Dershowitz Defines Dangers

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 September 2017.]

Selectively celebrated and nationally prominent attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz has become a familiar advocate of divers, sometimes conflicting, causes over the last few decades.  The country’s most prominent secular Jew has defended the likes of Patty Hearst, Mike Tyson, and O.J. Simpson.  On the political side Dershowitz is a dyed-in-the-wool progressive and a staunch Democrat, even acting as king-maker in the party.  His support for Hillary, then Barack, then again Hillary is understandable, but less so the whiplash induced by his current strong support for President Trump’s advocacy of various issues, especially those dovetailing with his longstanding pro-Israeli stance on mid-east politics.

Alan Dershowitz started making his mark as a young man at Yale Law School.  From there he clerked for several prominent judges and justices, finally landing at the Harvard Law School where he became their youngest fully tenured professor at the age of 28.  One of his lifelong guiding mantras has been to advocate for the obvious loser, declaring that it was “the Jew’s job to defend the underdog.”  And he has done this in his criminal cases, the numerous books he has authored, and continues to this day as a regular commentator for the left-leaning cable outlet CNN.

However, in recent years the avowed leftwinger and pro-socialist has been inching rightward toward a center-left position.  Through his recent columns and commentaries he is no longer the firebrand of yore, though he still gives rise to controversy by participating as a legal advisor to the notorious, such as Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame.  And today the mellowing progressive offers to give a balanced view of the dangers posed to our republic by the extreme Right and extreme Left factions in the land.  His attempt in the essay ‘The Hard Right and Hard Left Pose Different Dangers’ is both informative and revealing.

From the outset he acknowledges that the KKK and neo-Nazis assigned to the Hard Right in their support of white supremacy and Holocaust denial are proposing world views that are grossly out of favor in west, and which literally no one supports.  Dershowitz acknowledges that “no one claiming the mantle of conservative is willing to be associated with Nazi anti-Semitism or the KKK.  Neo-Nazi and Klan speakers are not invited to university campuses.”  In short, “history has set limits on how to the extremes of the hard right reasonable right-wingers are prepared to go.”

But that is not the case with the Left.  “The hard left lacks comparable limits.  Despite what Stalin, Mao, the Castros, Pol Pot, …, and North Korea’s Kims have done in the name of communism, there are still those on the left – including college professors and students – who do not shrink from calling themselves communists, or even Stalinists and Maoists.”  That it is “acceptable on campuses, even if not praiseworthy, to be identified with hard-left mass murderers, but not hard-right mass murderers is telling.”

Dershowitz correctly observes that “the danger posed by the extreme left is directly related to its (popularized) benign goals, which seduce some people” especially in the universities.  This explains the welcome given to hard left zealots on campuses.  In sum, Dershowitz teaches that the hard right is dangerous for what it has done in the past. … (but) the danger posed by the extreme hard left is more about the future.”  And this danger we already witness in the “increasing tolerance for censorship and even violence to suppress dissenting voices which may be the foretaste of things to come.”  The epitome of this vision is when the hard left’s secular views are combined with Islam’s extreme theological views, then the result is “toxic”.

But what Dershowitz misses completely is that there are very few people who hold extreme rightwing views – they number perhaps in the low thousands.  It is the Left’s views that today are institutionalized by academe, by our Fourth Estate (aka the media), the entertainment industry, and in all levels of government bureaucracies across the land.  And their adherents today number in the tens of millions.  When it comes to dangers from the extremes of the Left or the Right, as even Dershowitz argues, there simply is no case to be made for those dangers being anywhere near equal in early 21^st century America.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  As, perhaps, a poster child of the dangers promoted by the hard Left, I bring to your attention their current efforts to operationally abolish the Electoral College (EC).  Led by luminaries like Al Gore and Michael Moore, these socialists have launched what they call the Interstate Compact to work an “elegant runaround” that calls for signatory states to “pool their electors for whichever candidate wins the national (popular) vote irrespective of their state’s vote.”  To date 11 states and their legislatures have signed on to the Interstate Compact, which for obvious reasons is not widely publicized.

Wiser Democratic heads are counseling states not to sign on, correctly pointing out that 14 Dem candidates have successfully navigated the EC, most recently twice with Barack Obama.  They point out that the real reason so many Democrats want to do this end run is that 1) they lost the 2016 elections, and 2) they see President Trump being re-elected within our constitutional confines that includes the EC. (more here)

Everyone on both sides not suffering from the Trump Derangement Syndrome advises that such an Interstate Compact is also unconstitutional and will surely be struck down by SCOTUS.  Nevertheless, the initiative is popular with the Left, especially those dedicated to growing Leviathan without bound.  For they know that, since the Enlightenment, the surest road to power by autocrats has been through a pure democracy – insure the ignorant masses stay ignorant through control of education and information, and then have them vote directly on issues and candidates.

In the 12sep17 Union there was a worthy footnote to the dangers from the Left.  Local writer Dave Glubetich writes ‘PC, the Left’s lethal weapon’, wherein he points out that political correctness “PC is not free speech. PC doesn't give a hoot about our Constitution and PC isn't about fairness. It's the exact opposite of many basic American values.”

