Cancel Culture, Female Bias at Work, Mortgages, Corporate Credit, and Chinese Deflation - What Happens Next – 1.3.2021 – Alan Dershowitz QA

Larry Bernstein: Thank you, Alan, that was terrific.

Rick Banks: Thanks for that, there's a lot there. Let me start off with one question that is at the top of mind, which is Alan, I'm trying to understand how do we explain the emergence of cancel culture? It's easy to look back and understand the emergence of McCarthyism, right?... We might be opposed to McCarthyism, but we can understand where it came from, why it came about in the midst of the communist threat. But how do we explain where cancel culture came from now? How is it that we find ourselves in this?

Alan Dershowitz: It's a great question. I think it comes from the deep divisions that we have in our country. Today, there's no nuance, there's no middle ground, there's no center approach. Today, you pick sides, Red Sox or Yankees. You can't be in between, you can't say, "I like the Red Sox, sometimes they do some good. The Yankees, Hey, they've had some great hitters." You're either a Red Sox fan or a Yankee fan. Today, the choice between the hard left and hard right is driving people to basically choose sides, and when you choose sides you know the truth, capital T. And if you know the truth, why do you need dissenting opinions? And there's now, for the first time in my lifetime, an actual academic discipline that is developing for arguing against the first amendment, arguing against freedom of speech, saying free speech is a patriarchal colonialist capitalist imposition by the right on the left. And we know the truth, why do we need dissenting views? We know that when a woman accuses a man, she's telling the truth and he's lying. Why do we need trials? Why do we need due process? So it's a manifestation at the growing intolerance of nuance, the growing intolerance of opposing points of view, and of course the growing influence of social media.

Rick Banks: How disappointed should we be in the university leadership or institutions more generally, and how they support the cancel culture?

Alan Dershowitz: Never disappointed by university leaderships because I never expected anything of them, so I can't be disappointed. The university leadership is exactly as behaving as I expected they would, in a cowardly fashion, the way they reacted mostly to McCarthyism, they're interested in keeping things together. Take for example, what happened at Harvard. A very distinguished professor named Ron Sullivan, friend of mine, taught at the law school, teaches at the law school. The first African-American, along with his wife, used to be called master, now Dean of Winthrop House, one of the great colleges, and old colleges, Harvard, very distinguished, dean, but he dared to represent for only a month. Harvey Weinstein, as a result of that, some radical women in his house said that they didn't feel safe with him present. First of all, it was a lie. They were just lying. Of course, they felt safe.

Alan Dershowitz: He had previously, a year earlier, represented a New England Patriot player who had in cold blood, murdered two people, a gangland style killings. Nobody felt unsafe when he represented them. But when he represented Harvey Weinstein, they claimed to feel unsafe, they were lying, and I use my language carefully. I don't treat students as young kids, I treat them as adults. And when 19 to 20 year old says, "I am afraid, I don't feel safe." I look at them in the eye and I say, "You're not telling the truth, you do feel safe. But you learned that the words, I don't feel safe, have now become a mechanism for imposing your will and censoring." And what happened? There was a petition to remove him, not to rehire him as dean. And what did the administration do? It caved, and it didn't rehire him as dean. Now people like Noah Feldman, my colleague at Harvard said, "Hey, Alan, what are you saying? He wasn't fired, he just wasn't rehired." And I wrote back to Noah and said, what if they had discovered he was gay or Muslim, or in the 1930s discovered he was a Jew, and didn't rehire him? Would you make a distinction between not rehiring, of course not.

Alan Dershowitz: So administrators, faculty, cowards all have refused to stand up to the crowd, the bullying crowd of 19 and 20 year olds, egged on by bullying professors, many of whom have been very radical over the years and use the classroom as a podium for not teaching students how to think, but propagandizing them about what to think. And so it's a deeper problem at universities, but I never could be disappointed by university administrators because for 65 years in the college and university business, I've never expected anything much from university administrators. Occasionally when you get a university administrator who has courage, like Larry Summers, he too gets fired and canceled.

Rick Banks: Right. But even if we don't expect the university administrators to take a stand, why don't the faculty, if for no reason other than self-interest and the recognition that they might be next, why don't they take a we should stand for as a university? Why don't they do that?

Alan Dershowitz: You put your finger on it. Again, 65 years of being in the adult world, I'd never met a less courageous group of people than tenured faculty. Tenure just doesn't work. Faculty members want to be loved by their students, they want to get high teaching ratings from their students, and you know how you get high ratings from your students, the way Elizabeth Warren got high ratings from her students, never ever say anything controversial, telling the students exactly what they want to hear, confirming their preexisting views, teaching the same every year, telling you the same jokes every year, never getting involved in controversy, and you get the highest ratings. I used to get the highest ratings at Harvard Law School until I started taking controversial positions, and mostly out of class not in the class, in the classroom I was always the devil's advocate, but when my pro-Israel advocacy outside of class became well known, groups of students started giving me zero evaluations. I mean zero knowledge of the subject, zero ability to articulate my views, zero in availability outside of the classroom.

