TRIGGERnometry - Alan Dershowitz Tells Truth About Trump Trial, Epstein, OJ & Harvard

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Alan Dershowitz is an American lawyer and law professor who taught at Harvard Law School for just under 50 years. He served as the appellate adviser on the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, forming part of the legal "Dream Team", alongside Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. He was a member of the defense team for Jeffrey Epstein (2006), Harvey Weinstein (2018) and President Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial (2020). He has represented many other celebrity clients such as John Lennon, Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Jim Bakker, Claus von Bülow and Julian Assange. SPONSORS: We use Monetary Metals to buy gold and earn interest on it! https://monetary-metals.com/triggernometry/ Shopify - sign up for a £1 per month trial at https://www.shopify.co.uk/trigger/ Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm a Biden supporter. I'm a liberal Democrat. The idea that they're weaponizing the criminal justice system against a political opponent is extremely dangerous. He committed suicide, you know, allegedly. Did he? Well, no, that's what I was going to ask you. Did he kill himself? He certainly didn't commit suicide alone. Why was O.J. Simpson acquitted? Because some black jurors was saying, we don't care if he's innocent or guilty. He deserves to be acquitted on behalf of all the black people who have been wrongly convicted. And Alan, reading between the lines, sounds to me like you think he was guilty. I can't comment as to whether he's guilty. I can tell you a funny story about it.

Go on, funny story. Okay. Should he be deported for lying on his visa application? Her taking an awful lot of prison time to stay silent, people will say some smoke there for that. smoke and there's certainly some fire as well the question is how much fire Alan Dershowitz welcome to trigonometry so much to talk about don't want to waste any time whatsoever the first thing we're going to talk about many different subjects the first of which is for the

layman who is looking at Donald Trump all of these court cases all of these things that are going on you most of us are not legal experts we don't really understand what's going on there are people who say it's all a sham. There are people who say it's him being prosecuted for all the terrible things he's done. Give us a kind of legal expert's view of it. I wish I could. I've been doing this 60 years. I probably have more experience as a criminal defense attorney than any person in American history with all due modesty. I've been teaching 50 years criminal law. I've litigated more criminal appeals probably than anybody. I've written 55 books, many of them on criminal justice.

I do not understand these cases. Let's start with the New York case. The New York case starts with a minor misdemeanor, writing down, some corporate hack writes down that legal expenses instead of saying legal expenses for hush money for Stormy Daniels. So he writes legal expenses. The statute of limitations expired on that. So they resurrect the statute of limitations. by claiming that in his mind, when the corporate person filed the incomplete statement,

he must have intended to use that to win the election. So essentially he defrauded the American public, as if he's the first candidate for office ever to defraud the public and tell them that he will do something that he wouldn't do. The case is absurd. I just don't get it. And they're introducing all this extraneous evidence, which has no bearing on whether he is responsible for that statement

and whether the statute of limitations expired. The goal is to get a conviction quickly in New York where 85% of the jury pool doesn't want it to run for president, and then it'll be reversed on appeal, but it'll be too late. He would not be charged with any crime if his name weren't Donald Trump and he weren't running for president, and there was a desire to keep him off the campaign trail, gag orders, etc.

So although I'm not a Trump supporter, I'm a Biden supporter, I'm a liberal Democrat, the idea that they're weaponizing the criminal justice system against the political opponent is extremely dangerous. It was H.L. Mencken, once said, they go after the SOBs first.

They establish the bad precedent on their back and then they'll come after the rest of us. That's why I'm interested in that. So in your conception, this is open and shut case of political interference, using the criminal justice system for political tactics. This isn't anything to do with justice. Nothing to do with justice.

It has everything to do with injustice, misusing the criminal justice system for partisan political purposes. Look, he's guilty of having waived a piece of classified material in front of a journalist and saying, see, it's classified, I could have declassified it. That's a smoking gun. Not a smoking gun, a smoking cigarette butt. Because everybody does that.

Biden did the same thing. He showed a piece of classified material to his biographer. You never go after people based on classified material being possessed. He didn't give it to the Russians. He didn't sell it. So, you know, there are technical cases, but they never would have been brought heading up and running for president. Well, I don't want to overstate the case here, but what you're saying is horrific. It's horrific.

You've got a fiercely contested upcoming election. The country's polarized to hell, and we see that talking to people from both sides of the political spectrum in the time that we've been here. The last election was people claimed it was illegitimate to some extent. The last election was perfectly illegitimate. I totally accept that, but nonetheless, a lot of people believe that it wasn't wrongly based on what you're saying. So my point is we are in a fever pitch moment, and then you have people using the criminal justice system to prevent their political appointment from being able to run. It is horrific because if he loses, if Trump loses, he's not going to accept it. He's going to say.

But why would he in this circumstance? He's going to say, I was defeated by misuse of the legal system, particularly the poll show that some independent voters, we don't know how many, would be influenced by a conviction, even if the. the conviction were based on a non-crime, like in New York, it would be so much better to allow people just to vote. I have a constitutional right to vote against Donald Trump, and I don't want it interfered with by the scales being influenced by the thumb of politics and the politicization of the justice system. So, look, I have a podcast, and I award bananas on a scale of 10. If you get 10, you're a banana republic. And I've now awarded six bananas on the scale six to 10 based on these criminal prosecutions of the man running against the incumbent for president. Look, I like Joe Biden.

I've known him for 44 years. I met him in 1980. I voted for him. If he's going to win, I want to win legitimately. And what do you think that says about the United States that Donald Trump's political enemies are waging war against him in this fashion. First, people who hate Donald Trump think he's Hitler. So when I defended Trump on the floor of the Senate against an unconstitutional impeachment, I lost many of my liberal friends. They said, you're gerbils, you're Gehring,

you're a facilitator, you're going to help this Hitler come to power. They feel so strongly that they cannot think rationally, about constitutional rights. Many of my clients have had the same thing. You cannot think rationally about Jeffrey Epstein. He is the world's worst monster. And so if I defended him, I must be a facilitator of his wrongdoing.

