Full transcript: Why I Left The Left & Can’t Join The Right
0:58 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Alan Dershowitz, the American lawyer, academic, and author. You have spent your career defending high-profile clients like American football player O.J. Simpson, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, champion boxer Mike Tyson, Harvey Weinstein, and Jeffrey Epstein. This year, you represented President Trump in his Senate impeachment trial, which resulted in his acquittal. At the age of 28, you became the youngest full professor at Harvard Law School, and you have published more than 1,000 articles in publications like the New York Times magazine, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Throughout the global coronavirus pandemic, you have been outspoken regarding online censorship, the erosion of civil liberties, and the legalities of mandatory vaccination. Alan, welcome to London Real.
1:42 Alan Dershowitz: Thank you so much for having me on.
1:44 Brian Rose: It’s great having you here. Before we get started, I just wanted to announce to everybody that we are streaming on our brand new Digital Freedom Platform, which is a censorship free independent broadcasting system that is of the people, by the people, for the people, and available exclusively on our website at freedomplatform.tv. Can everybody watching us now please share this link via the sidebar on their social media channels? And Alan, I pledge to you and everyone watching us that none of this conversation will be edited, censored, removed, or banned, and that anyone in the world can watch the full version of this episode free at londonreal.tv/dershowitz. Thanks to the generous donations of over 32,000 people around the world that I affectionately call the London Real Army. For anybody wanting to become a founding member of the Digital Freedom Platform, they can go to freedomplatform.tv/give to donate and fight with us on the front lines to protect our human rights. Here at London Real, we’ve been a platform for free speech since 2011.
2:30 Brian Rose: And Alan, I’m super excited to have you here today. Maybe we start by talking a little bit about censorship. You know, up until 9 weeks ago, I had never had any piece of content taken down, banned, or deleted. But in the last 8 weeks, a lot of my content that’s been uploaded to these platforms has now been exactly that. And I’ve been deplatformed from many places, including LinkedIn. My TED talk mysteriously disappeared. And I think it’s because we’ve been talking about controversial issues like the coronavirus and vaccines and 5G. I’m curious what you see out there. That goes on with these social media platforms and does that constitute censorship in your mind?
3:13 Alan Dershowitz: Well, of course it constitutes censorship. It may not constitute governmental censorship, which is the worst kind of censorship, but any kind of censorship is bad. We see the New York Times firing an op-ed editor, because he allowed Senator Cotton to do an op-ed, which many of the readers disagree with. I’ve been censored. CNN has deplatformed me. It won’t allow me on its air because I defended President Trump’s constitutional rights. The 92nd Street Y, which is a liberal forum for speech mostly about Jewish matters, wouldn’t allow me to speak even about a book defending Israel. So censorship is rampant, pervasive. It’s becoming the norm rather than the exception. If you’re not censored, people are asking, “Wow, what’s wrong with you? What have you not said that didn’t result in you being censored? So censorship particularly from the hard left and the left and the center left.
4:08 Alan Dershowitz: You know I grew up with McCarthyism when the censorship came from the right and I fought against that. I’m not a person of either the right or the left. In fact my newest book is called The Case for Liberalism in an Age of Extremism: or, Why I Left the Left But Can’t Join the Right. I am politically homeless because I’m nuanced and I’m balanced and I apply to myself the shoe on the other foot test. What would I be saying if the shoe were the other foot? What would I have said if Hillary Clinton had been elected president and she were being impeached? Let me tell you what I would have said.
4:44 Alan Dershowitz: I would have opposed her impeachment. In fact, the original title for my book was The Case Against Impeaching Hillary Clinton. It then changed to The Case Against Impeaching Donald Trump when he got elected instead of she being elected. So censorship is pervasive and it’s a very very worrying trend.
5:01 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s dangerous and it’s great to see your perspective, Alan, because you’ve been through a few of these phases in the country and in the government as well. What do you think when you see these, you know, trillion dollar companies with these technology platforms that kind of hide behind a community policy? This is what I’m going up against with YouTube where there’s this community policy that seems to change on a whim, that seems to be very subjective. And that way they seem to be making subjective judgments about content and it’s quite frustrating, but they say, “Well, it’s a private company and you have to opt into our platform.” When other people are saying, “These things act like public utilities and maybe we should, you know, regulate them as such.”
5:43 Alan Dershowitz: It’s the hardest question under the First Amendment and freedom of speech that I’ve ever encountered in my adult life of 60 years fighting these fights. On the one hand you don’t want the government to be regulating the content of private companies even companies that are very very powerful. On the other hand we see today that these private companies have more influence on public opinion than any government agency known before to history. And so how to strike the appropriate balance between the two goals of freedom of speech? One is to prevent government censorship and two is to open up the marketplace of ideas as widely as possible and they used to be the same because it was the government that was the primary censor under McCarthyism and other institutions of the kind. Today it’s the private sector, the university that’s becoming a source of censorship, the New York Times, obviously the social media platforms.
6:41 Alan Dershowitz: So we really have to think hard about how to strike the appropriate balance between keeping the government out of our free speech and on the other hand opening up the marketplace of ideas as broadly as possible.
6:48 Brian Rose: Yeah, I had a guest on last week that says we have a fourth branch of the government and is these Silicon Valley technology companies that in some ways are dictating to the government when we saw President Trump come out against Twitter and saying, you know, you’re flagging me for producing quote unquote false information. We’re seeing these companies more powerful and now regulating the government or us here in the UK. It’s coming out of some company in Silicon Valley.
7:20 Alan Dershowitz: Well, we’re seeing and we’re now seeing, for example, that there are attacks on Facebook and advertisers are withdrawing from Facebook because they haven’t censored President Trump.
7:27 Brian Rose: Yeah.
7:32 Alan Dershowitz: And the failure to censor people who they disagree with, even if he’s the president of the United States, a man I voted against. I was a Hillary Clinton supporter, but I believe in free speech more than partisan politics. But now Facebook is facing push back from advertisers because it won’t follow the masses and the crowds. And what’s happening today is you have to choose sides. You have to pick sides. Whose side are you on? If you’re on the side of Trump, then fine. If you’re on the side of the Democrats, then you can’t say anything about Trump’s constitutional rights. If you’re on the side of Black Lives Matter, then you can’t criticize them for having in their platform calling Israel a genocidal and apartheid country because you have to pick sides. You can’t have nuance. Nuance has no place in a revolution. And what we’re seeing is an attempt by people on the hard hard left and the hard hard right to use these terrible killings and these legitimate protests as an opening wedge to a revolution in which the first thing revolutionaries do is shut down dissent, shut down opposing points of view.
