Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 2: Mister garbachow, tear down this wall.
Speaker 3: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Steven Hayward. I'm James Lylax.
Speaker 2: Whoa Peter Robinson. He's back and who are we going
to talk to?
Speaker 3: Our meet Dylan? So let's Arizlve's a podcast.
Speaker 4: And they're hoping that activists will get those tickets to
either disrupt the event from inside or not show up
and try and make it look like we have an
empty event. There's also a standby line that we usually
have in place so that if people with tickets don't
show up, that the standby line is able to get in.
They refuse to let us do that, and they told us, quote,
it's not our job to fill the event. Well, University
of Berkeley, it's also not your job to make sure
our event is empty.
Speaker 3: Welcome everybody.
Speaker 2: He's the Ricochet Podcast at number seven hundred and sixty six.
Why don't you join us at ricochet dot com and
believe me, I got a code later in the show
that's going to give you fifty percent off that you're
gonna love it, because once you join, you're part of
the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. I'm
James Lylax in a very overcast and very atumblal Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Speaker 3: Stephen is.
Speaker 2: While we're looking at Stephen in a bare room, he appeared.
It looks like a liminal space from a video game
from nineteen ninety seven. We'll get to that in a second.
And Peter Robinson is with us. We had rob Long
last week, and now we've got Peter. You know, it's
like we could just mash those two shows together.
Speaker 3: It'd be like old times.
Speaker 5: But Peter, Welcome, Welcome back, Welcome James. It's good, good,
very good to be here, very good to be here.
Although here in California it's a rainy, drippy day, it
sounds as though it's a similar to the day you're
having in Minneapolis.
Speaker 6: Why did God give us Autumn Whoa's of the year?
Speaker 5: No excuse excuse me. I put that, I put that,
I put that a little loosely. Why did God give
us the last third of autumn?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: The first a necessary transition from which we go from
the absolute chromatic glory that is well actually know, Audi
starts in full green involvement where everything is perfect and
everything's alive, and then it gradually diminishes, which can either
look as a shedding of identity to assume a new one,
or you can look at as death, or you can
look at as part of the cycle.
Speaker 3: Of life and things.
Speaker 2: So here even so, I'll be walking the dog in
the creek in the woods in a little bit. And
while most of the trees are scratching bare limbs against
the sky, there's a few trees that still have some
brown leaves on. There'll be a bush here and there
that's still verdant. There'll be a tree there that still
is green, and they will carry that into the time
when the first snow starts. And so we will have
this wonderful easing into transitions. But you're absolutely right, at
the end of November is a long, raw, miserable.
Speaker 1: And for Peter, no matter what the season, James Lyax
will still wax poetic. So shut out, Peter, don't.
Speaker 2: Peter's got behind him a nice littographic of a beautiful library,
and Steve and you have an empty shelves, and I
so you look like a place that's going out of business, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm in a borrowed office, and that's actually all
I should say.
Speaker 2: So between the suspended feelings and the empty ply with Ikia,
then we show a more harmonious place next to you.
So what we have going on in the world we
should talk about before we get to our guests, and
stuff that probably I don't know counts issues of the day.
Speaker 3: Tariffs.
Speaker 2: The other day I noticed that the tariff I think
I mentioned this last week, the price of bananas had
increased by fource ends at Trader Joe's.
Speaker 3: Trader Joe's used a whole banana prices like.
Speaker 2: Costco held their hont dogs and now they'd gone up
four cents, And I thought, well, there's your tariffs there.
I can bear this. But presidents decided to do cut
tariffs on beef and tomatoes and coffee, thank god, bananas,
and perhaps a stimulus check.
Speaker 3: No I macs of Carter era.
Speaker 2: Biden esque stuff, but is not surprising. So guys, tell
me what you thinking of the stimulus check.
Speaker 3: Idea and what you do with it if you got it.
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, it's these are all liberal ideas, right,
let's split throughout money, and the tariff decision really reveals
the sort of incoherence and contradiction of Trump's claims that
tariffs are paid for by the other countries and not US.
But I think there's a bigger point here. Trump has
been criticized by many conservatives for not recognizing the affordability
issue really has traction and allowing the left to get
back in on this. And here's one of the mistake
is being made, I think by all of our teams,
so to speak. Is so, you know, Mondamie a socialist
and other and as also we've talked about it a
few times in recent months. The abundance liberals have shown up,
and so they're saying, oh, we're concerned about affordability. And
that's when I raise my hand and I make two points.
First of all, who created the affordability crisis? Well, liberals
did with all their regulations for the last forty years
or longer. So don't There's a great chart I've viewed
sometimes I'll just describe it. It's not hard. If you
look at the three sectors of the economy whose costs
have increased the fastest over inflation. They are healthcare, higher education,
and housing. Healthcare higher education distorted by government sub season regulations,
and housing also suppressed and distorted badly by government regulation
going back forty to fifty years, originating in California.
Speaker 3: That's all.
Speaker 1: I've written a lot about this over the years, And
so why isn't Trump and other Republicans saying affordability, you
guys caused it. The only way we're going to fix
it is that for you guys to get out of
the way and let us fix your messes. And instead
we're doing these gimmicks. Oh, we'll send out a stimulus check,
We'll take the tear off so off that you're not
paying anyway. And so I think it's been a handheaded
response by Trump and our team when we should be
going in for the kill about what are mont Dommy's ideas. Oh,
let's have more rent control and government run grocery stores.
Oh that's going to work.
Speaker 5: I agree with absolutely every word Steve said there is,
And so why is Trump doing all this? And I'm
afraid to I have to state the conclusion that he
doesn't actually know better. I don't mean to condescend to
the chief executive, who is in all kinds of ways
an astonishing figure and has done more good than harm
by a lot, by a lot, but he doesn't really
know his way around economics. He knows his way around business,
he knows how to do deals, but he doesn't know
his way around economics. There is exactly one justification for
imposing tariffs. It might apply in the case of China,
and the justification is that we are in a long
term conflict with China. We have only two levers, one
is military and the other is trade, and we'd all
rather pull the trade lever than the military lever. Even
that needs to be hedged around with all kinds of qualifications.
