has now gone all the way to Congress.

00:24:59.000 It's gone from the campuses to Congress.

00:25:02.000 That not just what the president said, but the guy that might not have stormed the Capitol, but he might have been a thousand feet away, or he might have just been on social media saying something they didn't like, that that then turned into violence.

00:25:14.000 From less of a legal standpoint, but just more of a either a philosophical or a pragmatic one.

00:25:21.000 Can you talk about how dangerous it is to equate public speech then with violence?

00:25:26.000 Because that is something that seems to be catching on quite a lot.

00:25:29.000 And especially now as we see the reaction to what happened on January the 6th.

00:25:33.000 No, I completely agree with you.

00:25:35.000 And on college campuses, we see the fake word, we feel unsafe, we feel unsafe, presence of speech.

00:25:41.000 First of all, they're lying.

00:25:43.000 They are lying through their teeth.

00:25:45.000 When they say that they feel unsafe because Professor Ron Sullivan is the dean of a college at Harvard and he represented Harvey Weinstein, they're lying through their teeth.

00:25:55.000 Ron Sullivan, for example, had represented a mass, a murderer, a man who had killed two people and was horribly violent.

00:26:03.000 They didn't feel unsafe there, but because they hate Harvey Weinstein, they claimed they were unsafe and they got him fired as dean at Harvard.

00:26:11.000 It wasn't renewed, but it's the same thing as firing.

00:26:14.000 And so they've learned that if they say they don't feel safe, they get to win.

00:26:18.000 They get to suppress free speech.

00:26:20.000 They get to deplatform.

00:26:22.000 They get to cancel.

00:26:24.000 If you say that free speech is violence, you're abolishing the First Amendment and you're abolishing the basic, basic thrust of everything our Bill of Rights was designed to protect.

00:26:36.000 And there is an assault, an assault by many in the university, students and faculties, on our Constitution, on our Bill of Rights, and on our basic liberties.

00:26:45.000 And what it does is it turns people into activists that are less likely to ever sympathize with the other side of the argument.

00:26:54.000 If all speech is violence, well, then it justifies using the power of the state to potentially shut up that speech and to be able to.

00:27:02.000 Or use the power or use violence, your own violence, to counteract speech.

00:27:06.000 And that's what Antifa does.

00:27:08.000 When I speak on campuses, Antifa threatens violence to prevent me from speaking.

00:27:14.000 And so you're absolutely right.

00:27:16.000 When you shut off speech, it increases the amount of violence rather than the opposite.

00:27:21.000 Speech is a safety net.

00:27:23.000 And I think so.

00:27:26.000 I think it's very important that we maintain a fulsome approach to speech.

00:27:32.000 So, Professor, I wanted to get your opinion on something in the couple minutes we have remaining.

00:27:37.000 Both you and I are advocates for the state of Israel, and I've learned a lot from you on how to defend the Israel conflict in the Middle East.

00:27:45.000 I believe you nominated two friends of mine for the Nobel Peace Prize, Jared Kushner and Avi Berkowitz.

00:27:52.000 Is that correct?

00:27:54.000 Absolutely correct, and I'm so proud of it.

00:27:56.000 I actually proposed four people, the two of them, plus the two ambassadors, David Friedman, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, and Ron Dormer, Israel's ambassador to the United States.

00:28:05.000 These are the four guys who behind the scenes really accomplished the Abraham Accords, and they deserve to receive credit, along obviously with the leaders that signed on the dotted line.

00:28:17.000 But without these four people, and particularly without Jared Kushner and Avi Berkowitz, we would never have the Abraham Accords, which are the most significant step toward peace, certainly in the last quarter century.

00:28:28.000 So, Professor, you've been talking about writing about the issue of Israel for quite some time.

00:28:33.000 And you've done, if anyone's interested, they should look at one of your lectures where you make the legal case for Israel's creation.

00:28:41.000 And because that's one of the lies they teach in the academy that Israel was illegally formed, and you really go through it wonderfully. 0.61

00:28:49.000 What is the lesson that we can take away from how the Abraham Accords came to be? 0.61

00:28:53.000 What did Jared and Avi do that maybe the Biden administration can learn from?

00:28:58.000 This is a peace deal that eluded a lot of administrations, Republican and Democrat.

00:29:03.000 But it seems that President Trump and the team he assembled was able to achieve the unthinkable, at least the unthinkable, a decade ago.

00:29:10.000 From your perspective, what did they do right?

00:29:12.000 First of all, you mentioned my lecture on the legality of Israel's establishment.

00:29:17.000 You know, YouTube didn't take that down, but it put a caveat saying that was unsuitable for children.

00:29:24.000 And that's now become part of a lawsuit that's being abroad.

00:29:27.000 I'm not part of that lawsuit, but my YouTube lectures on the lawsuit.

00:29:33.000 What I think that Kushner and Berkowitz and the others did is they didn't allow the Palestinians a veto on the peace process.

00:29:41.000 They said, look, if the Palestinians want to join in, fine, you're invited.

00:29:44.000 But if you don't want to, if you sit this out, the way you refuse to engage in the peace process in 1938, in 1948, in 1967, in 1990, in 2000, in 2005, and in 2008, we're not going to let you veto peace between Israel and other Arab nations.

00:30:03.000 And it was a brilliant, brilliant strategic decision.

00:30:06.000 And it allowed three countries at the moment, maybe more coming up.

00:30:11.000 Four, we already have Morocco joining partly into this.

00:30:15.000 And maybe in the future, the Saudis and others.

00:30:18.000 I think it tells the Palestinians, you better come to the peace table or you're going to be ignored.

00:30:23.000 You can't get a state by just having BDS and protests and go to the UN.

00:30:29.000 You have to sit down and negotiate, and there have to be painful compromises on both sides.

