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Jan. 27, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:27
AFTER BREYER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep258
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Justice Breyer is stepping down, and who's going to be his replacement?
Is it going to be Kamala Harris?
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Daniel, this is Gil, and I will be here to discuss...
I'm going to examine whether Mitch McConnell is actually a more effective leader of his party than Chuck Schumer is of the Democrats.
Attorney Marina Medvin is going to join me.
She represents some January 6 defendants.
She's going to talk about a pro-Trump rabbi who was arrested after January 6th.
I'll expose the magnitude of invidious racial discrimination at Harvard and drawing on the economist Joseph Schumpeter.
I'm going to try to look at what it is that makes entrepreneurs different than everybody else.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I'm here with my daughter Danielle D'Souza Gill.
I don't really know if she needs an introduction, but let me mention she's the author of the book The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America.
She also has a show on Epic TV called Counterculture with Danielle D'Souza-Gill.
You can get it right off the Epic Times app.
And we're here to talk about Justice Breyer stepping down.
Well, I don't know if that was a surprise, but didn't Breyer say earlier that he was not going to step down?
Exactly. He had said that he didn't want to make the court political.
So that was his reason for not stepping down.
But evidently, he's now chosen to step down.
Now, ideologically, it seems to me this is no big change because it preserves the 6-3 majority.
Presumably, a liberal or leftist is going to be replaced by another leftist.
Breyer did vote occasionally with the conservatives, but not on any big issue.
I mean, he was for the vaccine mandate.
I mean, on Roe versus Wade, you don't expect him to be going...
Oh no. He'll be voting to keep it.
Right. So what do you think his reasoning is for this shift of approach?
I think that there's been a lot of talk from the left about packing the court.
And I think that's something Breyer really felt like would harm the integrity of the court.
And so I think in some ways he might have stepped down in order to Prevent the left from pushing that continually, instead maybe focusing on filling the seat as opposed to trying to pack the court.
Although I don't think packing the court would have worked anyways because Manchin and Sinema wouldn't have voted for it, but I think maybe Breyer felt like he needed to give something to the left.
To diffuse the political pressure for the court packing.
Now, interestingly, well, here's Jen Psaki, who essentially says publicly that they're going to be limiting the search to basically a black woman, black women. So identity politics has made its way now to the Supreme Court.
And let's think about this for a minute, because the court is not a ideologically or demographically representative institution.
It is a creation of constitutional democracy, but its job is to be a check on the democratic majority.
And how would you feel if you were, you know, on the court, but you got the black female seat on the court?
I mean, what a disgrace. Yeah, I mean, I think it would just be, it would just make you feel like, oh, I only got this because I was a black woman, because they said point blank, you're getting this because you're a black woman.
So I think that would be pretty frustrating.
And also just the fact that I'm sure that people can get that seat based on their merit, but, you know, the left doesn't really care about that.
I saw a tweet today from one of the Obamites, Joe Lockhart, and he goes, Republicans better gear up.
He's like, you don't dare to vote against a black woman who's the first black woman in history.
So the implication here is that somehow our side is intimidated by this precedent of history.
And I'm thinking, well, first of all, black women aren't exactly a key demographic base for the GOP. Not to mention the only black person on the court is on our side, conservative Clarence Thomas.
Right. So when they appeal to this historic first, I mean, obviously they're not going to look at conservative black women.
So it's not merely a matter of race and gender.
Well, I just mean them assuming that we're going to not like a black woman as crazy because we like this black man.
I mean, I don't know why they would think that.
They're the ones who hated Clarence Thomas.
Right. I think it's also interesting that these are, you know, the left after the recent events on the filibuster, blasting cinema, blasting mansion.
You know, these people are, we need to run them out of the Democratic Party.
And amazingly, Schumer was part of this.
Schumer actually, well, he didn't say that he supported it, but he didn't oppose it either.
And what that means is that I think that's a little reckless because Schumer now needs Sinema and Manchin both.
He cannot afford to lose either one of them.
And if even one of them is steamed and is thinking, well, you know what?
We're going to teach these progressives a lesson.
I don't think that will actually happen.
Do you? I don't think so.
I think that they probably will vote to confirm this person, assuming this person is a legitimate person.
Judge and everything, but if they pick someone who's really extremely woke and then that person has been doing all kinds of political things, I think maybe they'd vote against them because Manchin might not want to be attached to that.
What do you think is the possibility?
