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Sept. 7, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:18
DRAINING THE SWAMP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep659
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Coming up, I'll show why draining the swamp means reckoning with the administrative state in three upcoming Supreme Court decisions.
Deal with just that.
I'll examine strategies employed by the left in law schools to get around the court's affirmative action ruling.
I'll consider some recent advice from entrepreneur Peter Thiel about how to start a successful new business, and I'll examine the opening section of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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We often hear the phrase, draining the swamp, but what does it mean to drain a political swamp?
When you're talking about a real swamp, we kind of know what draining a swamp means.
You bring in all these engines, you pump the water out, you clear the swamp, you dry it out, you plant trees, and basically you now have A pasture or you have something where a swamp used to be.
But draining a federal swamp, the swamp of Washington D.C., is a whole different matter.
I want to emphasize that draining the swamp is often a case of undoing the power of the career bureaucracy.
These are people who are not elected, who are appointed, but it is their full-time job and many of them have, in effect, tenure, kind of like professors.
Why? Because they can never really be fired or they can't be fired except in extreme circumstances.
Now, there are three cases that are before the Supreme Court now that deal with draining the swamp, and they deal with the power of federal agencies.
We're now talking about these unelected agencies, agencies like the FCC, the Federal Communication Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission.
There is the National Marine Fisheries Service.
There's the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
These are all sort of alphabet agencies, normally known by acronyms, but they all have a lot of power.
Why do they have power?
Because Congress will make vague laws, like you're supposed to regulate finance, or you're regulating banks, or you're regulating fishing companies.
But Congress doesn't tell you what to do, and so these agencies go, wow, basically, we have tyrannical control over this industry.
We can do whatever we want.
And that's the question, really, the Supreme Court is considering.
Are there clear and defined limits to what these agencies can do?
Agencies, after all, think about the name.
If you are a federal agency, you are an agent, and an agent means you're acting on behalf of someone else.
Who's the someone else? Well, broadly speaking, it's the executive branch.
But who's the executive branch acting on behalf of?
The answer is the legislature.
So the legislature passes laws with typically an intention, a defined purpose, and yet the agency then goes like a runaway train and interprets or does whatever it wants, always appealing to some vague provision in the law.
So the first case involves the National Marine Fisheries Service.
And this is a group that is now going to small fishing vessels and saying, hey, listen, we have a lot of rules that enforce restrictions on methods and amounts of fishing.
It costs us a lot of money to operate this program.
We're going to charge you for this service.
Now, wait a minute. Where has the National Marine Fisheries Agency got the power to, in effect, tax these small fishing boats?
The answer is they don't have that power.
There's nothing in the law that gives them that power.
But in the past, some courts have given these agencies a lot of latitude, saying basically any reasonable interpretation of a congressional statute should be construed in your favor.
But now this is before the court, And the court is, I think, quite likely to say, guess what?
Yes, there is a certain degree of interpretive latitude, but it's not infinite.
This particular power that you're exercising, which is a taxing power, doesn't even belong to the executive branch.
It belongs to Congress.
So that's the first case.
The second case involves the Securities and Exchange Commission, which basically brought an action against a guy.
Now they are allowed to do that, but typically it goes to a court.
Well in this case, some of these administrative agencies have set up their own courts.
So if they file an action against a bank, it's not decided in a normal court, a district court or a federal court.
It's decided by administrative judges that are set up ultimately by the agency itself.
And so the question becomes, is this even allowed?
So one of the guys who is being charged for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission, he goes, hey, listen, it violates my rights to go to court, to have a jury trial, to have all the protections of due process if I'm being hauled up before an administrative court that is set up by the SEC itself.
So again, this is going to go before the Supreme Court.
And again, I think the Supreme Court is going to say, likely to say, no, sorry, you can't cancel out people's constitutional rights when they are charged in a criminal case by setting up your own courts.
You have to allow the person to be tried in a normal, which is to say a district or a federal court.
And the third case involves the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Let's remember this was set up right after 2008.
It's given a lot of power.
And in this case, Congress actually gave this group power and said in effect, you're accountable to nobody.
You are allowed to take as much money as you want from the Federal Reserve.
Remember, this is a group that's supposedly monitoring the financial industry.
And Congress basically said, listen, if you need money, just get it from the Federal Reserve.
Well, again, the Constitution has an appropriations clause.
