Ep 83 | How to Fix SCOTUS | Alan Dershowitz | The Glenn Beck Podcast

On paper, my guest today is somebody in this modern political climate I shouldn't get along with.

He voted for Hillary Clinton.

I can't stand her.

He endorsed Joe Biden.

I think Biden's the most corrupt politician in our history.

But he was also a lawyer on President Trump's legal defense team.

Defense.

Wait, how's that work?

What?

It doesn't work in today's politics unless your reasons are based on the Constitution and not the political winds of the day.

So who is this this guy?

Well, I think he's the forest gump of American judicial history because you look, you go back and look at pictures of any big important court case and you'll see him somewhere in the background.

He has represented notorious clients, Mike Tyson, Patty Hurst, Harry Reams, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump.

It has made him a target on both the right and the left, but he describes himself as a civil libertarian.

And that is why he and I won't agree on things, but can have a really fascinating conversation.

This, I think, is my favorite podcast yet.

This is a conversation that you do not hear anymore today.

Alan Dershowitz.

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How are you, Professor?

I'm doing good.

You're looking wonderful.

So are you.

You know, it's really a strange thing

that somebody as outspoken as you are, somebody who has been involved in in so much, and clearly somebody who is a Democrat, Hillary Clinton supporter, et cetera, et cetera,

I have no issue at all thinking that we're not going to have any issues, that you and I, even though we disagree on so much, are not going to have an unpleasant conversation.

Why is that?

I'm sure that's right.

I'm sure that's right.

Because I think that we know how to converse.

We're both intelligent, principled people who understand that reasonable people have different views based on their backgrounds, based on their heritage, based on how they grew up, based on a range of other issues, regional, gender,

religious, you name it.

So America is about talking to people with different views.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So is that something that

we fail?

fail to teach?

Is it, I mean, define civil libertarian, because that's what you say you are right a civil libertarian yeah is neutral and says free speech for all not free speech for me but not for thee due process for all right a civil libertarian is not result oriented he cares much more about the process the marketplace of ideas fairness than about results civil libertarians don't necessarily have to be people of the left i don't regard myself as a person of the left i regard myself as a centerist civil libertarian

some of my views are more left than other views, but I don't think of myself as a leftist.

I think of myself as a civil libertarian.

So when you

because that's the way I would describe myself, like for instance, the SCOTUS pick,

I don't care that they vote the way I want them to vote.

I want them to look at the Constitution and interpret it as it was written.

Sometimes that'll work in my favor, sometimes it won't.

But that's the only way that it doesn't become a legislative branch.

Well, that's the way Justice Scalia saw it.

I was close to Justice Scalia.

I knew his father as a professor at Brookham College, and so we formed a bond.

We disagreed.

He came to my class the first year he was a justice, and we had a two-hour debate over originalism and constitutional interpretation.

Look, every scholar I know believes that you start out by looking at the words of the Constitution.

When I stood on the floor of the Senate opposing the impeachment of President Trump as a liberal Democrat, the only previous time I was on the floor of the Senate was defending Alan Cranston, the very liberal senator from California.

But when I stood on the floor of the Senate, I said, I'm here to defend the Constitution.

It provides for grounds for impeachment.

Treason, bribery are other high crimes and misdemeanors.

And the House had failed to charge any of those criteria.

They charged them with these vague concepts of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, which were rejected by the framers of the Constitution as making us much more like the British parliamentary system.

So I always look to the text of the Constitution first, but sometimes the text is open-ended.

Give you two examples.

There's a provision of the Constitution that says you have to be 35 to be president.

It means 35.

You can't interpret it.

If you're 34 and a half and you're brilliant and mature, you can't be the president.

And then there's due process, equal protection, cruel and unusual punishment.

Those are open-ended terms.

Those are subject to interpretation.

Another example.

When the due process clause was passed in the 1860s in the 14th Amendment, not a single person voting for that would say that it meant desegregated public schools.

Black children going to school with white children?

Unthinkable.

The 14th Amendment never would have passed.

If people had said, it means a black man can marry a white woman?

God forbid.

And now, of course, everybody acknowledges that we can't have segregated schools in America.

We can't stop people from marrying people of a different race.

We've just interpreted equal protection differently.

And I think the framers invited us to do so by using a term like equal protection.

It doesn't say Martin Luther King's dream that people will be judged by the quality of their character rather than the color of their skin.

Maybe it means that, but it uses an open textured term like equal protection.

Take the term cruel and unusual punishment.

What is cruel and unusual back in 17 something where they used to

put things through the ears of people and cut off fingers and torture would now be regarded as cruel and unusual punishment.

Aaron Ross Powell, so then how are you for gun control?

Because that shall not be infringed.

Okay, I'm very conflicted over that.

If I were a framer of the Constitution, I would not put the Second Amendment in the Constitution.

We are the only Constitution that provides for the right to own guns as a fundamental constitutional right.

I think it would have been better off as a legislative right.

But I lost that debate.

They put it in the Constitution.

I'm now a supporter of the Second Amendment.

No, I didn't know that.

I don't want to change one word of it because I'm afraid that if I get to change the Second Amendment, other people will want to change the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.

So I am committed to preserving the Bill of Rights every single word, every comma, and every space between the words.

Why would you not, as a framer, knowing what they knew back then?

Or are you saying from your position today, you wouldn't put it in, but if you were them,

you wouldn't have put the Second Amendment in?

It's a very good question.

I can't put myself back in what I would have thought if I lived in the frontier and needed a gun.

I probably would have written something something that said you can use guns for self-defense and protection.

You can use guns for

hunting and sport.

Maybe I would have imposed somewhat greater restrictions or ability of the state to impose constraints based on mental illness, based on prior criminal record.

I would have tinkered with it, but in the end, probably living back in 1793, I would have said, you know, I don't want the government to take away our guns.

That gives the government too much power.

Let me explore a little further.

With what's happening, the America that I've grown up in, we didn't.

I mean, you could have a gun, you should have a gun.

If you wanted one, you have to be responsible.

But I didn't really need a gun most of my life.

We're entering a time now where

the police

is being defunded.

Seattle, the response times are going to be bad.

you've got real danger in the streets.

When you have that and a possible hostile government, both sides are saying the other side is Hitler,

when you have those things, that's what they were really asking for.

They were saying, when you can't protect, you have to protect yourself when nobody else could get there, and a government out of control.

Yeah, well, first of all, neither side is Hitler.

Let's count our blessings.

We are not, we don't have Stalin, we don't have Hitler, we don't have Mussolini.

We have people who fundamentally disagree with each other and we have people who are encouraging others to go to the streets and sometimes engage in violence.