It's very hard for people to understand the role of a criminal defense lawyer. It's interesting. Everybody understands the role of the doctor and the emergency ward treating Jeffrey Epstein or Donald Trump. In fact, a good friend of mine is a doctor who treated Donald Trump and saved his life.

Nobody criticizes him. That's probably because they don't know his name. Well, it could be. But even if they did, I think they'd understand that. Or if a priest or a rabbi or a minister, minister to a terrible mafioso, they understand that, but they don't understand the role of the criminal defense lawyer in providing a zealous defense for horrible, horrible people. Why do you think that is?

Why do you think that people look at Donald Trump? And again, I'm not a fan of Trump, but I think we can objectively say there are far worse people in the world than Trump. What is it about him that sends people on the left, people who are liberals, and makes them lose their mind? People, conservatives too.

Centrist kind of white Anglo-Saxon conservatives, Rockefeller conservative Republicans, Reagan-conserved Republicans, feel the same way about it. Donald Trump because he is a disruptor. He's provocative. He's hateful in his speech. I mean, some of the things he has said about women,

what he said about McCain, a great hero who was captured. He said, he's no hero. I don't like people who are captured. But, you know, he lost. So I never liked him as much after that because I don't like losers. But, but Frank, Frank, let me get to it. He hit me. He's a war hero.

He's a war hero. He's a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you. Do you agree to that? You know, he's made these outrageous statements that make you just hate him. And you can't say that about Biden.

You know, nobody hates Biden. You can dislike him. You can disagree with him. But, you know, he's not a hateable person. Trump is hateable, lovable. He's precisely the kind of charismatic person that people, are very much afraid of. I mean, it's, you know, Boris Johnson wasn't even close to that, but probably came as close as any modern British politician to that kind of extreme feelings.

Nigel Farage. Yeah. Nigel Farage. He's way closer to that position. Oh, yeah, but he's not mainstream. He was never going to be prime minister, but yes. Yeah. Let me ask you something else, which is why are you a Biden supporter? Why do you like Joe Biden? I'm not a Biden supporter. I'm just a Biden preferrer. I don't love Biden. I think he's a nice man. I think he's a decent man.

I wish he weren't running. I wish a younger, more vibrant, and more savvy a person were running. But as an alternative, you know, I vote often for the least worst candidate. Don't we all. It's interesting. touching back on what you were saying about people not understanding the role of the defense attorney.

Because I think, and push back if you disagree, I think that people are losing faith in the justice system. And they should be. And they should be. They should be losing faith in the justice system. I'll give you a perfect example. So Trump's on trial in New York. It's not on television. Every American should be watching that trial. and seeing what's going on. Instead, he's in a courtroom. He has a gag order, and we have to get the information about the case through the prism of CNN in the New York Times. And...

Who no one trusts anyway at this point. Nobody trusts anybody anymore to give them the information. So distrust is a good thing. It's gotten to the point where it's kind of dangerous because there is no institution in America today that's trusted. It used to be the Supreme Court.

No more. That's now regarded as highly politicized, particularly since the case of Bush versus Gore, when the Supreme Court five to four, five Republicans to four Democrats gave the presidency to the man who probably lost the election. So we don't have trust in the system. Having too little trust is safer in a democracy than having too much trust. But if you don't trust the institutions at all, there is also a problem. And right, and who do you think is at fault for the fact that we've come to this point where the public has such fundamental distrust in the institutions? Because if you look at, for instance, a black community, I mean, Rodney King was, that was a sizable, horrible, horrible moment. Is it a series of events like that? Or was there something else that happened? No, I think it's the social media that amplifies the extremes and creates silence.

so that people get only the information they want to get. They want to see confirmation of their views. They want to watch television like this, shaking their heads. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah, yeah, I really enjoy hearing that. They don't want to hear contrary views. When I used to teach my students, I would start the first day, 18-year-old college students, I would say,

this is going to be a very difficult class for you because every one of your views, everything you hold sacred, I'm going to challenge. If you want to feel good, there's a spot down the road, go get them, you know. But if you want every one of your views challenged, this is the class for me. And occasionally two or three students would drop out. And then the students at the end of the class, they would be yelling at each other.

They'd be sweating because I made them challenge every view that they had. And that's what teaching should be about. I never wanted to teach my students what to think. I wanted to teach them how to think, how to be critical thinkers. You don't see that today in many universities. Today, universities, people major in their own ethnicity because they want to be confirmed. You know, there is no, I guess, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant department,

but every other group has a department. And you go to the department to be confirmed. Yeah, we're great people. We've done wonderful things. Critical thinking is just not part of education today. But exploring further, I want to come to university campuses because I think that we definitely need to talk about that. But 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. But 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. And now we have been able to see

just how corrupt they are and have been, and we are therefore quite disillusioned simply because of the truth that's been revealed here. Yes, but that's a process that's been ongoing during the entire last century. We started seeing institutions exposed in the early part of the 20th century, and it was a developing concept.

it's become because of, and that's a good thing that the social media does and the media in general does, it gets to the inside of institutions. It shows people eating the sausage how it was made. And you don't want to eat it when you know how it was made. And so, but I think also we used to have institutions that were above reproach of the church. Look at what happened to the church, particularly the Catholic Church. Right. And look at what's happened to the media. We have all kinds of corruption and scandals about the media.

The courts, so every institution now is subject to challenge. When done in proportion, it's a very healthy development. Do you think that the way ultimately that this lack of trust, 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 white. than white, purer than pure, making sure there is as little corruption going on as possible. I don't see any other way. I don't think that's going to work.

I think people today want the institutions to serve their own parochial interests. And the last thing people want is fairness. The last thing people want is justice. They want to win. Donald Trump is the perfect example of that. Does anybody think he wants fairness or justice? He only wants to win. He writes about that in his books.

And I think that approach has become very, very common. What worries me so much is I don't see the 1940s being replicated at all. I see the 1920s and early 30s being replicated. Remember in the 20s and 30s, all through Europe, the world was divided into communist and fascists. The center really was squeezed out. We're beginning to see that in the United States today. the right is moving further right, the left is moving further left, the center is disappearing, and people aren't talking to each other. I don't know if the name William Buckley is well known

in Great Britain, but he was one of the great conservatives in modern American history. And he and I used to have a series of debates. We debated at Harvard, we debated on television, we debated in various forms, and we disagreed about everything. And then we had a drink afterward. I would say to you know, I really learned something from that point, but not that point. You don't hear that anymore. I am no longer invited to debate great issues as I was for many, many years. People aren't interested in hearing both sides of issues. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.