8:44 Alan Dershowitz: Whether it be the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. You know, interestingly enough, during the American Revolution, the press was not shut down. It was shortly thereafter with the enactment of the Alien and Sedition Acts that President John Adams tried to shut down the dissenting press. So every country has had a history of suppression and trying to abolish dissent and trying to present one point of view which is the truth with a capital T. But there’s no such thing in politics.
9:14 Brian Rose: You’re right. There is no nuance. You have to be on you’re either on our side or you’re on the other side and you’re kind of given the choice. It’s like when you go to a restaurant, do you want red or white wine? And maybe you don’t want any wine, but in this case, you don’t get to choose. Like you said, there’s no nuance and you’re feeling
9:29 Alan Dershowitz: You can even have rosé when you go to a restaurant. But in politics today, there is no rosé. You have to pick the red wine or the white wine. And if you pick the red wine, you can’t even taste the white wine.
9:42 Brian Rose: Alan, you’re a lawyer. I’m curious what you think about this opinion because we’re kind of taking legal action in the US and the UK against some of these platforms. What do you think of the argument that some of these private companies act as public utilities and as such might need to respect the laws of the land? There’s a I think a precedent here in the UK where the London Stock Exchange as a private company was still looked at as a public utility. When I look at YouTube here, there’s ads being run by the NHS. It’s a use it’s a communication tool especially during lockdown. Do you think there is an argument there to regulate these entities as such?
10:14 Alan Dershowitz: Well, the argument doesn’t flow from the fact that you can regulate private industry. You can regulate the airline industry. You can regulate trains. You can regulate a great many private industries because those industries are not protected by the first amendment to our constitution. But the first amendment says congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. So the problem is that when you have people who are exercising the first amendment, they’re not like other regulable industries. So, as I said, this is the hardest, most complex issue of the relationship between law, philosophy. Remember, people think of freedom of speech as the marketplace of ideas, but that’s just not true. And I think John Stuart Mill understood that even back 150 years ago.
11:03 Alan Dershowitz: Just because you don’t have censorship of by the government doesn’t mean you have an open marketplace of ideas, non-government entities can close down the marketplace of ideas when CNN won’t allow me on television to express views different. And when they doctor a tape, which they did of mine, I said in the Senate that a president could be impeached if he committed an illegal quid pro quo. They doctored the tape to have me say a president can’t be impeached even if he commits an illegal quid pro quo. Totally doctored it and then wouldn’t allow me on to correct the record. They scheduled to have me on and then from on high the word came down we don’t want Dershowitz correcting what we did by doctoring his tape. So I’ve been banned from CNN, a private company that shut down the marketplace of ideas. When Netflix presented a one-sided biased series presenting some of the women who Jeffrey Epstein had abused.
12:08 Alan Dershowitz: They excluded the data and evidence that showed that several of these women, including the woman who accused Prince Andrew and accused me, had a long history of lying and had emails that showed that she never met me, never heard of me, that her own lawyer in a tape recorded conversation said she couldn’t have met me and that she was wrong, simply wrong. That was all kept off the air. That’s a form of censorship. And fortunately, we still have available to us legal remedies. So, I am suing Netflix. I am considering suing CNN. You know, I never sued anybody in my life. Almost 82 years old.
12:46 Alan Dershowitz: I spent the first 70 whatever years of my life never suing or being sued. And now I’m going to end my life and career in court. I’m probably going to die arguing a case in front of a jury in favor of free speech. But it’s a good way to go.
13:02 Brian Rose: Yeah. I love this concept of the marketplace of ideas because again the reason I got into this fight is because we live streamed a conversation in this studio and it was the second-largest livestream in the world on April 6th second only to President Trump’s coronavirus you know daily update and it would have gone on to be watched 30 or 35 million times this conversation one of the most watched in history and yet it was banned and deleted 30 minutes later on YouTube. So, no longer was there a marketplace where people could consume what this guy said. He’s a 68-year-old man. Does not incite violence, revolution, destruction of property. He’s got some weird ideas, but there was clearly a demand for them. But now that he’s off a platform like YouTube, now you can’t have access to them. So now you have to find another way around and you have to find our platform. And so I guess like you said, that is censorship, isn’t it? And it removes that option for people.
13:53 Alan Dershowitz: Of course it’s censorship. And it’s censorship that goes in one direction. You know, if an institution has a single standard on which it will allow programs to be shown on its platform, that would be one thing. But clearly, there is no single standard. It’s very selective and it’s applied very differently to the right and to the left and to different kinds of speech. And so what we have is the worst elements of censorship. It’s not across the board censorship. It’s selective based on content. And that’s precisely what the concept of the marketplace of ideas is supposed to prevent. But it’s not working in the United States today. It’s not working well all over the world because the United States dominates social media and what happens in the United States spreads all over the world. We complain when China and appropriately so limits access of its citizens to anti-Chinese information, but we should be complaining as well when social media imposes biased restrictions based on standardless criteria.
15:06 Alan Dershowitz: And we’re not complaining loudly enough because we’re the victims. We’re entitled to hear different points of view. I’m sure I would have disagreed fundamentally with the content of what was on your show, but that’s my right to disagree, but I have to be able to hear it first before I disagree with it. Now, if you want to impose standards, I call it the circle of civility, exactly the same standards on all sides. Well, we can have an argument discussion about that. I’d probably be opposed to it because I’d rather hear everything, but at least you could say we’re applying a single standard. Today we have the worst elements of censorship. That is the marketplace of idea is closed and it’s closed selectively.
15:52 Brian Rose: You know, we’ve never seen some of these monopolies like this before. I mean, we saw it in the past with railroads and gas and steel, but this is like a monopoly or an information monopoly where it pervades all aspects of our life and our digital identity and our regular identity. For a lot of people, especially young people, it’s hard to know where one stops on the other ends. And sometimes you don’t even know you’re in an information war. You don’t know that maybe your opinions are being formulated by someone else. It’s a strange time right now.
16:22 Alan Dershowitz: And we thought that the digital age would end that. We thought that, you know, when 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there were seven or eight TV channels that was a monopoly. And today when you can have thousands of platforms, it would end the kind of control that a handful of people had on information. But it’s had exactly the opposite result. What we see is even though there are many many platforms, they are controlled by a few handfuls of major major private social networks and they control the flow of information and I think again we are the victims. We the public that should be able to hear anything we want to hear and form our own opinions. In the end it’s a sense of distrust. They don’t trust us to come to the right conclusions.
17:19 Alan Dershowitz: That’s what’s going on university campuses today. I’m a moderate centrist liberal and I can’t speak on a university campus today without being threatened with violence. Universities don’t invite me mostly because they don’t want the violence. So, might as well invite somebody who’s less controversial. And so, the students actually don’t hear conflicting points of view. And they don’t want to hear conflicting points of view because they feel very comfortable hearing from their professors the truth as they want it to be heard without any nuance or without any conflicting views.
