Alan Dershowitz joins me to talk about the O.J. Simpson case, the Trump/Stormy Daniels case, and how the criminal justice system is being used as a political weapon against a political opponent.
00:14:44.020Critical thinking is just not part of education today.
00:14:47.300But exploring further, I want to come to university campuses because I think that we definitely need to talk about that.
00:14:52.320But just finishing on what Francis is talking about, do you think that part of it is, yes, social media amplifies people's echo chamberiness and all of that.
00:15:01.500But part of it also is this is the first time where the general public have had access to the inside of these institutions, which, as I'm sure you'll agree, have always had the level of corruption within them because this is human nature.
00:15:15.940And now we have been able to see just how corrupt they are and have been.
00:15:21.260And we are therefore quite disillusioned simply because of the truth that's been revealed here.
00:15:27.020Yes, but that's a process that's been ongoing during the entire last century.
00:15:32.280We started seeing institutions exposed in the early part of the 20th century.
00:16:07.680And look at what's happened to the media.
00:16:10.300We have all kinds of corruption and scandals about the media, the courts.
00:16:16.800So every institution now is subject to challenge.
00:16:22.560When done in proportion, it's a very healthy development.
00:16:27.240Do you think that the way ultimately that this lack of trust and the way I see, I don't see any other way to get trust back into institutions other than for the institutions really to focus on being whiter than white, purer than pure, making sure there is as little corruption going on as possible.
00:30:22.800You know, they've done better than men.
00:30:25.160All you had to do was eliminate the discrimination when it came to women.
00:30:28.560That hasn't been true of other groups.
00:30:31.000And why do you think that nobody has pushed back on it?
00:30:35.780Why do you think that we colleges and the administrators and the people in charge of these colleges haven't had the backbone to go, hang on a second.
00:31:08.920Maybe it's because of my Jewish heritage and my recollection of the numerous classes and the discrimination that Jews suffer.
00:31:16.780I fought back very much against that, but it was always a losing battle because the powers that be very much wanted more, quote, diversity.
00:31:30.420But when's the last time an American university recruited fundamentalist Christians, evangelical Christians, people who have a different view of abortion, different view of gay rights?
00:31:41.220These are all views, you know, I'm very strongly supportive of gay rights and women's rights and all that, but there are people with different views, different views on guns.
00:31:50.480And that's the kind of diversity universities lack and won't have.
00:31:55.100And I have a friend who was the president of George Washington University, and he said to me the other day, the one criteria that doesn't exist for being president of a university is courage.
00:32:06.400And 50 years of teaching at Harvard, I've never met a less courageous group of people than tenured faculty.
00:32:14.240Alan, the question I think that's very important and very interesting in this situation is obviously a lot of the things that we're seeing at these protests are really pushing the boundaries of what some people might call acceptable speech.
00:32:26.500And you have this interesting position where obviously this country is built on the First Amendment.
00:32:33.620And yet at the same time, what do you do with people who burn the American flag, who chant death to America, who demand an intifada and all of these things?
00:32:42.800How do people who really, truly are committed to the principle of free speech reconcile that kind of speech?
00:34:14.620That is, if you're a First Amendment believer, then anything you think is okay for Hamas supporters has to be okay for Ku Klux Klan supporters.
00:34:22.780You can't make a difference between the Qiyafah and the hood.
00:34:45.620Universities are not as bound by the absolutes of the First Amendment.
00:34:50.580There are time, manner, and place restrictions.
00:34:53.960For example, you're not allowed to walk into a church and yell, scream in the middle of the sermon, God is dead, God is dead.
00:35:00.860You can say that outside the church, but you can't disrupt.
00:35:04.560And in universities, there are certain things that maybe you can't say.
00:35:08.120If you're a Klansman who believes in lynching, and you're a student, and you come into class wearing a hood, and you're sitting next to a black kid, that kid can't learn.
00:35:19.040So there are reasonable restrictions that universities can place on faculty and on students, but they're very, very limited.
00:35:28.180Well, very much within that conversation, can Jewish students learn while their fellow students are chanting for an intifada right next to them?
00:35:36.620They have to learn to have a thick skin.
00:35:40.800Freedom of speech requires a thick skin of everybody.
00:35:45.480Now, if somebody is leaning over you and harassing you and surrounding you, no.
00:35:51.500But if somebody is holding a sign, intifada, I think you have to tolerate that.
00:35:57.500Yeah, it's a very principled approach because there's a lot of people who would actually vehemently disagree with you.
00:36:07.920Remember, I also defended the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, even though the neighborhood was a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors.
00:36:17.500The First Amendment is very difficult.
00:57:07.760I had one woman who accused me of I never met, never heard of, and finally admitted that she, you know, may have misidentified me and confused me with somebody else.
00:57:15.940But it hurt my reputation, even though it was completely uncorroborated and one person with a long, long history of.
00:57:40.680But, boy, when you think of all the people that were accused, the former majority leader of the Senate, George Mitchell, the former ambassador to the United Nations, Cousteau's granddaughter, they were all accused of sexual misconduct and Prince Andrew.
00:58:01.360But, of course, Prince Andrew was his own worst enemy.
00:58:04.440That interview that he gave, I just don't understand why he gave it and the circumstances under which he gave it.
00:58:24.280It does reputational damage whether you're guilty or not.
00:58:28.640I wrote a book by that title called Guilt by Accusation.
00:58:32.360And today in America, if you're accused, you're guilty.
00:58:36.900Interestingly enough, the Me Too movement, which is such a part of that, has disgraced itself recently because their motto now is Me Too, except if you're a Jew.
00:58:47.080Believe every woman who says she was raped, except for the women who claim they were raped by Hamas, even though there's massive physical evidence.
00:58:57.580So many people from the Me Too movement are saying, well, where's your evidence?
00:59:22.880Now, how much of that do you think is as a result of social media and the urge and the lust to kind of get justice or revenge, as it were?
00:59:34.520And how much of that is due to the fact that when it comes to sex-based crimes, they are very difficult to prove and most of them don't result in a conviction?
00:59:46.100Sex-based crimes are the hardest to get a conviction.
00:59:48.480But what happened to the Me Too movement has happened to many movements.
00:59:53.060I think it was Eric Hoffer, the philosopher, who once said, starts as a movement, then it becomes a cause, then it becomes a business, then it becomes a racket.
01:00:03.640The Me Too movement has become a racket.
01:00:07.580And you see it over and over and over again.
01:00:10.240And so one has to look at the good things, and people who make false accusations of sexual misconduct are destroying the credibility of people who are genuine victims.
01:00:22.820And so they are the enemies of truth and justice.
01:00:26.640And one has to make sharp distinctions between those who are telling the truth and those who are using the Me Too movement to extort money.
01:00:35.100I have a friend who's a lawyer in Hollywood, and she said for a period of time she was writing $100,000 checks once a week on behalf of famous people who were being falsely accused.
01:00:46.340But their publicist said, write the check, pay the hush money, better than having an article in the newspaper.
01:00:53.840And so that was spreading and spreading and spreading.
01:00:56.000So both are evils, and both have to be constrained.
01:00:59.320I'd love to get your opinion, actually, on what's happening with Weinstein at the moment.
01:01:03.800Because obviously, the allegations were awful.