Michelle Goldberg, an op-ed writer for the New York Times, urged people to go to the streets and she didn't distinguish between violent and non-violent demonstrations to protest President Trump naming a nominee to the Supreme Court.

So, you know, we're seeing a greater increase in violence.

I lived through the 60s.

Of course, there was violence in the 60s, a lot of violence, bombs and universities and military recruiting stations.

And I have been threatened.

My life has been threatened repeatedly by all sides of the political spectrum.

I have been threatened because I brought a lawsuit against Cardinal Glemp of Poland 25, 30 years ago.

I was threatened because I defended the President of the United States.

I was threatened because I supported the First Amendment.

So I've been threatened and people have advised me to get a gun.

And I'm not going to disclose whether I have or not because that affects my security.

But if I wanted a gun, I should have a right to have one.

to protect my family.

Just recently, I got a call that said, enjoy your last night.

You will be dead tomorrow.

I called the police.

I called the FBI.

We traced it.

We found the person in Canada.

He was a kid, 16 or 17 years old.

And he was not arrested, but he was warned.

But I had a very sleepless night.

And my family were very nervous.

And at that point in time, I think a number of people in my family said, where do you keep your gun?

Where is it locked?

But I won't tell anybody.

But talking about how do you stop a government?

We're the only ones that have this right.

And that has really stopped the government from going too far one way or another because, you know, as Washington said, a government's like fire.

You better fear it or it will control you.

You control it or it will control you.

Look, we've had 2 almost 50 years of experience with this, and we've done very, very well.

We had a civil war, to be sure.

We couldn't resolve the issue of slavery peacefully, but we've resolved every other issue peacefully.

We had some terrible decisions in the United States, Plessy versus Ferguson, allowing for segregation, detention of 110,000 Japanese Americans in detention centers, McCarthyism, a range of other issues.

But we have self-correcting mechanisms, and I think we will get self-correcting mechanisms here as well.

You know, it's distressing when you hear both sides of the political spectrum say, you know, this election may result in violence.

If so-and-so wins, we're going to take to the street.

If so-and-so wins, we'll take to the street.

Well, you know, taking to the street is okay if it's just with signs and protests, but it's not okay if you start using violence or threats of violence.

And violence begets violence, and those with the biggest guns win.

And I'd much prefer to live in a country where those with the best lawyers win.

And I'd rather take the cases to court and let the Supreme Court decide the case.

Look, Bush versus Gore was a monumental decision in American history, not because of what it decided.

It was wrongly decided, in my view, but because Al Gore said, I accept it, and I will not contest the decision of the United States Supreme Court.

He might well have contested it.

It was five to four along party lines.

It was the wrong decision based on the history of the Eagle Protection Clause.

But he and Richard Nixon before him, you've got to give Richard Nixon a lot of credit.

He was beaten by Ted Kennedy in an election that he believed to the day he died was unfair.

He thought that Illinois was bought.

He thought that a number of other states, West Virginia, a number of other states, were bought.

And in the end, he told his advisors, although I think I may have won this election, I'm not going to contest it.

America is more important than my future as president.

So we have two presidential candidates who've done that, losing candidates who've done that over time.

Now we have a president who hasn't committed himself to accepting the results of the election.

Look, he has a perfect right to challenge the results of the election in court.

And that's what I think he's really saying.

It is.

And he's been misinterpreted to

believe that he's meant he believes something else.

I don't believe that.

Look,

he's planning legal strategy.

Both sides have war rooms.

They're planning legal strategy.

And you're going to see a lot of litigation.

That's why it's going to be very interesting to see who the fifth member of the Supreme Court is, whether the president gets to get the nomination, whether the nomination goes through before the election.

These are very complex and difficult issues.

I'm writing a new book on that about the whole confirmation process.

So here is, I want to come to the confirmation here in a second, but I want to stick on the election for a second.

The problem that I have, because we were just talking about this before you and I sat down, I was talking to somebody out in the hallway about what Donald Trump said, et cetera, et cetera.

And I agree with you.

I think he's saying, I'll challenge it and I'll see, but, you know, in the end, he would respect the view of the system, I think.

And I would, too.

If it was an Al Gore situation and I was on the losing side of it, I wouldn't be happy about it.

But that's the way it works out.

If it was fair.

And the problem is, is that you've got people saying on both sides.

Donald Trump said, well, we'll see.

We've got some things we have to look at.

We question.

You have Hillary Clinton coming out and saying he should never give in, never give in.

He should never concede.

When you have that on both sides in such a volatile thing, Alan, how do we come back together?

Well, I think we come back together through the institutions that the Constitution sets up.

If you read Hamilton, the most brilliant of our founders, I mean, Hamilton today,

you read the Federalist Papers, there are very few words that have to be changed.

Just the most brilliant analysis of our Constitution.

In Federalist 78, he talks about that.

He talks about how the judiciary, we have trusted the judiciary ultimately to make decisions when there's conflicts between the executive branch and the legislative branch, or where the executive branch claims too much power or the legislative branch takes too much power.

We have allocated to the judiciary, and until very recently, the Supreme Court was the most respected institution in the United States.

And if it renders a decision, like Bush versus Gore, the American people will want to see it followed.

What I worry about is now we have a four to four split in the Supreme Court.

We don't know.

Justice Roberts may go with one side or the other.

If the President appoints a partisan now, a strict partisan, and that partisan casts the deciding vote for the president in a contested election, there will be some who will say the thumb was on the scale.

I will not be among them because it's the process.

And again, as you said, you win win some, you lose some.

As a civil libertarian, you focus on the process.

So I trust the Supreme Court, even though I've lost in the Supreme Court and I've won in the Supreme Court, but I trust the process, just like I trust the electoral process.

My candidates don't always win, they win about half the time.

The other half, I'm upset.

I mean, we had a big party in our house to celebrate Hillary Clinton's victory, and there's still the champagne is still there.

Right.

So

let's go to the Supreme Court on that.

Do you see the nominees that he has, the three women that he has laid out so far, do you see them as partisans?

I'm very worried about one aspect of Amy Coney Barrett's judicial philosophy.

I'm not worried about her religion.

We can't enter, ever, ever, under any circumstances, disqualify a person because of religion.

The Constitution, the text of the Constitution, says no religious test shall ever be.

And I think that Senator Feinstein was wrong when she turned to her when she was being confirmed for a judgeship and said, the dogma is heavy in your life.

That's a statement that could be interpreted as an anti-Catholic bias.

It's not a dogma.

It's a deeply felt religious, spiritual connection to God through her own eyes.

And she's entitled to those views.

It was very reflective of the 1850s and the anti-Catholicism that was happening back then.

You're right.

And of course, in the 1917, when Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court, and half the leaders of the bar said, we can't have a Jew on the Supreme Court.