Speaker 1: You have to be extremely.
Speaker 6: Careful about what you impose tariffs on and so forth.
As for the rest of it, it's a drag.
Speaker 5: We can disagree about how much of a drag, but
it's a drag on economic growth.
Speaker 6: Oddly enough, I don't know.
Speaker 5: We'll see where the spokesman for capitalism and free markets
come from. But it felt to me as though a
great debate has just gotten launched on the island of Manhattan.
Two big events took place this past autumn. Steve mentioned
the first New Yorker's elected a socialist. And that's not
us calling names. He calls himself a socialist, a socialist
mayor The other event got most noticed on editorial pages
of the wal I beg your pardon, on architectural pages,
the arts pages of the Wall Street Journal of the
New York Times. But I think that it will prove,
or it could prove, a very significant political and economic event,
and that is that Jamie Diamond opened the three billion
dollar cathedral to free markets, the new office, the new
skyscraper office in the middle of Manhattan. Manhattan has a
way of putting arguments in masonry. So we have thirty
for we have the old Rockefeller Office, we have the
old New York Stock Exchange trading floor. These are down
on Wall Street. But this is incomparably the grandest monument
to free markets that anyone has ever erected, even on
the island of Manhattan. It's taller than the Empire State Building.
The lobby apparently is a couple of hundred feet tall.
And in the same season in which New York elects
a socialist mayor, Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, says, no,
I'm doubling down. I'm tripling down on this island, on enterprise,
on America's capital markets. We'll see how all this goes.
But that is one tough articulatembre in my opinion.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: And I cannot stand the building change it. I've been
watching it go up for years. I have been trying
because I love skyscrapers and people who make that commitment
and say, yes, we're going to stay in Manhattan, and
I do. There are a lot of super towels going up.
There are a lot of other buildings proposed. There's the
Commodore Tower, which actually I kind of like an awful
lot better, even though it sadly overshadows the Chrysler building.
Speaker 3: But I do not like the JP Morgan building.
Speaker 2: The great cross bracing of it reminds me of the
John Hancock, which is okay. The way it's sort of
stacked up like decks of cards and the rest of it.
I'm not crazy about the color. I really don't like
the way it meets the street. It meets the street
by swooping inward in a way that puts the mass
in the bulk above you, and I don't think that
that's a great idea. I think it makes people sort
of uncomfortable. But I just don't like it. I don't
like the hue, I don't like this, the brusqueness of it.
It is a broad shouldered building and that's great. Probably
would be better in Chicago. People call it art daco
over darn. It's nothing the sort. It's a throwback and
again glad they built it, good luck with it. And
I like the fact that they're saying, now that we've
built this palace, everybody's back in the office, Thank you Monday,
see you then, because yeah, well.
Speaker 1: Well, James, I mean, what do you expect from Lake
Capitalism by buildings like that?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: And Peter, the big question to Wag and Sharper is
they're going to have people back to the office and
they'll spend their first weeks packing up to move to Florida.
We'll see, yes, yes.
Speaker 2: Right, what we'll expect from Lake Capitalism. I expect a
lot more Barroken freo foo stuff. I expect things like
you saw in Billionaires roll along Central Park where they
have those these ridiculously tall apartment buildings where people are
on the eighty fifth floor and they take a bath
and the water sloshes up because the buildings swing and
the wind.
Speaker 3: They're welcome to it anyway, So yeah, Peter, that's good.
We like that.
Speaker 2: That's fine, But you're right if he sat down and
talked to some people. I'm willing to take, you know,
eat the four percent of bananas. But I'm wondering exactly
why we have a tariff on the banana countries at all.
Speaker 3: Is it to get to buy more of our stuff?
Speaker 2: The point you made about tariffs on China, about restoring,
about reducing our dependency. All that's good, and let's have
more of that, but you know, less of the coffee tariffs. Really,
On the other hand, coffee comes from what from other countries.
When it comes to foreign.
Speaker 3: Policy, the approval of the administration is way up. Now.
Speaker 2: I'd like to know why you guys think that is
he's at forty three percent today approval in.
Speaker 3: Foreign policy versus thirty five percent about this time.
Speaker 2: Last year, and that's above where Obama and Bush were
at their respective administrations.
Speaker 3: What do you think it is? Do you think it's
the Hamas Gaza.
Speaker 2: Do you think it's the Ukraine handling or do you
think that people are saying finally war with Venezuela or
is that just not on people's mind yet because there
seems to be something going on there.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I actually think these polls are misleading.
And I put to you this way. Peter may remember
this that back in the Reagan years, the polster has
always said Reagan himself is very personally popular. Individual policies
are unpopular.
Speaker 3: By the way.
Speaker 1: That was mostly wrong. But you know, never mind that
from another time, and I think with Trump we see
the opposite. I think a lot of his policies, and
some of the polling does show this, are popular. But
Trump remains a lightning rod because he's so abrasive, right,
I actually so My point is, I actually think his
political strength is understated by these polls that are taken
because I think you can't really pull Trump accurately for
the purposes that we usually try to do these things.
So I always kind of liked about you know, Trump
always I wanted a huge landslide. That's not true. You know,
I'm really popular. All the stuff he says is it
strikes people says, oh, there he goes again. He's bragging
and being weird and all the rest of that. I
kind of like all that myself. It's fun.
Speaker 5: So Steve, I want to make sure I understand this.
So in an ordinary job approval poll, and the question
is some version of do you approve of the job
the president is doing? People can't hear that. They can't
answer that question without making some comment on whether they
like him, And we know that something like a little
over half the country just cannot stand him.
Speaker 1: Right, that's your point, That's right, although I mean at
one more level of refinement, it is true that you
need to sort of wait the issues that are most
important in people's minds. So the approval rating is important
if the key issues are things that the president's on
the wrong side of, like affordability we were talking about
a moment ago. I did just see an analysis by
that very interesting progressive surveyor David Shore, and what he
shows is that Trump's still very strong on the economy.
