Unpacking an Unconstitutional Impeachment with Alan Dershowitz
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Hey, everybody.
Very special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show today.
My conversation with Professor Alan Dershowitz.
He's a liberal.
We don't agree on everything, but boy, do we agree on First Amendment rights, free speech, the Constitution, and the need to protect civil liberties.
We have a conversation about Trump's impeachment.
What is incitement?
What is sedition?
Treason?
Was the Capitol riot a terrorist attack?
We talk about Israel, social media, and so much more.
It's a pretty comprehensive discussion.
Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And this bonus episode brought to you on the Charlie Kirk Show podcast feed is thanks to those of you that support us at charliekirk.com slash support.
That's charliekirk.com slash support.
It helps our research team, our booking team, our editing team do what they do when you guys support us at charliekirk.com slash support.
Professor Alan Dershowitz is here.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us today is the legendary Professor Alan Dershowitz.
Honored to have him with us.
And I have been a follower and a fan of his for quite some time.
We might disagree on certain political issues.
I actually think we agree on the big ones, though.
So it's an honor to have him with us today.
Professor, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Well, thank you.
It's my pleasure to be on with you.
Thank you.
So I'd like to start with the obvious news of the day.
It seems as if the House impeachment managers are requesting President Trump to testify in the upcoming Senate trial.
I'd like your opinion on whether or not you think that is a good idea.
Should the president testify?
And if you were advising him, would you recommend he do that?
Well, first, it's a clever ploy by Jamie Raskin, my former student in the House managers.
It's just a public relations stunt.
They know he's not going to testify, and they want to be able to say, see, aha, we asked him to testify.
He said, no, he must have something to hide.
No responsible lawyer would allow the president to testify and walk into a perjury trap in front of hostile senators and hostile house managers.
So you can be sure he's not going to testify.
You can be sure Jamie Raskin is going to make a big deal out of it.
And legally, it has no effect at all.
I agree.
It seems like a PR stunt more than anything else.
And I don't think the president will show up.
And so I've read some of your articles recently pushing back the idea of this second impeachment.
Can you walk some of our viewers and listeners through why you think this entire idea of impeaching a private citizen does not follow the founders' original intent of what impeachment was supposed to be used for?
Well, you don't have to listen to me, listen to James Madison, who's the father of the Constitution, who he said that impeachment is only for somebody who's still sitting in office.
He said it quite clearly in the Federalist Papers, and there's no way around that.
The text of the Constitution is clear as well.
It says impeachment is for purposes of removing a president.
Once a president is removed, you can also vote to disqualify him, but disqualification doesn't stand alone as a remedy.
If it did, then the Congress would have a roving commission to go through the entire United States and decide who to impeach, who not to impeach, and who to prevent from running for office.
Say the Republicans come up with a young, vibrant candidate to run against Biden four years from now.
All the Democrats have to do is impeach him, even though he's never held office, and just disqualify him from running for office or find somebody who ran for a who had a smaller office, an earlier office, and they can impeach him.
That's not what the framers had in mind.
What the framers had in mind is not allowing the Senate to put people on trial.
That's called a bill of attainer.
And a bill of attainer is specifically prohibited by the Constitution.
So there are so many things wrong with this impeachment.
Number one, they have no jurisdiction.
Number two, it's a bill of attainer.
Number three, they're impeaching him for a constitutionally protected speech.
And the impeachment itself is doing a tremendous amount of damage to our Constitution.
There's a lot there I want to unpack.
And the one point you just made that I hadn't thought of is: you're right, it could be used as a political ploy to prevent future political opponents from entering into elections in general, if that's now the precedent, which I think is a really, really interesting point.
It means that several hundred members of Congress determine who runs for president rather than primaries and elections.
It would deprive hundreds, millions of people of the right to vote.
It's just so ultimately undemocratic.
It's not what the framers had in mind.
And so, without getting into the intentions or the motives of the people pushing this impeachment, I think politics obviously plays a role.
Is this impeachment constitutional?
You say no.
Can you help explain why the Supreme Court justice is not showing up?
Since he's not showing up, does that render it unconstitutional just from the beginning?
And does the Chief Justice have a decision here of whether or not he can take maybe a challenge to this in the Supreme Court in the future?
Well, the Chief Justice has made a decision.
He made a decision that it would be inappropriate for him to sit because the impeachment is not of a sitting president.
It's of a former president.
And the Constitution says that the Chief Justice sits when a president is impeached.
So the Chief Justice made the right decision.
I predicted he would make that decision.