Those days hopefully are gone forever.

But here's the problem I have, and I think it just should be explored.

She has written.

that she believes there is a right to life.

Now, she's never said specifically there's a constitutional right to life.

But if she believes that the Constitution protects the right to life, the implication are that New York could not pass a statute allowing a first trimester abortion.

Because if there is a right to life, a constitutional right to life, then the state has no right to kill a fetus who has the right to life.

So she has to be questioned.

I think her answers will be that's her personal view.

But right now under Oe v.

Wade, there is no right to life.

There is a right to choice in the first trimester,

conflicted in the second, not in the third, and that she'll follow the law.

That's what Justice Scalia said.

Of course, that's what John Kennedy said when he ran for president.

And I suspect that's what she will say, but she has to be questioned about that.

Not because she's a Catholic, but because of what she's written about the right to life.

But that doesn't make her a partisan.

I mean,

I believe there is a right to life, and

I'm like you with the Second Amendment.

I get very squishy because I don't want to be the judge there.

You know what I mean?

I just.

Yeah, no, I agree with you.

Look, my dear friend, oh, go ahead.

But that's not

a deeply held issue,

a belief.

That's not partisan.

That's not a partisan issue.

I'll give you some evidence on that.

My dear late friend Nat Hentoff, who I really learned civil liberties from, he was the great defender of free speech.

He was just the paragon of a civil libertarian.

He believed in a right to life.

He's a liberal Democrat, an atheist.

He believed in the right to life because he thinks that by allowing abortion, you trivialize and demean human life and that it's the first step on the road to

killing people.

And so he felt very strongly,

he was not allowed to serve on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union because he held those views.

He held them as a secular, liberal, leftist Democrat.

So I agree with you that views on abortion are not partisan.

I have friends who are liberal Democrats, but they're evangelical Christians or very religious Catholics.

Some of my Catholic friends as strongly oppose the death penalty as they do abortion, because they think both demean human life.

So I agree with you.

It's not a partisan view.

It could be an ideological view, but it crosses party lines.

For the most part, Democrats support a right to choose, and many Republicans oppose a right to choose, but it's not a partisan issue inherently.

I agree with that.

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Where would the mistakes

be made here in the next couple of weeks on either side that you would think?

Because we have to come out of this with people having respect for the Supreme Court.

And whoever the nominee is, if they are made to look like this is just a puppet,

then the whole election is going to be in question.

I agree with you, and Hamilton said that in the same Federalist paper.

He said, the judiciary alone can never hurt individual rights.

But when the judiciary is seen as in partnership with the executive branch or with the legislative branch, they can do much damage.

So the judiciary has to remain independent.

Look, the mistake was made years ago.

I'm writing a book about it, and I go through all the mistakes.

The first mistake was the way the Robert Bork matter was handled.

The second mistake was the way the Clarence Thomas matter was handled.

The third mistake was the Democrats getting rid of the cloacher and filibuster for judicial nominees.

The fourth and final and most serious mistake was the Republicans getting rid of the nuclear option and getting rid of the supermajority requirement for confirmation of Supreme Court justices.

And then the Republican refusal to allow the Merrick Garland nomination to go through eight months, eight months before the election.

And now the same Republicans are coming back and saying, well, it's only six weeks, but this is different because we control both the Senate and the presidency.

That's a hard sell for many Americans.

And I think a lot of Americans will say, look, a plague on both your houses.

Two hypocrisies don't make a principle, just like two rights don't make a wrong.

So I think a lot of mistakes have been made.

And in my book, I try to argue for how we can restore the legitimacy of the nomination process.

Look, this has been long in coming.

When John Adams was about to leave office, Jefferson was about to be president, he nominated all these midnight judges.

He stayed up until midnight signing these commissions so that his Federalist judges would dominate the judiciary for the next 25 or 30 years.

People didn't live as long as they do today.

You know, thankfully, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, who I knew since she was a young law professor at Rutgers University,

God gave her 87 good years.

Well, maybe 85 good years.

She's had a lot of bouts with cancer and illness, and she lost her husband.

But, you know, she was on the top of her game mentally until 87.

If justices now are appointed at 38, one of the people on the list is 38.

She could serve for 50 years.

I'm in favor of term limits for Supreme Court justices.

I would like to see that change.

20 years is long enough to serve on the bench.

And I like that better than retirement, because if you have a retirement age, say 75, that still incentivizes the president to pick young people, people in their 30s.

You shouldn't be a justice of the Supreme Court in your 30s.

Oliver Wendell Holmes got on the court at 60.

Brandeis, 60.

Ruth Beta Ginsburg, 60.

Maybe 50.

Okay.

But not 35.

And so if you can serve 20 years,

then it doesn't matter how old you are.

They'll put you on the court at 50 or 60, even maybe 65.

I'm a little too old.

I'm 82, so I'm not running for any judicial positions.

But there are people in their 60s who would make great judges.

Isn't it amazing that society starts to devalue people at 60, 65

and looks towards youth, but

without explaining, at least to me, I completely agree.

At 30, I don't care who you are.

At 30, you should not be a Supreme.

You have to have life experience and wisdom.

But we don't generally look at it.

I agree with you.

I agree with you.

I think wisdom is the main criteria for being a judge.

And the judges I know who have been the best judges not only are smart, you know, having taught at Harvard 50 years, smart as a dime a dozen, wisdom is difficult.

And wisdom, sometimes, like good wine, takes a little bit of aging.

Let me quickly just go on a couple of things here.

Immigration.

In terms of DACA,

which was more constitutional?

What Obama did or what Trump did?

You always ask the hard questions.

I think they were both constitutional.

You know, when you live by the sword, you die by the sword.

When presidents impose unilaterally executive orders, it opens it up to being rescinded by the previous president.

Obama, instead of having a treaty with Iran, which never would have passed the Senate, he imposed a deal on the American people against the will of the Senate, against the will of the House, against the will of many people in his own White House, against the will of the American public.

And then he then he complained when President Trump undid it.

But if you had a treaty, you couldn't undo it.

But if you have an executive order, you can undo it.

So probably both are constitutional.

I think one one is right and one is wrong.

I'm in favor of DACA, at least limited.

Look, I come from a family of immigrants.

Let me tell you a story about my grandfather.

Maybe it'll tell you why I'm so biased in this direction.

My grandfather was as poor as anybody could be.

He had a little house in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, at a time when Williamsburg was not the fancy neighborhood.

And he discovered that we had 29 relatives in Czechoslovakia who were about to be murdered in the Holocaust.

And they all sought exit visas and they couldn't get them because they didn't have jobs in America.