And what does the appropriation clause say?
It says basically Congress must provide appropriations for these executive branch agencies.
And so again, there's a challenge to the idea that this group, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, can derive, say, listen, this is the amount of money we need, $17 billion.
We're going to basically send a bill over to the Federal Reserve and collect our money.
This is going to go before the Supreme Court and I predict and I also hope that the Supreme Court says no.
This is a violation of the Appropriations Clause.
Ultimately, it's Congress that makes the laws and these agencies have taken an interpretive latitude.
They've in effect gone too far.
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We have seen a disturbing pattern of the left, both at the federal level and at the state level, using its power to go after conservatives.
We've seen this with Trump in his multiple indictments.
We've seen this in the other defendants who are charged, for example, in the Georgia case, even in the January 6th case.
And then at the state level, we see Democratic state attorneys general going after conservatives.
And this has happened, I mean, it happened to Tom DeLay.
This was when, honey, going back to the early 2000s.
That was one of the early cases.
And it happened in my case, 2013.
This was with the Southern District of New York.
So Democrats do this.
They've sort of perfected it and they are relentless in doing this.
And Republicans normally just stand back and don't do anything in return or in retaliation.
Where are the Republican attorneys general who have made major indictments?
I think there's a lot of room here for Republicans to hit back, indict Mayorkas, indict Merrick Garland, indict Biden for child trafficking.
There are all kinds of things you can do.
And again, the point is not that the charges have enormous merit.
It doesn't matter if they have merit.
The point is that you file them in jurisdictions where you're going to get a conviction.
This is the left strategy.
So I'm actually just recommending that we do the same.
conservative areas of Mississippi and Texas and Louisiana.
File these cases where you get red juries.
And then we'll see how the left likes it.
The point here, ultimately, is a sort of mutually assured destruction.
And I realize that many Republicans will go, well, we don't need to go there.
Well, if you don't need to go there, then you're basically saying that we agree to be the antelope and we're going to let the left be the lion.
And this is going to be the pattern of American politics.
Every time they want, they jump onto members of the herd and eat them alive.
The other members of the herd then run away, hoping not to be eaten next.
So my point is, it's kind of good sometimes to be the line, not because we want to be the line.
Ultimately, we want to live and let live.
But the way to live and let live is to give the left a taste of its own medicine, to mix a metaphor a little bit.
Well, Now, in Georgia, interesting development.
Just reported yesterday, Georgia Attorney General indicts 61 Antifa activists on RICO charges.
Whoa! Now, there are two things interesting about this.
The first is that the indictment is in Fulton County.
Let's remember that the Fulton County DA... We're good to go.
So here you have not Fannie Willis.
She's not going to bring a case against Antifa.
She's sympathetic to Antifa, if not a secret member of Antifa herself.
And in any event, it's not going to come from her.
Well, this is coming from the Republican Attorney General of Georgia.
His name is Chris Carr.
And he has brought this indictment against 61 people.
Now, a lot of them, some of them live in Georgia, but a bunch of them don't live in Georgia.
Doesn't matter. His point is that they have worked in a coordinated way using violence.
And so the charges involve domestic terrorism, attempted arson, money laundering.
And Carr puts it very well.
He says, look, as this indictment shows, looking the other way when violence occurs is not an option in Georgia.
If you come to our state and shoot a police officer, throw Molotov cocktails at law enforcement, set fire to police vehicles, damage construction equipment, vandalize private homes and businesses, terrorize their occupants, you can and will be held accountable.
Charge or charges is a group called Defend the Atlanta Forest.
And this is an environmental group that decided that we're going to terrorize and we're going to occupy 381 forested acres in DeKalb County.
This is, by the way, land that is owned by the Atlanta Police Foundation.
It's leased by the Atlanta government.
They were building an Atlanta public safety training center.
And after the George Floyd business of 2020, this group, this radical environmental group said, well, listen, we are going to go after the police.
We're going to occupy this land ourselves.
And so there were apparently 225 overt attacks or acts of violence that took place in the city going all the way back to 2020 and continuing to the present.
So continuing really over a three-year period.
Interestingly, one of the high-profile people involved in this is a guy named Thomas Juergens, J-U-R-G-E-N-S. He's a staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
So I'm actually thrilled to say that these guys are now facing exactly the same kind of RICO indictment that is being mobilized against Trump.