18:01 Brian Rose: Do you ever wonder how we got here Alan from where the experience you had as an undergrad, you know, at Yale or even at Harvard, how we got to this point? I mean, this must be such a different atmosphere than when you went to school and when I went to school. How did we get here?
18:10 Alan Dershowitz: Very different. Look, I grew up in the streets of Brooklyn. I didn’t go to Yale or Harvard. I went to Brooklyn College. Got into college in the skin of my teeth. I came from a poor family. We couldn’t afford, you know, fancy Ivy League schools. But where I went to school, there were debates all over the place. Everybody argued with everybody. The president of the university tried to ban communist speakers from speaking on campus. So, they would speak on the street corners and we would go and listen. I hated communism. I thought it was appalling. I hated Stalin. And I hated, you know, anything that had to do with communism or fascism, but I always went and tried to hear opposing point of view. There was a little bookstore in my neighborhood, run by a Trotskyite, and my parents said, “You can’t go to that bookstore.
19:01 Alan Dershowitz: It’s a communist store. They’ll probably take your picture and you’ll have a permanent record.” Of course, we all snuck into the store because we wanted to read what was banned. Anything that’s banned, you want to read. Today, you can’t get access to material that’s banned. You can try to flip the channels, but you don’t really find dissenting views as much as you did when I was growing up. You know, in the early days of America, people like Thomas Paine would be able to stand on street corners and hand out for a penny or even free a one-page handprinted leaflet. Today that’s not the way in which we get information. And so mind control is exercised not by the government as much as it is by by private companies.
19:46 Brian Rose: Have you ever thought if you know say you were a younger man, say you were in your late 20s and you got a presidential appointment to solve this problem, you got 20 years and whatever you want, whatever powers you want, have you ever thought about how you might solve it? Is it solvable? Is it so complex?
20:03 Alan Dershowitz: It’s very complex. It’s very complex and it requires striking a balance between not giving the government too much power and giving it too little power. You know, it’s so interesting. Even liberals and conservatives are very ambivalent about the power of government. You know, libertarians argue you should have less government power, less government control. But then some libertarians say, but when it comes to the social media, maybe the government should have more power to regulate the social media. You know, there are very few principled people in the world, principled libertarians, who will allow their libertarianism even to hurt their political outcomes. The same thing is true of free speech. The most common approach to free speech is free speech for me, but not for thee. Due process for me, but not for thee. My god, if a woman accuses you of doing anything wrong sexually, why do you need due process? Of course, women always tell the truth, and men who deny what women are saying always lie. There must be a gene that’s associated with gender and lying and telling the truth.
21:06 Alan Dershowitz: Why do we need due process? Why do we need free speech? We know what the truth is. We know you did it. We know you’re innocent. We know you’re a bad president. We know you’re a good president. We don’t need debate. We don’t need discourse. That’s the world we’re moving into. It’s not 1984. It’s not Brave New World because even those great authors could not have anticipated the pervasiveness of the censorship that we’re experiencing today.
21:37 Brian Rose: And you’re making reference to the Me Too movement a little bit there.
21:37 Alan Dershowitz: Yes. The Me Too movement is me, but not you. Me too, but not you. I mean, I’d like to start a movement of men who have been falsely accused. Me, too. Yeah. I’ve been falsely accused by a woman I never met and I have evidence to prove it. But you wouldn’t know that by watching Netflix. You’ll learn it when Netflix has to stand in court with their hand on a Bible and has to swear under oath and explain why they didn’t present the truth to their viewers. But until that happens, people just believe what they see on Netflix and don’t understand that what they’re seeing is a censored version of the truth.
22:11 Brian Rose: How frustrating is that for you, Alan, to sit down and do those interviews with Netflix, expecting them to give you know, a non-biased version or a non-edited version, and then to see it come out and just be like, “Oh my gosh, this is the last thing I expected in my 80s to happen, and now I got to go sue you.” What’s that like?
22:36 Alan Dershowitz: Well, no. I mean, it’s it is surprising because, you know, the woman who came to me and made a contract with me, an oral contract in front of my wife and witnesses saying that she would use this material and then just broke her promise, lied through her teeth, and refused to put the material on the air because it affected their narrative. Their narrative is women told the truth. And I had proof that at least two of the women had lied pervasively about you know having sex with Ehud Barak and George Mitchell and Bill Richardson and you name it and having sex tapes of Hillary Clinton. Just lie lie lie lie lie. But you wouldn’t know that if you watched Netflix and so they’re going to have to bear the consequences of that in the courts of law.
23:23 Brian Rose: And the Me Too movement kind of set that up where like you said there’s no due process. Free speech but not for you. So it kind of gives us the lens to look at these things and say, “Oh, it must be true because we’re used to that always being true.”
23:31 Alan Dershowitz: And it’s mostly true. And the point it’s very persuasive when you get things that are mostly true, and I think most women who are victims of sexual abuse tell the truth about it. And most men who are accused are probably being truthfully accused, but most is not enough for due process. Better 10 guilty go free than one innocent be wrongly confined goes back to Blackstone and to the founders of the American Constitution. But on the Me Too movement, it’s better 10 innocent people be falsely accused than even one guilty person be falsely acquitted. They turned the doctrine on its head because it’s a political movement. And beware of rabid political movements. Be skeptical.
24:24 Alan Dershowitz: Whether it be a Black Lives Matter, whether it be a Me Too, all these movements that do good. You know, it was Eric Hoffer, the great philosopher who once said, “Always every cause starts as a movement, then it becomes a business and ultimately a racket.” And now we’re seeing the movement from business to racket. We’re seeing Me Too being turned into a racket. A racket by abusive lawyers and women who are lying for money. I think we’re seeing Black Lives Matter at the extremes. We’ll see it soon turned into an extortion racket.
25:02 Alan Dershowitz: You don’t want your store burned down. Hey, there are ways of dealing with that. Pay me money. That has happened to every movement. Every good movement, the union movement, every good movement has moved from cause to business to racket. And our job is to prevent that, to keep it a movement, to keep it a cause and to make sure it doesn’t get hijacked for purposes that are not relevant to the core of the movement.
25:28 Brian Rose: What’s your read on the events in the US in the last two weeks from the protests to the riots to you know the calls for the defunding of the police? You mentioned a couple things there but what is your view overall?
25:36 Alan Dershowitz: My view overall of course is that defunding the police is a revolutionary act. It’s designed to make sure that there is no way to control the violence of revolutionaries. It’s a step toward revolution and the first victims will be poor people and particularly people of color who need the protection of the police. Those of us who have some wealth will hire private guards. We’re not going to need the police. I don’t generally need the police. But the people who need the police will be denied the protection. Are you going to now the next defund the fire department because there have been some racist people in the fire department? Are we going to defund the army? Because people in the army have sometimes shot innocent civilians. No, you increase the funding so that you get better training.