My grandfather went to everybody in the neighborhood and said, You have a house, you have a basement, you now have a synagogue.

You need a rabbi, you need a rabbi's wife, you need a ritual slaughterer, you need this, you need that.

Sign affidavits.

And he got 29 affidavits signed, and on the eve of the Holocaust, he rescued every single member of my family in Czechoslovakia.

Probably half of them were illegal immigrants because they, you know, probably one was 12 years old and he was going to be a rabbi.

But nobody cared because you had to save these people.

And so I'm sympathetic to people who try to cross the river to make themselves a better life.

On the other hand, I'm also sympathetic to people who played by the rules.

And so I want to be generous and I want to be compassionate, but you can't have just massive illegal immigration.

You have to have a reasonable approach.

Again, Alan, this goes back to a different dialogue than what we're having.

I mean, you and I are having.

I agree with you.

I say this all the time to my conservative audience.

Put yourself in their shoes.

You are in Mexico.

You got a drug lord running things.

You can't get a job, maybe.

If you do have a job, you're never going to improve your station.

Your kids aren't going to get a good education.

And right across that river is a place where all of that goes away.

And yes, you have to break the law, but they don't really seem to care that much about it anyway.

So, yeah, I would absolutely cross that river.

I would come north to

every time.

And not only that, but they're living in a country which is totally lawless.

Right.

They have never been taught respect for the law.

They want to come to America where they can respect the law.

Correct law.

Correct.

And, you know, I had an Uber driver the other day who I picked up, and

he seemed very smart, and he was a doctor in Venezuela.

And of course, in Venezuela, you can't live your life decently.

It's a tyrannical regime.

And he came to America.

He came legally, but he still has relatives there.

And the guy's Uber was like a salon.

He had, you know, he had water.

He had drinks.

He had this.

You could see this guy.

And he was a doctor.

He was a medical doctor and driving an Uber because he wanted to become a nurse in America.

I gave him a $50 tip.

I was so...

struck by, I said, this guy is my grandfather.

100 years later, this guy's going to make it.

He's going to contribute enormously to America.

He's what America is all about.

Yeah.

I had

I was going in for something that had to draw blood and I had a phlebotonist drawing my blood and he had a heavy

Eastern Europe

accent.

And the nurses were in and then he came in and the nurses left and his personality changed a little bit when the nurses weren't there.

And he started to open up and talk to me a little bit.

And I said, where are you from?

And he told me and he talked about how his life was oppressed over, you know, in Eastern Europe.

And he had come over here to America, but he was a heart surgeon in Eastern Europe, a heart surgeon, and he's now drawing my blood.

And he was just charming, it was amazing.

He was charming.

And the nurses came in and they said, Ivan, can we pick it up a little bit and kind of rolled their eyes?

And I thought, do you even know who this man is?

Do you even have any concept?

So I think immigrants make us better.

It's really important, et cetera, et cetera.

But you said something that I never hear from anyone when we're actually trying to solve something.

And that is, but you can't just have the Wild West.

There has to be, if you want to, I'm for more people coming in.

I just want to know who they are, why they're here.

I agree with you.

We need the rule of law.

I'll tell you a wonderful story about Ruth Beta Ginsburg.

Last time I had lunch with her, you know, we grew up not far from each other in Brooklyn.

We're approximately the same age.

She's a few years older than me.

She famously said, asked the question, what's the difference between a bookkeeper in the Garment District and a justice of the Supreme Court?

And her answer was, one generation in America.

And I said to her, Justice,

what's the difference between a bookkeeper and a Harvard law professor?

And she said, one generation.

My mother, too, was a bookkeeper in the Garment District, like her mother, and they both produced children who made great successes in the United States.

That's the American dream.

But now

you can be disciplined if you talk about the American dream in some context.

If you talk about meritocracy, if you talk about equality, you have to instead talk about identity politics.

It depends on what your race is, what your gender is,

and we have different rules.

based on different identities.

That's not America.

America is Martin Luther King, where we're judged by the quality of our character, not the color of our stints,

or our gender or anything else.

Isn't the politics of today of

the

critical race theory, isn't that pushing us

way, way back into the dark ages?

I mean,

California.

California passing a law or trying to pass a law that says we can discriminate is terrifying to me.

I don't care what color you are.

That's terrifying.

I agree.

I agree.

I have another book that will be out fairly soon about the cancel culture and about how the cancel culture wants to cancel meritocracy.

It wants to get rid of meritocracy.

Explicitly, people should not be judged by the merit.

They want to make sure symphony orchestras no longer audition potential players behind the screen.

They want to know if you're a woman or a man.

They want to know if you're black or white.

They want to know if you're Asian.

They want to know everything about you.

No, I want to know if you know how to play the violin.

And, you know, when I want a surgeon, I want a surgeon.

I always have a rule.

I want my doctors to be short, fat, ugly.

poor, and even maybe smell a little.

Why?

Because I know they've made it on the merits of their medical care.

They've not made it because they're charming and handsome or rich.

So that's the kind of doctor I want.

And, you know, I just want the doctor who's the best.

Let me go back.

You, you know, you looking at your life,

you have to at times go, I can't believe this has been my life.

This is crazy.

Right?

Well, I would have said that five years ago.

What a great life.

I mean, I started with nothing.

My parents hadn't gone to school.

I was the first member of my family to go to college.

And then five years ago, a group of lawyers got together with a woman and decided to conspire to try to destroy my legacy and my life by falsely accusing me of having sex with a woman I never met.

Fortunately for me, they left behind a trail of lies.

They try to suppress emails in which she admits she never met me.

They try to suppress a book manuscript where she described who she had sex with and said she didn't have sex with me.

They tried to suppress a telephone call between me and her lawyer, in which the lawyer said it was impossible for me to have met her and she was wrong, simply wrong.

They try to suppress another tape recording of her best friend where she tells her best friend and her best friend then tells me on tape that she was pressured to falsely accuse me by her own lawyers and yet because this accusation is still out there people believe it.

I mean I have the most overwhelming evidence that I never met this woman.

This is a woman who has lied about so many people.

She has a history of lying.

People don't care.

If you're accused today, you're guilty.

So my legacy has suffered.

My life has suffered.

I'm in litigation now up to my neck.

I'm suing them.

They're suing me.

I'm suing a lawyer.

He's suing me.

Legal expenses are mounting.

I am, you know, fighting for my reputation.

I will win because in the end the truth comes out.

But it has taken an enormous toll on me.

I'm 82 years old, and I'm spending too much time trying to prove a negative, to prove that I never met a woman who has falsely accused me and many others of improper conduct.

You're suing CNN for like $300 million?

Yeah, it's all going to go to charity.

I'm suing them because they doctored a tape.