So far, all of my predictions have turned out to be valid because I don't make predictions based on wishful thinking.
I make them based on a constitutional analysis.
And I think that has to be given some weight.
Whether or not the Supreme Court, as an institution, would get involved in this decision remains to be seen.
If the president were to be disqualified, he could then challenge that in court, or he could ignore it and simply run for president again if that's what he chose to do and leave it to the other side to bring a lawsuit to disqualify him.
So stay tuned.
So one of the charges that they are putting against the president, both in the impeachment papers and also in the court of public opinion, is that the president incited the mob.
You mentioned that this is constitutionally protected speech.
You wrote a very interesting piece where you said the president did not yell fire, obviously using the example that people oftentimes cite of yelling fire in a theater.
Can you tell us why the president was well within his First Amendment rights to say what he said and the speech that he gave and why that is not incitement?
Well, you wouldn't know from listening to CNN, you wouldn't know from listening to PBS that the president used the words peaceful and patriotic, just like you wouldn't know when the president spoke in Charlottesville that he said, I'm excluding Nazis and white supremacists and white nationalists from my statement.
There are good people on both sides.
So you can't believe what you see in much of the partisan media, certainly not on CNN and certainly not on PBS.
So the president said peaceful and patriotic.
That's not incitement.
Moreover, incitement has a technical meaning.
It has to call for immediate, imminent violence.
If he had stood in front of the Capitol and said, now break in and destroy and steal Pelosi's laptop and kill policemen, that would be incitement.
But advocacy is protected by the Constitution.
You can even advocate violence.
There are cases involving communists who advocated the violent overthrow of the government, and that was held to be constitutionally protected speech.
Or the Brandenburg case, where a neo-Nazi Klansman called for violence, and he was surrounded by people with guns and with crosses and with Ku Klux Klan paraphernalia.
And the Supreme Court nine to nothing found that to be constitutionally protected.
Even the ACLU, which favors the impeachment, has said that the speech itself was constitutionally protected.
That's very interesting.
Is there a set of cases, maybe you just mentioned them, that might be precedent to show that there is a speech and then something that came after that speech that goes to show that the actions of the people that might have participated in the speech were done on their own volition.
Do you understand?
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
Lots of such cases, and I litigated some of them myself.
I was one of the lawyers in the Chicago 7 case.
And in the Chicago 7 case, people stood and screamed and yelled for blood and for violence and everything.
And yet the courts held that that was constitutionally protected.
And the ACLU said that was constitutionally protected.
You get speakers, radical speakers, all the time on the left and on the right calling for action.
One of the cases I had back years ago, I represented a Stanford University professor who stood a few hundred yards away from the Stanford Computation Center and said the computation center is a source of war in Vietnam.
It's aiding the war, the immoral war.
I think it would be a good idea for some of you to take over the computation center.
And then they did.
And the people who took over the computation center were, of course, disciplined.
And they also went after Bruce Franklin.
And the ACLU defended Bruce Franklin, and I defended Bruce Franklin against those charges.
And so there's a long history of constitutionally protected speech that uses strong words, strong language, fighting words.
Oliver Wendell Holmes talked about fighting faiths.
He also said every idea is an incitement, but we don't want to compromise our First Amendment rights.
We work too hard to achieve them.
It's so refreshing, Professor, to hear you say that, because there seems to have been a non-stop barrage that is making the argument that anyone that used typical political speech, even as simple as go fight for your values, as if that is directly inciting violence, which is something that is used quite often.
Oh, yeah.
Look, labor leaders have used that, suffragettes have used that, civil rights leaders have used that.
People on the radical left have used that.
People on the radical right have used that.
It's part of political speech.
In fact, President Trump's speech, which I disapprove of personally, I think he shouldn't have done it, was pablum compared to some of the speeches I've defended and some of the speeches that I've seen people make in the Capitol itself and certainly in other venues as well.
So I'm curious, you mentioned the ACLU approved of not approved of the speech, but they thought it was constitutional, but they approve of the impeachment.
I'm just curious, what reasoning do they have for that?
Well, they regard impeachment as an employment decision.
Their argument is as follows: that since a federal employee can be fired by the president, and this is in the brief also of the House managers, since the president can fire a cabinet member for statements he made that are part of constitutionally protected statements, then it follows that Congress can impeach the president for that.
But there's not a correct analogy.
President has the power to fire anybody for any reason.
He can even fire somebody to strike an appropriate racial balance.
He can say, you're fired because you're white, or you're fired because you're black.