And so this could be a case where the Georgia Attorney General is just saying, listen, we have no tolerance for violence.
We're going to prosecute it.
But I hope it's also part of a bigger pattern because let's think about it.
We've had these left-wing riots all over the place.
And so these prosecutions don't need to be limited to Georgia.
Where are the prosecutions in Texas?
Where are the prosecutions in...
Florida, where the prosecution's stretching across the country, there are numerous Republican DAs who can do this stuff.
I'm glad the process is getting started, but I say, let's get it on.
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Get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. I'd like to talk about my film, 2000 Mules, and the fact that it is going up free on the Platform X, this is the former Twitter, this weekend, this coming weekend.
So Friday, September 8th through Sunday, September 10th.
I think we've slotted it to go up at noon Eastern on Friday, so tomorrow, and all the way through midnight on Sunday.
Now, a couple of interesting things about all this.
The first is that when 2000 Meals came out, there were lots of people who saw the film, and some of them came back to me and go, Dinesh, you know, you need to make this film available for free.
You need to make it so that everyone can see it.
Well, there were a couple of problems with that at the time.
Number one, I found, and you'll find as well, everybody finds, that when you offer something for free, you tend to devalue it.
And so it's kind of the good old, you get what you pay for.
So you come out and announce, I've got a film, I'm offering it for free.
People go, well, it can't be that good if it's being offered for free.
Not to mention the fact that films cost a lot of money to make and to market.
So typically with these films, we spend some millions of dollars to make them.
We spend some more millions of dollars to market them.
And not only do we have investors, but in the case of 2000 Mules, we partnered with Salem Media.
Salem Media being, of course, a national radio network that includes people like Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk and others, Eric Metaxas, Dr.
Sebastian Gorka. So Salem Media put up the funds to make the film and also to market the film.
And Salem is a public company, which is to say accountable to its investors.
And so it's not an easy business for me to go, hey, I'm making the film.
Guess what? People would like to see it and some people don't feel like paying for it.
So at the time, there was no way to do that, to offer it for free.
But the film, of course, has had a run.
Lots of people have seen it.
It's a controversial film in the sense that the fact-checkers have jumped on it, have tried their best to try to refute it, debunk it, as Liz Cheney says.
They have not debunked it.
In fact, if you've followed this podcast over the last couple of years...
I think I have systematically and effectively rebutted all the various criticisms of 2000 Mules from the good old geo-tracking doesn't really work.
It's kind of funny because these days on weekends when we have a little time off, Debbie and I will sit back and we watch all these crime shows.
And, uh, crime shows that are, uh, in which you're tracking somebody who's committed a horrific crime, typically a murder.
And guess what? In almost every case, some form of telephone geotracking is used to figure out where's the guy, or where was he at the time of the murder, or where did he go immediately following.
And so geotracking is used routinely, uh, And never once does anyone go, either in the investigation or in the subsequent trials, this technology doesn't really work.
That wasn't really his phone.
He wasn't really near that place.
Nonsense. So this is an accepted, a reliable technology.
And so the criticism of 2,000 meals is just downright absurd.
I saw a few months ago that on X, Matt Walsh put up his film, What is a Woman?
And it got a huge viewership.
And what this means is that, of course, X as a platform is now enabled that you can put long-form video.
It used to be that on X you could just put, this was when X was Twitter, of course, you could just upload a few seconds of video and so we would put up trailers for our films.
But the idea of putting up a whole film on X was...
Really inconceivable. There was no way to do that.
But thanks to Elon Musk and thanks to the fact that X is making all kinds of improvements, you know, sharing ad revenue with creators and a number of technological improvements, but I'm excited about this new possibility.
As far as I know, 2,000 Meals will be only the second sort of full-length film to be available on X. And I'm curious to see what the viewership is.
It removes the objection of people.
And there are some people on our side who say, and I believe them, you know, gee, I'm on a fixed income.
I can't really afford to see the film.
Well, now you can. There are people who are independent politically, who are somewhat reluctant to, if they think something is partisan, they're like, well, I'm not going to pay to go to the theater.
I'm not going to pay for a download.
Well, guess what? It's available to you free as well.
And finally, people on the left, I'm talking about people who have not seen the movie, but have seen things about the movie.