I said on the floor of the Senate, if a president does anything unlawful or illegal, he can be impeached.

But if he just does something because he's partly motivated by a desire to get re-elected, that's not enough to impeach him.

They edited out the part where I said unlawful, illegal, and they then had their commentators say, Dershowitz said a president can do anything unlawful or illegal.

Exactly the opposite of what I said.

They doctored the tape.

So I am suing them.

I'm not accusing you of looking for a big payday.

Why the number 300 million?

Well, my lawyer came up with that figure, but it's money I want to give to charity.

I have a lot of charities I would like to give it to.

I would like to give it to organizations that support real free speech, organizations that support victims of real sexual abuse, but also that support victims of false accusations.

So, you know, it's a figure that my lawyer says reflects my

value of my reputation, the value of my integrity.

And I don't want to diminish that value.

People can make fun of the figure, but let's see if you can get it.

I like the idea.

I like the idea of the figure being huge.

And

I wish it was bigger.

And I wish they had to pay bigger fines for things like this.

Because

you can't, they're not the only ones that have edited tape to suit their needs or leave facts out on the table.

And that's really dangerous, really dangerous.

This is worse than just editing a tape.

It's as if I said the following.

It's as if I got on the floor of the Senate and said, I do not believe a president can do anything illegal.

I do not believe a president can do anything illegal.

And they left out, I do not believe.

And they just said, a president can do anything illegal, says Dershowitz.

That's what they did.

They took my words, they took out the words illegal and unlawful, and they had me say the exact opposite.

Then they got Joe Lockhart, the former press secretary, to get on television and say, Dershowitz says a president can do anything criminal.

He's like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.

So, don't you think I have to sue them as well for that?

I'm not going to let people get away with that.

I personally do.

Let me

kind of go back back to the to the case you were talking about with the woman and go through it with Epstein.

Because you and I talked,

I don't even know, almost a year ago when this first came out, and you said you had all of the goods on the woman.

But the problem with this one is, and again, this is the cancel culture, you're just assumed guilty.

The problem with this one is, is it's this guy was such a bad guy.

And you were there and helped broker the deal for something that was crazy in Florida.

And I think that's my job.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

That's my job.

You know, that's my job.

I'm proud of what I did.

If you don't like the deal, complain to the prosecutor, complain to the court.

But the one thing the defense attorney has as an obligation is to make the best deal he possibly could.

The reason we got this deal is they had overwhelming evidence that he had done terrible things at a state level from the state point of view locally, but they didn't have a federal case against him because they didn't have any evidence that he had transported underage women and interstate commerce.

And so I presented the legal argument that they didn't have the state case.

And so we settled the case by having him plead guilty to state charges, but not federal charges.

You know, you can complain about that.

prepared to defend my actions, but don't accuse me of having sex with somebody who I never met in my life.

I can tell you categorically, since the day I met Jeffrey Epstein, I had sex with one woman, my wife.

I touched only one woman.

I'm not a flirt.

I'm not a hugger.

I'm not that kind of a guy.

I love my wife.

And these accusations are provably false, and I've proved it.

But nobody wants to hear the proof.

The 92nd Street Why, this great organization that had me and Elie Wiesel speak every year, has canceled me.

They say we know you didn't do it, but we don't want trouble.

That's what the McCarthy people used to say.

We don't want trouble.

That's why we're not putting you on television.

We're not putting you on the radio.

And they won't put me in the 92nd Street.

Why?

Because of a false accusation, which they know is false.

You know, defending somebody that is unpopular, I've done that.

O.J.

Simpson, Mike Tyson, you know, you name it.

I've had Klaus von Bulow.

That's been my life defending unpopular people, particularly people that nobody else will defend.

And I'm going to continue to do it.

Some people think I did much worse defending President Trump, but I'm going to continue to defend people when I think their constitutional rights or their legal rights have been violated.

Just a side topic here, just for a second, because I'm curious.

You remind me of John Adams,

who went and defended the British, which he didn't want to do, but he believed that you should have the best defense.

Does that play a role on how you pick people?

Because you really really nasty.

Well, I picked some good people too.

I mean, I've defended a lot of human rights people, a lot of First Amendment people, Natan Charansky in the Soviet Union.

I've defended other, and I've defended a lot of women.

I would say

I do half of my cases pro bono, free.

I would say 90% of my cases are people who you would find to be very decent.

But the most highly publicized ones tend to be on the other side.

I defended Mia Farrow against Woody Allen.

I defended so many other people.

I defended a woman who was locked up in a mental hostitution by her husband who wanted her money.

So I've done a variety of cases.

And I'm hopefully, if the good Lord gives me the energy at age 82 to continue, I'll defend even more bad people.

That's my job.

It's important.

Not only did John Adams do it, Abraham Lincoln did it, Clarence Darrow did it.

I'm not comparing myself to any of those people, but I have learned from them.

Abraham did it in the Bible.

He says to God, Far be it from thee.

How would you do justice, injustice, when God said he was going to kill all the people of Saddam?

Abraham said, what if there are 50 innocent people?

And God agreed with him.

If Abraham can defend the sinners of Saddam, I can defend Jeffrey Epstein and O.J.

Simpson and Klaus von Bulo.

So

where do you go next with this case to clear your name?

Well, I'm going to be in court.

We're going to litigate.

We're going to have jurors make the decision.

They'll hear all the evidence.

The evidence is overwhelming.

We have emails from her essentially saying she never heard of me.

Who is this guy?

Somebody had to tell her who I was.

Oh, I'm the guy who defended Klaus von Bielo.

They made a movie about it.

It's called Reversal of Fortune.

You should put him in your book because he'll help you sell your book.

We have that email.

And then she puts me in the book.

Then she puts me in the book as somebody she did not have sex with.

What could be clearer?

How they can even bring this lawsuit is absolutely shocking.

So who's behind it?

Why is that happening?

David Boyes is behind it.

He is a lawyer who's had more ethics charges than any prominent lawyer in modern American history.

He's been charged with so many violations of legal ethics.

He is behind it.

He has been funding it.

He was hoping to use me as a lever to extort

a billion dollars from Leslie Wexner.

Here are the facts.

They accuse me in public.

At the same time they accuse me in public.

They go to Leslie Wexner in private and they say, we can do to you what we've done to Dershowitz.

We can accuse you of having sex with this woman who you probably never met.

And if you don't want to be accused, there are ways of resolving this.

So that's one of the issues.

Do you have evidence of that?

We do.

We have evidence that

they met at about the same time.

We have evidence that she accused, the same woman accused Leslie Wexner, not only of having sex with her on multiple occasions, but making her wear Victoria's secret-type lingerie.

