No email yesterday because I was addressing the Heartland Institute's benefit dinner in Chicago -- I was one of three speakers, the others being Governor Ron DeSantis and actor Kevin Sorbo; I was happy to have a chance to meet some of my good Chicago readers there.
(Little Henry Woods was happy for another chance to wear his tuxedo.)
Wednesday night our friend Dave Smith debated the war in Iran with Alan Dershowitz, who spent 50 years as a professor at Harvard Law School, and known for taking on (to say the least) high-profile and controversial cases.
The whole thing is worth your time, but there's a particular portion I wanted to quote in particular.
You will surely remember what happened after Rep. Thomas Massie lost his re-election bid: Jewish individuals and groups boasted in celebration that their efforts had unseated Massie, but if you said exactly the same thingas a lament, why, you're an anti-Semite!
A similar thing happened between Dave and Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz has expressly said that he switched from the Democrats, his lifelong party, to the Republicans, because he thought the Democrats were now unsound on Israel.
The obvious conclusion from this -- in fact it's just the implication of the statement -- is that Dershowitz votes on a single issue: the welfare of a foreign government.
Dershowitz himself has no hesitation in informing the world that this is the case. But if Dave does it, why, Jewish Dave Smith is repeating "anti-Semitic" accusations!
There's far too much good stuff from Dave -- the six-minute clip in which all this unfolds is one of the best things I have ever seen online -- to quote here, so I'll have to confine myself to the Dershowitz accusation and then link you to the video for Dave's response:
So we're talking about disproportionate loyalty. If that isn't a code word for anti-Semitism, I don't know what is. And I accuse you to your face of being a bigot. You're making the core accusation that has been made about German Jews, Polish Jews, British Jews, American Jews, disproportionate loyalty -- that means dual loyalty, that we're not loyal to the United States.
I am an American citizen. I love America. Everything I say is based on what I believe is based for is good for America and good for world peace. Shame on you. Shame on you for invoking a trope that goes back thousands of years, actually, to the book of Esther in the Bible, to the book of Exodus. Dual loyalty. Disproportionate loyalty. Shame on you.
Here's the clip with Dave's response (you'll need an X account, or you can just find the entire debate on ZeroHedge):
Alan Dershowitz taught at Harvard Law for fifty years. He has argued before the Supreme Court. He has been on television more times than you and I could count.
Dave Smith does not have those credentials, and he'd be the first to tell you.
And the overwhelming consensus is that Dave dismantled Dershowitz.
Anyone who denies that Dave is extremely good at this is just wrong. He is excellent at it. As Darryl Cooper says, "Dave lays waste to the other side’s best so consistently that I take for granted how good he is."
For that matter, if you've ever been to one of Dave's comedy shows, he owns that room from the moment he steps onto the stage. I sit there in the audience genuinely proud to know him.
Now Dave didn't win that exchange with Dershowitz because he had access to classified information. He won it because when his opponent tried to convert a factual claim into a slur, Dave could restate the point, in real time, so plainly that the reframe couldn't stick, and in fact made Dershowitz look ridiculous.
That is a skill. It is not a personality trait that you either have or you don't. It is certainly not a credential. It's a skill, and almost nobody works on it or even knows how to work on it.
So I'm doing a webinar on it.
Based on my 30+ years of experience, I'll lay out the architecture of a speech that actually moves a room: how you open so people put their phones down (I have two strategies for you, and neither of them is "start with a joke"), the crucial question of organization, how to disarm a hostile audience, and about a zillion other things. (Honestly it's nearly a zillion.)
Who this is for: people who have already built something and know things worth hearing, and who suspect -- correctly -- that their ideas are traveling at a fraction of the speed they should be.
That's business owners, doctors, attorneys, candidates for local office, people who run a nonprofit or a company and have to stand up in front of a room a few times a year and wish they were better at it --but really, anyone who has to persuade a room, either periodically or for a living.
It is not about stage fright, and it is not an introduction to public speaking. It's about taking successful people to the next level.
I'm only doing this live, no recording, so click here to reserve your spot and let's make you someone who commands a room (and enjoys all the benefits that come with that) rather than simply occupying it:
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