26:29 Alan Dershowitz: You get make sure that the police officers or anybody else who violates the rules are disciplined or fired. You need money to do that. Defunding is absurd. Absurd on its face. And obviously the act of just people who want to turn us into a violent revolution and we have to stop that. Those of us in the middle, those of us in the center who want to see a just society and non-racist society and non-violent society have to increase the funding of police and other organizations that protect us. In my experience, the vast vast majority of policemen, FBI agents are wonderful people who just want to go home to their families at night and be safe and help protect us from violent criminals. We should not be on the side of the criminals.
27:14 Alan Dershowitz: I have a job where I sometimes have to be on the side of the criminals. I’m appointed by courts in murder cases, in death penalty cases to defend people, some of whom are guilty, some of whom are innocent. That’s my job. But even when I do my job, I side generally with law enforcement. I side generally with those who were trying to keep us safe.
27:34 Brian Rose: And what about the fact that we’ve seen the destruction of property and in some ways I don’t know it feels like they’re being allowed to kind of vent their anger or I don’t know politicians and police seem to be a little more hands-off in this. What do you see there? And does that link back to the Black Lives Matter movement? And it feels like people are I don’t know using people’s emotions or co-opting this for some other gain this revolution you’re talking about.
27:51 Alan Dershowitz: Well, I think there are some there are most of the people who are involved in protests are there for legitimate reasons. There’s been too much police violence against too many African-American, particularly men, but sometimes women, and that has to stop, and we have the right to protest that. That’s a core part of free speech. Destroying property is not protected by the Constitution. Throwing Molotov cocktails into a police car, as apparently two young lawyers did recently in New York, is not protected by the Constitution. And that has to be stopped by by the police. So again, nuance. Yes, protect every legitimate demonstrator. I would even give them a little room if they want to, for example, walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and stop traffic for half an hour. Okay, that’s an act of civil disobedience.
28:45 Alan Dershowitz: It’s probably technically illegal, but if I were a police commissioner or a mayor, I don’t think I would intrude to try to stop that. But once they start attacking property particularly when they select the property for example in Los Angeles there were graffiti on the walls of synagogues free Palestine f and then you can fill it in the Jews or Israel or attacking neighborhoods that are ethnic those things have to stop. Violence against individuals is the worst form of violence, but we also have to protect property.
29:21 Brian Rose: Alan, there’s a documentary on Netflix called LA 92, and I’ve been watching it recently, and it kind of talked about the LA riots that came after, you know, the Rodney King verdict, and then they flash back to the Watts riots in ’65. And, you know, I wondered, you know, there’s obviously a pattern here. Will does this end? Does this continue? Do you think we’ll see reforms? What do you see?
29:40 Alan Dershowitz: I see reforms. I hope there are reforms. I hope that police officers particularly of the kind represented by the main defendant in the Minneapolis case are better screened and not allowed access to force. Training has to abolish choke holds and knees on necks and all of that. We need to begin to use far less lethal methods of arrest. By the way, we shouldn’t even be arresting people for passing $20 counterfeit bills. We should be giving them a summons, taking their driver’s license if they have it, telling them they have to appear in court. But there’s no reason for $20 to have to handcuff somebody, hold them down on the ground, and put them in a police car.
30:28 Alan Dershowitz: So, I think lots of reforms are overdue, and we’re going to see lots of changes in our society as a result of the coronavirus. We’re going to start with the smallest things. I’ll probably never shake another person’s hand in my life. Handshaking I think is over. The elbow is coming in, no more hugging. I think zoom conferences less travel. You know we learn from experience. I wrote a book called Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the origins of rights in which I argue and I think persuasively that most of our rights grow out of a recognition of wrongs that we’ve experienced over time.
31:07 Alan Dershowitz: Freedom of speech grows out of the experience we’ve had with censorship. Racial equality grows out of the experience we had with slavery. Human rights law grow out of the genocide of the 1930s and 1940s. So, I think we learn from experience. Experience is the basis. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “The life of the law is not logic. It’s experience.” And I think we’re learning a lot from the coronavirus. The first piece I wrote about it was believe science but be skeptical of scientists. And we saw scientists made so many mistakes. In the beginning they said masks don’t work. In the beginning they said coronavirus is not transmitted by aerosol or by air only by touching.
31:47 Alan Dershowitz: Now we’re having debates about people who are non-symptomatic and how contagious they really are. You know, as a person with a family, I resolve all doubts in favor of caution. But that we need to have the information and we need to have information that we can trust. And we live in a society now where we can’t trust. There are so few people out there we can trust. I remember when Walter Cronkite was the major deliverer of the news and he looked you in the eye like your great wonderful uncle and when he said something, we believed him. We trusted him. I can’t think of people today in our society who invoke that sense of trust and I hope we can restore that someday.
32:34 Brian Rose: Yeah, every piece of information seems to have an agenda and you can’t always read what the agenda is. So, it’s everything’s kind of tainted. How do you rate the world and the various government entities and the three-letter organizations on the last 90 days of the pandemic and lockdown? What do you see, Alan?
32:50 Alan Dershowitz: Well, I think there’s a tremendous variation. I think Dr. Fauci has done a very very good job. He’s been honest and honorable. Has he been perfect? No, of course not. And let me give you an example of a of a problem, a good problem. So, in the beginning, they were telling us not to wear masks. Why? Because there was a shortage of masks for health care workers. But they weren’t honest with us. They didn’t say don’t buy masks even though they will help you and protect you because it’s more important that people who are doctors and nurses have the masks. That would have actually affected me. I wouldn’t have bought a mask. I would have made one but not bought one that would keep it from somebody who was in the public health or in private health in any kind of health care.
33:37 Alan Dershowitz: But they didn’t do that. Instead, in order to achieve a good result, not having people buy the masks for private use, they didn’t tell us the truth. They said masks don’t work. Now, my instinct just as a human being is, of course, masks work. They may not work perfectly, but they work better than no masks. And so, I’m going to wear a mask. And I did. And yet they had a good reason for deceiving us. But I think once you deceive the citizens, you’ve lost their trust. And so, I think it was a serious mistake to do that. So, you know, we’re living through very dangerous times of distrust, of picking sides, of denial of free speech, and it’s very very worrisome.
34:21 Brian Rose: Talk to me about vaccines because you’ve come out and just talked about the legality of potentially a government-mandated vaccine. What are your thoughts on the science? I know you’ve got a debate coming up with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who’s been on this show. I think that’s going to be fascinating. I’m really looking forward to that. That typically nobody wants to debate the not antivaxers, they hate that term, Alan, but the people that question the vaccine. So, I’m glad you’re doing that. What do you see from, you know, the legal sense of what a vaccine might mean for us and can we be forced to take one? What are your thoughts?