In fact, they've typically made up their mind because they've seen the Reuters fact-check by that little twerp, Ali Swenson, or they've seen some other critique of the film.
In fact, some of the left-wing critiques are very cunningly titled, things like, We've seen this film, so you don't have to.
In other words, they're trying to say, you don't need to watch it.
Just believe what we have to say about it.
But guess what? You don't have to do that.
In fact, it's irresponsible to formulate opinions in the absence of facts.
2000 Meals puts out a lot of facts.
It takes on the mantra, the axiom that has been put out since 2020.
This was the most secure election in history.
Well, I say, ha, ha.
But I also say that the evidence is right there in the movie itself.
And so people can watch the film now.
They can make up their own mind.
They can decide for themselves whether or not this was the most secure election in history.
And they can also address a question related to Trump.
Because two of the four Trump indictments have to do with the fact that not only was the 2020 election secure...
But Trump knew it was secure.
Trump knew it was not rigged and stolen.
And this movie has a lot to say about that also.
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Feel the difference. I don't know if you know the name Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel is the billionaire entrepreneur who founded or co-founded the company called PayPal.
Think of it when we pay online, many people use PayPal.
I think we use PayPal, don't we?
We do. And Peter Thiel was the founder of PayPal.
He was also an early investor in Facebook.
So he, you can almost say, had two major home runs.
He started PayPal. He made a bunch of money.
And then he invested some of that money in Facebook, and he made a whole bunch of more money, and this is really what got him to billionaire status.
I remember also Peter saying that he learned from one of his professors that he should make investments out of his IRA account.
In other words, not out of his normal account.
And think of how important this simple thing is because if you invest out of a normal account and you make money, $100, and you're in the top tax bracket, well, you owe 38 of those dollars to the government.
But let's say you take the same $100 from your IRA and you make that investment and you make $1,000.
The amount you give to the federal government, at least at present, is zero.
Why? Because you're investing out of a tax-free account.
And the gains also accumulate tax-free.
Now, you may have to pay taxes when you take the money out at some later date, but that's a subject for another day.
The money can grow tax-free in the IRA account and there are other similar vehicles.
Well, Peter Thiel Gave a remarkable, a very interesting lecture.
It's interesting both in the theoretical sense that it makes some general remarks about monopolies and about businesses.
But then it also has some practical advice if you want to start a business.
What kind of a business should you think about starting?
And so there's a practical relevance to it.
And so I thought I'd devote a couple of segments in the podcast to summarizing Peter Thiel's lecture.
He begins by making a provocative claim, which I think is undoubtedly true.
Every time you start a business, you want to have a monopoly.
Now, monopolies are thought of as bad news.
Oh, no, I don't have a monopoly.
I'm just trying to start a successful business.
But think about it. The most successful business is one in which people have to buy from you.
So a monopoly is, in a way, a goal.
It's not a societal goal.
It's not good for society to have monopolies.
It's good to have open competition, low barriers to entry.
But for the business guy himself, he or she does want to have a monopoly.
And then Peter Thiel says, you'll find something very interesting when you look around at different types of businesses, and that is that you do have some monopolies, but they always deny that they are monopolies.
And then you have businesses that are not monopolies.
And he goes, they deny that they are not monopolies.
They claim that they are monopolies.
And so what Peter Thiel is saying is that there's a lot of camouflage and deception in the way that businesses describe themselves.
And he gives the reason for this.
Let's look at a simple example.
Let's look at the example of, say, an airline on the one hand.
And Google on the other.
Now, says Peter Thiel, airlines in general are not very profitable.
Many times they make a small profit, 2%, 3%, 5%.
In some years they make no profit or they lose money, and yet airlines keep going.
And so airlines would not seem to be a good business to be in.
Airlines in that sense is like restaurants.
There are a lot of airlines and there are a lot of restaurants.
And the costs of maintaining these are high.
High fuel costs for airlines, high infrastructure costs.
You have to buy and build and maintain these planes.
And similarly, high costs of a restaurant.
You have to have all this food.
So if people order anything on the menu, gee, you've got to have it on hand and be ready to prepare it.
You've got to pay all these employees, whether or not anybody shows up to eat dinner.
So restaurants, as a result, are a difficult and, by and large, not a highly profitable business.
By contrast, Google as a search engine is a monopoly.
There's virtually, there are a couple of other smaller search engines, but Google basically has almost the entire market of search engines.