PC is now a “political tool” both “dangerous and expanding”, and the proxy for “the rule of law followed today by most media outlets, universities, and large corporations”, the corporatists.  What the media and union schools keep from the public is that PC is a social policy "conforming to a particular sociopolitical ideology or point of view, especially to a liberal point of view concerned with promoting tolerance and avoiding offense in matters of race, class, gender and sexual orientation."  (American Heritage Dictionary)  And guess who it is that defines the insane boundaries of these “matters”.

The Right has no equivalent purchase on America’s public mind.  Perhaps the endemic advance of political correctness across our land is yet the greatest of the lopsided dangers to our republic fomented by the Left.

Comments

[Barry Pruett]

Thanks George! Here another piece about the Anti-first amendment folks.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/09/09/what-learned-from-antifa-handbook-for-starters-won-t-believe-who-is-defined-as-fascist.html

I do like fidelity to the Constitution of Dershowitz. Intellectually honest.

[Account Deleted]

One of the finest victories of the left has been to brand in the public's mind the idea that the NAZI party is 'far right'. It was and is no such thing. They were the party of immense govt control over the people unburdened by having to respect any of the basic rights afforded us by our Constitution and Bill Of Rights. It was the nationalist socialist party and in every respect they were left wing - just as any socialist country is.
It is a total mystery to me how folks can decry the NAZIs and the Klan but wink at or even support the communists. The commies slaughtered far more innocent people than the NAZIs and enslaved millions more than the New World slave trade could have ever done. To this day, the communists still cause far more human suffering in our times than any thing else in the world yet still have their ardent adherents in academe and govt.

[George Rebane]

ScottO 1214pm - We need to be reminded of this important distinction time and again, for the progressive mind has no means of retaining it. RR has been educating readers to the fallacy of Nazis not being collectivists (socialists). Here is a record of one of these debates with a leading local leftie.
http://rebaneruminations.typepad.com/rebanes_ruminations/2010/11/the-latest-volley-from-the-local-left.html

As can be seen, among other things he is totally ignorant of how the Nazis under Hitler totally (i.e. constructively) owned the means of Germany's production. Hitler was smart enough to leave the factory owners and managers in charge of operations, and did not make them destitute as did Stalin and the communists. (This also played well in the western press where Adolph wanted to be seen as a reasonable reformer of Germany's devastated economy.) A most authoritative citation for this is Konrad Heiden's 'Der Fuehrer' (1944).

[Bill the Tozer]

I want to be PC, but that woman makes it so hard to play the game.

https://m.facebook.com/PatriotPost/photos/a.82108390913.80726.51560645913/10155051327045914/?type=3&source=48.

[Walt]

And Folsom becomes Berkeley.
http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2017/09/14/high-school-usa-chant/
If you hear kids cheering USA! USA! USA!,, and it offends you, it's high time you leave to a nation where you won't ever hear it. Except when that nation has gone to shit, and starts demanding aid and a police force from the "USA".

[Bill Tozer]

Maybe an alternative heading to Dr. Rebane's post is " Dershowitz Defys Danger."

These two law professors certainly will be paying the price soon enough.
https://lawnewz.com/crazy/universitys-ban-of-sausage-fests-panels-is-sexist-say-male-professors/

[Account Deleted]

Bill T at 6:47 - Oh c'mon, Bill - this can be easily handled. Next time the good profs realize it will be a stag panel, just go down to the local stripper bar and hire the most top heavy cutie in the joint and tell her to show in something with a really low cut top. She can sit there and do her nails. That and a few wimmins conferences that find they have to have a person with a dirly-wanger sitting with them and I think the whole she-bang will go away PDQ. As an alternative - if they question why all the panel members are just bros - have one of the guys declare he is believing herself to be a woman for the duration of the conference.
I told you the left have become mentally ill.

[Walt]

No place is safe.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/14/activist-hijacks-press-conference-to-call-ben-shapiro-a-fascist-and-a-white-supremacist/

[Todd Juvinall]

Just back from a Seattle visit and if you want PC and anti=speech that is the place to go. The whole state.

[Account Deleted]

Todd - 9:22 - Not the whole state, although if you hang out in King County you'd believe that. There are a lot of folks in eastern Wash and Or that would love to break off from the coastal lefties that control their states (sound familiar?) and join Idaho. No new state would be created and the people in the rural parts of Wa and Or would be far better represented in their state govt. But as with Ca, good luck with that. The coastal lefties need the rest of the state's producers to fund their socialistic dreams.

[Bill Tozer]

Very good article, IMHO.

A Brookings Institution study revealed ominous signs about the threats to free speech in this country. Some 1,500 students at colleges and universities were surveyed about various ways that a speaker on campus might be stopped. Shockingly, 19% of them responded that violence is an acceptable method of shutting down a speaker.

Another quote:
Part of the problem is that many students simply don’t know what’s in our Constitution and are unable to identify even one of the freedoms in our Bill of Rights. Without the knowledge that our Constitution protects all speech, even that which expresses ideas contrary to our own beliefs, students are engaging in tactics that not only threaten civil discourse in academia but also threaten our very constitutional system.

The conclusion is best. Dershowitz would agree.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51445

[George Rebane]

BillT 757pm - Mr Tozer, I don't mean to accuse you of inattention to detail, but your fine comment may be more apropos under the recent Scattershots in which I discussed the Brookings Institution study and provided a link. I know with all that's happening, it's a bitch to keep up with everything ;-)
http://rebaneruminations.typepad.com/rebanes_ruminations/2017/09/scattershots-20sep17.html