34:58 Alan Dershowitz: I think there are three issues. Number one, constitutionally in the United States, can the government compel you to take a vaccine? That’s e a legal issue, a constitutional issue. And there is a fairly clear answer to that. The answer is yes. There’s a Supreme Court decision based on the smallpox vaccine that said the government has the right. If they can draft you in the army and make you die for your country, they can make you take a vaccine. The vaccine is not to protect you. It’s to protect others. There is no right to be a typhoid Mary. So constitutionally the issue is settled. Next question is scientifically what are the arguments for and against vaccines? And the third argument which is the most important is we must allow people whether they call themselves antivaxers or critics or skeptics, we must allow them to have their day in the court of public opinion.
35:49 Alan Dershowitz: We cannot shut them down. Which is why I am deliberately agreeing to debate Bobby Kennedy with whom I know I will end up disagreeing. But I want his view heard. I want his people to hear my view and I want my people to hear his view. And the idea of shutting down any view on this very important subject a is going to backfire because unless people are allowed to hear all points of view, they’re going to say, “No, I’m not going to take a vaccine.” If they hear all points of view, maybe the scientists can persuade them to voluntarily take the vaccine. But in the end, the government will have the power to do it if legislation is passed. Now, you got to get past legislation, too. Governor can’t make you do it. A mayor can’t make you do it.
36:39 Alan Dershowitz: Dr. Fauci can’t make you do it. Only a legitimate legislature can pass a law doing it. Now, some states don’t compel ordinary vaccinations, but they say you can’t send your kid to public school unless he or she is vaccinated. That’s another way of compelling it. People who homeschool don’t have to do it. Anybody who wants to stay out of the public surely should have the right not to be vaccinated if they’re not going to offer anybody contagion. I put it this way once. You have a constitutional right to inhale a cigarette. That’s your own lungs. But you have no constitutional right to exhale it into my face. And the right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose and the right to infect me ends at the tip of my nose. So if they developed a vaccine to prevent cancer or heart disease, none of us would have to take it.
37:28 Alan Dershowitz: That’s a choice we all have whether to live or die or to take risks for our own health. But if the vaccine is designed to give her immunity and to protect others, then the constitutional issue becomes a much more compelling one for compulsion. But look, let’s continue to debate these issues. I want never the debate to stop. I want the debate to go on and I don’t care about those who say, “Well, if you allow them to debate it, maybe people won’t get vaccinated.” That’s the cost of free speech. People will make decisions you don’t like, and that’s what we have to endure if we want free speech.
37:59 Brian Rose: Well, I couldn’t agree with you more and I’m so happy that you’re going to debate Bobby because like you said, it’s important that your people hear his point of view and his people hear your point of view. And Alan, I’m going to try to put the majority of this conversation on YouTube. But I’ll tell you right now, because we’re talking about vaccines, I will be censored. If I upload a piece of content to YouTube, I actually have to tick a box that says it’s vaccine related because that way they’ll extra check it. And I’m in such a place with that platform right now that I’ve been told quite frankly that I am one video away from being completely deplatformed. And for me that’s 9 years, 8,000 videos, a quarter billion views.
38:44 Brian Rose: So I’m probably not going to. And so I’m being censored as we speak now, which means people won’t hear your point of view, which mean there’s no debate. So that’s being stopped by some pretty big forces out there. And it’s I can’t imagine that YouTube would censor my point of view on vaccines, but since it’s being promoted by you, maybe.
39:02 Alan Dershowitz: So look, we have another experience. There is a commentator who did a series of videos on Israel and I was asked to do a two-minute or three minute thing on the legal basis for Israel’s right to exist. And it was a kind of dry dull kind of legalistic I don’t think I’m ever dull but legalistic analysis of how Israel came into being through the Balfour Declaration through the various treaties of the League of Nations, the United Nations, all of that. And in order to see that, you had to check off certain things and indicate you were not a child. In other words, my presentation on Israel was apparently restricted to adults. And I can’t imagine why I didn’t say anything that a 15 or 16 or 17 year old shouldn’t want to watch about a controversial political issue involving Israel. And I spoke to somebody at YouTube about it and there’s a lawsuit now being raised by Dennis Prager who ran the platform. And we haven’t gotten a particularly satisfactory answer. We were told it was done by an algorithm, but algorithms can censor too. Algorithms are written by individuals and human beings. So, I would like to see some critique of this approach and I want my views on vaccines which are nuanced and centrist to be able to be heard by people who want to watch it and that they shouldn’t be censored.
40:40 Brian Rose: Yeah. And I appreciate you saying this and it’s great to hear someone talk about these things. You know, and I think people will appreciate it. Again, you said something earlier. It’s trusting the science. Maybe not the scientists from my conversations, although they’re brief with Bobby so far, is that, you know, I went to MIT down the road from where you were at Harvard and that the science of a vaccine is a beautiful thing. The application and practicality of what seems to go on in the industry and the lack of liability and some of the things, that’s what worries me more. And when you say if it’s a proven vaccine, then I’m wondering where do the facts come and if that information is somehow tainted by a pharmaceutical company’s profit or by a government’s need to be the first company to have the vaccine. And that’s where I worry and that’s when I worry about that.
41:27 Alan Dershowitz: These are all legitimate questions that should be debated in public and shouldn’t be censored. You know, the government has no right to make the following statement. Look, we want everybody to take vaccines. That’s right. That’s good. We want every therefore we’re going to deny them information that might incline them not to take the vaccine. That is not a permissible government function to deny you the information that will produce a result the government doesn’t like. The government has to give you all has to allow you to get all the information from whatever sources there are and have you make up your own mind. Then they can perhaps enforce it and force you to have the vaccine and maybe it’ll make their life more difficult. But that’s what freedom of speech is all about.
42:11 Alan Dershowitz: Remember, it starts with wars. The leading case, United States v. Schenck involves the government didn’t want people who were about to be drafted into the army or volunteer to serve in the First World War. The government didn’t want them to know that there was some people who thought this was Wall Street’s war. It was an unfair war because it might affect whether they joined the army or not. And that was an impermissible form of censorship. Censorship won in that case, but justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and others wrote resounding dissents. Which have become basically the law today. The government can’t keep information from you just because they don’t want you to act on that information even if the government’s purposes are good purposes, legitimate purposes. So, I’m completely in favor of the open marketplace of ideas, even when the censorship is against ideas that I myself find appalling.
43:09 Alan Dershowitz: I defended the rights of Nazis to march in a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie, Illinois with Holocaust survivors. I can’t imagine anything more obscene than neo-Nazis carrying signs about putting Jews in the gas chambers in a community of survivors. And yet I defended the rights of those Nazis to do that because I don’t want to give the government the power to tell people what they can say and other people what they can hear.
43:37 Brian Rose: When did you do that? What year was that, Alan?