Do you think part of it as well is touching on the justice point, and I'd be interesting to hear what your opinion on this is. It seems to me people don't want justice. They want to win, but it goes deeper than that. They want revenge at some perceived slight that they have been dealt. Well, certainly Donald Trump is the master of that. He has stated, if he's elected, he's going to take revenge. He said that, and people love it. And so I think you're on to something, Francis, very much.

I think people have a lust, a deep sense. They've been wronged. They call it reparations sometimes. But, you know, from a primitive point of view, it's revenge, getting even. Rodney King and O.J. Simpson. Yeah. Why was O.J. Simpson acquitted? Well, at least in part, because some black jurors,

I was one of the lawyers in the case, so I'm aware of all the facts in it, was saying, we don't care if he's innocent or guilty. He deserves to be acquitted on behalf of all the black people who have been wrongly convicted. There were other reasons. The prosecution screwed up the case

and they made all kind of mistakes and planted a piece of evidence and we caught them. But you cannot eliminate race and revenge from the equation. Sorry, just to finish his point, because I saw this in the documentary, in the SPN documentary,

after one of the jurors stood up and literally did a black power salute. But we also had a jury named Denise Aschenbach, who was a white, a woman, who had previously been on a jury, and the original vote was 11 to 1 for acquittal, and she turned them around and made them go 12 to nothing for conviction. So the race alone didn't justify it. Race alone probably would have produced a hung jury. It was race coupled with the... inadequacy of the prosecution that gave us a surprising 12 to nothing victory in the case. You know, and because you made the point, Alan,

about that there should be cameras in the Trump trial. But if you think about it, the Simpson trial had cameras in it. And what actually happened in that is that there were a lot of people who started to play to the cameras. And one of the criticisms about it

was that it stopped being a court of law and started to be something else more like Jerry Springer. Yeah, exactly, a soap opera was a reality TV program. Part of the time, I mean, I argued a number of motions there. I didn't think about the camera. I didn't even remember there was a camera.

I'm intensely focused on the judge, but there was an interesting poll that was taken. People who actually watched the trial on television were not surprised at the verdict. The people who read about it in the New York Times and the Los Angeles of times, or shocked because they didn't see, for example, the man who wrote the script for the TV show about Simpson, a former student of my, Jeffrey Tubin, left out the most important part of the

case that they took a sock and they poured, literally poured OJ Simpson's blood on the sock and the blood of one of his victims. And the policemen who did it didn't realize that the blood from the test tube had EDTA, a chemical not found in the human body, but found in test tubes. We caught them! And six of the jurors in post interviews said, that was the reason they acquitted. Jeffrey Toobin didn't even

put that in his book or his reporting. And so if you don't know that, then you say, my God, how can they have acquitted? There was a mountain of evidence. Yes, there was a mountain of evidence, but one piece of that mountain was framed up by the government and jurors will say to themselves,

if they could do that to what, crudical piece of evidence, who knows what the rest? I was in the courtroom. I was sitting as far away from OJ Simpson as I am from you when he tried on the glove. And that was the most important moment at the trial. It didn't fit. He walked right up to the jurors, and he said, it's too small. Now, maybe it's shrunk. Maybe it's because it was gloves. But he was able to look the jury in the eye and say, now, the prosecution could have easily had him try the glove on outside of the courtroom. outside of the jury room to see whether it fit first and then make the decision. They were so arrogant they didn't do it.

So those issues, if you saw it on television, would at least explain how a jury might come to a verdict of acquittal. Remember, they didn't find him innocent. They found that the government failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. There's a difference. And, Alan, reading between the lines, it sounds to me like you think he was guilty. I can't comment as to whether it's guilty. I can tell you a funny story about it. Tell us a funny story.

Benjamin Netanyahu gets elected prime minister in 1995. I knew him when he was a student at MIT. So my wife and I happened to be in Israel. I was writing a book. And he calls me and says, bring your wife, your daughter over, we'll say hello, I'll take some pictures, you know, new prime minister. We go there, we talk for a little while.

And he takes me into his own private little room and says, Alan, there's a question I've just been dying to ask you. I thought he would ask me about Iran, about, he said, did OJ do it? So I said, Mr. Prime Minister, you know, I can't tell you that. But I have a question I want to ask you, does Israel have nuclear weapons?

No, you know, Alan, I can't tell you that. I said, uh-huh. So we both couldn't tell each other something. Well, Israel's position in nuclear weapons, as I understand it, is we don't have them. But if the state of Israel is a thread, then we will definitely use them. We'll get them. Right. We'll definitely use them. So O.J. Simpson, aside, we talked a little bit about what's happening on campus. And I want to talk more about this. We have had guests after guest on the show from

the Chris Rufors to James Lindsay's to all kinds of people, explaining what's been happening on university campuses around the West for the last 60 years. What do you think has been happening? You've been teaching there. You see what's happening now. The American public, I put it to you, are sort of waking up out of a bit of a stupor and slumber about this and kind of going, we've got people chanting death to America. That seems to be a problem. How did we get from the places like Columbia and Harvard and other Ivy League? Two words. George Floyd. The George Floyd killing was the single most important transformative event of the 21st century. It changed everything. Forget about whether he was murdered. I think he was. Forget about whether the sentence was just whatever.

it caused every major American institution to do a reckoning. And it invented, or at least it expanded on the concept of DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, intersectionality, black studies, a range of issues that divided the world into two, oppressors and oppressed. And now that's what's taught in many American universities. If you're Jewish, you can be the poorest, Sephardic, dark-skinned Jew in the world, you're an oppressor. If you're an Arab, you can be the Emir of Qatar, you're oppressed. And it really creates that zero-sum game division. And I don't think you can understand what's going

on on college campuses without that. And, you know, there'll be, the pendulum swings widely, and it will swing back a little bit. These demonstrations have not particularly enamored the demonstrators to many people because they've gone too far in their violence, trying to intrude on Christmas celebrations, trying to include on the Met Museums, gala trying to do all those things. But as long as the universities retain their commitment to this phony notion of diversity, equity,

inclusion, why is it phony? Diversity under this concept means only skin-deep diversity. It means only more blacks. It doesn't mean diversity of opinion. It doesn't mean diversity of views. equity is the opposite of equality. It means you're not judged based on your ability or meritocracy. It's the Martin Luther King nightmare.