Can you imagine what that would have done to the company if it had been exposed that the head of the company, Leslie Wexner, the head of Victoria's Secret, was making a young woman wear Victoria's Secret-type lingerie to have sex with him.

And so they went to him with that information, threatened to expose it.

And then we'll see what happened, whether or not there was a payoff, whether or not there was, maybe they concluded she was lying.

But if she was lying about Leslie Wexner, why do they believe she's telling the truth about me?

All of this will come out at the trial.

I'm looking forward to presenting all of this evidence.

From day one, I didn't want to suppress any evidence.

I want everything out.

Every photograph, every video, every witness.

The other side has tried to deep six all the evidence.

They failed to disclose the emails.

They failed to disclose the manuscript.

They tried to hide the tape recordings.

Now it's all coming out and they will be exposed and I will be vindicated.

Let me switch to

Keith Ellison.

Sure.

You said that you would cancel your party membership if Keith Ellison was appointed party chair.

I apologize for that, sir.

Why did you see him as such a threat?

I didn't see him so much as a threat.

I saw it as a reward or a failure to condemn his close connections to Louis Farrakhan, who's one of the most bigoted people in American history.

I mean, he is a guy who has said the most terrible things about Jews, about gays, about so many other people, about white people.

And Ellison had a close association, which he has not completely told the truth about.

And so I thought that putting a person like that at the head of the Democratic Party would send a terrible message.

Look, I'm toying around with that issue right now.

I don't like the squad.

I don't like the members of Congress who have expressed bigoted views about Jews in Israel and about other people.

And I think the Democrats have a problem.

The Republicans have done a much better job marginalizing extremists.

There were a few on the Republican side, and they've marginalized them.

The Democrats have embraced the extremists, and that's what worries me.

Did you put me in that category category back in the day?

No, no, no.

No, I never thought of you as an extremist.

I did think of Pat Buchanan in that category, and there were one or two members of Congress that were taken off important positions.

They were stripped of their chairmanship.

The Democrats did the opposite.

They made one of these bigots a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

So I'm

wondering how, because I think I know a lot of Democrats.

My family was Democrat.

You know, my grandfather and grandmother, and,

you know, they were FDR Democrats.

And I think there's a lot of people that

have voted Democrat their whole life, but they now see this anti-Americanism,

this really bigoted kind of approach, and

an openness or a willingness to...

To stand with people who say there's nothing good about America and it should be destroyed.

That is.

I hate that.

Right.

I mean, what has happened to the Democratic Party?

And is it going to choose who they are?

I mean, what?

I hope not.

And one of the reasons I remain a Democrat is I want to make sure that it remains a centerist party.

I think nominating Joe Biden instead of nominating some of the others who were running

showed that the Democrats, at least many in the Democratic Party, want to move away from the margins and toward the center.

But we'll have to wait and see.

And we'll wait and see who, if he gets elected, who he appoints, and how he deals with, if he's elected, it's not a foregone conclusion at this point,

how he deals with the squad.

You know, all politicians want to have it both ways.

They don't want to alienate any of their base.

On the other hand, they don't want to embrace people who are extremists.

And we'll wait and see how that develops.

But for me, it's a work in progress.

If I remain a Democrat as long as I think the Democratic Party has the hope of remaining a centrist party, which can have bipartisan support for Israel, bipartisan support for American values, and I could never vote for a candidate who puts America down, who says that America was built on racism, America was built on bigotry.

Every country has had its bigotry, its racism, its

history of oppression.

We've mostly done a pretty good job in overcoming it.

We're not perfect, and

we still have a long way to go, but we should not be defunding the police.

We should not be

knocking patriotism.

I'm a patriot.

My grandmother, who came from a stettland, Eastern Europe, used to take me to stand in front of the Statue of Liberty on July 4th and recite the Pledge of Allegiance and recite the national anthem.

She was such a super patriot because she saw from whence she came and she loved America.

And believe me, that was contagious and it spread to my father and me and my family.

We believe in America.

So

why is there such reticence to disavow Antifa

or say black lives do matter and peaceful protests are good, but there's an underbelly of Black Lives Matter that is that Black Lives Matter Inc.

is a declared Marxist organization.

That's separate from what the average person is doing.

Why is I agree with you?

Go ahead.

I've written about that.

I wrote a piece in the Boston Globe saying that Black Lives Matter should

stop saying the things it says in its platform.

That I support the concept of Black Lives Matter, but the organization, unless it changes its platform and eliminates some of the most objectionable things that most people don't know about.

And when I talk to my son, for example, about it, he says, well, there's no such thing really as Black Lives Matter organization.

There are like 12 people who write the platform.

It's a concept, and you should support the concept.

And I do support the concept.

But I strongly oppose using the concept in any way as a cover for the kind of bigotry that's reflected in the Black Lives Matter platform.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

And Tifa, we've had people say that those are white extremists.

They are white extremists, but that they're right-wing right extremists.

That's the latest.

We know who these people are, mostly white.

I think they're using the plight of the African-American to foment their revolution.

But you have people that say they're not a problem.

You have people refusing to disavow them.

You have these,

I don't even know if you can call them democrats out in the west and in some cities that are are seemingly bowing down to them it's

wrong um should yeah it's dead wrong antifa is a terrible organization it's a terrorist organization basically it believes in violence they would say to you all dershowitz they fought against hitler how could you possibly how can you possibly say that

the communists fought against hitler too um and i don't support the communists um just Just because you're the enemy of my enemy doesn't make you my friend.

I have to have something in common with you, and I have nothing in common with Antifa.

It's a violent organization.

It has protested my speeches because I support Israel and I support

decency and centerism and peaceful protests.

And so they have protested my speeches.

That's fine.

They can protest them.

But they threaten violence and they use violence.

And I think they have to be looked into.

And the legitimate protests have to be separated from the illegitimate protests.

There's never an excuse or a justification for using legitimate causes to justify looting or violence or threats of violence.

So this is one I wrestle with a lot.

I am a federalist.

I want the least amount of government as possible.

I want the most control as close to my house as possible, the least in Washington.

And if you are sitting there, let's say I live in Minneapolis, and my police is being cut.

I'm worried about things.

My city council seems to be okay with all of this stuff.

My mayor does.

My governor's not doing anything.

I could see myself in that situation going, where's the federal government?

Because I'm a U.S.

citizen, too.

Where is my protection?

But

I don't want the federal government to be able to come in outside of the state unless invited.

What do you do?

How do you solve that?

Well, I wish we could invite Jefferson and Hamilton into this conversation.

As you know, Hamilton was the great federalist, and Jefferson was the Democratic-Republican.

But Jefferson was the state's rights guy.

He wanted to keep everything close to the states, and Hamilton saw the need for a bigger federal government.