You're fired because you're Jewish.
We have too many Jews in the cabinet.
We have too many this in the cabinet, too many that.
We want more women.
President can do anything he wants when it comes to deciding who's in his cabinet.
But Congress can't impeach a president unless the constitutional criteria are established.
And so one of the constitutional criteria has to be that it must not violate the First Amendment.
Give me an example.
What if Congress impeached a president because that president was Muslim?
And the defense was: no, the Constitution says no religious tests shall ever be required.
The ACLU and the House managers would say that's irrelevant to impeachment.
Of course, it's not irrelevant to impeachment.
Impeachment must be based on constitutional grounds.
And the First Amendment prohibits any consequences by Congress for a constitutionally protected speech.
And so, therefore, the entire charge of impeachment surrounds the speech.
It's all about the speech then and whether or not it was constitutionally protected or not, which is the case you've made from the beginning.
So, some of the people that have been indicted who have stormed the Capitol, there's some new stories that are coming out that they might be charged for sedition.
Quite honestly, I don't really know what that legally means.
Have you ever been involved in a case around sedition?
How does one get charged for sedition?
Of course not.
And of course, I haven't been involved in it because there have been no sedition cases.
You know, sedition is something that happens when you have a revolution.
Sedition is an anachronism.
It's just never used anymore.
This was not sedition.
This was not a revolution.
This was a violent riot, a violent protest, an illegal, violent riot and protest.
But it wasn't sedition and it wasn't any of those things.
And it wasn't terrorism.
You know, when Democrats started calling this terrorism, I got calls from friends in Israel saying, are you kidding?
We know what terrorism is.
Going to a school in Maloten, murdering 32 children, going on a bus and blowing it up.
That's terrorism.
This is not terrorism.
This is a violent riot.
Terrorism is designed to kill as many civilians as possible.
So words like terrorism, sedition, revolution, all of those are inappropriate.
This was just a riot, a terrible riot.
It got out of hand.
It shouldn't have.
And some of these people are now going to defend on the ground the president made me do it.
The devil made me do it.
Twinkie made me do it.
You know, criminal defense lawyers can be very creative in their defenses.
But anybody who participated in this riot is responsible for their own.
The person who killed the policeman should go to jail for the rest of his or her life.
The people who stole Pelosi's computer ought to be punished.
The people who broke down walls ought to be punished.
But you don't punish the speaker.
Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter about that in 1801, in which he's asked that question.
And he said, under the American approach, you go after the actors, not the speakers.
The speakers can speak, and the actors should be punished because at the first breaking of the law, the law steps in and punishes the illegal actors.
The Constitution distinguishes between illegal actions and speech and it protects speech.
And so what is now unfolding, it seems, is a sequence of investigations and indictments to see whether or not there was conspiracy.
Now, conspiracy is obviously different than sedition.
So conspiracy would be, and you would obviously know it better, two or more people working together to commit a crime or to do something.
They have to agree.
They have to agree.
There has to be an agreement for there to be a conspiracy.
And obviously, the president didn't agree.
He told people to engage in peaceful and patriotic protests.
He didn't tell them to break into the house and to kill a policeman or do anything like that.
So there's no way in which the president could be charged as part of a conspiracy.
If other people arranged in advance to do this, even in advance of the president's speech, that also undercuts the theory that it was the president who incited people to do it.
They would have done it anyway, even if the president had never spoken, which I wish he had not.
And there's more and more evidence pointing to that, such as the pipe bombs that were placed the night before, people that came with military gear and walkie-talkies and with text messages that showed the intent to engage in that, which would go to show this was not just an event gone wrong.
There might have been elements of that, but it might be actually more complicated than that.
And so, something, Professor, I want to talk about, and you've been amazing on the issue of civil liberties for years.
In fact, I think you've been the most consistent voice on this, is where this might lead us in regards to domestic surveillance.
It seems as if that there are more and more calls because of what happened on January the 6th for almost a new, more robust, modern era Patriot Act.
Is this something that we should be concerned about?
Do we have enough laws on the books to already fight domestic terrorism?
We have too many laws on the books, and we don't need more laws on the books.
We have all the authority we need to fight against both domestic terrorism and international terrorism.
We need more coordination between branches of the government, and I think we'll see that now.
But the last thing we need is more FISA court warrants, more FBI misstatements about facts so that American citizens are subject to unconstitutional surveillance.
Civil liberties comes first.
Free speech is first among the civil liberties.