On immigration, He's very strong on that, very strong, and
to the extent that immigration is a high important issue
like it was a year ago and still into this year.
Then he does very well on it. But one of
the things that is a declining issue for Democrats is
climate change the environment. Right, we could do a whole
episode on how the climate change movement is all right
and Republicans are now trusted on energy, that is all
Republicans are trusted more on that. So the point is
so that all know, mix have an election tomorrow depends
on the Democratic candidate. I still think Trump wins.
Speaker 5: So what do you guys think about the moving the
USS gerald Ford into the Caribbean and the attacks on
these gunboats off the coast of Venezuela.
Speaker 6: Where does that come into the polling?
Speaker 3: Not yet. I don't think it enters yet.
Speaker 6: You don't think it enters yet, all right, So may
I try out?
Speaker 5: My own feelings on this are mixed because I take
every word that Rand Paul says. If you're going to
be killing people, if you're going to be attacking boats
in where this needs to be done under coloration of law,
even if it's by the chief executive of the United States,
he's not okay.
Speaker 6: So there's that.
Speaker 5: On the other hand, it feels to me as the
lot of people say, wait a minute, drugs have been
a problem in this country for half a century, and
finally somebody's doing something about it. I mean, at that level,
it just feels to me as though a wide swath
of ordinary Americans say, yeah, good for him. What do
you how do you how do you do you feel
both put tugs in that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do, absolutely so. I mean, I'm sure that
somebody is going to.
Speaker 2: Say, well, there was a joint military resolution whatever you
want to call it, that was passed after nine to
eleven to go after terrorism, and these guys are terrorism
in this extent, and therefore we're gonna.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just a bunch of made up stuff.
Speaker 2: I too, would prefer, as I do with continuing resolutions
and all the rest of these things, a bill, a
vote at the way it ought to be, instead of
wrapping it into some vague thing and saying let the
courts later hammer it out.
Speaker 3: But Peter, you're absolutely right.
Speaker 2: On the other hand, people look at this and say,
hold on, you, isn't this what a country should do
without really having to apologize for an thing that people
are bringing noxious substances? That can I mean, if they're
bringing in enough fentanyl to kill a million people and
it's going to be cut down, of course, it seems
to me to be something of a weapon of mass destruction,
even if people willingly themselves ingested.
Speaker 3: And it's like the border.
Speaker 2: Situation with Biden, where they would say, well, yeah, these
people are streaming over, but what are you going to do.
I mean most people look at this and say, well,
there are a variety of things that you can do
and that you used to do. And all we need,
basically is Sergeant Joe Friday who's got a gimblet eye
about these things and looks coldly upon it and does
what has to be done.
Speaker 3: And you know, they.
Speaker 2: Let the law take its course if there's a law here,
but yes, you can't do something. And something is being done,
and they seem very serious about it. And we don't
know exactly what's being taken to the cartels. We don't
know whether or not there is a delta force or
some guys with some smeared on, you know, paint on
their faces, no underwear, or a sneaking around there and
doing some very very serious things to some very bad people.
Speaker 3: We don't know. The pressure on Maduro is interesting.
Speaker 2: What's happening in Mexico City is Mexico as people are
protesting their own government for cartailed involvement is interesting. So
I think there is an opportunity here. Of course, if
Americans didn't want it, it wouldn't be a problem. But you
know a lot of Americans do.
Speaker 1: Well, Can I make a larger. I think a larger
point about this. By the way, I'm having a running
argument with John you about the legality of it all.
He has doubts about it. But I suggest there's a
larger strategic dimension that is not being recognized by the
media and commentators, and that is item one. As Peter
likes to say, there's been NonStop flights from Tehran to
Caracas for many years now, and I don't think that's
for tourism, and I don't even think it's just about
coordinating the OPEC and oil market stuff. Venezuela is a
bad actor and they're getting worse, I think. And second,
I think the other player that is on the mind
of the Trump strategist is China. China would love to
get close to Venezuela. It's just another market for them,
an oil source. And I think that that's on the
drug thing is totally legitimate and so forth. But I
also think in the back of their mind, this is
the Monroe doctrine, Baby, and we're going to stop Venezuela
from getting closer to our.
Speaker 3: Enemies exactly right.
Speaker 2: Monroe doctrines back, Baby, which mean is it's about time
for the Brison f doctrine to come back somewhere as
the network outs. Well, listen, lots of stuff we could
talk about forever an everde flapper jaws and amuse ourselves.
But hey, we have a guest, and what a guest,
And now we're welcome to the podcast. Army Dylan again
the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of
the US Department of Justice. She was nominated by the
President in December, sworn in by ag Bondi in April,
and prior to joining the administration, she ran her own
private practice deal in law group, and she founded the
Center for American Liberty, a nonprofit organization dedicated to pursuing
civil liberties legal claims.
Speaker 3: Welcome, how are you today?
Speaker 7: I'm great, Thanks for having me again.
Speaker 2: Let's go right to Berkeley. Civil Rights Division has been busy.
They've been investigating a disturbance, said Berkeley. I involved threats
of and shows a actual viole. Was it a tp
USA event which many people may have seen on their
social media feeds. It seems this case reminds us of,
you know, a classic problem we have in campuses, you know,
the Heckler's veto versus the right of people to speak,
especially in elite campuses were supposedly free information is supposed
to flow, but this one has an added piquency given
the killing, the assassination of Charlie Cook las September. So
tell us what happened at UC Berkeley and why it
matters to your team and what's being done.
Speaker 7: You're absolutely right. I mean, I dating back to my
days in college at Dartmouth, we had these free speech
issues on campus, and you know, I remember bringing William F.