The dream is a dream of a day when my children will be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of that character. Equity, no, you must be judged by the color of your skin. We must get revenge. We must get reparations. So everything is a group decision. And inclusion explicitly excludes Jews and Asians. So, you know, the DEA, DEI bureaucracy, which is now billions of dollars on university campuses, will never be dismantled.

And it's been the breeding ground for a lot of this division and a lot of this anti-Semitism. Well, I'd agree with you about George Floyd being a huge catalyzing moment. But I would put it to you that DEI oppressor oppressed, which is just Marxist. I come from the Soviet Union, so it's very easy to recognize once you've seen it before. There's been taught on university campuses for 60 years now, isn't that? It's been taught, but it's been largely not mainstream. And now it's become mainstream. And I spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union.

I defended dissidents. I defended Natanzeransky. I was there in the 1970s defending people on death row. So I'm very familiar with the Soviet Union, my family. obviously comes from what would have been the Soviet Union. And there's great similarities going on. In Russia, even before the Soviet Union was established, there was what we'll call the numerous clauses. That is, you were allowed to attend university in proportion to the number of people your ethnic group had in the society. So if you were Ukrainian, you could get in with this percentage.

If you were Jewish, 2%. And they're returning to that now. So that, for example, Jews at Harvard, when I was teaching there, was 23% of the student body was Jewish. Now it's 9%. Because they want to reduce the number of groups, that's all part of DEI. They want to reduce the numbers of every group to the number in the population itself. And so that was borrowed from Tsarist Russia, and it was one of the things that communists continued discrimination against various groups and in favor of other groups. And we're seeing that now. The distinction now is between the privileged and the unprivileged.

And if you're privileged, you get no rights. And if you're unprivileged, then you get all the rights. And there's something to that. I mean, we should give affirmative action to people who have made it individually by hard work. But I would be included in that. I grew up in a very poor family, first person in my family ever to go to college. And I made it based, you know, on my own. abilities, but I wouldn't get any, I wouldn't ask for it, but I wouldn't get any privileges.

It's interesting, too. Women were very much discriminated against, probably more than any other group, and they just eliminated the discrimination without affirmative action. And women have thrived. You know, they've done better than men. All you had to do is eliminate the discrimination when it came to women that hasn't been true of other groups. And why do you think that nobody has pushed back on it. Why 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.

This is insane. Well, thank you for calling me nobody. I have fought back since the 1970s. I was the most liberal person on the law school faculty when I was appointed at age 25 in 1964 and I fought against race-based affirmative action right from the beginning, even though I was the most liberal person on the faculty. That was one thing. Maybe it's because of my Jewish heritage and my recollection of the numerous clauses and the discrimination that Jews suffered,

that I fought back very much against that. But it was always a losing battle because the powers that be very much wanted more, quote, diversity. I wish it were more diversity. But 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. These 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. And that's the kind of diversity universities lack and won't have. And I have a friend who is 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 university is courage. And 50 years of teaching at Harvard, I've never met a less courageous group of people than tenure faculty. Alan, 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. and you have this interesting position where obviously this country is built on the First Amendment and 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 how do people who really truly are committed to the principle of free speech reconcile that kind of speech? This is a testing time I am completely committed to free speech I think you can burn your own American flag You can't burn somebody else's American flag. You can burn your own Israeli flag.

You can chant death to America. But you can't incite people to do things right now immediately. The line between incitement on the one hand and advocacy on the other hand is a very difficult one. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said every idea is an incitement. Of course, you know, call Marx caused many deaths. So did the Bible. But you can't ban Marks. marks and you can't ban the Bible. So you have to tolerate a lot of really, really bad free speech,

but you have to answer it. You have to respond to it. University shouldn't be engaging in speech that's negative to students. Now, there are limits. Give you an example. There's a professor at Columbia University. His name is Joseph Massad. And before he got tenure, he had the following exchange with a student. Called on the student. He's teaching close. in the Middle East politics, the students started answering, he said, I sense an Israeli accent. Yeah, he says, I'm Israeli. I will not allow you to speak in my class unless you admit you're a war criminal. Now, a teacher should not be allowed to do that. And I have a rule, a test. I call it the Ku Klux Klan test. That 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. You can't make a difference between the kiafa and the hood. The Constitution doesn't permit that. Would you permit as a university, a teacher, to advocate lynching of blacks? No, you never would under any circumstances. So would you then permit a teacher to advocate the raping of Jewish women in Israel? You have to have the same rule. Universities are not as bound by the absolutes of the First Amendment. They're time, manner, and place restrictions. For 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.

You can say that outside the church, but you can't disrupt. And in universities, there are certain things that maybe you can't say. If 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. So there are reasonable restrictions that universities can play. on faculty and on students, but they're very, very limited. Well, very much within that conversation, can Jewish students learn while their fellow students

are chanting for an interfaider right next to them? They have to learn to have a thick skin. Freedom of speech requires a thick skin of everybody. Now, if somebody is leaning over you and harassing you and surrounding you, no. But if somebody is holding a sign, in Tafada, I think you have to tolerate that. Yeah, it's a very principled approach

because there's a lot of people who would actually vehemently disagree with you. Yes, they do. They do when they write to me all the time. And they say I'm a sellout. Remember, I also defended the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, even though the neighborhood was a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors.

First Amendment is very difficult, and it's very hard to live with. I know I've been defamed, attacked, libeled, slandered all over the place. For my views and my actions, and, you know, you take appropriate action when you have to and when you can, but mostly you just develop a thick skin. I'm used to it. My family is not so used to it. And, you know, they are often the victims of this kind of defamation.