And the idea that so many people on the left and so many liberals and so many Democrats are prepared to sacrifice civil liberties in the long run in order to pile on and get Trump in the short run.
Look, we won.
Trump was defeated at the polls.
That's what elections are about.
That's where presidents are supposed to be held accountable.
He was held accountable, and he is now a private citizen.
And the idea of piling on now and compromising our First Amendment rights and other rights is a terrible mistake.
Can you talk about how such a Patriot Act such as that might actually be used against liberal activists in the future?
We have lots of liberal liberties.
It always has been.
Yeah, please.
Remember that.
Yeah, denial of civil liberties has always been used more against the left than against the right.
You go back to the Alien and Sedition Acts.
You go to the Palmer raids.
You go to McCarthyism.
It's the left that has always been victimized by government over action.
I grew up during McCarthyism, where it was the left that was attacked.
Today we're seeing the left with very short memories being willing to forfeit their own civil liberties.
A great philosopher once said, he or she who forgets the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
And if they are going to repeat them, it will be turned mostly against the left, not against the right.
And so I think many on the left are shooting themselves in the foot and they're forgetting about long-term implications of what they are doing.
They're creating loaded weapons lying around to be used against them in years to come.
Yeah, it's puzzling, quite honestly, Professor, because I remember in the early debates of the Patriot Act, it was people on the left that were the ones that were challenging it.
You were challenging it from a civil liberties standpoint, but even people such as Senator Bernie Sanders was against the Patriot Act because he was afraid it was going to be used against socialist groups or left-wing advocacy groups.
And he was right.
That's right.
Totally.
And that whenever you give that kind of force to government and any sort of disagreeable group might pop up, don't be surprised when that force might be used against that disagreeable movement.
And that's...
Well, we all remember the great German Lutheran philosopher who said, when they came for the trade unionists, I didn't complain because I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews, I didn't complain.
Then when they came for me, there was no one left to complain.
So civil liberties is for everybody.
You know, we can have civil liberties for me, but not for thee.
Because when you deny anybody civil liberties, it establishes a precedent that will come back and be used against you.
And that's what's so, so dangerous about what short-sighted liberal Democrats and people on the left are doing today.
And why I, as a civil libertarian who has always associated myself with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, feel so strongly against what the Democrats are doing today because they're so short-sighted.
I understand their desire to get rid of Trump and to pile on, but I don't understand why they're prepared to compromise civil liberties, which will eventually be used against them.
So, Professor, an argument that some of the liberals will use that I encounter is they say, well, this is just one exception.
It's not about setting a precedent.
Trump is that bad.
We must use the tools necessary.
I'm sure you encounter this argument from some of your liberal friends where this is what's the best way to respond to that for the liberals that are watching this because they're saying we've never seen anything like it.
Now's the time to use every tool at our disposal.
Well, you've heard that throughout our history.
We've never seen anything like communism.
It's only an exception.
Let's introduce McCarthyism.
We've never seen anything like radical immigrants upsetting our country.
So let's have the palmer raise.
We've never seen anything like World War II.
Let's lock up 110,000 Japanese Americans in detention centers.
It's always this is special.
When you add up all the things that are special, you end up losing all of our liberties.
That's really well said.
And for the Democrats and the liberals, I think some of them have very good intentions, Professor.
I do.
I think some of them are.
And I've talked to some of these reporters privately.
They really are scared that if we don't do more, that there could be uprisings throughout the country.
I also think that they don't look at unintended consequences, that if you continue to use terms like terrorist or try to label half the country as the worst thing imaginable, it might actually create more radicalism, not less.
You know, you're someone that defends freedom of speech in every form or fashion, regardless of whether or not you agree with it.
Can you talk about how speech is actually the remedy to some of the rising radicalism in our country, that radicalism might actually be growing because we're talking to each other less?
Oh, I think that's right.
I think we're becoming a nation of extremists and we're having fewer conversations.
I'm writing a book now about the golden age of freedom of speech, which was from the end of McCarthyism, say 1960, to the beginning of the 21st century, where the vast majority of expansions of freedom of speech occurred.
It was also the golden age for civil liberties, for civil rights, for women's rights, for gay rights.
So I don't think there's any inconsistency between a fulsome approach to free speech and a fulsome approach to other rights, including environmental rights.
I think when you start taking away free speech rights, you're going to see a diminution in other important values.
So people who say, well, we support free speech, but we prioritize the environment over free speech.
We prioritize gay rights, women's rights.
They're wrong, as a matter of fact.