Alan Dershowitz: The dean called me in one day and said, "This is ridiculous, there's no professor at Harvard that's more available to students. You take every student that you have to lunch, you invite them over to your house for dinner, your door is always open, and you get zero for availability out of class?." And I said, "Don't you understand? They have a group that has said, 'Give Dershowitz all zeros, and that will knock his student evaluations from perfect five down to 3.8 because he'll have 10 or 15 zeros.'" And so students use teacher evaluations as weapons against the faculty and the faculty, who for the most part lack any courage or any willingness to stand up to students, simply go along at the faculty dining room they talk about it and they rail against it, but when it comes to making public statements, forget about it. You cannot count on tenured faculty members to show courage.

Rick Banks: Let me just insert there though, as a faculty member who has tenure, we know that teacher ratings or student ratings don't really affect one's life. If you have tenure, the ratings don't really affect your life in any material way, so it doesn't... That's not feeling like the real answer.

Alan Dershowitz: I fundamentally disagree. If you have tenure at Harvard, it may not affect your life. But if you have tenure at Minnesota and want to go to Harvard, it affects your life-

Rick Banks: Right, but we're talking about-

Alan Dershowitz: How did Elizabeth Warren get her job at Harvard? She had not published any significant scholarship, she got her job at Harvard because she was the most highly ranked teacher. So teacher evaluations do matter, teacher awards do matter, teacher awards matter in terms of getting into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and other evaluations. And it's not only teacher evaluations, it's your general approval. As a teacher, I've gotten many teachers who've told me, law school teachers, that they haven't been overtly punished, but they just subtly were told, "You no longer teaching first year students, because you're too controversial and the students feel unsafe when you talk about certain subjects."

Alan Dershowitz: Let me give you an example. Professor, friend of mine, taught criminal law for years, he spent the whole summer a few years ago finding any casebook, criminal law casebook that never mentioned the word rape, because he didn't want to teach it because he knew that as a white male, there's no way he was going to be able to teach rape without getting completely attacked for expressing any views that were in any way out of the political mainstream, and he didn't want to skip it. So he looked for a book that didn't include it and he found it, and he was so thrilled and he taught the whole criminal law class without mentioning the word rape and he got very good student evaluations and he continued to teach first year students. But that's what happened today, you cannot take positions in the classroom, even as devil's advocate that expose you to this kind of cancellation.

Rick Banks: Wow. So I'm almost hesitant to ask, is there anything we can do to move beyond this morass that we're in?

Alan Dershowitz: Yeah, keep having programs like this and keep involving teachers to say what they think. Many teachers agree with me, they call me, they email me, always marked confidential, and often they'll call me with a whisper. I've had the same experience even before cancel culture, when I would speak on college campuses about Israel. I remember going to Ohio State and speaking to a thousand students about Israel, making the moderate centrist two-state solution, pro- Palestine, pro-Israel speech, and a professor called me the next day, whispering on the phone saying, "Thank you so much for expressing those views, I agree with them." I said, "Why don't you express them?" "Well, I just can't, it would just hurt my career if I do."

Alan Dershowitz: I was invited every year to speak in Columbia on Israel because they couldn't get a single faculty member of the entire university to make the pro-Israel case. The moderate two-state solution pro-Israel case, so they had to import every year, a professor from Harvard, who's prepared to make the case. Always with protests, efforts to cancel me, efforts to shout me down, prevent me from speaking. And that has become even more common today of course. I will never again be invited to speak at a college campus because of the false accusation against me, and if I do, there'll be students protesting rape culture, rape this, rape that, Israel, Trump, he takes any... I mean, I have the tri-factor, I support Israel, I've been falsely accused of sexual misconduct and I defended Trump in front of the United States Senate, so you want to hear the perfect candidate who will never be invited to give another graduation speech? Never be invited to get another honorary degree? I got 15 of them before cancel culture began, but I'll never get another one. I don't care about that, what I care about is the young assistant professor who was trying to get tenure, how she or he will react to this.

Larry Bernstein: Alan, outside of the campus environment, how is it affecting corporate America? How is it affecting governments positions, government speech? Is cancel culture-

Alan Dershowitz: Yeah, let me start with corporate media, The New York Times, Bari Weiss had to quit The New York Times because she was so affected by the cancel culture of their newsroom and editorial room. The editors, the op-ed editors were fired and demoted for running a piece, Hachette Press, everybody threatened to quit if they dared to publish Woody Allen's memoir, fortunately I helped to get my own publisher to publish Woody Allen's memoir, and I was against him. Woody Allen in his lawsuit with Mia Farrow, I represented Mia, but the idea of not having his book published because he was accused 25, 30 years ago of something that he categorically denied and that the local law enforcement authority said is untrue, but he's been canceled and he can't speak on a college campus, and he can't get a mainstream publisher to publish his book.

