We're leaving you, we're abandoning you, you better darn change, or you're gonna disappear as a party. — Alan Dershowitz, Constitutional Law Expert, Author
Forty-two days before the midterm elections, The Homeland host Dean Cain conducted two separate interviews for Episode 16, each with a guest whose life has placed them on the front lines of the battles shaping the American republic: constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz and national security expert Brigitte Gabriel.
The episode is divided into two distinct conversations. In the first, Cain and Dershowitz discuss party realignment, the collapse of academic integrity at Harvard, Iran, Israel, and anti-Semitism. In the second, Cain and Gabriel cover her survival of the Lebanese civil war, legal immigration, grassroots civic engagement, and the stakes of the upcoming vote. What binds both conversations together is a shared conviction: America is an exceptional country, and defending it requires action, not silence.
Alan Dershowitz: A Lifelong Democrat Becomes a Republican
Alan Dershowitz spent fifty years on the Harvard Law School faculty. He worked closely with the Kennedys, with Bill Clinton, and with Barack Obama. He describes himself as having been a “knee-jerk Democrat” for most of his adult life. That era is over.
“The Democratic Party left me like it left Ronald Reagan,” Dershowitz told Cain. He described a two-step departure. The first came when the Democratic National Convention invited only anti-Israel speakers to its platform. That prompted Dershowitz to register as an independent. The second step followed when he considered who would chair key congressional committees if Democrats regained control of the House and Senate. “AOC, Elizabeth Warren, people who hate America,” he said. “I couldn’t be in the middle. I had to take sides.”
Dershowitz’s new book, Why I Quit the Dems and So Should You, chronicles that journey. President Trump wrote the back-cover endorsement. Dershowitz acknowledged he still disagrees with some Republican positions, including on abortion rights and the separation of church and state, but said he is in “far greater agreement today with the Republicans than with the Democrats.”
He placed his decision in a broader pattern: Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Elon Musk all made a similar move. “I want to encourage others to do the same,” he said. “We’re leaving you, we’re abandoning you, you better darn change, or you’re gonna disappear as a party.”
Harvard and the Crisis in Higher Education
Dershowitz did not spare his former institution. He described Harvard as having abandoned its founding motto, Veritas, in favor of what he called “mediocritas.” Meritocracy, he said, has been replaced by identity politics in admissions, hiring, and classroom discourse.
“The one thing nobody teaches at Harvard, certainly since I left, has been courage to stand up for your ideas,” he said. He named Steven Pinker as among a small number of faculty willing to challenge the prevailing consensus. He estimated that ninety-eight percent of the Harvard faculty identify as Democrats and described a culture where supporting Israel, in particular, is a career disqualifier.
Iran, Israel, and the Road to Middle East Peace
Both Dershowitz and Cain identified Iran as the central obstacle to stability in the Middle East and beyond. Cain outlined the Trump administration’s posture: Iran “defanged, defunded,” its nuclear program set back, its terror proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis “degraded substantially.”
Dershowitz went further, calling Iran “the greatest evil, greatest barrier to world peace in the world today.” He drew a comparison to 1935, when Britain and France had the opportunity to stop Nazism and failed to act. “President Trump did something to defeat Iran,” he said. “He has not done 1935.”
Dershowitz expressed full support for regime change in Tehran and predicted progress in the final years of the president’s term. He also argued that a weakened Iran would improve prospects for peace between Russia and Ukraine.
On the broader question of Israel, Dershowitz drew a distinction between Zionism and what he called “Palestinianism.” Zionism, he said, built a state that has contributed enormously to the world in medicine and technology. Palestinianism, in his view, seeks only to destroy one. He pointed to what he described as rising anti-Semitism on the political left and inside major universities and called on Jews and Christians to work together to defend the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Brigitte Gabriel: A Survivor’s Warning to America
Brigitte Gabriel’s story begins in Lebanon, which she described as the only majority-Christian country in the Middle East, a republic modeled on the United States. Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Lebanon was the Switzerland of the region.
That changed when, as Gabriel described it, the country welcomed people who did not share its values and dismissed the warnings they issued. “We refused to read the writing on the wall,” she said.
In 1975, when Gabriel was ten years old, radical Islamic terrorists bombed her family’s home. She was buried under the rubble, wounded, and spent two and a half months in the hospital. When she asked her father why it happened, his answer was direct: “Because we are Christians. They consider us infidels and they want to kill us.”
Gabriel and her family then spent seven years living in an underground bomb shelter, an eight-by-ten room with no electricity, no running water, and scarce food. She described digging dandelions from the ground for nourishment and crawling under sniper fire to reach a nearby spring for water. “Every time we left our bomb shelter,” she said, “we would say our last goodbyes because we did not know if we were going to come back alive or dead just to get a drink of water.”
At thirteen, Gabriel was told her town might not survive the night. She dressed in her Easter dress, what she called her burial dress, knowing that if she was killed, no one would be left to bury her. Her father opened the Bible and read from Psalm 23. Her parents told her that if the attack came, they would create a distraction and she should run toward the Israeli border, five kilometers away, because “we knew that the Jews are not going to slaughter us.”
Israel intervened that night, establishing a security zone around the town and setting up artillery positions to protect the Christian community from further attacks. Gabriel noted that Israel maintains a presence in that same security zone today, forty-five years later.
Act for America and the Case for Civic Engagement
Gabriel came to the United States on April 29, 1989. She described in detail the legal immigration process she underwent: applying for a visa at the American embassy, paying for her own travel on TWA, undergoing medical testing for leprosy and tuberculosis at her own expense, waiting four to five years for citizenship, and studying a book published by the Daughters of the American Revolution covering American history, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the branches of government. She passed both a written and a verbal exam in English. “By the time I became an American,” she said, “I knew more about America, our government, and our history more than my American-born husband did.”
After September 11, Gabriel founded Act for America, which she described as the nation’s premier grassroots organization focused on preserving American freedoms and values. The organization now has five million members and has helped pass three hundred bills at the federal and state level. She urged viewers to visit actforamerica.org, join a local chapter, and engage directly in the legislative process at every level of government.
“I named the organization Act for America. Not Think About America, not Hope for America, not Pray for America, but Act for America. Because without action, nothing changes.”
The Midterm Stakes
Both guests framed the midterms as pivotal. Dershowitz warned that if Democrats regain control of one or both chambers of Congress, the president would face impeachment proceedings and every cabinet member would be called before Democratic-led committees. “The goal of the Democrats will be to stymie President Trump in his last two years,” he said.
Gabriel pointed to reports of a new migrant caravan forming in Honduras as evidence that foreign actors are watching the election closely. “We need to go out and vote as if our life depends on it,” she said. “Because it does.”
Cain opened the episode by cataloging a series of economic and security benchmarks he attributed to the current administration, including $21 trillion in global investment into the United States, GDP growth at 5.1 percent, the lowest poverty rate ever recorded, the lowest murder rate since 1900, and the first drop in prescription drug prices since the Johnson administration.
He closed the episode with a phrase he returned to throughout: “You may not be interested in politics, but I promise you, politics is interested in you.”
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