Buckley Junior to come speak on the campus and all
the drama surrounding that and introducing him when I was
when I was an undergrad, I sued UC Berkeley in
twenty seventeen for preventing conservatives to come and speak on
the campus, including and Culture and David Horowitz, and we
used a settlement where they agreed that they were not
going to impose higher security fees for conservative speakers and
they were going to protect them. And you know, during
the course of that litigation, Ben Shapiro came and indeed
there was a big, massive police force to protect him
and deal with all the silly protesters. So what I
saw the news last Monday about this violent reaction to
the speech on campus of Rob Schneider, the comedian. I
was very disappointed because I personally negotiated that this would
not happen again, and so the president got engaged in this.
He and I spoke on the phone about it. He's
very concerned about violence on campus and asked me to
personally handle it. So I flew out to Berkeley last
Wednesday and met with the US attorney and the special
Agent in charge of the FBI and gave them some
direction as to what I think they should be looking at.
But so far, what we found is that ANTIFA related groups,
and in this case, the name of the group that
I'm very familiar with from prior litigation at Berkeley is
by any means necessary, had been advertising that they wanted
to attack this event for as much as two weeks
according to witnesses before the event. And there were also
five student or quasi student organizations, some recognize, some not recognized,
that have been openly fomenting trouble on the campus around
this event as well. And then finally the campus itself
participated in I think, disrupting the event by forcing the
student group to allow online reservations for the ticketing instead
of how most student groups, particularly conservative student groups, prefer
to do the ticketing, which is send out an email
blast to their members, let their members sign up first,
so that we don't have the pernicious signing up for
tickets and not attending the event that you see on
many campuses. Will Berkeley force them to do it this way.
So the event was half empty, and we will be
investigating the criminal aspects of this, the violence, the materials,
support for terrorism potentially that may be part of these
types of circumstances on campus, and potential First Amendment retaliation
as well as other civil rights claims and so civil
rights divisions kind running the show on this, but with
significant support from our criminal FBI and DOJ components.
Speaker 2: There's something when they were willing to go black shirt
over Rob Schnyder, I mean, wait until the heavyweights of
the intellectual movement get up there and have the audacity
appear on stage. When I was in college, there was
a bruhaha and a threat of violence in all people
getting upset because Jeane Kirkpatrick was coming to speak.
Speaker 3: And then a little while later somebody who.
Speaker 2: Sailed in with open arms and was warmly welcomed by
the by the college was Angela Davis.
Speaker 3: So this is an old, old, timeless issue.
Speaker 5: Alas Peter Well, harm me, your old friend, Peter Robinson.
Here civil Rights division has an honorable inception. It goes
back to civil rights disturbances in the South, when there
was a more than plausible argument that African Americans needed
particular protections or particular oversight in Washington, make sure they voted,
their rights were respected, and so forth. But by the
time Donald Trump takes office for the second time, we've
been through the me Too movement, We've been through the
Obama years, we've been through the Biden years, and it
was perfectly plausible, I think, and I came to this
view myself that the Civil Rights Division had long ago
been captured by the deep state and was a tool
of the progressive or the left in Washington.
Speaker 6: You don't look at it that.
Speaker 5: Way, and I know you don't, because I know you,
and I know you would never have taken the job
if you did look at it that way. What is
the right way to look at the Civil Rights Division?
Speaker 7: Both ways are correct, And the fact of the matter
is that the personnel are the policy. A famous phrase,
And when I showed up here what I found was
over four hundred attorneys and other I mean, they are
like gobs of statisticians and other non attorney staff here
at the Civil Rights Division. Who you know, it's like
that Obama photograph when the Obama White House was on
their last day and the Trump folks were moving in
in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3: You know that.
Speaker 7: Sullen and menacing resentment kind of look. That was kind
of how we were greeted here when we showed up.
And I had to do my training, all kinds of
HR training and how to handle sensitive documents training and
don't sexually harass people training. And then the second week
I put out memos to the heads of all the
different sections in the Civil Rights divisions. I think they
were eleven or twelve of them, and I said, these
are the federal civil rights statutes that we enforced and
their Title seven, Title nine America's Disabilities Act, and RALUPA
and YOKABA and HAVA and MBRA, and are we going
to take our priorities under these laws that we are
definitely going to enforce because I swore I would enforce
them from the President's executive orders, okay, And I put
that in writing and I put it out there, and
this caused over two undred attorneys to quit, and some
of them. Now, mind you that under the.
Speaker 6: Half the staff, half your staff.
Speaker 7: By now more than two thirds of them have quit,
and frankly a few more need to quit because they
don't really aren't really really with the program. But I
haven't fired a single person. I just told them their
job was different than how they wanted to do it,
which is absolutely how the executive branch of the government
needs to work. And I think they thought, and some
of them were featured in a New York Times article
whining about our change priorities just a few days ago,
and I think they thought that this would somehow cripple
us and we weren't going to be able to function,
and that hasn't turned out to be the case. First
of all, I'm just sorry to say, as a person
who had two CEO roles and worked around the clock
just a few months ago, people in the government don't
work as hard as those of us in the private
sector on average. Now, some of them do have some great,
you know, wonderful career attorneys here who work very hard,
and they're the ones who you go to time and
again and there's just a bunch who four years to
do an investigation and never reach a conclusion that is
supportable in court. And so we weren't crippled. We started
hiring again. There was you know, there was some pickups
in that process. I'm still understaffed, but that's a supply problem.
At this point. Conservative lawyers are not stepping up to
come and do this work. Throughout the government. We're having
problems in staffing the US Attorney's offices, other sections of
the DOJ. We're all kind of overwhelmed. But those of
us who are here are doing the job, and we
have actually, I would say, pound for pound, done more
enforcement actions in the Civil Rights Division in the eight months,
not even eight months that I've been here, then most administrations,
perhaps all administrations do in four years. I include the
last administration, and I include the prior Trump administration. I
do not view it as my job to simply slow
down the bad. A lot of the people who were
far left left and so now we have an opportunity
to enforce our federal civil rights laws on campuses, protect
all were the disabilities who are being mistreated with autism,
and so forth, protect the rights of the disabled in
our country, which was a law passed by and signed
by Republican President, and our voting rights laws. I am
the first Assistant Attorney General to bring help America Vote
Act and NVR enforcement actions I think at all, but
certainly in the volume that we've been doing them. And
so you know, we're just flipping the script and doing
civil rights from a conservative perspective. And I love my job.