43:39 Alan Dershowitz: In the 1970s and I’ve continued to do that. I defended a neo-Nazi years later in the 1980s and you know will continue to do that. I have defended the rights of anti-Israel PLO speakers to speak on the Harvard campus. I defended the rights of Palestinian students to put the Palestinian flag up when Yasser Arafat died. I am constantly defending the rights of people who I fundamentally disagree with because I elevate principle over partisanship.
44:11 Brian Rose: You know, it’s great you mentioned this now because I told a few people I’m having Alan Dershowitz on and I said he’s the guy that defended O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson and Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein and they all get a funny face. They get a funny look in their face. Alan, I’m sure you’ve seen it before where they’re judging you by your association with these people that obviously they’ve tried in their own mind. I guess this is something you’ve gotten your entire career. How do you react to that? How do you try to explain why maybe that is the wrong way to try to understand what you do?
44:41 Alan Dershowitz: Well, first of all, I take them on their own terms. All right, you want identify me with my clients. Let’s talk about who my clients are. I represented Natan Sharansky, who was a prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union, and I did it for free. I defended many other prisoners of conscience around the world. I defended women who have been abused by their husbands, women who have been locked up in mental hospitals. I defended a young girl who was taken away from her mother because her mother was a lesbian. I have defended the widest range of people. Most of my clients are obscure. Half of my cases are pro bono. So, first judge me by my entire career, not by the six people who you have heard of and who you have demonized. But then let’s focus on the six people who all of whom you think are terrible people. I’m proud of the fact that I defended them and will continue to defend the most hated people in the world. That’s my job. John Adams, who was a patriot during the runup to the American Revolution, defended the people at the Boston Massacre, who murdered American civilians.
45:42 Alan Dershowitz: Abraham Lincoln defended murderers and robbers and horrible people. Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, every American lawyer of note has defended people who people fundamentally disagree with. During McCarthyism, if you defended a communist, you were a communist. That’s McCarthyism. And I will continue. You know, people hate me when I defend people who they think are guilty until it’s their own son or their own nephew. And then I get a call on the phone saying, “Oh my god, my son was picked up with cocaine, with marijuana.
46:19 Alan Dershowitz: He’s been accused of rape. He’s been accused of this. Please, please, please defend him.” They don’t say he’s innocent. They say, “We want you to defend him whether he’s innocent or guilty.” So, I’m going to continue to do what I’ve done all of my life. I go back to the Bible with Abraham standing up for the sinners of Sodom and saying to God in the book of Genesis, “How dare you, God, the judge of all the world, not himself do justice, what if there are 50 people who are righteous in the city of Sodom? Would you destroy the whole city on their behalf?” And so I think of myself as trying to follow the lead of great people who have been vilified for defending bad people. And that’s the job of a lawyer. It’s the job of a doctor. It’s the job of a priest, a minister, a rabbi. A priest won’t throw somebody out of confession because the person is seeking salvation having done terrible, terrible things.
47:16 Alan Dershowitz: He has a job to do. I have a job to do. It’s a very important job and I’m going to continue to do it as long as the good Lord gives me the power to do it.
47:24 Brian Rose: Do you have any disciplined ways that you behave when you walk in for the first time to meet an O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, Harvey Weinstein, a Jeff Epstein, a Mike Tyson, when you go in there and to try to remain objective to try to be the best lawyer possible? Are there certain things you do or don’t do? Do you ask them if they did it?
47:40 Alan Dershowitz: You know, here’s the way I start the meeting. I said, “Look, you’ve heard my reputation. Don’t believe it. I’m not a miracle worker. I may be able to help you. I’m going to work very hard, but I can’t promise you a good result. I’ve had good results in my career. I’ve had bad results in my career. I’ve never lost anybody to death row, but I came awfully close with two young boys who were innocent and who came very close to being executed. So, I make you no promises except hard work. I’m not going to ask you whether you did it or not because I know you’re going to tell me you didn’t do it. Why should we start a relationship with you feeling that you have to maybe lie to me? I will not let you go on the witness stand if you’re going to lie.
48:28 Alan Dershowitz: I will not represent you if you ever do anything again. I you get me once, not twice. I don’t represent people who are in the business of committing crimes who were going to go out and do it repeatedly. But I will use every legal, ethical, factual issue at my disposal to get you either the best deal possible or an acquittal if I can. And you know, in many of my cases, I’ve gotten acquittals. In other cases, I’ve gotten reversals on appeal. In other cases, I’ve made plea bargains. In the Jeffrey Epstein case, we made a plea bargain. People didn’t like the plea bargain. Don’t blame me. Blame the prosecutor.
49:07 Alan Dershowitz: But I got the best plea bargain I could. That’s my job. If I had gotten a worse plea bargain, I would have engaged in malpractice. My job is to get the best deal I can for my client. And I will never turn down a case because you think my client is guilty. That happens in the Soviet Union and in Syria and Iran and China. A lawyer can’t represent somebody who the government thinks is guilty. In America and England, you can. And we do. And a lot of this tradition comes from British barristers who represented people who were very unpopular. And I that’s my job and I’m very proud of the job I’ve done.
49:45 Brian Rose: So I’m watching or just finished watching the 10-part series The People v. O.J. Simpson on Netflix, another show that you’re on as well. And there’s a point in there where you’re telling I think a bunch of students at Harvard and maybe it’s fictionalized that the story is very important in the courtroom and outside the courtroom. First of all, was that true? And second of all, what do you remember most about that case? I was a young man, so I’m reliving it. I was in Chicago. I remember when the verdict was read and I remember what the room did. What do you remember most about that trial?
50:18 Alan Dershowitz: Well, first of all, the series is a total distortion. They deliberately, willfully left out the major reason that O.J. Simpson got acquitted. If you saw the series, you won’t remember this because it wasn’t in it. What happened is they found a sock and the sock had not only the blood of O.J. Simpson, but it also had the blood of the victim on it. What a couldn’t have a better piece of evidence. The problem is it was a contrived manufactured piece of evidence. We were able to prove that not only the sock, the blood in the sock had a chemical in it called EDTA. It’s a chemical that’s not found in the human body. It’s an anti-coagulant. It’s found in test tubes. We were able to prove that the blood was poured by officer Vannatter onto the sock as it was lying flat on a table. It didn’t hit O.J. Simpson’s legs as he was running through the bloody scene.
51:09 Alan Dershowitz: Then we were also able to prove by blood splatter evidence that in fact it had four mirror images on all four sides of the sock. The same blood pattern on all four sides of the sock. That couldn’t have happened if he had been wearing it while it was splattered with blood. It could only happen if the sock were laying flat. And as a result of that, every single juror, every single one of them concluded that the police had planted a piece of false evidence against him. But you wouldn’t know that watching the series because, as is commonly done on these series, they left out the most important thing because it didn’t help their narrative.