But that's what makes America so special, is that you have this First Amendment. because I look at what's going on in the UK regarding speech. This Scotland, I don't know if you've been following in this, introducing hate speech laws, criminalizing public performance. And you go, we wouldn't have these problems in the UK if we had what you had in this country. Oh, you'd have variations of the problems because most people in America don't believe in the First Amendment.

It's free speech for me, but not for thee. And even in Israel, they now banned Al Jazeera. That was a terrible mistake. You come up with an alternative newspaper that answers Al Jazeera, but you don't ban it. And so I am a strict First Amendment advocate. And almost there are very few people who will apply the First Amendment to their enemies. They really love the First Amendment when it protects their speech, but they don't love it when it protects their enemy speech. And it's always been the case.

Look, you know, human beings have always been biased. We always have confirmation of bias. always been the case. But do you think that people's faith in free speech and belief in free speech has been degraded over your lifetime? Without a doubt, without a doubt. And the reason is because free speech has become much more dangerous and much more horrible and the internet. And so when I grew up, free speech wasn't a big deal. You know, it meant some nut in the street corner or somebody, you know, in Hyde Park holding a sign. Who can't?

cares about that. But today with social media and this university, you know, you cannot get a university. You can't get 10 people today to protest what China is doing to the Uyghurs. You can't get five people to protest what Syria did when they gassed their own people. You can't get one person to stand up on behalf of the Kurds statelessness. You can't get many, many people to protest Russia in the Ukraine. But you mentioned Israel and Jews? 10,000 students who don't know anything about the Middle East will come out and join the chance and become zombie-like lemmings who are joining the cult of their professors.

How do you explain that? It has to do with over 2,000 years of history of Jew hatred. Jews are successful. And they fit into everything that DEI hates. Jews have succeeded through meritocracy. and the opposite of DEI is meritocracy, making it on the merits. You don't want people to make it on the merits. Jews are the poster children for now it's called, you know, privilege, meritocracy, success, Nobel Prizes, all of that.

I wrote an article recently and I said, what happened in the Soviet Union is going to happen in America. What happened to the Soviet Union is Jews couldn't succeed when they had to be picked by somebody else to do something. but if they could do it on their own, play the violin, play chess, develop mathematical theories, they were incredibly successful. The same thing is going to happen in the United States. Jews are not going to be picked to be admitted to Harvard Law School in Harvard College. They're not going to be picked to work in, you know, fancy, fancy jobs, but they'll still be able to succeed at things that the free market economy allows them to succeed in. So that's one reason. Jews love the free market economy.

And of course, people from the other side hate the free market economy. They'd much prefer the Soviet-controlled economy, which imposes restrictions. This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Selling your car should feel like one less thing on your list, not one more. With Carvana, it is. Just go to Carvana.com and to your license plate or Vin and get a real offer down to the penny. No back and forth, no surprises, just an experience you can trust. Like your offer?

at schedule pickup, and we'll come to you with a check in hand. Your car, your timeline, your terms. Visit Carvana.com to sell your car today. Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. We're talking about the free market economy, because you look at universities, the Ivy Leagues, and also the other ones, you know, Yale, etc., etc., etc.

Do you think that these institutions can be saved, or do we need a free market solution like, the University of Austin and others to come and challenge them. Absolutely, we need new institutions. I think that Ivy League universities will never be the same. I know lots of young people who are now applying to great universities, you know, Emery, Duke, universities in the South, University of Florida, University of Miami.

They are becoming, for many, first-choice universities over Harvard and Yale. Look, I was educated in a free college, city university of New York, which provided education for immigrant kids. Almost everybody in my class was first generation. We got as good at education at Harvard, but we didn't get the elite status. And I think the elite status is disappearing from many American universities. And I think we're going to see excellence in universities spread more widely around the country instead of being in any way limited to a few. elite colleges and universities. Because it's going to be a case, you know, if people, if these

elite colleges are churning out a certain type of person with a certain type of political view, with a certain type of attitude, there's going to be a lot of people going, well, look, if you're ultra left wing and you believe in the oppressor-oppressed dynamic, I don't really want you working at my bank. I think that's happening already. Just the other day I saw 13 federal judges wrote a a letter to Columbia law school saying we're no longer hiring law clerks from Columbia. We don't like what you're teaching your students. That may be an overgeneralization because there are some kids who are rebelling against what's being taught at Columbia and they should be hired.

But I do think that we're going to see some second hard looks at some of these universities. And I think here I'm in conflict with some of my civil liberties friends. I want to see the protesters, even those who are perfectly exercising their First Amendment rights, I want their names published. I don't want them to be able to wear masks unless they're afraid of COVID. But if they're just afraid of being identified, I think we, the public, have a right to know who you are if you support rape, if you support Hamas, if you support death to America. I want to know that.

And I think every, for example, law firm should know that because would you, if you were a client, want to be represented by somebody who supported Hamas rapes? No, so I think transparency cuts both ways, and it should be required of protesters that they identify themselves. I must say, I find that thing about law for the judges not hiring clerks very, very troubling. Me too.

Because it's a scattergun approach. You're punishing people who haven't done anything wrong, and in many cases probably are horrified by what other students in their classes are doing in this blanker way. That seems to me completely out of order. I completely agree with that. But I can understand the judge asking a law clerk, are you a member of the National Lawyers Guild,

second largest bar association in America? On October 7th, not October 8th. They issued a statement supporting what Hamas had done. And then they went on and on and on and days later. I would, if I were a lawyer, a client, a judge, ask an applicant, do you support the National Lawyers Guild approach? to Hamas. And if he said, yes, I would say, I'd wish you great luck to getting a job with some, you know, left wing or whatever, but I'm not hiring you. So I think I have a right to know that.

That's an individual approach. The blanket approach worries me tremendously. I agree with you. Just banning people from a certain institutions. I understand why people are thinking about it because they're going with these institutions, I mean, what the hell is going on in there? But even so, there will be lots of perfectly talented, capable students. But let me tell you where I might disagree with you. For example, I used to contribute to Harvard, where I taught for years, to Yale, where I went to law school and to Brooklyn College. I no longer contribute to any of those institutions. Now, you might say, but it hurts students who are on the good side of those issues, but how else do I do this?

