Alan Dershowitz
speaker
787 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 16 Aug
Alan Dershowitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
A smaller minority now, when I started, I was teaching at Harvard, about 23% of the student body was Jewish. Now it's below 10%, which was the anti-Jewish quota that was imposed by President Lowell. The number of Jewish students now are lower than that. It's true of the number of white students in general. And we've seen a dramatic change. in the demographics of the university.
And that's part of the end of meritocracy. You know, we'll never get back to having universities first grade again unless we get back to meritocracy. Broadly defined, I'm not talking about grades or SAT scores. I'm talking about what the merits are. When you pick your surgeon, you want the best surgeon in the world. You don't care how far he's developed or what he's come from.
I think we should have the best students at Harvard meritocratically selected. And I think meritocracy always produces some diversity. Maybe not enough, but it produces diversity. We have to get back to meritocracy.
Forget about anti-Semitism for a minute. The Harvard Corporation picked as its president, Claudine Gay, a clear DEI choice, a clear affirmative action choice, utterly unqualified, probably unqualified to be a professor, ultimately charged with plagiarism.
Why would anybody pick Claudine Gay, who was against the First Amendment, against free speech, fired a professor because he represented somebody that she didn't like? And this is the corporation. headed by Penny Pritzker, who's still the chairman of the corporation. You'd think you'd fire the person who hired Claudine Gay to be the president, but no, she's still in the corporation.
And so the problem goes deeper than anti-Semitism. It goes deeper than any kind of bigotry. It goes to... changing Harvard's motto from veritas, truth, to mediocritas. We'll accept mediocrity now as long as it satisfies social justice principles. Yeah.
Yeah, it's $1,000 a cliche and she's getting paid.
Remember who Claudine Gay replaced two later was Larry Summers, who was the most brilliant president of Harvard, former Secretary of Treasury. He got fired not because of what he said about women. That was the excuse. He got fired because he was perceived by the left as being pro-Israel.
And in fact, there was a cartoon in one of the local newspapers, and it had Larry Summers on his hands and knees begging the corporation, saying, No, no, no, I didn't say women aren't good at math. I said Israel's an apartheid state. Now can I have my job back? So... ...started with the firing of Larry Summers, and...
When I started teaching at Harvard, I was the first, quote, Jewish Jew at Harvard, the first Jew who wore his Jewishness on his sleeve and stood up and defended the rights of Jewish students. Harvard had had a sordid reputation in relation to Jews for many years. And tragically, he's coming back. Look, Alan Garber is a very decent guy.
He's trying his best, but he has a hard left faculty that won't let him sit down and negotiate. He should be negotiating with with the president, President Trump, and giving in on about 80 percent of what the Trump administration wants.
Well, I understand that. And look, the key now is to prevent more of what happened in the District of Columbia last week, because I think it's going to increase. I think we're going to see more and more people crossing that line because we're going to see T-shirts with the killer. We've already seen people praising the killer. I'm not even going to mention his name.
But and the same way we saw Mangione T-shirts and people praising him. Once we begin to praise terrorists and killers, we become Hamas like. And, you know, we're very far away from that, but we can get there. Again, just to mention my book, The Preventive State. I go through all the mechanisms that we have used historically to prevent the spread of illnesses, to prevent terrorism.
And it's dangerous because the more we do to prevent, the more we can restrict freedom of speech and other freedoms. So we have to strike the appropriate balance. We're in a very critical stage now because the threats are cataclysmic, nuclear war, pandemics, but our ability through AI and other mechanisms to prevent and predict these threats are greater than they've ever been.
And so it's important to create a jurisprudential framework for allowing us to take preventive action. And deportation is one of the keys to it. Deciding who lives in this country is the single most important preventive measure we can take. And if we can keep our country free, of terrorists, of people who come from across the border illegally, we will have a much, much better country.
But we have to do it within the rule of law. And I think the Supreme Court ultimately will uphold the presidential decision who comes into the country, but will make him do it by crossing every constitutional T and dotting every constitutional I.
Well, do you know where this idea all came from? It all came from radical Democratic lawyers who started a project called the Project 65. It started during the Biden administration, and its express goal was to punish law firms and lawyers who had defended Donald Trump. So I wrote an op-ed piece saying, If you go after anybody because they defended Donald Trump, I will defend them pro bono.
So what do you think they did? They filed a bar charge against me. It cost me over $100,000 to defend myself against frivolous bar charges in Arizona and Massachusetts. I won all my cases, of course. But a bunch of lawyers... who were asked to defend Donald Trump said, no, we don't want to be, quote, Dershowitz. We don't want to have happen to us what happened to Dershowitz.
So it all started with Project 65, a group of left wing lawyers. And there was no objection from the bar. Indeed, there was cooperation by the bar. And so we're seeing a lot of hypocrisy. I don't like what Trump is doing to law firms. But it all started with liberal Democrats, and nobody cared about it then. So this is, again, the application of a double standard.
Don't stand up against Donald Trump if you are prepared to stand up, if you are prepared not to stand up against the 65 Project. The 65 Project, look it up. It started all this, and it expressly said, It was going after lawyers who defended Donald Trump. So let's understand where this started from. And it's wrong no matter who does it. We should not be weaponizing our legal system.
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