I think it's low, but people are saying on social media it's going to be Kamala Harris because apparently that serves two purposes at the same time.
On the one hand, they're embarrassed having Kamala Harris on the second part of the ticket.
Sort of like we picked the black woman.
I mean, think of it. It didn't work out there, right?
So now they're like, back to the black woman theory.
But nevertheless, the idea is maybe we can shift her out of the White House and move her into the court.
Now, she is ridiculously unqualified.
I mean, she is a former attorney, to be sure.
But just from her statements, she's extremely...
I guess she would have to... She'd be part of confirming herself, then, if the...
I don't know.
She's the only black woman in the country we can pick to be the vice president.
She's the only one we can pick to be on the Supreme Court.
I mean, there have to be better options.
The other thing I think is kind of funny is that two names that have circulated usually in tandem are Michelle and Barack Obama.
And what I find particularly funny about this is the assumption that both of them are women.
Obama too. So the gender fluidity within the Obama family is apparently playing out here.
And again, I think this is unlikely that they'll actually do that.
My guess is they will look for a black female judge somewhere down the line.
person go through. Right. And they might also, maybe another reason Breyer stepped down is because he knew that a lot of conservative decisions were to come out this year. You know, maybe overturning Roe v. Wade and some other things. So he thought, you know, let's try to give the Democrats some positive news.
Oh, that's interesting. In other words, you're saying that, well, this is a good point.
Now, if you think of the Dobbs case, right, which is the abortion case from Mississippi, although the decision is supposed to come out in the spring, the justices vote on it much earlier.
Then they go into the rigmarole of writing the majority decision.
Then they pass that over to the minority.
They write the dissenting opinion.
All of that takes weeks.
So it is possible that the judges know how this decision is going to come out, obviously including Breyer.
And I guess what you're saying is that Breyer thought, well, look, if these guys are going to take a major blow, maybe I can head off the storm a little bit by exiting myself.
Or maybe he's like, I don't want to be at the scene when this comes down.
I'd rather be, you know, at the...
In my beach house in Massachusetts, and we'll let the firestorm engulf other people along the way.
Now, he's staying on until the end of his term.
I do think another thing surprising, though, about him retiring is that he actually seems pretty lucid.
He's not like Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, where she's falling asleep and incoherent.
It seems like he's still a person, so I think him stepping down is still a pretty political decision.
Although I think if we were to apply the lucidity test across the board, this would imply that Pelosi and Biden might want to step down.
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Who's a better leader of his party?
Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer?
This topic came up briefly in my conversation with Danielle in the previous episode.
And at first glance, it may seem that the answer is obviously Schumer.
Sometimes as Republicans, we think, wow, the Democrats are just so much better at the game of politics, so much tougher, so much more savvy, more ruthless.
And that may be true in general.
But let's look at this matter a little more closely.
True, Schumer is more flamboyant than McConnell.
That's not a close call.
Schumer is more media-sophisticated, and of course, media adulation comes easily to Schumer, and it's not so easy for McConnell to get.
McConnell seems, by contrast, a kind of a plotter.
He's almost like a turtle in a shell.
He speaks in a relative monotone.
He rarely smiles, except with the kind of ironic smile that is almost as if to say, why am I even really smiling here?
So, it seems to be hands down for Schumer.
But then you actually look at Schumer's actions and McConnell's actions.
Let's notice that McConnell, under very difficult circumstances, has held the Republican Party together.
Now, he's done it in a way that some of us may not always approve of when there were MAGA attacks on Republican moderates, even Republican rhinos, even on people like Murkowski and Trump.
Mitt Romney. Essentially, McConnell rallied to their defense.
And McConnell's reasoning, I believe, was not that I, McConnell, am a rhino, but rather, I'm going to need these guys.
There are times when we need a unified Republican blockade, particularly in the circumstances we find ourselves now, after the Georgia debacle, where the Democrats essentially have a tie in the Senate.
McConnell needs all his team.
And you know what? Most of the time he's able to hold the team together.
Now contrast this with this bizarre behavior by Schumer.
Schumer has decided to go along, at least tacitly go along, with progressive attacks on Manchin and Sinema.
Schumer has basically said that he refuses to condemn the idea, which has come from people like Bernie Sanders, that these people should be primaried.
In fact, Bernie Sanders implied, I, Bernie Sanders, will support I think that's politically dumb of Schumer because he needs Manchin and Sinema no less than McConnell needs Romney and Murkowski.
