Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of the Chicks on the Right podcast.
We're honored and delighted today to have with us harmeet Dylan,
who is the former California GOP chair. She is the
founder of the Dylan Law Group. She helped launch the
Center for American Liberty, and she is now of course
serving as US Assistant ag for the Civil Rights Division.
Speaker 2: And so you have been busy.
Speaker 1: And we were among the many proponents of you replacing
Roni McDaniel back in the day in twenty twenty three,
but it kind of seems like maybe you've ended up
exactly where you're supposed to be, and we're wondering if
you feel that way too.
Speaker 3: Well, Look, I do believe that God has a plan
for all of us, and so that did not work
out the way I wanted it at the time. But
I'm very happy doing this job for the President and
is a tremendous honor of my life to be able
to do this.
Speaker 1: Well, we're glad to have you in that role, for sure, totally.
Speaker 4: So some of the things that I know that you've
been working on. One of the things that we are
adamant about talking about on our show is fighting anti
semitism on campuses and just fighting anti semitism in general.
We see a big surge of that happening in America.
I don't understand why. Actually I'm not really sure why
that's happening, but we see a lot of it concentrated
on college campuses. Can you speak to that a little
bit about the fight against that and how and why
you think it is happening across the.
Speaker 3: First of all, well, that's a good, great question. It
is one of our top focuses. So, first of all,
our college campuses, even dating back to when I was
in college a very long time ago, have been hot
beds of radicalism and extremism.
Speaker 2: And you know, pick.
Speaker 3: The issue du jour, and when I was in school,
it was liberation theology and El Salvador and Nicaragua, or apartheid,
and there have been many other issues over your black
lives matters, you name it.
Speaker 2: Whatever the cause du.
Speaker 3: Jour is, the liberal campuses are useful idiots for soaking
that up and propagating it. The different situation I believe
with the anti semitism is is that I believe it
has been accelerated by foreign influence and foreign money. So
a lot of these so called student groups that are
perpetuating the blockages and the encampments and the no go
zones for Jewish students at UCLA and other institutions. They
appear to have some ties to foreign funding. I'll leave
it at that, because that's something that we're investigating. But
I think that is one thing that's a little different.
And of course I think it is also the case
that there's some organic anti semitism going on here.
Speaker 2: It's ugly, it is kind of shocking in a way.
Speaker 3: Some prominent voices are perpetuating false narratives about Israel and
about Jews, and we have a zero tolerance policy for
it in this administration. Our president is the strongest president
in history on these anti Semitism issues. I speak to
Jewish leaders every day in my office, and Jewish leaders
and Jewish students are Americans, and they're idle to equal
protection and safety on our campuses, on our streets, in
their houses of worship, even in prisons wherever they are.
Speaker 2: They're entitled to the equal protection of the laws.
Speaker 3: And we're ensuring that's the case in this Civil Rights
Division under our Attorney General, Pam BONDI.
Speaker 1: Well, and you part of your role too has been
to fight against DEI. I mean, obviously that's been a
huge issue for Donald Trump too, and he's put as
much of a stop to that at the college level
and just across businesses as he can. But what do
you do because you know, we see the videos all
the time, the undercover videos of various schools and various
business departments trying to hide and get around that initiative
by renaming the departments or renaming the titles of.
Speaker 5: The people that work in DEI.
Speaker 1: And they're so brazen about, you know, getting around the
system and trying to fool everybody. How does your department
how do you attack that knowing that they're sneaking around
the rules.
Speaker 3: Well, look, I'm getting mocked by the left a little
bit for this analogy, but you have to think of
it similar to the desegregation movement. When Brown versus Board
of Education came down from the United States Supreme Court
using a legal theory that hadn't been previously applied, it
was a sea change for millions of people in this
country who had gotten used to a system of racism.
They could put black people in separate classes and separate
water fountains and not let them meet at the lunch
counter and make them sit at the.
Speaker 2: Back of the bus.
Speaker 3: There was little literally industries around that, and governors didn't
want to go along with it. Not just corporation heads,
literally they were governors. There's Oraville, Faubus and other people
like that. They didn't want to go along with this,
and you know, the President had used route force to
make it happen throughout the country. And so we're almost
in a similar situation here because for decades it has
been the law of the land under Supreme Court precedent,
and you know, pressure campaigns from woke corporations and all
these interest groups that you had to discriminate using quotas
in order to comply with federal law. Federal government still
collects data under or at least on the books. There's
a law that if you're a company over five hundred people,
you have to provide your race data to the EEOC,
so the EEOC can contain a database against you to
bring a case against you at any given time. So
the culture has to change and people haven't gotten used
to that. They're literally thousands of diversity officers and people
who went to college to become race hustlers.