That's different. So I think there are matters of degree. Of course. Of course, but there's also the other side as well, which would say maybe it is a responsibility for people who want to challenge this. system to go into it and work from it in the inside. And so many people are doing that. Many of the large contributors to University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, MIT, are conditioning their grants to the school doing something about making it safe for people with opposing points

of view. And that's a point that I agree with that. The problem is fighting from inside is very difficult. I taught at Harvard Law School for 50 years. There are 100 professors at Harvard Law School. I do not know of a single one, not a single one who has stood up for the Jewish students against these attacks,

including a physical attack by a member of the Harvard Law Review. And a lot of these professors call me, and they say, they whisper, Alan, thank you so much for speaking out. Why don't you speak out? Well, I don't want to lose my peers and my students. I don't want to divide students. So you can't count on insights.

change. For example, when Claudine Gay was being charged with plagiarism and all of that, law school faculty stood behind her. They didn't want to rock the boat. They have a good job. They have sinecures. They have tenure. So, fighting from within requires courage.

And courage is not a qualification for being a professor at Harvard University. Does that piss you off the lack of backbone with some of these people? It pisses me off, but I can't say it disappoints me only because I know them. And I'm not at all surprised.

But I think often of, I just bought a letter from Albert Einstein, written by Albert Einstein in 1945. I own it. It's a great letter. And in it, he says, the finer people, the better, who use the word, the better people of Germany are as responsible for Nazism as the Nazis themselves because of their silence.

And I often think of my friends and colleagues and what they would do if we ever got a return to those horrible days. How many of them would stand up? How many of them wouldn't? I'm not comparing where we're at now with Nazism at all, but I am comparing it to the 20s and 30s. Well, right, you're not comparing it. In fact, I would argue it's a lot easier to stand up and say something now than it wouldn't have been in Germany under Hitler, and yet people aren't doing it. There's no question. I went to see with my wife the other day, we went to see a revival of cabaret.

Oh, great, wonderful. It could have been written today because it's all about what happens when the mood of a country changes and how many people go along with it. I'm seeing a lot of people going along uncritically with some awful things today. You make it sound as if Harvard is doomed, Alan. If you're talking about, you know, what's happening in the legal faculty. the people who run this, not having a backbone. The first prerequisite for change is the desire for change.

And if there is no desire for change... I disagree with you. Desire for change is meaningless unless there's action. I think a lot of the faculty at Harvard desires change. They're just not willing to put their bodies on the line to bring it about. All that's necessary for evil to prevail, said Burke, is for good people to remain silent. And a lot of good people at Harvard are remaining silent.

So, yeah, there's the desire to change, but there's not the willingness to sacrifice, to put things at risk to change. That's what's necessary for change. Well, speaking of evil thriving when good men do nothing, there was one other subject we wanted to talk to about, which is a former client of yours, Jeffrey Epstein. Yes. And this guy, he never got a trial in which he was properly convicted of all the things of which he was accused. but I think it's widely accepted now that he was a pretty evil man who got up to some terrible things.

And you were his lawyer. I was. I was his lawyer before it was known. How many terrible things he had done. But I would have been his lawyer, even in the face of all the terrible things. For me, the more terrible the charges against you, the more unpopular you are, the more likely I will be to take your case. Can I take your number? You remember there's a scene.

You can afford Alan's service. There's a scene in the film. reversal of fortune about my representation of Klaus Montbuello, where I say you have one thing going in your favor, everybody hates you, and he says, well, that's a beginning. And of course, as a tenured professor who has no economic concerns and not worried about my life, and I was teaching my students over and over again, you have to defend the most deplorable, always using John Adams' defense of the people accused of the Boston Massacre, which was so unpopular, how could I be a hypocrite and not do it? I can't just preach it. So I do defend people like that,

whether they be Nazis or whether they be Jeffrey Epstein, whether they be Donald Trump. I'm going to continue to do that as long as the good Lord gives me the strength and the energy to do it. Well, just coming back to Jeffrey Epstein himself, what do you? What do you, what you know and what did you believe about what he was up to? He called me. I didn't know anything about anything like that. My wife knew him. She had no suspicion. She didn't like him because of his sexist attitudes. And my children didn't like him and I didn't love him. But he was a bright guy. But we knew nothing. In fact, I allowed my grandchildren and us to stay in his house in Palm Beach a year before all of this stuff came out.

And there were no pictures of young women or anything like that. It was an ordinary house. So we knew nothing. And then he called me one day and said, I've been accused of having sex with two underage, having massages and two underage girls. And so I represented him at that point and tried to negotiate a deal.

At that point, there were only three potential victims, one above age and two who were 17 in that area. I could be wrong about it may have been one underage and two. 18 or 19, but they were young women in that period. And I defended him. And what I did is I put together research on what people got sentences for that kind of thing all through Florida and presented it to the state attorney. I had no idea of the multiples that were involved. And I ended up representing him in that case only. And then I terminated my representation and my friendship with him once he served his term. Have you ever been on his island? Yes. My wife and I,

were invited to his island when he first bought it. We were vacationing in the Caribbean in St. Thomas or somewhere. No, no, no, no, in Martinique. And he said, I just bought an island, and he sent a small plane over. And my wife and I and Professor Porter at Harvard Business School and his wife and one other couple went and had dinner on the island. There was nobody there.

And it was mostly not even built up. And that was the only time I was ever on the island. I was ever on the island with any young people or anything like that. But I was on the island, yeah. Alan, what type of man was he? Because you look at, you know, you look at his crimes and what he did, but you also look at the company he kept. Now, this must have been a man who was incredibly successful and highly charismatic.

There must have been, for one of a better term, something special about this man. There was. he was very clever, clever and true. I'll tell you a story that we'll give you the whole. This is a name-dropping story. So I'm on Martha's Vineyard. I was very popular on Martha's Vineyard, so I'm invited to have dinner with Caroline Kennedy and her husband and President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and another couple. And we're having dinner at Caroline Kennedy's home. And he's president. And the Secret Service comes over to him and puts a phone next to him and says, call and he walks away for about 10 minutes, 15 minutes maybe, and he's on the phone jabbering away.