The other thing that Schumer does is he holds votes when he knows he's going to lose.
So he's been doing this.
He did this on the so-called second...
He held a vote on the Voting Act and lost 52 to 48.
He's been talking about holding a similar vote on the Build Back Better bill, the sort of second infrastructure bill.
That would probably go down to the exact same fate.
He hasn't held a vote yet, and I don't know if he will, but he's been threatening to do it.
I'm going to get everybody on the record.
Who cares? Manchin doesn't mind being on the record.
The vast majority of his constituents are against this So what you see, and by the way, contrast Schumer with Nancy Pelosi, who's more shrewd.
Nancy Pelosi is kind of famous for saying, listen, I will not bring a bill to the floor for a vote unless I know what the outcome's going to be, unless I know that I'm going to win.
So she only plays when her vote counters, who are actually pretty good, have counted enough votes for there to be a success.
It seems that by comparison with Pelosi, Schumer is a kind of a dummy.
He's, I'm going to hold the vote anyway.
You know, let these people go on the record.
I think it turns out that Schumer is, in a very tight situation in the Senate, not proving to be quite as effective as Trump.
As Pelosi or as McConnell.
And if the Biden agenda is being successfully resisted for the most part, which I think it is good news for us, part of the reason is the ineptitude of one Chuck Schumer.
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This may be a little weirdness on my part, but every time I hear Michelle Obama's name, and most recently I've been hearing it in the context of the, maybe she can be a replacement for Breyer on the Supreme Court, and I'm thinking, wait, my mind always goes back to her Princeton thesis.
And I'm like, have you read her Princeton thesis?
This woman is dumb, dumb, dumb.
Christopher Hitchens, I think it was, who said, this thesis is not written in any known language.
It's semi-illiterate.
I think I said once on social media that if this thesis were submitted in India, I don't think it would survive the seventh or the eighth grade.
So then you have to ask a question that goes beyond Michelle Obama.
Because think about it, this is not just an indictment of her.
I mean, she can't help being dumb.
But Princeton, why would Princeton degrade itself in this way?
Well, the two-word answer to that is affirmative action.
A lot of these characters who have been put forward as the best and the brightest are far from the best, and they're clearly far from the brightest.
But the question is, how do we get people like this?
I mean, we're not just talking about people who, like, this is not someone who is trying to make the pole vault and, like, narrowly hit the bar.
We're talking about people who can't even get themselves up on the pole.
These are people who don't belong, maybe not just at Harvard, but I'm not even sure if they belong in college at all.
But nevertheless, we get some insight into this question when we look at the data that's coming out now from Harvard.
And think about it. Harvard has kind of the pick of students around the country.
And this applies no less to black and Hispanic students as it does to white and Asian students.
And when you look at the data, what you see is, well, here's a tweet that summarizes some of this.
It says that if you're an Asian American applying to Harvard and you're in the 90th percentile, which means you're essentially in the top 10.
The top 10 in what?
The top 10 in grades.
The top 10 percent. The top 10 percent in grades.
The top 10 percent on the SAT. The top 10 percent across the board.
If you're in the 90th percentile, you will be passed over.
For whites who are in the 80th percentile.
In short, it's a little easier for whites, it seems, to get in to Harvard than Asian Americans.
If you're Hispanic, you would only have to be in the 60th percentile.
So 40% of people ahead of you, and you still have the same chance of getting into Harvard as an Asian American in the 90th percentile.
And then if you're black, you only need to be in the 40th percentile, which means 60% of people taking the SAT or 60% of people on grades are ahead of you.
So look at the inequity of that.
Really what's happened is that Harvard has set up, you could almost call it separate racial tracks.
This is not to say that there's no competition, but everybody competes in their own racial track.
So Asian Americans compete against who?
Asian Americans. Whites compete against whites.
Blacks compete against blacks.
And this is how Harvard does their racial balancing.
Ultimately, they want to get the best students, yes, but not the best students across the board.
They want the best blacks. They want the best Hispanics.
And since these groups don't perform equally in academic preparation, this is why they have set this up this way.
And as a result, Harvard has sort of lost its place.
You can't talk about Harvard as having the best students in the country.
They clearly don't. They have some of the best students in the country, but they have very mediocre students also who are supposedly there to provide diversity.
How mediocre people provide diversity is unclear to me.
It seems to me if you have a lot of smart people in a room, you're going to get a more diverse set of ideas than any other way.