When you diminish free speech, you also diminish the ability to advocate on behalf of these good and important values.
I agree with you.
Many of the people who are our new censors are good people.
They're decent people.
But it was Justice Brandeis who warned us 100 years ago that the greatest danger to liberty lurks in well-meaning people, people with good intentions, with zeal, but without understanding.
And that's, I think, what we're seeing today.
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Professor, can you help respond to something a lot of the students we deal with hear a lot of, which is that speech is violence?
You touched on this a little bit, but this is something that's growing in the university.
And it almost as if this university narrative has now gone all the way to Congress.
It's gone from the campuses to Congress.
That not just what the president said, but the guy that might not have stormed the Capitol, but he might have been a thousand feet away, or he might have just been on social media saying something they didn't like, that that then turned into violence.
From less of a legal standpoint, but just more of a either a philosophical or a pragmatic one.
Can you talk about how dangerous it is to equate public speech then with violence?
Because that is something that seems to be catching on quite a lot.
And especially now as we see the reaction to what happened on January the 6th.
No, I completely agree with you.
And on college campuses, we see the fake word, we feel unsafe, we feel unsafe, presence of speech.
First of all, they're lying.
They are lying through their teeth.
When they say that they feel unsafe because Professor Ron Sullivan is the dean of a college at Harvard and he represented Harvey Weinstein, they're lying through their teeth.
Ron Sullivan, for example, had represented a mass, a murderer, a man who had killed two people and was horribly violent.
They didn't feel unsafe there, but because they hate Harvey Weinstein, they claimed they were unsafe and they got him fired as dean at Harvard.
It wasn't renewed, but it's the same thing as firing.
And so they've learned that if they say they don't feel safe, they get to win.
They get to suppress free speech.
They get to deplatform.
They get to cancel.
If you say that free speech is violence, you're abolishing the First Amendment and you're abolishing the basic, basic thrust of everything our Bill of Rights was designed to protect.
And there is an assault, an assault by many in the university, students and faculties, on our Constitution, on our Bill of Rights, and on our basic liberties.
And what it does is it turns people into activists that are less likely to ever sympathize with the other side of the argument.
If all speech is violence, well, then it justifies using the power of the state to potentially shut up that speech and to be able to.
Or use the power or use violence, your own violence, to counteract speech.
And that's what Antifa does.
When I speak on campuses, Antifa threatens violence to prevent me from speaking.
And so you're absolutely right.
When you shut off speech, it increases the amount of violence rather than the opposite.
Speech is a safety net.
And I think so.
I think it's very important that we maintain a fulsome approach to speech.
So, Professor, I wanted to get your opinion on something in the couple minutes we have remaining.
Both you and I are advocates for the state of Israel, and I've learned a lot from you on how to defend the Israel conflict in the Middle East.
I believe you nominated two friends of mine for the Nobel Peace Prize, Jared Kushner and Avi Berkowitz.
Is that correct?
Absolutely correct, and I'm so proud of it.
I actually proposed four people, the two of them, plus the two ambassadors, David Friedman, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, and Ron Dormer, Israel's ambassador to the United States.
These are the four guys who behind the scenes really accomplished the Abraham Accords, and they deserve to receive credit, along obviously with the leaders that signed on the dotted line.
But without these four people, and particularly without Jared Kushner and Avi Berkowitz, we would never have the Abraham Accords, which are the most significant step toward peace, certainly in the last quarter century.
So, Professor, you've been talking about writing about the issue of Israel for quite some time.
And you've done, if anyone's interested, they should look at one of your lectures where you make the legal case for Israel's creation.
And because that's one of the lies they teach in the academy that Israel was illegally formed, and you really go through it wonderfully.
What is the lesson that we can take away from how the Abraham Accords came to be?
What did Jared and Avi do that maybe the Biden administration can learn from?
This is a peace deal that eluded a lot of administrations, Republican and Democrat.
But it seems that President Trump and the team he assembled was able to achieve the unthinkable, at least the unthinkable, a decade ago.
From your perspective, what did they do right?
First of all, you mentioned my lecture on the legality of Israel's establishment.
You know, YouTube didn't take that down, but it put a caveat saying that was unsuitable for children.
And that's now become part of a lawsuit that's being abroad.
I'm not part of that lawsuit, but my YouTube lectures on the lawsuit.
What I think that Kushner and Berkowitz and the others did is they didn't allow the Palestinians a veto on the peace process.
They said, look, if the Palestinians want to join in, fine, you're invited.