That's why people use Google as a verb.
Hey, I Googled it. And yet, says Peter Thiel, if you talk to Google, they deny that they're a monopoly.
Why? Because they don't want to be regulated as a monopoly.
They don't want to be broken up.
And so they pretend they're not a monopoly.
Google will say, well, you know what?
We're really not in the search engine business.
We're in the advertising business.
So, why do they say that?
Because, of course, there are, out of every, you know, million dollars spent on advertising, maybe Google takes in 100 or 200 of that.
So, when you put it that way, it doesn't look like Google is a monopoly because, of course, there's advertising money that's spent on newspapers, advertising money spent on billboards, there's other types of online marketing.
Google is only one player in the advertising market, but in the search engine market, Google has a monopoly.
But, very interestingly, Peter Thiel goes on to say that people who are, say, starting a restaurant, who don't have a monopoly, because there are, let's say, thousands of restaurants in Texas, but if you're starting a restaurant in Texas and you want to raise money, you've got to pretend like you're a monopoly.
Oh, sir, we are starting the only Asian Indian restaurant, you know, in Tyler, Texas.
And so you act as if you've got some kind of a niche market where you are going to own that market.
But of course, when people are going to go out to eat, they don't necessarily say, what's the best Indian restaurant in Thailand?
They go, where should we go out to eat?
And so they're considering a lot of different types of restaurants, and you're just one among many.
So you're pretending to have a monopoly that you don't really have.
So to sum up, and this is Peter Thiel's first point, monopolies, like Google, pretend to be non-monopolies.
And people who go into businesses that generally aren't doing that well, airlines, restaurants, and so on, in order to raise money, they pretend to have monopolies that they don't really have.
Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my local channel.
This is an excellent time to become a subscriber.
Why? Because I've got my new movie, Police State, coming out next month.
The movie will retail for $24.95 or $24.99.
But if you join my channel, the movie is included, along with a bunch of other stuff I've got up there.
I post a lot of exclusive content on Locals, including content that's censored and other social media platforms.
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You can also interact with me directly.
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Eastern. No topic is off limits.
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I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's Dinesh.Locals.com.
I'm continuing my discussion of Peter Thiel's ideas and...
He goes from talking about monopolies and non-monopolies to now a very practical question.
If you want to start a business, what kind of business should you start?
And here he's going against the conventional wisdom because the normal way that people start a business is that they look at some large segment of the economy.
Like advertising or retail or restaurants.
And they say, they reason kind of like this.
Restaurants in Palo Alto or restaurants in Houston are a multi-billion dollar industry.
And therefore, if I start a restaurant, I'm going to get a piece.
And then they make some fantastical predictions.
I'm going to get 4.5% of this billion-dollar industry.
And Peter Thiel goes, that's thinking about it all wrong.
Because you don't want to go into an area that is densely occupied by competitors who have been there for a long time.
Why? Because they've learned all kinds of things that you don't know.
They are experts at what they do.
You're going to find it a crowded and difficult field to succeed in.
In fact, you're very likely as a small fish to be kind of gobbled up or pushed to the side by the big fish.
So don't do it that way.
Do it the other way.
Find a market which is a small market.
In fact, it can be so small a market that nobody really cares about it.
Nobody thinks there's any money to be really made there.
Go into that market and kind of kill it.
By kill it, I mean succeed, dominate it, take over that market, and then build out from there.
Now, Let's look at a couple of examples of what Peter Thiel is talking about.
Amazon. Amazon began as a bookstore.
And it began as an online bookstore.
Very simple. You need a book?
We'll get it to you.
And although we know that lots of people like to go physically to a bookstore and browse around, we'll make it really easy.
We'll mail the book to you and we'll speed up the mailing process so you get it right away.
Amazon starts with books.
They are fantastically successful.
They become the online seller of books, and then suddenly they start expanding out from there, so they become the kind of retail magnet that they are now.
eBay. eBay began just with a few products, just putting it out there.
You want to sell some old Beanie Babies that you have?
You want to sell some...
Some stuff. Put it on eBay.
You know, you want to get rid of it anyway.
Why don't you make a few dollars off of that?
So you start off of that and suddenly you've got this giant auction site called eBay, PayPal.
PayPal began actually as an adjunct of eBay.
People were buying stuff on eBay, but typically when you bought on eBay, you had to mail the guy a check and it would take, what, five, seven days to get there.