Speaker 2: Quite frankly, it's a whole profession.
Speaker 3: Their job is now over, so you can imagine why
those people are fighting for their careers. They're going to
have to learn to code, or learn AI or something,
or learn how to install solar panels.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but their job is over.
Speaker 3: And so those people I feel for them in a
way theoretically, but I feel more strongly for the millions
of Americans who've had their rights denied to them, the
millions of young people who are told that they are
not qualified for that job because they're white, or they're
male or some other other straight This is ridiculous. It's
aut American, and we're putting a stop to it. So
it's it's just chipping away at it. It's whack them all.
We're making some big examples of some big institutions, and
hopefully everyone gets the message out of that. I've literally
only been in office for a little over five months now,
and we've made tremendous change already, and so by the
time we're done, DEI will d I E.
Speaker 5: I love that. I absolutely love that so much as
it should that's.
Speaker 4: That's the way to be curious, and you know, we
like to look forward because we think that this administration
is doing so many wonderful things to get us back
on track, because man, we lived through some crazy years, right,
and some of those years were COVID, Like some of
the COVID years, some of the mandates and things that
happened to us, and the lies we were told, things
like that, And I feel like a lot of times,
and I don't think I'm alone in this, but I
feel like a lot of times some of the stuff
is just brushed into the rug. Some of the things
that happened, some of the things we were told, people
who lost their jobs because they weren't willing to do
certain things right. So I was just wondering, like, if
you could just speak to some of the accountability, or
will we see some accountability for some of the things
that were done to Americans during that time.
Speaker 3: Well, you're talking to the lawyer who filed more lawsuits
against governors than any other lawyer in the United States
to challenge COVID restrictions.
Speaker 2: And I lost most of those cases.
Speaker 3: I'll never forget those and I want some of those
cases in the United States Supreme Court against the State
of California and Gavin Newsom shut down our beaches, Gavin
Newsom put sand in skate parks.
Speaker 2: Gavin Newsom didn't allow.
Speaker 3: People to visit their elderly disabled children in homes, and
Gavin Newsom allowed old people to die alone. And Gavin
Newsom now is trolling the president with his stupid pr account,
and we've just moved on to focusing on that. I'm
not going to forget the lives he destroyed, and either
does this Department of Justice. When cases are still available
on the docket, like the case of the coach in
Washington State who was fired from his job because he's
Catholic and he refused to take the vaccine. My office
has filed an amicus brief in that appeal in the
Ninth Circuit. And as people ask us to step into
these cases and stand up for the rights, particularly if
they're religious in nature, because they have greater rights under
the Constitution.
Speaker 2: But I'm not leaving it at that.
Speaker 3: When members of Congress asked me, Harmeet, what can we
do to make your job easier? I say, you need
to legislatively overrule Jacobson versus Massachusetts.
Speaker 2: The United States Supreme Court.
Speaker 3: President that all of the judges who ruled against me
cited to say that under an emergency, where a governor
declares an emergency, you have no rights, You have no
constitutional scrutiny to this governor's misconduct.
Speaker 2: He can close your beaches. He can.
Speaker 3: By the way, the governor actually opened the beaches as
soon as I filed a lawsuit, so we never got
to test that theory.
Speaker 2: He knew he was in the wrong.
Speaker 3: And the governor is making noises about an emergency with
regard to this voting thing he's doing. He's doing violence
to the California Constitution. I lived in California for twenty
five years and he's violating the California Constitution and the
CALIFORNI your voter's rights with his little stunt. And he
may use emergency powers to get it through. So pay
attention to that. It is not free to declare an emergency.
And we Americans need to stand up for our rights
and not be conned into this concept that governors can
suspend our fundamental rights with their one word emergency.
Speaker 1: Well, and I love seeing I mean because you know
we follow you on Twitter and we see a lot
where you use the acronym that we also love very much.
Speaker 5: FA and FO.
Speaker 1: So I see that a lot on your feet, and
I know our audience and we too, as Daisy mentioned,
we are hungry for accountability. So without naming names because
we know you can't do that, but like, do you
sense do you anticipate that we will finally see some
people in orange jumpsuits that will feed our hungry audiences
desire for that accountabile at.
Speaker 4: Least maybe like before the end of President Trump's term,
you know what I mean? Like that it's something to
look forward to you maybe even a couple of Christmas
presents along the way, that would be great.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The thing is, I can't tell you what I know.