51:47 Alan Dershowitz: They used a book by by an author and the author had deliberately and willfully left this fact out although he was there and he saw and interviewed jurors afterward and they told why they acquitted him and it was the sock. And yet they deliberately left it out because it would interfere with the flow of their narrative which is he was guilty and he was acquitted because black jurors engaged in racism in favor of a black defendant. That was the narrative and they weren’t going to let the facts get in the way of that.
52:20 Brian Rose: Wow. What’s the case that you remember the most? What’s the moment that you remember the most or the big ones in your career?
52:27 Alan Dershowitz: No question about it. And it’s when I represented Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky, a Soviet dissident approximately my age. You know there but for the grace of God could have been me. Our grandparents great grandparents grew up in the same part of the Pale of Settlement. My parents made a left turn and came to America. His parents made a right turn and went to Russia. He was prosecuted for being a dissident. I spent eight years along with Irwin Cotler, a great lawyer from Canada defending him and finally when he walked over the Glienicke Bridge, a free man, and a few days later whispered in my ear the Hebrew words matir asurim, “Blessed are those who free the imprisoned,” which comes from a prayer. That was the greatest legal moment of my life. I don’t usually cry, but I had tears flowing down my eyes.
53:15 Alan Dershowitz: It was the biggest fee I ever made in a case. Of course, he didn’t pay me. I did it for free. But to get that blessing from a man whose life I had helped to save by freeing him from an unjust imprisonment, that was the highlight of my legal career.
53:33 Brian Rose: Wow, that’s powerful. And what did you learn from the Trump impeachment hearing about politics, about media censorship? What did you learn from that whole experience?
53:40 Alan Dershowitz: Well, CNN of course totally censored me. I had said clearly on the floor of the Senate that if a president does a quid pro quo that’s illegal, he can be impeached. They doctored the tape, took out the word illegal and had me saying that a president can’t be impeached. Even if he commits a quid pro quo that was illegal, totally distorting what I said. And I may be suing them. Another one of my collective lawsuits because they totally distorted what I said. Then they had people on the air saying Dershowitz says that a president can do anything he wants, even kill his opponent, even tamper with a voting machine, do anything illegal when I had said exactly the opposite. My exact words were if he does anything illegal, anything anything that violates the law, he could be impeached. So it taught me a lot about the medium.
54:32 Alan Dershowitz: It taught me a lot about politicians. You know, all the votes were partisan votes, pretty much along partisan lines. And it taught me that the framers of the Constitution were wise in making it very difficult to impeach and remove an elected president.
54:48 Brian Rose: Right now, Alan, there are some 20-something-year-olds that are watching us from around the world that want to grow up and one day be like Alan Dershowitz. And if they do, what advice would you give to them if they want to follow a storied career like yours? What do they need to focus on? What do they need to not focus on? What’s the secret to your success?
55:06 Alan Dershowitz: Well, first of all, you have to develop a very very thick skin because you say success. I’m a pariah in many parts of the United States. I live for the summer on Martha’s Vineyard. I have no problem socially distancing on Martha’s Vineyard because nobody wants to speak to me or be seen in my company because Martha’s Vineyard is a very lefty place. And the fact that I defended the president of the United States on the floor of the Senate from an improper impeachment charge makes me a pariah. So, we’ve lost friends. These are people whose kids I helped get into college, kids I helped bail out of prison, fathers I represented pro bono, people I did favors for won’t talk to me because they didn’t like what I did and on behalf of President Trump’s constitutional right. So, you have to develop a thick skin. You have to put principle over partisanship and even over friendship. Of course, it taught me who my real friends are and they are much fewer than I thought on Martha’s Vineyard and other places. But that’s the most important thing.
56:07 Alan Dershowitz: If you’re willing to put principle over partisanship, principle over personal issues, I think you can become a very zealous defender of individual rights both in the marketplace and in the courts of law. But if you’re going to kowtow to pressures, if you’re going to give in to the mob, you’ll never be able to do what I’ve tried to do over these many years. I’m very proud of my career. I have never violated an ethical rule. I’ve never done anything to my knowledge illegally and yet I’ve been accused of having sex with a woman I never met all because of the role I played in defending and making a deal for Jeffrey Epstein. So you have to be prepared to do that. I wouldn’t recommend it for most people.
56:53 Alan Dershowitz: Most people come to me and say we want to be like you. I say don’t you know become a commercial lawyer. Do wills in estates. When you represent people in wills and estates they’re dead so they don’t come back and argue with you. It’s a much easier life. But if you want to be in the vortex of the age, it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said you live the passions of your times. And I have certainly lived the passions of my times. I’ve been part of it. I’ve been victimized by them and I’m continuing to fight back. The only thing I fear in life is that I won’t be strong enough to fight all of my battles to completion because I’m almost 82 years old. So, I walk every day five or six miles. I try to stay healthy. I want to be able to have the strength to fight back against the enemies of justice, the enemies of fairness, the enemies of due process.
57:45 Brian Rose: Was it always the plan to be this well-known? You got to be the most famous attorney in the world. Or was something was it Claus von Bülow that really got you in the public eye? And was it something that just happened? Or is this what happens when you defend the people that other people don’t want to defend?
58:01 Alan Dershowitz: Oh, totally unplanned. My mother had an idea for me. I was the first person in my family to go to college. And my mother thought I would live in Brooklyn and have a little street corner law store in which I sold insurance. My father said I had to be a notary public as I probably wouldn’t make a living doing law. At least that way I can get 25 cents for every document I notarized. So I had no idea that I’d ever be well known or as controversial as I have. The thing that surprised me most is how controversial I am. Just I don’t see myself as controversial. You know, in my family, I’m a pushover.
58:38 Alan Dershowitz: I never win an argument. My wife prevails, my children prevail. I’m the easiest person to get along with. I’ve never fired a staff member. I’ve never raised my voice to a secretary or a staff member. I’m a pussycat. I’m very, very easy to get along with. And yet in the media, I’m this controversial guy who was always putting my finger in people’s face. The Boston Globe put it this way. They said, “If he’s not getting into your face, it’s as if he’s not doing his job.” You know, this is that’s what I do, who I am. I was a very successful teacher. Students love me. They gave me very high ratings.
59:17 Alan Dershowitz: There were always a number of students, the anti-Israel students, the Me Too type students who didn’t like my due process approach or my free speech approach. But in general, we had long long waiting lists. President Obama is still mad at me because he was not allowed in my class on legal ethics. He tried to get in twice, but he was excluded by the computer because I would have 500 or 600 students apply for 50 spaces in my class. So you know I did something right as a teacher and I think of myself still as a teacher. I teach on your program. I teach on other programs. I try to stimulate thinking and stimulate debate and that’s what I love doing.