Alright. Now, there are colleges in the country that don't do this.
To me, the most notable of them is Caltech.
Caltech has essentially remained meritocratic through all this affirmative action nonsense of the past 40 years.
Caltech's point is, if you can do math, if you can do science, if you are ready for Caltech, you compete in a single race in which everybody goes at it together and we pick the best of the lot.
And that is the end of the matter.
Now, it may seem that Wow, you know, this affirmative action is really needed.
We need to have, essentially, racial discrimination embedded in the rules and in the law.
Why? Because, you know, whites are, after all, so racist in their attitudes and we've got to combat this existing racism in society.
It's a very interesting survey that is put out by this guy.
It's actually shared by a young Asian-American activist whom I've had on the show, Kenny Zhu.
And he makes the point that when you look at how racial groups rate each other, well, first of all, Pretty much every racial group rates its own group the best.
That's true of all the groups.
But here's something interesting.
When you look at whites, they rate the other racial groups, which is to say blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, all the same as And all almost exactly the same as whites themselves.
Whites are the closest in having an almost uniform rating for all the groups.
Whereas when you look at any of the other groups, you find that they are far more race conscious.
And so, for example, I'm looking now at blacks.
Blacks put blacks first of all.
They put Hispanics second.
They put Asians third, meaning that blacks prefer Hispanics to Asians.
And they put whites last.
If you look at Asian Americans, Asian Americans obviously put themselves first, but then behind, they have whites, Hispanics, and blacks rated about the same.
And Hispanics have Hispanics first, they have Asians and blacks second, kind of almost tied, and then they have They have whites rated last of all.
So the point I'm getting at here is not necessarily what the rankings turn out to be in terms of who's ahead of who, but rather whites of all groups appear to be the most colorblind.
Whites of all groups appear to be rating people as individuals, whereas these other groups have stronger prejudices.
I like this group, and I don't like that group.
Of course, I like my own group best of all.
And so... We're putting into place racial preferences to fight a problem that manifestly does not exist.
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Guys, as I've talked on this podcast before, a number of the January 6th defendants have had trouble getting good attorneys.
In some cases, they end up saddled with state counsel, and in some cases, those are leftists who sort of try to propagandize them against their beliefs.
But an attorney who does not fit into that category, in fact, an attorney who has been capably representing some January 6th defendants, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Marina Medvin.
She's a nationally recognized attorney.
She's had some big and important cases, and she has been representing.
Representing, I believe, several January 6 defendants.
Marina, thanks for joining me.
I appreciate it. How many of the January 6 defendants are you representing currently?
Right now we have six.
You have six. Okay, awesome.
And as you remember, I had contacted you some time ago to say, hey, come on my podcast and talk about this.
And you were like, wait a minute, I've got these ongoing trials.
I can't really do that.
So when I read that there was one of your clients that the case was resolved, I was like, let's talk about that one because it'll give us a little window into how these prosecutions operate and how these cases come to a conclusion.
So let's begin by talking about this guy...
Michael Stepakov.
Who is Michael Stepakov?
And what was the conclusion of his case?
Rabbi Mike.
Michael Stepakov is Rabbi Mike.
And Rabbi Mike is the leader of a congregation in Florida.
And he came to Washington, D.C. in order to take part in the protest, just like everyone else, seeking election integrity, seeking fair elections for his voice to be heard.
For the voice of his congregants to be heard.
And he followed a crowd into the Capitol building.
He was there for a total of five minutes inside.
He should cancel the police officer.
He walked out. He took some photos.
He walked out. He didn't do anything as far as violent or anything that appears negatively against the His types of people, but he was charged.
A search warrant was executed on his house.
His family was humiliated, and he was brought to court in D.C. He was on probation for over a year.
And the case concluded as one year of probation with two months of home incarceration and 60 hours of community service.
So it's a pretty complex penalty for somebody charged with a first offense in a Class B petty offense misdemeanor at that.
So, Marina, let's put what you said in a little bit of slow motion.
Here's a guy. He's a rabbi, and he's a messianic rabbi, which means he's sort of a rabbi who is Jewish culturally, but nevertheless believes in Jesus.
Nevertheless, he comes to Washington, D.C. He's upset about the election.
Let's look at what he did. Now, you said he went into the Capitol building.
Apparently, he observed no violence.
And not only that, but he was part of a group where the cops were around and they were interacting with these guys and shaking hands with them.
And you have that on video, don't you?