So PayPal was, you know, this way you can pay immediately.
The seller gets the money immediately and And there were only a few thousand people at the time on eBay.
So PayPal dominated that market and built out from there.
So this is really, I think, a very important insight by Peter Thiel.
He says, I'm not quoting him, you don't want to be the fourth online pet food company.
You don't want to be the 10th solar panel company.
You don't want to be the 100th restaurant in Palo Alto.
So in other words, don't be misled by thinking, oh, pet food is a huge business.
People love their pets. I'm going to start a pet food company.
Well, there's a whole bunch of people already doing that.
The same, by the way, applies generically.
I mean, you can apply to things that you do or I do.
I mean, okay, I make documentary films.
Well, I've been making them since 2012.
That's when the Obama film came out.
And it's a difficult business because getting people...
To get out of their car and go to the theater, watch a documentary, and buy a ticket is not easy.
Typically, if you're looking at people, say, in a food court or in a mall, and you ask how many of those people would go to the theater to watch a documentary, the answer is, as a percentage, not that many.
So it's a difficult business.
And so there's a lot of lessons to be learned along the way, a lot of pitfalls, a lot of experience.
So kind of what Peter Thiel is saying is that...
That you can make it work if it's a niche business and over time you get really good at it and then you can expand out.
But I can't tell you how many guys I run into and these are, you know, limo drivers and people and they're like, I'm making a film.
I'm writing a book. I'm like, you're writing a book?
Well, You know, do you have any idea of how books are composed, how they are manufactured, how they are marketed?
Have you thought about who the audience is?
Let's just say you want to write a book, The Adventures of a Limo Driver.
Well, unless your limo driving experience is so unique, you've got adventures that are going to blow people's mind.
And even then, finding a way to your potential audience is extremely difficult to do.
How, as a limo driver, would you do that?
How would you sell books when you have a name that nobody recognizes at all?
How would they know that there's great stuff in your book?
So what happens typically, and Peter Thiel's point is, find something you know.
Find a niche that is not densely occupied, where the competition is actually weak.
Move into that niche, develop a business and make it successful and then think, how can I take this little successful business in this niche and radiate out or expand concentrically so I can now pick up more customers and wider markets but building from a position not of weakness but of strength.
No surprise, law schools, left-wing law schools, are trying to figure out a way to get around the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action.
Now, this was a landmark decision, in some ways a decision that overturns almost a half-century of racial discrimination I won't say in favor of minorities, because it's in favor of some minorities, namely Blacks and Hispanics, and against other groups, namely whites and Asian Americans.
And this has been going on at the undergraduate level, in business schools and law schools.
But law schools are some of the most egregious and And relentless practitioners of affirmative action.
And so it is not exactly astonishing that they don't like the Supreme Court decision.
And being lawyers, they're going to think of clever ways to get around it.
And they've, by and large...
We're unified around a single strategy.
Now, I'm going to tell you in a moment why the strategy is not going to work.
In fact, it's not going to work because of legal precedent and legal reasoning, but we do need conservative organizations to file the lawsuits that are going to take this to court, that are going to challenge these law schools and force them ultimately to conform to the Supreme Court decision.
So the law schools know that they cannot openly discriminate on the basis of race.
They can't say, for example, OK, John, are you white or black or Hispanic?
And we're going to give you, in a sense, brownie points or admissions points based upon your race.
They can no longer do that.
And the good old, in the past, they would also try to dodge some of these civil rights laws by saying, well, we don't have a quota.
We only have goals.
But the simple fact of it is, if you have goals and you're discriminating to achieve your goals, even if you don't have a rigid quota, the Supreme Court goes, who cares?
This is not about goals or quotas.
You cannot discriminate at all.
And so... The law schools have now decided, well, maybe we can test this law by finding race-neutral ways to achieve a racial outcome.
Think about it this way. You could say, for example, and in fact, let's look at some particular examples that law schools are doing.
One of them is, this was Columbia Law School, they initially announced, we're going to have our students submit a 90-minute video statement about themselves.
Now, ha ha ha, we know that if a student submits a video statement, the law school immediately knows what race they are.
They don't have to ask you this, look at your video.
And so right away, there was an outcry and there were groups that said, listen, if you do this, you're going to be sued because this is a disguised way of counting by race while pretending not to.
