Litigators

Guys, I'm Worried About Alan Dershowitz

He seems to think this is all a game.

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One of the more painful parts of the Trump Era is how it takes people from you. The high school buddy, the respected colleague, the celebrity icon: people who you used to love or respect or both are BODY SNATCHED by the Trump regime, and deployed against you. We’re faced with a president who is openly bigoted, is an admitted sexual predator, courts nuclear war, lies, cheats, steals, and yet so many people are willing to serve him or give him aide and comfort publicly.

Trump makes you lose so much. He causes so much anguish.

There are three categories of loss. In bucket A, you have all the private people, the friends and family, who you can no longer talk to. How can you still break bread with people who think that their economic grievances are so important that it justifies national racism towards you, your children, and your immigrant wife? I’ve lost friends because post-Trump I can’t even trust them to be around my kids.

In bucket B, there are the public people. The ones you don’t know personally but whose work or art you respected. I cannot respect somebody who will raise their voice and expend their effort on the same side that the Nazis are fighting for. I cannot forgive that. Some of these people openly support Nazis, others merely compartmentalize the white supremacy away from whatever policy point they think is really important. Either way, these people are irredeemable. When you decide to roll around in trash it matters little if you are rotten to the core or if you just smell that way. I’m keeping a list, for when the wheel comes back around.

In bucket C, there are those who are silently complicit. They don’t say anything overtly Trumpish, but they also don’t do anything at all to resist. These are the “both siders.” They are LEGION in media. I see you. You’re dead to me too.

I say “body snatched,” but the reality is that all of these people have made a choice. They’ve all purposefully decided to throw themselves into the service of evil. They’re not “confused,” they’re not “mislead,” they’ve decided to be bad people. There’s a difference.

And yet… I still want there to be a group of people who have simply, literally, turned into some kind of brain eating, p***y-grabbing zombies. If it’s a virus, maybe they can come back.

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I think, I hope, Alan Dershowitz falls into that category.

He’s out there making trash arguments about how the president can’t do anything illegal and saying that Black Lives Matter is Anti-Semitic. It’s bad.

My colleague, Joe Patrice, has detailed the problems with Dershowitz’s newfound foolishness. I’ve stayed out of it because I’m compromised. I never had Dershowitz for a class, but I have been to his office hours. I have debated him. I have respect for him. My wife took his class. He was our favorite law professor. He’s met my parents.

What he’s doing is so painful that I need to believe that he can come back.

The Washington Post ran a piece today that allowed Dershowitz to, essentially, bitch and moan that nobody likes him anymore because he’s become a Trump person. In it, he sounds like a parody of a law professor. He sounds like a junkie who gets high off of playing devil’s advocate to a hypothetical overdose.

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Check out the end, where he seems giddy that his wife and children are concerned that everybody hates him now:

“But look, I have a very thick skin,” he said. “It’s upsetting my children. It’s upsetting my wife a little bit. For me, it’s energizing.”

I’ll give Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe the credited response:

I need to believe that Dershowitz will find his way out of bigot Jumanji before it’s too late.

Elsewhere in the Washington Post article, Dershowitz spends a lot of time complaining that people are questioning his motives.

“People have accused me of everything,” Dershowitz told The Post. “Of taking money. … A guy on MSNBC asked me if I was being paid by Trump. Others have asked me if I’m writing a book about it,” he said. “The answer to both is no and no.”

“Everybody’s questioning motive,” he said, with some suggesting he’s jockeying for a seat on the Supreme Court (“I’m 79 years old”) or that he wants to be Trump’s lawyer. None of this is true, he said.

He doesn’t get it. People are questioning his motives because impure motives are EASIER to believe than the possibility that Alan Dershowitz is just a trash-person now. It’s EASIER to think that he’s getting paid or that he’s got some kind of long game he’s playing, than to have to confront that reality that yet another person is fundamentally okay with bigots and predators running the country.

If Dershowitz had been, say, BITTEN by something, then somebody could just find the patient zero monkey that started this, synthesize an anti-virus, and inject Dershowitz with the cure, and he’d go back to normal.

And then we could try that anti-virus on your uncle, and my buddy, and Tom Brady, and somehow this whole nightmare would end and we could start rebuilding society.

But this ain’t no fairy tale, is it? Dershowitz isn’t an actual zombie, is he? People are just like this now. Evil continues to win the day.

Alan Dershowitz’s new reality: Tweeted by Trump, shunned by liberal friends [Washington Post]

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