That is correct. We did request for the five minutes of footage, the security footage of him in the building, to be released to the public, and it has been released on Thursday, and we posted it to our website so everyone could see for themselves.
Because at the end of the day, look to see for yourself.
Don't trust me. Don't trust Dinesh or anyone else for it.
Go look at the video and see what's on it.
And you'll see a crowd of peaceful protesters walking into the capitals through open doors.
And you'll see police officers there.
And the police officers aren't asking anyone to leave.
They're interacting positively with the individuals walking in.
We are shaking hands.
I was able to count seven individuals walk up to police officers during a five-minute video and shake hands.
Marina, I want to turn to the prosecution here because I want to give people a sense of their modus operandi.
What the prosecution is doing is evidently producing video that occurred 12 minutes before Mr.
Stepakov got there and 30 minutes after he left.
And it looks like the argument they were trying to make to the judge is somehow that this guy, Michael Stepakov, is responsible for what other people did before him or after him.
In short, that he was part of a group or a crowd, and he is somehow held responsible for the actions collectively of the crowd.
Is that an accurate summary of what the government was trying to show?
That is exactly the argument we made to the judge, yes.
I'm sorry.
Well, I was going to make the point that you argued that this is a guy in a justice system who should be held accountable for what he did, right?
Correct. That's what criminal sentencing is.
In federal court and state court, we look at the individual and his individual contribution to the alleged offense.
And here, instead of looking at Mr.
Stavrakov's individual involvement and what he would have seen or what he would have done or what was right around him. The government brought into evidence video from 12 minutes prior and 30 minutes after he left in order to say that the events around him were very tumultuous and much more complex than he let on. And we of course objected and we presented the case of what he saw.
Of course we're using the primary evidence in the case which is the surveillance footage of him going into the Capitol. That's the primary evidence. That's what the court should be concentrating on. That's what he did. That's what he saw.
That was his experience.
You and I would agree Marina that by simply being in the Capitol building at that time he wasn't in that sense committing an infraction.
He admits that and he said, look, I shouldn't have been there.
But the point I want to make is this.
To people who just say, well, he broke the law...
The law isn't just a matter of did you break the law, but it's also a matter of how do other people who do sort of the same thing get treated?
Now, you make the observation in your documents that the leftist Kavanaugh protesters of 2018, they disrupted proceedings in the Senate gallery, and they typically got A, a $50 fine, and B... Dismissal.
Case dismissed. Pay 50 bucks and you're out of here.
It's not going to stay on your record.
No house arrest.
No fine apart from the 50 bucks.
And I think what you're saying is, what is so different about what my client did?
He walked in there.
He didn't know what was going to happen.
He certainly didn't know what other people were doing.
He wasn't asked to leave.
And so his penalty, although perhaps not severe in the big scheme of things, is pretty severe when looked as proportionate to what he did and what other people similarly situated have gotten.
Absolutely. Not only if we compare them to the Kavanaugh protesters do we see the disparate treatment of those protesters and the disparate penalties.
We see more than that.
So let's take a step back. Let's go back to the Kavanaugh protesters.
Not only did they receive this $50 fine and a dismissal disposition without anything on their record, their conduct was worse because those individuals disrupted Senate proceedings inside the gallery.
So the particular individual that we note in our pleadings, this woman stood up in the gallery and she made a fuss and she was arrested and removed.
My client never went into the Senate gallery.
My client was in the hallway. He actually stood next to the front door where he entered the whole time.
Played on his phone, took a photo, and left before shaking hands with an officer.
So his conduct was significantly less egregious than hers.
So, of course, we were appalled to learn that someone like her is going to get a $50 fine in a dismissal, whereas we have to face a year of prosecution, a conviction, albeit for a petty offense, but nonetheless, that's a conviction.
And his fine was $742.
He had a restitution to pay, even though he didn't break anything, but this is something that the government's ordering for all such defendants.
And the government relentlessly prosecuted him for the entirety of the year.
The government asked for 14 days in jail.
They didn't ask for a fine. They asked for 14 days in jail.
That's something that we should all be very aware of.
Of course, the government had a dismissal disposition for him or for someone like him, someone facing a misdemeanor charge.
It's on their website. If you go to the website for the federal prosecutor's office for the District of Columbia, you will see on their website that they will look at each case individually and offer a dismissal disposition.
When it's applicable to that individual defendant.
They're going to look at each case individually, they said.