I don't know if he's on the phone. And then he turns the phone to me and says, somebody wants to talk to you. And it's Jeffrey Epstein who had been talking to President Clinton for 15 minutes, and he just wanted, he heard I was there, he wanted to say hello. Clinton knew him, everybody knew him, Bill Gates knew him. he helped people get rich not me but he you know gave advice to people

he met Fidel Castro and he was Zellig from you know the Woody Allen movie or you know whoever else you might think about from literature he did have some special qualities he introduced me

to the secretary of Treasury and Great Britain, whose name I don't remember. And other people from Great Britain, he introduced me to, obviously, Prince Andrew, and to Lady Rothschild and to Lord Rothschild. And he introduced me to Harvard professors, who I didn't know. For example, the church, the man who decoded the genome. So he was a, you know, somebody you really wanted to get to know and join

his suarez, his dinner. Nobody knew about, I mean, not the president of Harvard who asked me to meet with him. Nobody knew about his extracurricular activities. He kept them completely, completely secret. Does it surprise you, though, that as a result of what happened to him, the fact that he committed suicide, you know, allegedly? Did he? Well, no, that's what I was going to ask you. Did he kill himself? He certainly didn't commit suicide alone. Certainly there was, there was government involvement. there was people who were guards facilitated the suetide. My theory is he probably paid them off,

but I'm still suspicious because he had a chance of getting out. He had a chance of getting bail. He had good lawyers at that point. And he killed himself, if he killed himself, before the court had made decisions that might have freed him. So I am a little suspicious, but I don't know how they could have gotten to him. But it's possible. Do you think that,

Whether he killed himself or whether, as you put it, euphemistically, he killed himself with other people involved. He did so because the people whose dirty laundry would have been aired had he gone to court. They didn't want that. I tell you why I don't think so. You don't think that's right. Because he had no credibility. Nobody would believe him. And in any event, whatever credibility he had were in his documents.

So we know that who was on his airplane. We know who was in his home. I don't know what more he could have said that would have endangered other people. But it's possible. With all respect, that is the first thing you've said where I cannot possibly believe that you believe that. Because if Jepsy Epstein went on the witness stand and said, I don't know, Prince Andrew is a pedophile or Bill Clinton is a pedophile. You think anybody would have believed it? I think a lot of people would have believed it.

but I'm not sure. I think there are a lot of people who would have believed that. But even if you say, like, oh, they got off, the reputational damage from that is huge. If he had gone on the stand and said, Bill Clinton is a pedophile

who sleeps with underage girls, that's it. Clinton's reputation is finished. So look, that happened to me. I had one woman who accused me who I never met, never heard of, and finally admitted that she, you know, may have misidentified me

and confused me with somebody else, but it hurt my reputation, even though it was completely uncorroborated and one person with a long, long history of... Accepted, but that's not Epstein. Yeah, no, I understand that. That's a different thing. But it was an Epstein person. It was related to...

What we're getting that is your argument that nobody would have believed him had he accused very famous. It doesn't matter whether you believe or not. It's just if you're accused. That's certainly a plausible point. Yeah. But, 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. But of course, Prince Andrew was his own worst enemy. That interview that he gave, I just don't understand why he gave it and the circumstances under which he gave it. and then he settled the case. In my case, I obviously refused to pay a nickel and the woman backed down eventually and said she may have mistaken me for somebody else. But you're right, it does reputational damage.

Whether you're guilty or not, I wrote a book by that title called guilt by accusation. And today, in America, if you're accused, you're guilty. Interestingly 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. Believe 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. So many people from the Me Too movement are saying, well, where's your evidence? She's dead. How can she testify? We don't believe her. You know, show the evidence. The Me Too movement has exposed itself as politically corrupt. And yeah, and touching on Me Too,

that is another movement which it started off and it seemed incredibly noble and you know the first few people it went after you were like good I'm glad now how much of that do you think was

as a result of social media and the urge and the lust to kind of get justice or revenge as it were and 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. All of that. You're absolutely right. Sex-based crimes are the hardest to get a conviction. But what happened to the Me Too movement has happened to many movements. I think it was Eric Hoffa, the philosopher who once said, starts as a movement, then it becomes a cause, then it becomes a business, then it becomes a racket. The Me Too movement has become a racket. It's now a vehicle for extortion. And you see it over and over and over again. And 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. And so they are the enemies of truth and justice. And one has to make sharp distinctions between those who were telling the truth and those who

are using the Me Too movement to extort money. I 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, but their publicists said, write the check, pay the hush money, better than having an article in the newspaper. And so that was spreading and spreading and spreading. So both are evils and both have to be constrained. I'd love to get your opinion actually on what's happening with Weinstein at the moment, because obviously the allegations were awful, there were convictions. Now, what's happening at the moment with the case? I've seen some of the convictions be overturned. Yes. I've seen some of the convictions be overturned.

was a consultant on the case. I've known Harvey Weinstein since before he was Harvey Weinstein. He retained me to represent his film clerks, I think, in some of the early case, 1990s. The early days of Miramax. Yeah, Miramax. So I was his lawyer. I've never been his friend, but I was his lawyer. And so he asked me to consult on this case, and I consulted with the lawyers who just won the appeal, four to three verdict because what happened was they allowed evidence to be introduced in the jury by women who were not part of the accusation, but they could testify that he did something similar to them. And the court threw that out. So the New York conviction has been reversed. California conviction is still valid, but it's being appealed as well. So it's a case in progress.

I have to tell you, I don't think Harvey Weinstein ever had to rape anybody. I think these were transactional. You know, these were the casting couch. Hollywood has been infamous to the casting couch for years. If you want to be in my film, perform. Terrible, horrible. And it should be made a crime. But right now it's not a crime.

But I would push back on you there when you say didn't have to rape someone. But there have been numerous people in show business. particularly, they don't have to, but it's a different urge, Alan. I know I agree with you. Look, what happened with Bill Cosby, again, he could have had voluntary sex with so many people, but you must have if the evidence is true, if it's to be believed,

there must have been something about giving them drugs or something. But it's so interesting how different people are treated differently. Roman Polanski is accepted more in society and yet the allegations against him are much. more serious, you know, drugged and had sex with a young teenager, but he's not placed in the same category as Weinstein or Epstein. Sex is so complicated and so difficult and so emotional that Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, hard cases make bad law, and I think that's true of sexual cases too.