He rejected, of course, the Articles of Confederacy.

He wanted a strong central government.

That's now changed somewhat.

And, you know, the answer is you can't do it in the abstract.

We have to do it in the particular.

There is a role for the federal government.

When the rioters try to close down federal courts or federal buildings or threaten federal employees, the federal government has the right to send their people in.

Otherwise, they need the consent of the state.

They need the governor or the mayor to invite them in.

We do not have a federal police force, and we should never have a federal police force.

That should be a local matter.

So, you know, whether you're a federalist or an anti-federalist, a Democrat, Republican, I think we can join in knowing that we have to have a system of checks and balances, where the federal government has a function, state governments have a function, municipal governments have a function,

law prevails.

prevails.

We are on the same page, I think, on this.

But

you and I both know if things get out of control and your local and state are

going along with people who are saying, tear the country down, burn it down.

I agree.

Isn't there some sort of insurrection in there?

I mean, without getting the, how do we do it without confusing and blurring the lines?

Because I don't want the feds to be able to do it.

But there's got to be some trigger.

I agree with you.

I've written about this.

The Constitution speaks to it.

It talks about the federal government guaranteeing every state a Republican form of government, Republican with a small R, obviously.

And it also talks about in cases of insurrection and suspending the writ of habeas corpus.

It's interesting that the United States Constitution doesn't mention the word martial law, which is in the Constitution of a number of other states.

And states have declared martial law over time.

The Hawaiian Islands declared it after Pearl Harbor.

We never have had martial law.

We came close to it during the Civil War when the president suspended the writ of habeas corpus and essentially was overruled by the United States Supreme Court.

So, you know, we have to keep the balance struck.

Our government is a process.

You know, we're not like other countries where sovereignty resides in the king or in the prime minister.

In our case, sovereignty is a process.

It's a system of checks and balances.

It's a system of separation of powers.

No one institution has all the power.

The courts may have the last word subject to the public accepting it.

But

what is the definition of insurrection?

What is that trigger, that line?

Is that a bright line or is that just subjective?

It's not a bright line.

We had a few insurrections early in our history, and Jefferson wrote about them and talked about, you know, insurrections every so often or the blood of

liberty,

all of that.

But we've been blessed.

Other than the Civil War,

we had draft riots.

The way we handled, for example, Irish immigrants coming to the United States during the Civil War, we just made them into cannon fodder.

We sent them off to be killed.

There were riots, obviously, and we understand that.

But a balance has to be struck.

And the Constitution tries to strike the balance with a variety of provisions, provisions, ultimately leaving it to the courts.

Is it a perfect system?

It's not.

But as Churchill said about democracy, it may be the worst system except for all the others that have been tried over time.

When

we look at COVID,

Donald Trump, I mean, honestly, one of the things, I was against Donald Trump in 2016.

And I have been impressed on some things.

I hate other things.

But

the one concern that I had, in fact, I said it in 2016, that this guy's going to get elected and he's a power guy.

He's just a power guy.

And he's used to being the CEO and he'll just administrate, which is not our system.

And I worried that there would be some sort of a collapse or catastrophe at this time.

And he would become more FDR than FDR.

He has shocked me,

even with the invitation from the left: you've got to just tell these companies what to do.

You have to tell the states what to do.

You have to have a national mandate.

He's refused every step of the way.

We're now talking about Biden saying, I am going to do a national mask deal.

Does the president have the right to do those things, or is Donald Trump doing what the Constitution is saying?

The president has no authority to make laws.

People confuse the president with the commander-in-chief of the country.

He's the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

He can tell a private what to do.

He can tell a general what to do.

He can't tell you what to do.

He can't tell me what to do.

He is not our commander-in-chief.

He is the president.

He can enforce the law.

He can't make us wear masks.

He can't make us not wear masks.

The legislature does that subject to approval by the courts.

But the president administers the law.

He has no lawmaking authority.

That's true of governors and mayors.

So then where are we getting these?

So where are we getting these?

Like, for instance, Texas, we're not in session.

So everything that has happened has been done through the governor.

Where are we getting this authority?

It's not really there unless the legislature has authorized the governor to act in cases of emergency.

Generally, governors have no lawmaking authority.

The governors can't make you close your shops.

They can't make you open your shops.

They can't keep people from going to church.

All they can do

is

enforce the laws.

That's what the executive does.

Now, in some states, the legislature has authorized the governor to take such actions.

So the governor is acting as an agent of the legislature in that situation.

But our system of checks and balances, separation of powers, doesn't give presidents and governors the authority to make law, particularly to make law that carries with it punishment.

So there's a big issue of whether executive authorities can tell people what to do if the legislature hasn't passed a law.

I will tell you that I think the greatest lawsuit that I've ever seen, just this ripe lawsuit just hanging low on the tree, is the federal government telling people you must close your business

and

then not paying them.

I mean, some are getting loans, but wait, I don't need a loan.

I was doing fine with my business.

How does this not end in an absolute nightmare?

How many people have been wiped out

with what authority?

Well, I think there will be lawsuits under the takings clause of the Constitution.

The Constitution says the government may not take property without just compensation.

And when they tell you to shut down your business,

they are taking your property in the interests of other people, in the interests of the government.

And we shouldn't be putting all the economic burden on small businesses, which I'm afraid of what we're doing.

And I hope small businesses can survive because small business has been the essence of the American character.

I like the fact that Google and American Express now have ads on television saying, please support small business, because I think small businesses, a lot of them, are in real trouble and they should be supported.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle with tech.

I don't want to put the genie back in the bottle.

I think tech is amazing.

I think what's on the horizon with artificial intelligence,

with discovery, with everything is amazing.

It is also the greatest danger I think mankind has ever faced.

I agree with you.

I agree with you.

I think, you know, that in the end, all these science fiction movies about robots taking over the world and machines taking over the world, we already know our privacy.

The younger generation of people, my children, my grandchildren, seem to have much less concern about privacy than our generation had.

They put everything online.

They know that everything

they do is subject to being captured by high-tech.

You know, I get all these emails about telling me what books to read based on what books I've already read.

I'll never forget when I went to the Soviet Union in 1974,

I arranged for a young man who was about to be drafted into the Army and who was an anti-communist.

I arranged for him to come to America and live with me and take care of my children.

I was a single father.

And so he moved into my house and he helped me take care of the children.

I walked him to Harvard Square and he said to me, what's that?

And I said, that's a bookstore.

He said, a bookstore?

You can actually go in and buy a book and they won't keep a record of it?

I said, yeah, just pay the five bucks, give it to them, and nobody knows you bought the book.

He couldn't believe it.

He said, in the Soviet Union, if you want to read a book, the government is going to know exactly what book you've read.