But as we revealed in our pleadings, the individuals who are faced with January 6th prosecutions were told not to even worry about that.
That's not going to apply to them.
None of their cases are going to get dismissed unless maybe they pass away.
But that's it. There's really no dismissal disposition offered to them.
So they're not being treated fairly at all, in our opinion.
Marina, I want to commend you for the good work you're doing against people who have been terribly vilified, and keep it up, and I hope we can have you back to talk about other cases as they get resolved.
I appreciate it. Thank you.
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Remember Michael Avenatti?
Yes, you remember Michael Avenatti.
He was on CNN over 100 times.
122 times, actually.
And CNN was even promoting him as a presidential contender.
He was on MSNBC over 100 times.
Why? This is for his relentless, savage bashing of Trump.
And of course, his client was the porn star Stormy Daniels.
Avenatti was also, of course, regularly on ABC, CBS, NBC. Well, Michael Avenatti is back in court.
He's on trial. And he's on trial for what?
Fraud! Now, Michael Avenatti has already been convicted in a couple of other cases.
He was found guilty of trying to shake down and blackmail Nike.
And I think he got a two and a half year sentence for that, which he hasn't actually started serving yet.
But here he is back in court being sued by, well, Stormy Daniels.
And this time I'm not seeing a lot of Michael Avenatti on CNN. They're not really covering this case, I think, because they're covered in embarrassment.
Now, Michael Avenatti has been ripping off, it seems, his own client.
And how he's doing it shows what sleazeballs these kinds of people are.
Notice that these are people who pose as champions of social justice.
Yeah, Trump is a danger to the country.
We've got to get rid of him.
I'm going to set aside my legal...
I'm going to take all kinds of risks because I need to put myself on the line to go after this guy.
Let's look at the mechanics of what Michael Avenatti did.
Stormy Daniels made a contract to write a book, and she was supposed to be getting payments of, I think, the total advance, it says here, yeah, $800,000.
She was essentially going to get roughly $200,000 in four payments.
The first payment, I think, was a little higher, the second one a little bit lower, but let's just go with the four equal payments of $200,000.
So she got the first payment, no problem.
But when she was due the second payment, she mentioned to Avenatti, hey, my second payment is due.
And what Avenatti does, he goes to the book agent and he says, hey, listen, he gave the book agent his account, not Stormy Daniels' account, to put the money in.
Now, the agent said, listen, I can't do that.
I need a signature from Stormy Daniels authorizing me to send the payment not to her but to you.
And then the agent got a letter, as it turned out, forged by Avenatti, claiming to be from Stormy Daniel, saying, go ahead and process the payment.
Give it to Mr. Avenatti.
So here's Avenatti. I mean, what's he doing?
He's outright stealing from his own client.
And the money, sure enough, went into Avenatti's account.
Avenatti spent it on all kinds of things, including himself, airfare, insurance, hotels, car services, restaurants.
He put some of the money into a coffee business he owned.
He spent some on another case involving a different client, not Stormy Daniels.
And then when the third payment was due, Avenatti contacted the publisher in advance and said, I want this payment early.
And the payment was wired into Avenatti's account.
So he took a second payment, another roughly $200,000.
And Stormy Daniels apparently went to Avenatti on the day the payment was due and said, where's my payment?
And Avenatti replies to her, quote, on it.
I'm on it. Not saying that two weeks earlier he had collected the money himself and And not told her.
So Stormy Daniels had no idea that there was this second account set up by Avenatti, and he was essentially siphoning off her funds.
Finally, of course, she figured it out.
She became furious.
She's suing Avenatti.
And so here you have a classic Democratic scoundrel, a classic leftist, pretends to be doing this all for noble purposes, is essentially a racketeer lining his own pocket.
I'm hoping he gets like another two and a half years for this one, because...
Michael Avenatti, well, he might still appear on CNN. I don't think he's going to.
They'd really have decided, well, you know, this guy's not going to make it to the White House after all.
he's more likely to be sitting in the big house.
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That number again is I'd like to talk about the ongoing travails of Marilyn Mosby.
Marilyn Mosby is the state attorney in Baltimore.
I actually talked several days ago.
I was telling Debbie, she's like, well, didn't you just do Marilyn Mosby?
I'm like, well, you know, I did talk about Marilyn Mosby trying to rip off the government by claiming dire circumstances and collecting money from the COVID fund, which was then invested in real estate in Florida.
So this woman appears to be a crook.
Well, it turns out her crookedness goes even further and involves not just her, but also her husband.
