Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Dershowitz

Dershowitz isn’t confessing; he’s baiting. The line is built like a concession speech, but it’s really courtroom choreography: stipulate the ugly facts, then smuggle in the argument you actually care about. By stacking “racist,” “bigot,” “despicable” in a rhythmic pile-on, he performs moral alignment with the audience’s outrage. It’s disarming on purpose. If he can’t be painted as the guy defending prejudice, he gets to pivot to defending principle.

The specific intent is to separate two things Americans constantly muddle: condemning a speaker and censoring a speaker. Dershowitz, a civil-liberties maximalist in many public fights, often uses this move to make the First Amendment case feel less like complicity. “You’re absolutely right” isn’t agreement with Grant’s worldview; it’s an opening bid to claim the higher ground before arguing that even the indefensible retains rights.

Subtext: I am not your enemy; the enemy is the temptation to treat free speech as a reward for good behavior. That’s why the sentence is so aggressively evaluative. He’s not moderating the criticism, he’s amplifying it, as if to say: take all the condemnation you want - just don’t ask for the state (or a mob, or an institution) to do the silencing for you.

Context matters because Bob Grant was a notorious shock-jock figure in New York talk radio, the kind who thrived on provocation and racialized grievance. Dershowitz’s quote functions as a cultural rebuttal to the era’s urge to solve toxic media with bans rather than with counterspeech, boycotts, and public shaming. It’s principled, yes - and also shrewdly self-protective rhetoric.