Speaker 3: I will tell you that the Attorney General, who I
speak with and meet with regularly shares your zeal for this.
Speaker 2: Kind of an outcome. So do my friends at the FBI.
Speaker 3: Our new deputy co Director of the FBI, Andrew Bailey,
the former Attorney General of Missouri, is a tremendous resource here.
He's going to be amazing in that job. He's a
lawyer who gets it and goes after the bad guys.
And so I'm really excited about that development here in Washington.
So I think the answer is yes, we certainly want that.
I think that the American people deserve accountability. But there's
so many different things. Like you mentioned COVID. COVID is
now kind of far in the rear view mirror. I
haven't forgotten that a lot of people have moved on
from it. We have great people at the NIH and
HHS who I think are going to make some changes there.
They'll protect Americans. But American doctors are still calling for
the COVID vaccine for infants.
Speaker 2: No other civilized country in the world does that. That's insane.
Speaker 3: Americans need a medical system here, but we're going after
the medical school education. So I'm going after in a
number of different ways. But the Russia collusion hoax is
a huge issue and target, and I know people are
working on that.
Speaker 2: We'll have to see how that unfolds.
Speaker 3: There's all kinds of pardons and immunities and things that
have happened by the prior administration. And you know, there's
a law fair that has occurred. I have friends who've
had their law licenses suspended for just simply giving advice
to the president. That's outrageous, and you know they're coming.
The Left is coming for everybody and so you know,
at a certain point there needs to be accountability and
vengeance really for the people who did that. Now is
that going to come from the Department of Justice? I
can't tell you that, but I can tell you that
I think justice requires accountability.
Speaker 2: Well, we love to hear that for sure.
Speaker 1: And there's now there's this new, this wild new case
out of Louden County, Virginia, where there is this trans
girl in a boy's bathroom. And now somehow the boys
are the ones that are in trouble. What is up
with Loudun County. It seems like they're always the seat. Yeah,
all of this trans craziness.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean loud And County is one of five
northern of Virginia counties that are in this Trump derangement
syndrome slash denialism where they're like the Dixie Krats. They're
simply going to violate federal law. It is federal law
right now that you cannot do this. You cannot allow
children of either sex to violate the privacy rights of
the other, take their trophies, what have you.
Speaker 2: Mostly it's the other way. But boys have rights too.
Speaker 3: And I think this is a developing fact pattern but
I understand from the news that there were actually three
boys who complained. One is Muslim and the other two
were not Muslim. The Muslim child, whose family is equally
protesting like the others, was not punished, and the other
two children are punished. And this is insane. This will
not stand. The Department of Justice is following it closely.
I'd open up an investigation into this fact pattern even
before the suspensions were announced, and I think.
Speaker 2: People should just stay tuned.
Speaker 3: I believe there is going to be legal action of
some kind regarding this outrageous misconduct by these school officials.
Every boy in America deserves the same rights to privacy
as I believe every girl does.
Speaker 5: That's amazing that that needs to be said. All right,
I know this.
Speaker 2: Trans girl came into the bathroom videotaping, Come.
Speaker 3: On now, right, I should be for our locker rooms
to not I mean, no one wants to see that.
In my vision, certainly when I'm working out, no one
needs to see that.
Speaker 5: So yeah, nobody does need to see that.
Speaker 4: I feel like common sense is starting to make I
would hope it's making a comeback. I think just with
the election of Trump, we're starting to see that, and
we're starting to see that, you know, conservatism is even
kind of making it a resurgence. And the reason I
say that is because it used to be, because we've
been doing this for seventeen years and so much in
the past people would be like, I agree with everything
you say, but I'm afraid to say it out loud.
And I think more and more people are starting to
be more confident and saying I'm a conservative because these
people over here are just flipping crazy, you know, right, So,
and that is refreshing, and I'm so glad to see that.
You know, we have normal people like you who are
in the offices that they're in, doing the things that
you're doing and fighting for the American people. It's just
it's super refreshing to see that.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm one of many.
Speaker 3: I've gotten lawyers to come from all over the country
to help us, and in prior administrations, the Civil Rights Division,
Republican side was kind of a sleepy backwater. Nothing ever changed.
It was like a place where nothing ever happened. And
you know, we had lawyers who've been here for over
fifty years who quit when I joined this administration.
Speaker 2: Wow, you know, I mean It's about time, folks. Yeah,
it's about the laws have changed.
Speaker 3: The world has changed, our legal approach needs to change,
and that's happening this under this Attorney General.