And he is also a public official city council president, Nick Mosby.
So we have the Nick and Marilyn show going on here.
Let's figure out what they're doing now.
Well, it turns out that they have been taking money from their campaign fund.
and spending it on their criminal defense.
Now, we need to think here for a minute about what a campaign fund is and also what the law allows.
First of all, there's no prohibition against a campaign fund Using money for legal purposes.
Why? Because campaigns require legal aid.
If you set up a campaign, you need an attorney to sort of set it up for you.
You obviously need accountants who have legal expertise.
There are campaign finance laws you have to deal with.
Also, there are other aspects of a campaign that require sound legal advice.
Can we endorse this guy?
Is this allowed? Can we do this with this nonprofit?
Et cetera. So legal expenses of that sort, legal expenses that pertain to the campaign, can be used from the campaign.
But this is where the Mosbys decide to carry the law to a whole different level.
What they're doing is apparently raiding their campaign finance coffers to pay for their own personal criminal defenses.
And this has now been well documented.
I'm actually looking at a report in HotAir.com.
It points out that Marilyn Mosby took $37,500 of her campaign funds and paid it to Reed Smith LLP in Washington, D.C. Now, that's not her campaign attorney.
In fact, that's her criminal defense attorney who's representing her in the fraud and perjury allegations I mentioned a moment ago involved ripping off the government's COVID fund.
Mosby also paid another $10,000 to a second criminal defense fund, also from her campaign.
Nick Mosby, the same thing.
He's been taking from his campaign funds to pay Reed Smith, the exact same law firm, another $40,000 to a second criminal defense firm.
So these are considered problems.
Personal legal debts.
You can't use your campaign to pay for them.
And so here you have the city attorney and a top official in Baltimore, and they're dealing with a very bad situation in Baltimore, an escalating crime rate, murders, robberies are all up.
I just saw that...
Homicide is now listed as the number one cause of, quote, unexpected deaths among children in Baltimore.
So instead of attending to her public duties, which she evidently doesn't care a whole lot about, Marilyn Mosby is very busy not only figuring out ways to loot the U.S. government through the COVID fund, but also ways to siphon money from her campaign finance fund and illicitly,
apparently unlawfully, I'd like to, in my concluding segment, talk about what is it that makes entrepreneurs Distinctive or unique.
Now, some of you are probably entrepreneurs and many of you are probably not.
Most people aren't.
They're professionals or they work in some salaried field.
They're paid by the hour or by weekly or monthly, but they don't live the entrepreneur's life.
Of course, raising the question of what is an entrepreneur's life?
What makes it different?
Many years ago, when I was at the Hoover Institution, the director of Hoover, a well-known economist named John Raisin, a really nice guy, kind of a roly-poly guy.
John Raisin and I were flying in a private helicopter, not ours, of course.
It belonged to a wealthy entrepreneur.
We were flying across the San Francisco Bay to this entrepreneur's estate.
I was basically there because I was giving a little talk.
I think I had a new book cut around then.
And I remember John Raisin leaning over to me and saying, we were talking about the entrepreneur whose home we were going to visit, obviously a kind of a palatial home in, I believe, Marin County.
And John Raisin said to me, I bet I can do what that guy does.
And I remember that kind of struck me because I can see why Raisin was thinking that.
Raisin was an economist, so he was familiar with the world of business.
In fact, in other words, this wasn't some sociologist or professor of romance languages, you know, I think I can run Amazon.
No, this was a guy who actually had credentials in the economic field.
And yet, that question kind of nagged at me.
Of course, I didn't say anything at the time.
I just sort of nodded. But I was thinking to myself, can he?
I mean, is it really the case that an academic who deals with economics could do what an entrepreneur does?
And I think as I think about it, I realize that probably, and I only say probably because you never know, the answer to that is no.
He could not have done what that guy did.
I know in my own case, I've become something of an entrepreneur, but only in later life.
For most of my life, I was, well, kind of a salaried guy.
I worked at the Heritage Foundation for their magazine.
I then went to work for the Reagan White House.
I was in think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution.
Now, there was a small entrepreneurial element in what I did, and what I mean is I would get a salary for working at a think tank, and that was kind of my base salary.
That's kind of how I paid the mortgage and paid for the car.
And then I would do speaking and I'd get paid for that and I would write books periodically and I would obviously receive royalties for that.
But by and large, I had a sort of predictable flow of income that came from these sources.