Alan Dershowitz: So it goes outside and it's going to be much worse because the corporate America will be influenced by the students who are now conducting the cancel culture on college campuses. And it used to be the case that, well, the students will grow up, many students are radical when they're in college, when they get out into the real world they'll see radicalism doesn't pay off. That's not the case anymore because many of the corporate boardrooms are now dominated by people who support this. Look, for example, at the impact of Black Lives Matter, today you cannot be critical of Black Lives Matter. I am critical of Black Lives Matter, I support the concept of black lives matter, but the Black Lives Matter statement of positions calls Israel a genocidal, apartheid state akin to apartheid, South Africa.

Alan Dershowitz: And so I've been very critical of the Black Lives Matter platform. And today, if you are critical of anything in Black Lives Matter, you get a canceled. Every corporation supports holy without question Black Lives Matter as an organization, and so there's no room for dissent. Black Lives Matters does good, so does the Me Too movement. But every movement were to be criticized, even Eric Hoffer once said, "Every cause begins as a movement, then it becomes a business and ultimately a racket." And we're seeing the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter turn from a cause to a business, and at least in the hands of some people into an extortion and racket.

Larry Bernstein:

Do you think this, too, will fade? And you started the whole story with the Me Too movement, and then we got to Black Lives Matter and cancel culture. The Me Too movement seems to have really slowed down in the context of these new movements. Maybe it's my own supposition, not yours, that why do you think the Me Too movement has slowed down? Did it go too far, and when it showed its weaknesses, there was a pushback?

And do you think that same process will hold itself for cancel culture, it'll go too far, people will think what they've done is maybe ridiculous or off-base, and then it will naturally come to its normal conclusion? Just as the McCarthy period when that witness said, "Have you no shame?" Is that where we're headed? And if so, what kind of timing do you see? Is this a five-year problem, a 10-year problem, a 24-month problem and we'll move onto the next issue?

Alan Dershowitz: I wish I could accept your underlying assumption. I don't think the Me Too movement is slowing down. I think what they did is they exposed a lot of people, and a lot of people very legitimately right in the beginning. In some ways, they ran out of obvious famous suspects fairly early. But it's still fully operational. Anybody who's accused of anything, on a campus, in a job, anywhere who's Me Too'd... I mean, look at Jeffrey Toobin. What he did was stupid and foolish and ridiculous, but he didn't hurt anybody. And the idea that they're ganging up on him, I'm no great admirer or supporter of Jeffrey Toobin, he wasn't my student. But the idea that he should be fired from the New Yorker or CNN because of what he did clearly shows the strength of the Me Too movement.

Alan Dershowitz: And whenever they try to say what he did and put it in context, you get the Me Too-ers out there attacking him and wanting to cancel him forever and ever. It's just overreaching. I don't see it. I don't see the trend moving away the way it did with McCarthyism. It moved ahead because the Cold War dissipated, because McCarthy turned out to be a fool and a cheat, and of course famously the lawyer from Boston who said, "Have you no shame," put a lot of shame on him. And the president of the United States and some presidents in universities stood up to him. I don't see that happening today with the either Me Too, cancel culture, or Black Lives Matter.

Rick Banks: But Alan, haven't we seen on campuses though, haven't we seen a revival of ideas now of due process, and this idea that you really are innocent until proven guilty? Or is that, am I just reading-

Alan Dershowitz: No, we see that. No, that's seen as a Republican ploy done by the Secretary of Education, DeVos. And now she's attached viciously, and the Trump administration is attacked. Look, I'm a Hillary Clinton supporter, I didn't vote for Donald Trump. But nonetheless, the changes on campus are seen very clearly as Trump's attempt, and his Secretary of Education's attempt, to undo what the Obama administration... Remember that it was the Obama administration that introduced the abomination of telling universities that they would lose federal funding if they required proof beyond a reasonable doubt, or proof by clear and convincing evidence, instead of proof by a preponderance that a sexual allegation was true. Or if they allowed cross- examination of the accuser.

Alan Dershowitz: All of those were done by the Obama administration, they were undone by the Trump administration. But I don't know what the Biden administration will do. I hope that they will, as in many areas, come down in the middle and have a more moderate and centrist position on all these issues. But I'm not convinced of that. I think that particularly if the Democrats get control of the Senate by a 50/50 vote, the Democrats will be held hostage by the Bernie Sanders and some of the extremists, and maybe will have veto power over what Joe Biden would like to do. Joe Biden himself I think is a very reasonable man who would like to move the country back to the center, and away from the extremism of some of the both Obama views and Trump views on either side. But I don't know that that's going to happen, we'll wait and see.