Speaker 1: So Harmie, it's Steve Hayward today actually just down the
street from you here in Washington, d C. And I'll
just say in passing that I'm not surprised that Berkeley
came apart because John, you and I are taking this
semester off, and we were there. We wouldn't have let
it happen, So you can blame us. And then when
I hear that two thirds of the career lawyers have quit,
the first thing I want to say is congratulations. How
did you do it? I mean, I know how you
did it, but it does raise this point. And then
I've got a big question to present to you. You
may know the history of this. Your predecessor, way back
in the Reagan years, William Bradford Reynolds. They were trying
to make some course corrections on a civil rights a
scene of distortions of civil rights that were minor compared
to what we've seen in the last ten twenty years.
And I think then something like two hundred lawyers threatened
to quit. I think they ended up not quitting, but
they made some accommodations and also made some important progress
in the eighties. And that's an interesting story. But now
things are so much worse. And Peter was too nice.
I mean, look to restate what he said is the
left thinks the civil rights or establishments and enforcement processes
belonged to them. Holy right, We're not entitled literally what
they think, right correct. So here's my big roundhouse question.
We now, you're the first Republican civil rights Assistant Attorney
General since the Harvard and North Carolina cases, which reversed
to know more than forty years of complete corruption of
the Civil Rights Act.
Speaker 5: Rightly understood, Steve, some of those cases remind people what
those were, well, well, at least were the the race
based the firm of action and missions at Harvard and
North Carolina and anyplace else that practices it, which was
essentially everywhere, And on principle, I believe harmead and correct
me if I'm wrong. It Also the principle clearly extends to.
Speaker 1: An awful lot of private sector activities, you know, hiring
corporations and schools and so forth. Now the parallel is
being drawn is that this is as monumental as the
Brown versus Board of Education decision in the fifties, and
as everyone knows who knows the history, massive resistance to it,
and we're seeing massive resistance now to students for fair
admissions by elite universities and so forth. And it took
at least fifteen years of subsequent litigation by the Civil
Rights Division by a private lawsuits under the statutes to
enforce Brown versus Board. And a lot of people are saying,
and you know, Edward Bloom's a very good friend of mine,
the same thing's going to have to happen now. So
I wonder if you comment on that assessment is generally correct,
and what you think are some of the priorities for
how to extend well enforce that decision and then extend
the principle of it in domains right well.
Speaker 7: When you add students for fair admissions to Aims versus Ohio,
which applies an equal standard for majority plaintiffs versus minority
plaintiffs and Title seven litigation in the private workplace. You
absolutely have a sea change in the way that people
are looking at this and they have to. And so
what we've done is, you know, the signature I think
we're going to look at back at this first year
of the Trump administration, and a signature accomplishment is going
to be are the letters that I sent out literally
the first friday of my job here in the first
week of April, to fifty of the top fifty universities
in the United States, and then I added the top
medical schools and the top law schools, and then we
added a few more in there as well, and we've
gone down I'd like seventy eighty investigations open into these institutions,
and we reached settlements with several of them. I personally
have negotiated the settlements in Colombia, Cornell University of Law
school alma mater, and I've also met with university presidents
at Dartmouth and UNC and some other schools that were
not going after because you know, they are in a
dialogue with us and showing us their homework what they
have done. To combat anti semitism on campus, to dismantle DEI,
to bring their websites and their programs in compliance with
the law. But it is very, very deep seated. It
has been decades. There's a couple of different threads here
that are problematic. First of all, the academic vogue for
decades has been this concept of affirmative action in hiring
and in faculty and even my goodness, footnotes in laarview
articles and lar review selection they've measured that, and in admissions.
So it's a culture. And you know, the liberals who
go into this field feel like it's deeply offensive to
them and their moral code to have to change that.
It's repugnant to them, just as it would be repugnant
to us to you know, go back to the nineteen
sixties and fifties and separate water fountains. It's repugnant them
to dismantle this system. So they have a moral conflict.
And secondly, generations of young people have gotten useless degrees
in gender studies and of race hustling is what I
call it. And who's going to hire them? You know,
an AI company's not going to hire them. Google's not
going to hire them. Unless it's for the Diversity Office.
Their jobs have been imposing these frameworks in academia and
in the American corporation, and now what their jobs have
effectively been eliminated if these institutions are being honest. So
people their friends don't want them to be out of
a job. They like Susie down the hall, and so
that rebranding Susie's job as the DEI officer or the
equity officer as the Opportunity Office, the Office of Opportunity,
and they're doing the exact same things and they think
that we're not going to find out. Well, thanks to
the Internet, whistleblowers are calling that out in five minutes
and we know about it. We send a letter and
it usually gets shut down.
Speaker 1: But it is wlackable.
Speaker 7: That's why I could use one hundred or two hundred
more lawyers to do this enforcement work. And it's going
to it's not going to be easy, but it is necessary,
and it is it is our mandate. It is our
duty to enforce these laws equally.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the things you mentioned there before, where
the people who come out with useless gender degrees I
useless unless of course they go right to you know,
to another university and get hired to teach it there.
But the reevaluation of the gender ideology that's flowed through
the society in the last five.
Speaker 3: Ten years has been one of the emphasy of the administration.
Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, if you go right now
to Google and you ask about the Civil Rights Division
and the Trump administration and transgenderism, what you find, according
to Google's AI Interview AI assummation, is that the Civil
Rights Division under you has been accused of weaponization against
civil rights principles in pursuit of a politicized agenda. That's
how Wikipedia frames it, when in truth, we've been dealing
with a politicized agenda for many years and this is
the pushback to it. So what do you see as
the end results, say, after the end of your tenure,
when it comes to managing what many regard as the
madness of the gender ideology that swept at the institutions.