But if you don't want to, if you sit this out, the way you refuse to engage in the peace process in 1938, in 1948, in 1967, in 1990, in 2000, in 2005, and in 2008, we're not going to let you veto peace between Israel and other Arab nations.
And it was a brilliant, brilliant strategic decision.
And it allowed three countries at the moment, maybe more coming up.
Four, we already have Morocco joining partly into this.
And maybe in the future, the Saudis and others.
I think it tells the Palestinians, you better come to the peace table or you're going to be ignored.
You can't get a state by just having BDS and protests and go to the UN.
You have to sit down and negotiate, and there have to be painful compromises on both sides.
And negotiate in good faith.
Don't say you want to negotiate and want peace and then walk away from the table at the last moment.
Where the conflict actually enriches the ruling class of the Palestinian authority from Mahmoud Abbas to many others.
Oh, yeah, the kleptocracy, where they steal money from their own people and deny their own people rights and safeguards.
Look, Hamas is anything but democracy, and it murders dissidents and others.
And so it's very important for there to be a peace process in which all sides in good faith seek to resolve this issue.
And I think it's resolvable if only goodwill prevails.
Do you think that the Biden administration will continue the Abraham Accords?
I don't think they'll have much of a choice.
Can you talk about that?
Are you optimistic about the Biden's approach to the Middle East?
I am.
One of the reasons I nominated these folks for the Nobel Peace Prize is to help put the pressure on to keep, make sure that everybody the importance of the Abraham Accords.
I've known Joe Biden for 40 years.
He is supportive of Israel.
He's critical of some of the policies.
But I do think that he'll move and build on the Abraham Accords.
You know, a lot of people in the new administration don't want to give the Trump administration credit for anything, but they have to build on the positive.
That's very important.
So you mentioned YouTube.
I want to get one last topic in really quick.
What is your opinion on the big tech censorship and how much power these companies have?
Being a civil libertarian and defending freedom of speech, how do you balance that with private property rights?
And some would call these companies monopolies.
Do you think that there are legal measures that need to be taken against these companies?
Are they too big to be considered as private companies, maybe public utilities?
What's your analysis on that?
Well, first of all, I think they're making a mistake in getting into the business of censorship of content based on offensiveness or untruthfulness or all of that.
It's a mistake.
You can't win that battle because once you say certain things are untrue and keep other things up, people will assume you're saying the other things are true.
And, you know, they're not.
Many of them, there's a lot of falsehoods on social media.
So I think it's a bad business decision for them to be in the business of deciding what's truthful and what's not truthful.
You can eliminate their Section 230 exemptions if they behave like publishers rather than platforms.
But the last thing I want to do is see the big high-tech media censored by the government.
That would be self-defeating.
They also have First Amendment rights to put on the air what they want to and take off the air what they want to, but that doesn't mean they're right in doing it.
They have the right to do it, but they're wrong in the way they're doing it.
And I think we have to keep putting the pressure on the social media.
Professor, thank you for being so generous with your time.
How do people check out either your, I think you have a podcast.
I listened to a couple episodes.
I do.
It's called The Dersh Show.
The only thing that's missing is The Wits, and that's provided by my viewers and listeners.
So it's on Rumble, it's on YouTube, it's on iTunes, it's on Spotify.
You can get it.
It's on pretty much every day.
The last days I've been talking a lot about the impeachment and the briefs I've been deconstructing and taking apart the briefs filed by the House managers, talking today about whether the president can be compelled to testify whether the Senate has jurisdiction.
Every day I talk about a very important issue, and I try to simplify it for the average listener and viewer.
And your book that you wrote, I think it was The Case Against Impeaching the President.
Is that right?
Well, that was about 10 books ago.
Since that time, I've written Tangled Culture.
I've written The Case for Liberalism.
I'm on a writing spree.
The one only positive thing about the pandemic is it keeps me locked up in the house.
And you give me a pen and a paper, and I just write a book.
So I've been writing a bunch of books.
I'm writing a new book now called The New Censors.
How can we combat the censorship of the social media, the progressives, and the universities?
So I'm writing.
Prolific.
Well, Professor, I think this discussion is one that needs to happen more.
We agree on civil liberties.
We might disagree on other political issues, but that's why speech is so critically important.
I just want to encourage you to continue to fight for the rights of all people.
And it's really been amazing the last couple of years.
Your voice has been a really encouraging one.
So thank you.
Well, thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
All right.
Professor, thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your questions.
As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Email me your thoughts about our discussion right here with Professor Alan Dershowitz.