Alan Dershowitz Will Defend Free Speech By Suing The Library

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(Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images for Hulu)

Alan Dershowitz, chair of Harvard University’s Center for the Advanced Study of Cancel Culture and president of the Martha’s Vineyard Society of Nudists and Narcissists, is very upset on behalf of his constituency.

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What constituency? Why the many people in Chilmark, Massachusetts who are dying to hear Dersh hold forth on his new book about how no one ever lets him talk. You know, the same people who don’t invite him to parties any more. If those people who don’t want to talk to him aren’t allowed to hear him talk, then what even is the First Amendment for?

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“It’s not me. It’s the library and the institutions. The library has refused to allow me to speak, and other institutions,” he complained to the Martha’s Vineyard Times last week. “People want to hear me speak. This is a McCarthyite black ball. If it was someone who was a liberal Democrat, there would be a lot more concern and opposition to it.”

Naturally, Professor Dershowitz won’t be taking this modern-day Salem Witch Hunt lying down naked on the beach. He’ll sue, goddammit!

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“The library is a public institution,” Dershowitz huffed. “They can’t ban me because I defended President Trump.”

Ebba Hierta, the director of the Chilmark Free Library, called Dershowitz “a genius.” But she said her policy of refusing to host him long predates Trump’s presidency, since the facility can only accommodate 40 people, and he routinely brought in six times that many.

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“It became a public safety hazard. The building was overpacked. Staff were being abused, and unable to deal with patron requests,” she told the MVTimes.

Hierta also says that she’s gotten death threats and had to install burglar bars on her bedroom window since Dershowitz started screaming about the library on TV. To which the professor responded, “That doesn’t have anything to do with me. Let her call the authorities,” adding that “She should get a different job if she can’t take the heat.”

Yes, a public librarian in a beach town with a population of 1,212 should really learn to “take the heat.” Also Dersh’s wife, who “doesn’t agree with what I’ve done and said, is losing friends,” needs to step up and grow a pair, too. Doesn’t she understand that he has to go on Newsmax and threaten a public servant or free speech means nothing at all?

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And speaking of Newsmax hits, here’s the poor victim of the Great Silencing opining on Friday’s Bannon verdict for Greta Van Susteren.

Alan Dershowitz on the Bannon conviction: "Entirely predictable and entirely a violation of the Constitution."

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— Newsmax (@newsmax) July 24, 2022

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“Entirely predictable and entirely in violation of the Constitution,” Dershowitz railed, adding that “The judge denied him a jury trial.”

Which is a rather odd thing to say about a verdict rendered by a jury of Bannon’s peers in the city he calls home.

“They wouldn’t allow him to put on evidence that he believed that there was an executive privilege involved and he wanted a judicial determination before he violated an executive privilege,” Dershowitz went on, conveniently omitting the fact that there is binding Circuit precedent that mistake of law is no defense to a contempt of Congress charge.

“The conviction was a foregone conclusion,” he groused, going on to invent out of whole cloth an obligation for a court to order a witness to testify before he can be charged with defying a congressional subpoena.

Van Susteren, herself a former lawyer, professed her profound respect for juries, but then tut-tutted that “this is a community of 94 percent Democrat [sic].”

“Well, not only that, but probably 97 percent Trump haters,” Dershowitz agreed. “And all you had to do was say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this man Bannon worked for Trump.’ That’s the end of the case.”

Indeed, voters in the District of Columbia do detest the former president. And perhaps if Bannon’s lawyers had requested a change of venue based on the political composition of the jury pool, he’d have gotten his trial moved. Probably not, since none of the January 6 riot defendants have had success with such a motion — but at least he’d have preserved the issue for appeal. But, in point of fact, he didn’t do that. Of all the hundreds of pages of furious motions filed by the podcaster’s lawyers, not one of them involved moving his trial to redder pastures. So in the unlikely event that this case gets overturned, it will not be because the jury pool was “97 percent Trump haters.”

But while we’re on the subject of things left unsaid, we’d note that Van Susteren’s husband John Coale is the lead lawyer on Trump’s ridiculous LOLsuits against Twitter, Google, and Meta. Ah, well, must have slipped her mind when she was throwing shade at the judicial ethics of Trump appointee Judge Carl J. Nichols.

Alan Dershowitz is at it again [MV Times]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Topics

Alan Dershowitz, Carl Nichols, Free Speech, Greta Van Susteren, Law Schools