00:30:33.000 And negotiate in good faith.

00:30:35.000 Don't say you want to negotiate and want peace and then walk away from the table at the last moment.

00:30:41.000 Where the conflict actually enriches the ruling class of the Palestinian authority from Mahmoud Abbas to many others. 0.82

00:30:48.000 Oh, yeah, the kleptocracy, where they steal money from their own people and deny their own people rights and safeguards. 0.66

00:30:57.000 Look, Hamas is anything but democracy, and it murders dissidents and others.

00:31:04.000 And so it's very important for there to be a peace process in which all sides in good faith seek to resolve this issue.

00:31:11.000 And I think it's resolvable if only goodwill prevails.

00:31:15.000 Do you think that the Biden administration will continue the Abraham Accords?

00:31:18.000 I don't think they'll have much of a choice.

00:31:20.000 Can you talk about that?

00:31:21.000 Are you optimistic about the Biden's approach to the Middle East?

00:31:24.000 I am.

00:31:24.000 One of the reasons I nominated these folks for the Nobel Peace Prize is to help put the pressure on to keep, make sure that everybody the importance of the Abraham Accords.

00:31:34.000 I've known Joe Biden for 40 years.

00:31:37.000 He is supportive of Israel.

00:31:39.000 He's critical of some of the policies. 0.97

00:31:41.000 But I do think that he'll move and build on the Abraham Accords.

00:31:45.000 You know, a lot of people in the new administration don't want to give the Trump administration credit for anything, but they have to build on the positive.

00:31:52.000 That's very important.

00:31:54.000 So you mentioned YouTube.

00:31:55.000 I want to get one last topic in really quick.

00:31:58.000 What is your opinion on the big tech censorship and how much power these companies have?

00:32:03.000 Being a civil libertarian and defending freedom of speech, how do you balance that with private property rights?

00:32:10.000 And some would call these companies monopolies.

00:32:13.000 Do you think that there are legal measures that need to be taken against these companies?

00:32:17.000 Are they too big to be considered as private companies, maybe public utilities?

00:32:21.000 What's your analysis on that?

00:32:24.000 Well, first of all, I think they're making a mistake in getting into the business of censorship of content based on offensiveness or untruthfulness or all of that.

00:32:33.000 It's a mistake.

00:32:34.000 You can't win that battle because once you say certain things are untrue and keep other things up, people will assume you're saying the other things are true.

00:32:41.000 And, you know, they're not.

00:32:42.000 Many of them, there's a lot of falsehoods on social media.

00:32:46.000 So I think it's a bad business decision for them to be in the business of deciding what's truthful and what's not truthful.

00:32:53.000 You can eliminate their Section 230 exemptions if they behave like publishers rather than platforms.

00:33:01.000 But the last thing I want to do is see the big high-tech media censored by the government.

00:33:06.000 That would be self-defeating.

00:33:08.000 They also have First Amendment rights to put on the air what they want to and take off the air what they want to, but that doesn't mean they're right in doing it.

00:33:17.000 They have the right to do it, but they're wrong in the way they're doing it.

00:33:19.000 And I think we have to keep putting the pressure on the social media.

00:33:23.000 Professor, thank you for being so generous with your time.

00:33:26.000 How do people check out either your, I think you have a podcast.

00:33:29.000 I listened to a couple episodes.

00:33:30.000 I do.

00:33:30.000 It's called The Dersh Show.

00:33:32.000 The only thing that's missing is The Wits, and that's provided by my viewers and listeners.

00:33:35.000 So it's on Rumble, it's on YouTube, it's on iTunes, it's on Spotify.

00:33:40.000 You can get it.

00:33:41.000 It's on pretty much every day.

00:33:43.000 The last days I've been talking a lot about the impeachment and the briefs I've been deconstructing and taking apart the briefs filed by the House managers, talking today about whether the president can be compelled to testify whether the Senate has jurisdiction.

00:33:58.000 Every day I talk about a very important issue, and I try to simplify it for the average listener and viewer.

00:34:04.000 And your book that you wrote, I think it was The Case Against Impeaching the President.

00:34:08.000 Is that right?

00:34:08.000 Well, that was about 10 books ago.

00:34:11.000 Since that time, I've written Tangled Culture.

00:34:13.000 I've written The Case for Liberalism.

00:34:20.000 I'm on a writing spree.

00:34:22.000 The one only positive thing about the pandemic is it keeps me locked up in the house.

00:34:26.000 And you give me a pen and a paper, and I just write a book.

00:34:30.000 So I've been writing a bunch of books.

00:34:32.000 I'm writing a new book now called The New Censors.

00:34:35.000 How can we combat the censorship of the social media, the progressives, and the universities?

00:34:41.000 So I'm writing.

00:34:42.000 Prolific.

00:34:43.000 Well, Professor, I think this discussion is one that needs to happen more.

00:34:46.000 We agree on civil liberties.

00:34:48.000 We might disagree on other political issues, but that's why speech is so critically important.

00:34:52.000 I just want to encourage you to continue to fight for the rights of all people.

00:34:56.000 And it's really been amazing the last couple of years.

00:34:58.000 Your voice has been a really encouraging one.

00:35:00.000 So thank you.

00:35:01.000 Well, thank you so much.

00:35:02.000 I appreciate it.

00:35:03.000 All right.

00:35:03.000 Professor, thank you.

00:35:07.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:09.000 Email me your questions.

00:35:10.000 As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:12.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.

00:35:16.000 If you'd like to support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support.

00:35:20.000 Email me your thoughts about our discussion right here with Professor Alan Dershowitz.

00:35:24.000 Thanks so much, everybody.

00:35:25.000 God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 05, 2021

Unpacking an Unconstitutional Impeachment with Alan Dershowitz

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