Former President Donald Trump's controversial Jan. 6 rally speech was cherry-picked by media outlets that left out his call for "a peaceful, patriotic protest," not a mob siege of the U.S. Capitol, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
In an interview on "John Bachman Now," Dershowitz asserted "others have called for much more radical protests" in fiery speeches at the nation's capital.
"He said he wanted a peaceful, patriotic protest," Dershowitz said of Trump's rally remarks ahead of a violent mob's breach of the Capitol that led to five deaths.
"But if you watch CBS, PBS, CNN . . . MSNBC . . . . the president never said 'peaceful protest,'" Dershowitz lamented.
"That's the way we learn our history. We learn it from channels that now doctor tapes and edit things out," he said.
Dershowitz also maintained the media carefully edited Trump's controversial 2017 remark after protests in Charlottesville, Virginia — when he declared there were "good people on both sides."
"He also said 'and I mean to exclude neo-Nazis and white nationalists,'" Dershowitz said. "You don't know that because much of the media simply picks and chooses which words to show the American public."
Dershowitz also revealed he is writing a book about censorship sparked by "the hard left, progressives, and the Internet."
"We're seeing a real attack on freedom of speech in America," Dershowitz said.
"And if a president were ever to be impeached for making a constitutionally protected speech, or if lawyers would be disbarred for making constitutionally protected speech . . . I think it would be the worst attack on our First Amendment since McCarthyism."
"And in some ways even worse than McCarthyism, because the people making the attack are our future leaders . . . young people, not the last dying gasp of an old McCarthyism."
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