Speaker 7: I'm touching my pearls, so let me unclutch them. After
the horror of a politicized agenda and the Civil Rights
Division is difficult to contemplate. But look, I'm a woman
in the workplace and it just blows my mind that
feminists have so easily given up the hard fought rights
of girls and women in this country and handed them
over to dudes and dresses. It is outrageous. And on
top of that, I think the sexual mutilation of children
in this country is a civil rights crisis, and it
is the abortion of our and it's We're going to
look back on it as a shameful period in our history.
And so I feel very comfortable weaponizing, if you will,
the current laws, enforcing them to protect the rights of
women and girls and boys. I find we just filed
in a case in loud And County, Virginia. I authorized
the filing in a case where, well, we have an
investigation pending in the reverse where a girl comes into
the boys locker room and boys have rights too, boys
have privacy rights also. It's an equal problem as far
as I'm concerned, and so I don't think there's any
there's any problem here. Now, what's going to happen in
the next administration is going to depend on who's the president. Obviously,
if it's a Republican president, I think we're going to
see the same trend continue. If it's a Democrat president,
I don't know. Because what I'm hearing from a lot
of my Democrat friends, dads who have kids and care
about them, they don't like this stuff either. It's not normal,
it is fringe, and the Left has really been captured
by the far left extreme of its own party. And
so I think you may see a course correction. I'm
not sure that Democrats in twenty twenty eight are going
to be running on the agenda of boys and girls,
locker rooms, or some of that other gender madness that
we've seen at that level. I hope that people are
coming to their senses, and.
Speaker 2: Bill Maher will give cover to the older boomers, Joy
Reid will give cover to other people, but there's going
to have to be somebody from the younger generation that
actually breaks with it and says, no, this is anti
scientific nonsense.
Speaker 3: Peter, I think you had something.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Armead, I'd like to go back to something you
mentioned in passing a few minutes ago. You've got a
couple hundred lawyers you need more, but you added conservative
lawyers are not stepping up, they're not putting their resumes in.
So my question, my question is not to the rights
and wrongs of what you're doing, needless to say, I'm
totally behind you. The question is the structure of legal
careers for young lawyers, so to speak, to put it
crudely on our side, for the old structure was there
were going to be some lawyers who were perfectly content
to go to the Civil Rights Division and make an
entire career there because they felt comfortable with it because
of the stability of government employment. And then there were
going to be other lawyers, again on the democratic or
left or progressive side, who understood that they could spend
a couple of years at the Civil Rights Division because
there would be big time law firms right there in
Washington that would be happy to hire them right out
of the Civil Rights Division. Young talent on our side
doesn't want government as a full time career. Might be
I'm guessing this, I'm putting this to you as a question,
might be happy to go to work for Harmeat Dylan
for a couple.
Speaker 3: Of years, But then what do they do.
Speaker 5: The big time law firms in Washington are going to
be nervous about them, aren't they.
Speaker 6: How do you make this permanent? How do you change?
Speaker 5: How do you change the incentive is for talent? Young
talent on our side.
Speaker 7: So let's break it down. First of all, when I
refer to conservative, I'm talking about the front office political staffing.
Of course, when we're hiring for career attorneys, we don't
take politics into consideration. That said, I've very clearly articulated
what my agenda is, and it's to enforce Trump administration's priorities.
So I think people can get the clues they're not
going to be coming here and doing consent decrees on
trivial differences and arrest rates in some city and then
you know, making a city pay at tens of millions
of dollars to a monitor for that. We're not doing
that anymore, and that's what a lot of these folks
have been doing. But the lecture I've been giving to
people is if you want to come and pick up
some new skills, this is a great place to work.
Think of it like the Peace Corps or something, or
Teach for America or something like that. Young lawyers today
in the movement, well, when I got out of law
school thirty two years ago, thirty three years ago, there
was no opportunity to go work at a nonprofit like
the one that I founded six years ago, the Center
for American Liberty, which provides jobs for several lawyers who
enforce our federal civil rights laws and state civil rights laws.
But now there are Now there's an ADF, and now
you know, there's foundations like the Foundation. Steve's talking about
having a meeting today at Jim Krantz to those nonprofits,
and they do good works. If you wanted to do
good for your career, you could do that. You don't
have to be a young lawyer. I want to make
this very clear. Unlike my predecessors who really put a
premium on hiring young people, I've offered jobs to lawyers
at the end of their careers, lawyers who made their millions,
Lawyers who want to end their careers by doing some
good for their country. Some fellow members of the Republican
National Committee, one of my fellow colleagues in the RNC,
this is going to be his last job in his career.
He could have wound down or sold a law firm
and came and joined us. And he's doing what he
calls the reverse Sherman March. He is shutting down consent
decrease from the nineteen seventies and nineteen sixties all over
the South, we have school districts under consent decrease where
that everyone is dead who did the discrimination, and yet
there's still some lawyer getting paid to monitor the school district.
That's nonsense, and we're stopping it. He's overjoyed every time
he comes into my office. He's like our meet. We
filed another motion to dismiss and a stipulation on a
consent decree. So I would say, secondly, setting aside this context,
the days of someone joining a law firm at the
beginning of their career and then having the Cravath march
when they die at the end of their career are over.
People hop around like free agents all day long. I
was at four major law firms before I started my
own in New York, London, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco.
And people are free agents. So I would encourage people
to come get the skills to be a plaintiff's lawyer
in civil rights litigation. That includes election litigation, it includes
dei litigation, it includes this gender discrimination and gender mutilation litigation,
and others. You can make a lot of money doing that.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 7: I was a plane of s lawyer for the last
twenty years. In my private practice, and it was a
satisfying and successful career. I started my firm with two
people and now they're forty people at my law firm.