Many of them make very bad law. Which brings me, we need to wrap up, but the one thing I was going to ask you about Epstein and this speaks to the conversation you've just had with Francis about Weinstein as well is sex is often not just about sex it's also about powers and so I don't know about why in particular but one of the things that I've heard kind of people talk about is one of the reasons that there are these super rich people who are often involved in cases of sex with underage people, minors, etc, is that it's the last

taboo that this person actually has existing because if you're a billionaire, you can break any rule, you can break any law, you can do whatever the hell you want, you can park your car in the middle of a busy New York Street, no one's going to do anything, you can go to any restaurant, eat anything, throw any play anywhere,

beer as a rude, you can do anything. Yeah. Except this. And that's why they find it so good. That's a very, very interesting point. I hadn't thought about that. I have often said that many of my clients, who were wealthy and powerful were willing to give up what they had limited amounts of, freedom, life, health, in order to get more of what they had unlimited amounts of, money, sex, etc. And so you may have a point about that, that it is the last taboo,

but it's a serious and important taboo. I debated, what's his name, Ginsburg, the poet. Alan Ginsburg. We once had a debate about whether pedophilia should be legal. I said, no, it shouldn't be legal. That it's a horrible thing to have sex with young people who are incapable of consenting,

although I think the age of consent is far too high in many American states. 18 is ridiculous. So many people are having sex at 15 or 16 that it gives enormous discretion to prosecutors to decide which ones to prosecute and they do it often on racial grounds, for example. For the most part,

people who were charged with statutory rape in the South were black men who had, say, 19-year-old black men who had had sex with 17-year-old white girls. And so there should be more reasonable. That has nothing to with pedophilia. That's just racial discrimination. Yeah, yeah. And that's racial discrimination. But the laws were used in that discriminatory fashion. But you have an interesting point.

I think that wealthy people don't think they should be. I mean, it's Nietzsche. It's Uber mention. It's, you know, it's people think they are above the law. But, you know, you can be accused of that. I'm a man who had never has had sex with anybody, but my wife. I've been totally faithful to her since the day we met. And yet I was falsely accused.

And everybody who knew me knew it was totally false because I don't flirt. I don't hug. I don't do anything. But in the interest of getting money, I was falsely accused. thought because the difference between me and Prince Andrew, I wasn't worried about a deposition. I couldn't wait to be deposed because I did nothing wrong ever in my life, whereas Prince Andrew was Randy Andy. And his mom wouldn't allow him to be deposed where he'd be asked about other things. So even if you were completely innocent, he couldn't be deposed. And that's where

extortion works the best when you get people who are vulnerable. I'm not. talking about the Prince Andrew case in particular, but if you get people who are otherwise vulnerable, who have done terrible things in their life, those are the easiest people to extort because they can't submit to a deposition, whereas people like me, we have nothing to hide. Yet, if you're accusing me, it hurts my reputation. So people ask me all the time, is there any case I wish I hadn't taken? And the answer is yes, Jeffrey Epstein. I wish I hadn't taken the Jeffrey Epstein case, not because of what I did in court, but because of what I was accused falsely of doing out of court. I wish that part of my life hadn't existed.

I got a call from the obituary writer from the Washington Post, not so long ago, and his obituary voicing. Alan, I need to tell you that I'm writing your obituary. And he said, you know, when we write your obituary, it means you're going to live a long time. Ha, ha, that's an obituary joke. He said, but I have to tell you that I must include in your draft obituary the claim against you, even though you've denied it and even though it's been disproved and even though the woman has admitted that she may have mistaken you for somebody. I have to include it. Well, that tells you something.

That here I've had this rich life in which I've defended so many people. I've done so many good things, written so many books. And in my obituary will be the false accusation. So the power of a false accusation explains why people are prepared to pay hush money to avoid even a false accusation from coming out. We really interrupt up, but I have to ask you this question before we ask our last one and go to locals.

Do you think that there should be some kind of criminal punishment for making false accusations against people? Absolutely. It goes back to the Ten Commandments. And under Ten Commandment Law, you got the punishment that the person would have got had he been truthfully accused. Absolutely. I believe firmly that people who make false accusations must be tried, must be imprisoned, not only for the sake of those who are falsely accused, but for the sake who are of those who are true victims who are hurt by false accusers.

So I am absolutely committed to seeing prosecution of people who make false accusations, deliberately willfully false accusations. I'm not talking about mistakes. It'll never happen. because the public doesn't care about false accusations in the sex area. They only care about diminishing the reputation of people who are accused. It's one of the worst scandals that I think we have going today, and it's something I've been victimized by, so I care about it deeply, and I'm committed to seeing that people who make false accusations are accurately investigated and adequately punished.

This has been such a brilliant conversation. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Well, you know, when a British person says anything about me brilliant, I totally discount it. When somebody calls me on the phone and says, could you have an interview at 9 o'clock? And I say, no, 10 o'clock. She'll say, brilliant. So the word brilliant has lost its meaning from Britain. Yeah, like a lot of things, unfortunately.

But before we head on over to our locals where our supporters get to ask you questions, we finish our interviews with the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that really should be. There's so many things where we're not talking about. I would say until recently, we hadn't been talking about anti-Semitism. We're now obviously talking about it. That's a good, that's a good thing. I don't think we're talking enough about the quality of education of what's happening to colleges and universities and how they become politicized. You know, I think we have to think hard about why so many less than excellent people are running for office. Why today the leaders of so many other areas, business, the military, are better than leaders of government that most highly qualified people are staying away from government.

and why we've ended up with a choice in America between Donald Trump and Joseph Biden. Alan Dershowitz, thank you so much. Head on over to locals where we ask Alan a few of your questions. Should he be deported for lying on his visa application? Her taking an awful lot of prison time to stay silent, people will say some smoke there for that. Oh, this smoke, and there's certainly some fire as well.

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