Speaker 1: Yeah, gosh, yeah, I mean yeah, just with the amount
of desperation that people have to finally clean house, to
drain the swamp, and to see that happening, to hear
that you're working on the cases, to watch your Twitter.
Speaker 5: Feed when you say FAFO, it.
Speaker 1: Gives us all tremendous optimism about the future, especially because
Democrats right now are so hell bent on focusing all
their attention on the worst people, whether it's criminals, whether
it's illegal aliens, whether it's I mean, they're always on
the side of who they feel is oppressed, but who
are actually the oppressors. And the most recent example, of course,
is right there in your neck of the woods in DC.
Now there's this, you know, this thirty day edition of
National Guard troops to help police the city because of
the crime has been so bad. And now we've seen
this absolute tumble in crime rates in d C.
Speaker 5: Is it true?
Speaker 1: Because we've heard that there are lots of Democrats in
DC who are secretly all about the addition of the
National Guard troops.
Speaker 5: They want to be safe, is that true?
Speaker 1: And they're just afraid to go against the Democrat grain
right now, which is apparently pro pro crime.
Speaker 4: Or to say that they're for President Trump, because God
forbid they say that out loud.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, look, Maya, I'm a new and reluctant resident of
the District of Columbia. My job was here and I.
Speaker 3: Figured I'm going to be spending really long hours in
the office. I didn't want to commute, so against the
advice of many friends and said go live in Virginia.
I'm living in DC and it's been interesting. But I
come from San Francisco, so my head's on a swivel
all day long. I'm not phased by street crime or
what have you. It is much worse in DC than
in San Francisco.
Speaker 5: Wow, it is.
Speaker 3: In San Francisco there are places where you could walk
and feel safe and the crime was limited to certain kinds.
There could be random shootings in DC and you could
die just being on the wrong corner. That's not the
case in San Francisco. So so that's the baseline. But
you asked the question about Democrats. I don't know the
political most people are not that political really in their
day to day lives. We think of those of us
who are in politics, think of Republican and Democrat. I
would say the average resident in DC, if you were
to ask them or was a political is thrilled by
the likelihood of their getting randomly shot or carjacked, or
much by the homeless person going down. Who wouldn't They're
not crazy. They love their children, they love their cars,
they love their lives, and no one wants to get shot.
Speaker 2: And so I think that is the case.
Speaker 3: The only people who are loudly complaining, I mean, I
think Steven Miller made the point very brutally this week
with the vice president at Union Station saying it's a
bunch of old white hippies who are complaining about this
and not the actual residents of DC.
Speaker 2: They're not complaining.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm I have a neighbor who's put up
a sign that is complaining. And I won't say they're old,
but they do fall into one of the other categories.
Speaker 5: But they're not young either.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're not. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean, so they're in the resistan mode on everything.
Every time I do something in the news, my neighbors
put up a sign opposing it.
Speaker 2: It's kind of insane anyway.
Speaker 3: But for the most part, I think people are very happy.
You've seen that man on the street, woman on the
street interview. Whatever their background is, they you know, might
be any color, any religion, They're like, yeah, thank goodness.
And frankly, what we're hearing is the residents of other
cities all over America saying, gosh, I wish the president
could nationalize my city and send a National guard and
clean things up over there. I mean Oakland, California could
use a little bit of a you know, clean out,
and some other cities as well.
Speaker 2: The President has tweeted about.
Speaker 3: But I think ultimately, as I've said before, it's really
up to Americans to demand better government, and that starts
at the local level. And too many cities and states
have gotten rid of strong laws that would allow them
to punish the predators, and then the prosecutors they elect
don't want to even force those weak laws. So this
is really a local problem. It's not a federal problem.
It's only then in DC the President can do something
about it. That's unique, and the rest of the country
we have to take care of ourselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So what happens at the end of the thirty days,
like what will the process be after that.
Speaker 3: I think the President's going to take a look at
what's happening and whether this needs to continue in at
what level, Probably may not need to be the same level.
The other thing is, I want to tell you people
like to hate on the police and the police chief here.
I don't think anyone goes into policing wanting criminals to
run rampant in their city. They wouldn't have put their
lives at risk every day to get shot and all
the risks. I really respect the police, and I think
once they feel empowered and it becomes politically palatable to
be a good cop, a hard cop, and prosecution is
applauded by the public, I think things will change organically.