So I built up business doing good and every day
I get up in the morning and I do good
all day and then I go to bed. I don't
feel guilty about what I did, and I couldn't feel
that way when I was in big law, you know,
representing to me, you know, the polluters, the sexual harassers,
the napalm manufacturers, like I wasn't satisfying for me. And
so you can be a lawyer and make money and
do good and have choices. And that's how I would
tell people to look at it is give yourself the
opportunity to pick up some new skills there is. I've
argued four cases in the federal Courts of Appeals as
the Assistant Attorney General, which is also very rare. I
don't know that my predecessors did one much less four,
and I'm hoping to do a lot more. But there's
nothing more satisfying than standing up in front of a
federal court and saying I'm hard meat Dylan for the
United States, And you know, I encourage to come get
that experience. A career doesn't mean you have to spend
your whole career doing it. You can have a career
position at the DJ and leave after two years. That's
what the that's what people have often done, and they
may get trial experience. They get experience investigating hate crimes,
interviewing witnesses, protecting people from anti semitism, protecting people from
zoning discrimination, and all the other things that we do here,
and and election law. I mean, you know it's there.
These are transferable, valuable skills.
Speaker 3: Great, thank you, And you add something to add before
we let her go.
Speaker 2: We understand we're coming up against the time at which
he has to get back to the business of the country.
Speaker 1: Well, well let me try and cheer her meat up
real quick. And you have the very last word for
we don't have to let you go. I understand the
frustration you and other people have finding people who can
go do these jobs. On the other hand, the conservative
legal movement, to me is so impressive these days, and
but it's been the different mode. I mean, who wanted
to go to the civil division before you got there? Right,
So there was your law firm, right of course, sort
of a private civil Rights Organization, our friends at consaboy
McCarthy that I know, you know, Phil Hamburger's new Civil
Liberties Alliance, and it's gon take a while, but I
think we should take heart that the talent is there
in depth, and that the frontiers of activism on the
side of the true and the right are been advancing
on many fronts. I mean, Bloom, we mentioned already once, right,
and now you're there. And I know, I know you're like,
you're fighting surrounded and you don't have enough troops. But
I say take heart, Peter Harmeet. I think we're going
to win.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Harma, I would just ask you one thing. Please,
don't be such a shrinking violet, you know.
Speaker 5: Right, stand up for yourself, harmony, will you once in
a while?
Speaker 3: Well, what's asure?
Speaker 1: What a pleasure?
Speaker 7: One thing I didn't expect when I took this job
is to see my name drag through the mud viciously
by a federal judge of Chaps week. That was pretty
bad thirty six hours until another federal judge stepped in
and bench slapped the other two. But I mean, this
is this was not a thing. In law school. Everyone
was very polite. Everyone wanted to be a federal judge,
and when I got up close to it, I was like,
I don't think I want to do this, but the
lack of decorum from the bench is something new and alarming,
and I think it's not a fund that we see.
Because I can't fight back.
Speaker 1: I have to go.
Speaker 7: I have to go in front of these judges again
and again and again. So I can't say. I can't
say nan yah nah, call them names, but they can
do that to me. It's just it's wrong. And I
hope that the court step in indisciplinement of what is
happening here in our court's writing. Anyway, that was my
extraneous thought.
Speaker 2: Write it down for the inevitable book and we'll be
sure to buy it and enjoy our me deal. And
thanks so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure,
and we hope to speak to you again in the future.
Speaker 3: And good luck.
Speaker 7: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it, ar meet.
Speaker 3: Thanks. You know.
Speaker 2: It's entirely possible that somebody out there is going to
want to say happy Holidays to somebody or maybe even
Merry Christmas.
Speaker 3: Will they be brought up.
Speaker 2: In judge just by hr for using alienating language during
this Christmas season.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, during this holiday season.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's something that actually the uh
you know, the Harmat's division would get to around to
talking about.
Speaker 3: But it is something you think about, right, I mean.
Speaker 2: I had a little Christmas tree in my desk back
at the office when I used to work at the
office in.
Speaker 3: A previous life.
Speaker 2: Nobody complained because really, frankly, it's not that big of
a deal. But the holidays are coming, Christmas is coming,
and that is a big deal, especially if you're looking
around and saying, oh, what am I going to get
everybody this year?
Speaker 3: What am I going to do?
Speaker 2: I've been married for thirty eight years. Is no possible
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for the rest of the year. Wow, that's incredible. All right, gentlemen,
before we go, lots of stuff that we haven't talked about,
Actually we have. Oh, I can't get interested in the
Epstein story. I don't know why you think that somehow
this would peak all the purient interest and memories of
Bill Clinton and address with the red shoes and a
painting in the foyer.
Speaker 3: But you know, where do you stand on this?
Speaker 6: I'll be really interested to hear what do you guys.
Speaker 3: Make of it? I can't that's a great way at dodge.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, no, I am sort of interested in it,
But I'm interested in the part that nobody else seems
to be interested in, which is a puzzle to me,
just as the whole thing is a puzzle to you, James.
In as much as the sex stuff, I don't find
that particularly interesting on what seems to me the invincible
grounds that Donald Trump has been a major figure in
this country for a decade, and if there were stuff
in those files to use against him, it surely would
have leaked long before now, And in fact, what has
leaked has rebounded against leading Democrats, most notably Larry Summers,
who now has been forced to leave harst public life.
Yes exactly, Well, first he withdrew from public life, and
now he's announced that somebody else is going to finish
the last three lectures of his core. He's even been
removed from teaching at Harvard, which is I mean, as
Harvard things go, that's quite a blow.
Speaker 6: Okay, So that's the sex stuff.
Speaker 5: What nobody seems interested to me, and what still makes
absolutely no sense is the money side. This guy started
out as a high school math teacher and ended up
living in the biggest private residence on the island of Manhattan,
with a private island in the Caribbean and a big
ranch I think in nim Where did this money come from?
That's what I haven't seen. Honestly, Even journalists don't seem
I say, even journalists, if there are were people who
are real journalists left. Nobody seems to be digging into
exactly what this guy did to end up a very
very rich man. So that puzzles me, but it doesn't
seem to be the story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's Jay Gatsby, right, There was always that mystery Gatsby,
you would do these parties, right, that's kind of an
insult of Fitzgerald and Gatsby, I think in this case.