And here in America, you can buy a book and nobody will know.

We take these things for granted and they're so important.

Today, can you buy a book without a record being kept?

I'm not so sure.

Right.

But the problem here is that people don't see a problem with it because they've never experienced a problem.

And I think these companies, Google, the founders, I don't agree with people saying, oh, the founders didn't see this.

The founders didn't see a lot of stuff, technology, et cetera.

But the principles were the same.

The one principle that I don't think they grasped at the time was that a corporation could become more powerful than a sovereign state.

Agree.

Or that social media could become more influential than the New York Times, NBC, CBS, CNN.

And they're less subject to control because the FCC doesn't regulate them.

One of the great First Amendment constitutional issues that our children and grandchildren are going to face is how to deal with the increasing power of social media and our desire not to censor them through government agencies, but the need to make sure that they are accountable somehow.

There was a very interesting thing that happened just this week.

A woman named Lila Khilid, who was a terrorist, who hijacked two airplanes, was invited to speak, of course, at San Francisco State University.

they wouldn't invite me to speak or you to speak but they'll invite a convicted terrorist to speak a person who hijacked an airplane and google and facebook refused to carry it and youtube and they canceled her and they said we're a brand and we're not gonna put terrorism as part of our brand First Amendment people are up in arms.

It's a great question.

Should they do it?

Shouldn't they do it?

They're private.

Do they have a right to make that decision?

Aren't they just like telephone company in the taxi cab?

They have to take first people who come, or do they have the discretion to determine that they don't want to promote terrorism?

Very hard question.

And if we have another two hours someday, Glenn,

have to come back, we'll debate that issue.

I'd actually love to spend more time.

I have so many questions for you.

I've really enjoyed this.

Let me just ask you just some quick things, just for a snapshot of Alan Derschwitz.

Sure.

Do you ever wrestle, have you ever ever wrestled?

You don't have to give me the details, with defending someone you are like, this guy's guilty.

No, not that he's guilty, but I don't defend people who are in the business of crime.

I don't defend people who that's their job, being the mafia or drug dealers.

I don't defend fugitives, people who have tried to escape justice.

But the fact that you're guilty or may be guilty, you know, I've been shocked.

I thought Klaus von Eulo was probably guilty when I took his case.

And it turned out he was not.

There was no crime.

I've had the opposite.

I've taken cases where I was sure the person was not guilty, and then I discovered that probably

he was guilty.

So, you know, my job is to defend the most unpopular people, the people who nobody else will defend, because for years I had tenure, and I couldn't be fired.

So I had a special obligation.

By the way, I'm discussing a lot of these issues now.

You know, I have a podcast.

We're competing.

I have a podcast now called The Dirse Show.

My son came up with that name, Derse Show.

Or in fact, maybe it's called It's ITZ, The Dirse Show.

And you can get it on Apple and Spotify.

And I've been having a lot of fun talking about these issues.

And a lot of people call in with this question.

Do you ever have, do you ever lose sleep over defending?

Let me tell you what I lose sleep over.

I defended two young boys on death row.

who were about to be executed, and they were innocent.

And their father had committed the crimes for which they were being executed.

I saved their lives.

But let me tell you, I didn't sleep for months before that.

Losing somebody to the death row.

I've never done it.

I've never lost somebody to the death row.

I've won 23 out of my 27 homicide-related cases.

I've had a very good record in that regard.

But I don't worry, I don't lose sleep over defending somebody who's guilty.

I would lose sleep if any of my clients ever went out and did it again.

I've never had that experience.

But I do lose sleep when I represent innocent people who I might fail and they might be convicted and they might be executed or spend the rest of their life in prison.

That's what really keeps me up at night.

Last two questions.

And it's the same question.

I want you to play it both ways.

I believe you're an optimist.

You believe that America is going to heal.

Let me give you my definition.

So

in Israel, they say a pessimist is somebody who says, oy, things are so bad they can't get worse.

An optimist says, yes, they can.

Exactly right.

I'm an optimist.

Things can get worse, but I hope that's not.

By the way, you bring up Israel, and this is on one of my notes, and we just didn't get to it.

Quickly, the peace in the Middle East that Donald Trump has brought about,

it's amazing, right?

It's amazing, and it's going to get better.

I played a teeny, tiny, teeny, tiny role.

I met with some of the Arab leaders in the Gulf.

I went to the White House.

I helped work a little bit on the peace plan.

You know, know, for me, bipartisan means the person I voted against, Donald Trump,

I support and praise when he does the right thing.

This peace process was the right thing.

And the president I supported, Barack Obama, I condemn when he does the wrong thing to deal with Iran.

So that for me is a bipartisan.

And to be an American, you criticize the people you voted for.

You praise the people you voted against, depending on the merits.

Aaron Powell, put it in the scale of

historic.

It's very very historic.

You know, in some ways, it's less immediate than Egypt and Jordan because Egypt and Jordan had attacked Israel and killed many, many Israelis, and there was peace.

These countries had never attacked Israel, but this could spread throughout the Arab world and throughout the Muslim world.

Oh, I think it's going to.

And it can really normalize Israel's relations in the Middle East.

You know who gets the most credit for it?

You know, people say Trump, he gets a lot of credit.

People say the Emir gets a lot of credit.

Netanyahu gets a lot of credit.

The credit goes to Israel as a country.

It made itself indispensable.

It has become so strong economically, scientifically, technologically, militarily, the rule of law, that every Arab country now realizes you're far better off allying yourself with a stable, successful, strong country like Israel than with Iran or any of the other countries.

Okay.

Here's the scenario.

It's 15 years from now, you're dead.

And America did not rediscover

who she really is.

We continued down the path of the road we're on.

What does this place look like?

Well, first, I'm coming back.

If America is destroyed, I'm not staying there.

I want to be part of the process of rebuilding it.

No,

it could happen.

It could happen.

I don't think it's going to happen.

I think, as Lernon Hand, the great judge, once said, when liberty dies in the hearts of men and women, no law can save it.

And the opposite is true as well.

When liberty lives in the heart of men and women, no law can destroy it.

And I really do think that we are a country steeped in our commitment to liberty, our commitment to due process.

You know, we have arguments, we fight with each other, there are extremists, but at the center of this country, at the core of this country, Democrats, Republicans, centrist liberals, centrist conservatives, we share a common commitment to decency and goodness and American values.

So I'm an optimist.

I don't think 15 years from now, when I'm 97 years old, that

we will be a dramatically worse country than we are today.

Hopefully, we'll be a better country.

A more perfect nation.

Alan Airschwitz, thank you very much.

God bless you.

What a pleasure.

What a pleasure to have intelligent, thoughtful conversations.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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