Speaker 4: I hope it becomes a recruiting tool for police across
the country. I hope just by empowering those people and
saying you know what your job matters, and we actually
we back you, rather than you know, dissing you like
so many presidents pass. I think that hopefully it will
it'll draw people to that profession, and that would to
me at least, I think that that is a good thing,
because I mean there are people that I know that
are cops that of course they don't go into it
to want criminals running running things they go into because
they're usually they're servant minded. You know, these are good
people that love their families, they love their communities, and
they want them to be safe, just like the rest
of us. So hopefully it'll just be a recruiting tool right.
Speaker 2: Well. Absolutely.
Speaker 3: I mean several of my colleagues who came from all
over the country to work in the leadership of the
Civil Rights Division, they live in the district as well.
One of them was a victim of a violent crime
in near our office as the Department of Justice. So
you know, a lot of people's lives are affected by this,
and I for one, I think all of our colleagues
at DJ are very grateful to the President for taking
this leadership. Yeah, grateful to Jeanine Piro for her work
arresting people right left and center and smacking heads, and
you know for the Attorney General and her leadership too.
Speaker 2: She really has gone out of her way.
Speaker 3: She's meeting with the police and the deputies and the
National Guard folks and praising them for their work and
we need to thank our cops and make them feel
appreciated because they do a tremendous job to keep.
Speaker 2: Us all safe.
Speaker 5: Totally.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: One of the things I've noticed about your Twitter feed
is that you are You share a little bit of
your personality and your personal life to some degree on Twitter.
And I know you lost, unfortunately your husband last year.
What have you learned about grief and how might you
counsel someone going through a similar loss.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, you have to try to keep perspective,
and if you have a baseline of faith, that's helpful.
But it's a very hard thing to lose the most
important person in your life. And luckily we had a
wonderful many years together, sixteen years together, and so I
actually hear voice all the time giving me advice as
I faced challenges in my job, and I keep those
memories alive and I try to live according to, you know,
the life we had, And so that's important, maintaining perspective.
You know, God has a plan for all of us,
and so there's a purpose and there's an end of
the tunnel at some point, you know. And so I
won't say it's gotten easy, but it is less painful.
As the days goes on, the memories are always going
to be there and they're amazing. You know, I lost
my dad six weeks after that, so you know, dad
died too, and so I'm lucky to be closer to
my mom. She lives in North Carolina. We see each
other regularly, and so you know, we're going through it together.
And you know, that baseline of faith is critically important.
And I also am blessed over the years with a
tremendous number of friends and family who care about me,
check in on me, friends drop by in DC and
come see me, and you know, we try to do
things and be active.
Speaker 2: So that's part of my faith as well as there
isn't really really a morning period.
Speaker 3: You're supposed to live your life and honor that person
in your life every day, and so yes, I try
to keep busy with my cooking, my gardening, my knitting
and try to enjoy life as much as I can.
Speaker 4: I was going to ask you actually about your your knitting,
because you knit some six sweaters out there, really beautiful stuff.
I tried knitting for like five minutes and I'm like,
I can't do this.
Speaker 5: I'm never good. Do you do you sell that stuff?
I mean, do you like you don't have it? Or
is it just for you? Is it just for family?
What about all about? I wanted you.
Speaker 3: See the economics of a sweater that I would make
for my husband. The wool costs about three hundred dollars
if you're using good woolf if it were the well.
I actually started knitting for him because he wanted We
lived in Sonoma and there were sheep there.
Speaker 2: He wanted a sweater made of those sheep, and.
Speaker 3: It was like we were really wet or newly together,
and I wanted to impress him.
Speaker 2: So I wanted the sheep, and I sent it to a.
Speaker 3: Wool mill and I had it processed, and that was
a very expensive sweater. But you know, I get paid
by the hour as a lawyer before I came to
this job. And if you look at the number of
billable hours that go into making a sweater for a man,
a complicated sweater, it's about one hundred hours.
Speaker 2: Oh so my husband used to brag.
Speaker 3: That his sweaters were the value of a g wagon
or my NBMW.
Speaker 2: So that's the economics of it. So the answer is, no,
I don't sell my dewere.
Speaker 3: Now. Last year I made hats for about thirty friends
and I gave them to my friends, and so those
are That's what I'm planning to do again this year.
Speaker 2: I haven't really had.
Speaker 3: That sweater knitting mojo since my husband died, but there
will be hats made for friends this year.
Speaker 4: That's a labor I love. The best kind of gifts,
the absolute best. Yeah, absolutely, well, Harmy Dylan.
Speaker 1: We've been very very happy to talk to you and
get to know you a little bit better and about
the work that you're doing, which we all appreciate.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for your time today.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. It was fun, you bet, thank you.
Speaker 3: Hello m