There was nothing particularly entrepreneurial about it until I got almost accidentally into the movie business.
And then once I started...
Doing that, I realized that, wow, this now involves a whole different game.
I now have to be involved in a wide assortment of decisions.
Well, think about it. How do you make a movie?
Well, the first thing you do is you have to have the idea for it.
That part was familiar to me.
That's, in a sense, no different than writing a book.
You have the idea. But the next thing is you've got to go get money.
You need investors. That's an entrepreneurial function.
In fact, most entrepreneurs don't use their own money.
Steve Jobs didn't fund Apple on his own.
He went to venture capital firms.
He got investors. Then you have to do legal work to set up your enterprise.
Then you have to assemble a team.
Then you have to make the movie.
That involves cinematographers, gaffers, all kinds of people.
Then you have to get distribution.
You have to negotiate with companies, Lionsgate and so on.
And finally, you have to market the film.
Now, you can kind of see here when you lay all this out why it's pretty hard to make a movie.
It's pretty hard to make a movie because people who generally have one or two of those skills don't have all of them.
Generally, people who have money or access to money aren't all that creative and they don't know how to make a movie.
You have creative people who are pretty good at making movies, but they don't know how to bankroll them and they have no idea how to market them.
So this is the kind of complexity that I was, as I say, it wasn't that I set out and said, I'm going to become an entrepreneur.
It's like I kind of signed on to do the movie, and then I realized, oh, wait, where's the money?
Oh, wait, what do we do next?
So piece by piece, I sort of began to...
I began to learn my way.
And this now brings me to the book I wanted to talk about.
It's this book right here. Not a very well-known book, but to me, a very fascinating one.
It's written by a famous economist, Joseph Schumpeter, who is known for other things.
Schumpeter is known for his idea of creative destruction.
But this book, The Entrepreneur, to me, is a kind of little-known classic.
Now, why? It's a little-known classic because it talks about the entrepreneur in action.
It describes what the entrepreneur does, and it distinguishes what entrepreneurs do from what other people do.
It makes all kinds of trenchant and valuable observations, and I now realize I'm probably just going to introduce the book today, and then I'll go into it in a little more depth tomorrow.
Notice if you think about it that we have powerful figures who make the case for capitalism.
I think here, for example, of Adam Smith I think also more recently of someone like Ayn Rand.
But while Adam Smith talks about the sort of macroeconomic effect of what entrepreneurs do, he talks about the invisible hand of competition.
He talks about mercantilism and free trade.
He looks at history and discusses the corn laws.
But if you look at Adam Smith and say, well...
Can you describe in The Wealth of Nations who entrepreneurs are?
What kind of people are they?
How do they spend their day?
What makes them different? Adam Smith doesn't really go into that.
Now, Rand goes into that a little bit more.
But really, her focus is on the clash between the sort of titanic entrepreneurial builder and then the left-wing fake altruist, the progressive, if you will, who is cunningly trying to leech off the entrepreneur, denounce the entrepreneur while slipping a hand into the entrepreneur's back pocket.
And Rand is very effective in doing this.
But to me, Schumpeter is in a class of his own in simply...
And Schumpeter himself is not an entrepreneur.
I mean, here's a guy who was an emigre from Europe to America.
He became a Harvard professor.
But what I like about Schumpeter is he wasn't just a theoretical guy.
He wasn't just making, if you will, the microeconomic or macroeconomic case for capitalism.
He actually said, look, let me closely observe the entrepreneur and think about what kind of person becomes an entrepreneur, how do entrepreneurs view themselves, and how do entrepreneurs carry out activities that make them different from the run of the mill.
I'll simply introduce the topic by saying that Schumpeter describes the entrepreneur as, quote, a man of action.
I think what he means by this is that most people are not people of action.
Now, obviously, everyone is acting and doing things, so that's not what he means.
But what he means is that most people in the world follow a predictable, conventional, and a safe path.
They travel, if you will, a certain road.
And here we come to the key observation of Schumpeter, is he says that the entrepreneur doesn't travel the road, he makes the road.
And so that's what he means by a man of action.
A man of action is someone who looks at a situation and starts off by saying, oh, you know the world as it is?
Is not the way it ought to be.
I can see a way in which the world should be different than it is.
And I'm going to play a role.
In fact, I have an idea of how I can move the world from the way it is closer to the way it should be.
And the guy who thinks like that and then makes it happen, that is the entrepreneur.
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