59:58 Brian Rose: And Israel, why are you so passionate about Israel? What do most people not understand about Israel?
1:00:03 Alan Dershowitz: Well, I grew up during the time that Israel was established. I was 10 years old in 1948. And I remember Israel’s fighting for its survival. I remember the Holocaust and how many friends of mine lost relatives, including myself, losing relatives and how important it was for the Jewish people to have a state of their own. I favor the two-state solution. I was never a supporter of the occupation or civilian settlements on the West Bank. I think of myself as a moderate. And yet, because I support Israel and its right to exist as a democracy, I’m regarded as a pariah by people on the hard hard left. But and I’ve advised Israeli prime ministers on the left and the right Rabin and Barak and currently Netanyahu and Olmert and I’ve advised American presidents Obama and Trump and Bush and Clinton on Israel related matters. And I’m very proud of what I’ve tried to do and the role I’ve played. But I care deeply about Israel because sur the survival of a democracy of a Jewish democracy in the Middle East is critically important to fairness in the world. I also want to see a Palestinian state.
1:01:19 Alan Dershowitz: I want to see the Palestinians thriving and living peacefully and living productively. My experience with Palestinians, the ones I know are wonderful, wonderful people who want peace and want families and want to start up companies and want to emulate what they see among Israelis on the other side of the of the border. So, I’m a big admirer, supporter of peace. I consulted with this administration on the peace plan. I’ve consulted with other administrations starting in 1967. I started consulting with the United States government on peace plans for Israel and I hope I’ll continue to do that.
1:01:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, I was there for the first time a few years ago. We filmed a documentary movie there and I had an incredible time, incredible experience in Tel Aviv and went to Jerusalem and yeah, it was really eye opening and I hope we can figure things out over there for both sides. Just want to finish on the book. Tell us about the book. Why write another book now? It must take time to write these things. Obviously, I guess it’s a it’s a chronicle of your experiences recently of, you know, wanting to leave the left but not wanting to go to the right. What’s it all about and when can we get it?
1:02:30 Alan Dershowitz: Well, look, I’ve written four books in the last year and a half. I wrote a book called Defending Israel about a year or so ago. Then I wrote the Trump book The Case Against Impeaching Trump. And then I wrote a book called Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of Me Too, which lays out all the evidence of my innocence and the dangers of denial of due process. And now I’ve written this new book, The Case for Liberalism in an Age of Extremism, where I lay out the arguments against the extremes on both sides. What I love to do more than anything is I don’t type. I don’t use a computer. I sit with a yellow pad and a ballpoint pen and I write every single day. I try to write about 3,000 words a day, which means I come close to writing a million words a year. It’s the great joy of my life. People see me as, you know, being on TV or defending people, but writing in solitude is what I love to do. I’m writing a new book now called The Preventive State about how the state is government is moving much more into the area of prevention than reaction and the pros and cons of that and I’ve written I think 43 books my goal is 50 if I can make it before my hand stops writing I right now the biggest barrier to writing is my fingers my hand gets tired and I don’t do very well dictating and I don’t know how to use a computer. So if my fingers remain agile, I will write more books. The newest book I think is something that people who see themselves as supporting a centrist regime, you know, the old debates I used to have with Bill Buckley, a centrist conservative, centrist liberal, I want to see those days return where the fights are not between the extremes extremes on all sides, but we move closer to the center and continue to have active debates as to whether liberalism is better than conservatism or conservatism is better than liberalism. Let people decide.
1:04:33 Brian Rose: And your plans for the next few years, are you gonna still keep taking on cases and still writing? You’re Okay. Pedal to the metal.
1:04:41 Alan Dershowitz: Yep. Keep doing what I’m doing as long as I have the strength to do it.
1:04:45 Brian Rose: I love it. Alan, a lot of respect for you. Seriously, it’s incredible what you’ve done with your career and the fact that you’re still putting these ideas out there. And I really appreciate the perspective that in order to do that, you have to take a lot of hate from a lot of parties. And when you stick to your principles, I guess that’s what happens. And there’s a few people out there that actually stick to their guns, I think, the way you do. So, just want to thank you for really sticking to your guns and, you know, social distancing because of that. And I appreciate this concept of the marketplace of ideas. That’s the one thing I’m taking away from this conversation. Again, I want a free market of ideas where you can go out and take in anything you want and then let let adults make their own decisions.
1:05:27 Brian Rose: That’s really what I want in the end and I hope we can find
1:05:27 Alan Dershowitz: Completely and one thing you can be absolutely assured of is I will never deviate from my principles. I live by my principles. I will die with my principles. I will always live a principled life regardless of what the consequences are or what people think.
1:05:45 Brian Rose: All right. I appreciate that. And I might be giving you a call to get you on our legal team. Alan, how do you feel about that?
1:05:45 Alan Dershowitz: We’ll talk.
1:05:52 Brian Rose: Okay. All right. Thank you so much. The book is coming out very shortly. Do you have a website? What’s the best way for people to get a hold of you?
1:05:58 Alan Dershowitz: Well, I have a website. I’m not good at that kind of stuff, but you can get my books on Amazon. The book Guilt by Accusation is free on Kindle, so you don’t have to even pay for it. Just press a button and you’ll get Guilt by Accusation and you’ll see the lies of Netflix in the book. And you’ll see why you can’t believe all women while continuing to make sure every woman has the right to express her view. You just can’t take for granted that what everybody says is true. And if you read my book, Guilt by Accusation, that will be proved beyond any doubt.
1:06:31 Brian Rose: I appreciate you articulating those points. Not many people are bold enough to say those things because they know they’ll be crucified in the social media and with the leftist publications out there. So, I really appreciate that. It’s a breath of fresh air to hear this stuff. Alan Dershowitz, thank you so much for your time. Next time, I’d love to do this in person. I’ll give you an elbow. And until then, all the best again.
1:06:51 Alan Dershowitz: Really appreciate you and all your work. Thank you so much. Be well.
1:06:54 Brian Rose: Okay, sounds good. And for everybody here, thank you so much for tuning in to London Real. Please share this with a sidebar on the left to any and all of your social media channels. Ask your friends and family to just give some of these thoughts their perspective. We appreciate your support. If you want to be one of the founding members of the Digital Freedom Platform, go to freedomplatform.tv/give and join us. We’re fighting on the front lines for freedom of speech. Digital freedom of speech has never been so important. You’ve heard Alan Dershowitz talking about how this is crucial. We need a marketplace of ideas, allow people to get the information in their heads and make their own decisions. It’s so important to have a debates otherwise there’s no way of making intelligent decisions going forward. There’s no wide way to live in a great society and to evolve as a human species and that’s what we’re all about here at London Real. So until next time, we will see you at London Real. Thank you. Bye.