But look, I can't resist some James Lilac's bait and
say this scene. You'll see why. This whole business reminds
me of the scene in the Wrath of Khan where
Kirk taunts Khan by saying, like a bad marksman, you
keep missing the target. Because this reminds me of a
rerun of Me Too. Remember the whole Me Too business
precipitated to be sure by Harvey Weinstein's grotesque grease, if
that's a word, but pretty clearly the left grabbed onto
it and ran to it, hoping it was going to
take down Orange, the bad Orange Man, because of what
he'd said and you know about grabbing parts of anatomy.
And instead it took down liberal after liberal in the
media and in politics. You know, it ended this Charlie Rose,
Charlie Rose and Al franken Hey got kicked out of
the Senate. And so in other words, it mowed down
a ton of liberals and Democrats. And now all of
a sudden, the Epstein files they think are going to
bring down Trump instead you mentioned it's already taken one scalp.
Hilarry Summers. By the way, I found it amusing that
he used the same language that the Royal the House
of Windsor used in England about Prince Andrew's going to
step back from his royal duties. Yes, Larry Summers is
going to step back from his So a whole lot
of stepping back on here. And you know, I don't
know if Trump there's a genius to a method or
a genius to his madness. It's not really madness. But
the point is I won't be surprised that this is
another boomerang that comes back and hits Democrats squarely in ahead,
because that's certainly what all the circumstantial evidence looks like.
Speaker 2: Well, yes, the walls are closing in. I think I
saw that actually at the other day. This is going
to be the one that does it. And I mean
anybody who was a conservative during the Clinton years remembers
that every six or seven months or so, there was
something that was going to put this guy away. If
it wasn't Whitewater, if it wasn't Vince Foster, if it
wasn't this, it wasn't that the walls were always closing
in on Bill Clinton. He was just I was this
closed and finally being revealed to all, and it never happened.
And when you see it happening to the other side,
you can say, I've been there, brother, I know exactly
how it feels. The walls are not closing in. When
I look at Reddit, for example, which is coded way
to the sort of bubble left, very much blue sky,
very much of their own creation. There's always mega panic,
mega panics, Trump furious Mega panics, and Trump is furious
over Mega Panics.
Speaker 3: And it's all.
Speaker 2: Because apparently the Mega movement and conservatives in general have
fled from Donald Trump because of the Epstein thing and
his positions on it.
Speaker 3: And I look at these people and I say, I
don't know anybody who cares about that.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know anybody who doesn't think that
Donald Trump was it was a bit of a you know,
Studio fifty four kind of guy, maybe back in the seventies,
part about doing coke and drinking.
Speaker 3: It's, you know, straight arrow that that way.
Speaker 2: I think anybody would be surprised of the libertine nature
of the life that they live the guy's on the
cover of playbook for ifan sakes. So no, there's no
mega panic, and there's no walls closing in, and there's
no fleeing in the rest of it. It just kind
of is a dull fud, maybe wrong. The people who
are really interested in this are the people who have
a close connection to those who believe that a huge
pedophile ring runs through Washington or River of Adrenochrome that
goes back to the Pizza Gate thing, and you know
all the rest of it.
Speaker 3: They're very much invested in this.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean, how did Epstein get its money by,
you know, by arranging things. I just think he was
a great arranger in an era that had a disgustingly
curdled sort of sexual politics that came from the the
you know, the inevitable result of the sexual revolution is
that worked its way from hippies into the bourgeois.
Speaker 3: Clett I go on, well, you know, I can, if.
Speaker 1: I were an irresponsible person, I could make up a
unified field theory that says Epstein got his money by
arranging the cocaine shipments to the Mina airport and airport.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: That would bring us we'll circle back to the glory
days of the Clinton scandals.
Speaker 2: There you go, where his brother arranged for the assassination
of the two youth who were found by the railroad tracks.
Speaker 3: I get it absolutely. I was there too. Thank you
David Brooks for that hard hitting stuff.
Speaker 2: But you know, one of the more interesting things that
I've seen in the last couple of days is that
Epstein files revealed that Epstein hated Donald Trump and thought
he was a bad man. And they're holding this up
like proof of something like, I mean, like, the guy
who's the worst man in the world thought that this
guy was a bad guy.
Speaker 3: What does that necessarily toll?
Speaker 2: That mean that he's lower on the ranks, or he
didn't like him because he was trying, he was indifferent
to him and his blandishments and the rest of it.
I don't think the twenty twenty six elections will will
revolve around this. I do know, however, that unless you
guys have something sparkling and bright to add, we best
get out and leave these people in a nice, tight
one hour podcast. Peter, anything you'd like to tell us
about your long absence and where you've been and what
you've done.
Speaker 5: I've been minding my p's and q's. James, I have
nothing entertaining to say about that.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, oh I've been informed. Of course there was
David Brock, now David Brooks.
Speaker 3: Who am I thinking of? I'm thinking of James Brooks.
Speaker 1: The Simpsons said they all met one to get it right.
Speaker 2: Sorry, sorry, sorry, I don't have coffee or too much.
And Stephen, you've got Thanksgiving coming up as well. We
hope everybody has a good one, and remember that Thanksgiving
COVID Thanksgiving twenty.
Speaker 3: Five, I'll get your half off for the year.
Speaker 2: And of course if you use the Ricochet code at
Cosey of the Earth, you get up the forty percent
off if you go to Apple Podcasts and give us
a five star review.
Speaker 3: You can't believe what's gonna happen. I can't tell you.
Speaker 2: It's not as if Glinda and the Goodwitch is going
to come down in a bubble and tap you with
a wand could happen, not saying it won't, probably won't.
But in any case, what you need to do is
come back next week when we won't be here. No,
come back in a fortnight when Charles CW. Cook will
be able to tell you precisely which version number of
Ricochet we are on, but I'm pretty sure it's still
in the forest. We'll see everybody in the comments at
Ricochet four point whatever. Happy Thanksgiving, Bye bye, Happy Thanksgiving.