So Colombia withdrew that requirement or at least that admissions demand because they knew that this would be easily exposed as a pretext for racial discrimination.
And But there are other more clever ways to try to get a diverse result without explicitly considering race.
So, for example, essay questions.
Talk about your experiences and some of the hardships that you've experienced in Nash.
And then I go, well, you know, as an Asian Indian, well, that wouldn't help me because they're discriminating against Asians.
But what I'm saying is, oh, as a Hispanic, I've had to struggle in the barrio, and so on.
So the point is, it's a way that you can weave in your racial, quote, identity.
Without the school explicitly asking you about race, another way is for schools to say, well, we're going to downplay the LSAT, the law school admissions test.
And by downplaying merit and raising up other considerations, the idea is that we're going to get a more diverse outcome.
But, even though these law schools are very clever, and there was a recent conference that involved the dean at UC Berkeley Law School, this is Erwin Chemerinsky, and also the University of Michigan General Counsel, a guy named Timothy Lynch, and they were talking almost in a certain kind of a wink-wink code.
Let me quote Lynch to give you an idea of what they're talking about.
You should be aware right now of the record you're creating.
What are your faculty saying in emails?
What are they saying in public?
So it's almost like this legal guy is telling these law schools, listen, you can discriminate, but do it quietly.
Don't make a record of it.
Don't have your faculty say, hey, was this guy black in an email?
Because that's going to be part of the discovery if you're ever sued.
So it's almost like criminals cover their tracks.
They're like, listen, I'm going to take money out of the ATM. I better pull my cap all over my face so no one will recognize me.
So it's a disguise to avoid detection.
That's what's going on. You can clearly see that's what these guys are talking about.
And then Erwin Chemerinsky, by the way, a renowned legal scholar, he goes, great point.
And then he goes on to say that, and he's talking to these students at a conference, and he goes, he's telling them techniques to get around the law.
And then he goes, quote, if I'm ever deposed, I'm going to deny I said this to you.
So this is like a smoking gun.
These are deans and legal advisors, general counsels of law schools talking about getting around the law.
The good news, I think, is that the Supreme Court is on to all this.
And I say on to all this because for a long time, Southern Democrats in the South would try to achieve a racially discriminatory result in favor of whites by setting up these facially neutral criteria.
So let's say you don't want blacks to vote.
You go, okay, well, there's a poll tax.
There's a $10 fee to vote.
And no, there's no racial criteria.
Everybody has to pay the $10.
But the idea is that poor blacks can't afford the $10, so they're not going to vote.
So that's a way of suppressing the black vote.
There's a whole record of courts deciding that you can't do that.
You cannot employ criteria that may seem facially neutral or neutral on its face, but nevertheless producing a racially discriminatory result.
And if you can't I'm continuing my introduction to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which he describes as a work of historical and literary reconstruction.
Historical because it talks about true events.
In fact, here's Solzhenitsyn in his author's note.
In this book, there are no fictitious persons nor fictitious events.
People and places are named with their own names.
If they're identified with initials instead of names, it is for personal considerations, often protecting someone's security.
But it all took place just as it is here described.
So we understand the historical part.
The literary part is Solzhenitsyn's genius as using the techniques of a novel, a fiction, Welcome to my show!
But it's divided thematically, and so it's kind of easy to follow the kind of main ingredients or features of the gulag.
Now, the work was also composed under extreme duress.
Solzhenitsyn began writing it by keeping journals and doing interviews while he was himself in prison.
So think about it. When you're in prison, they search you.
You're not allowed to have paper.
If you have paper and pencil, they look to see what you're writing.
Solzhenitsyn had to hide the information he was collecting.
And as the material became larger and larger, he couldn't even keep it all together in one place.
Why? It would easily be found out.
And so the manuscript literally was being hidden and stored by multiple people, and in some cases, in different places.
And Solzhenitsyn himself could never read the whole manuscript in one shot because it wasn't in one place at all.
It was only when he was released for prison, in fact, later, when he left the country and he was in exile, it was only then that he was able to pull it all together, create, in a sense, the single masterwork we now know as the Gulag Archipelago, and release it.
Now, this is a work that is unmistakably Russian.
And by Russian, I mean it's written by a guy who doesn't just happen to be Russian.
He's very knowledgeable about Russia.
Not, by the way, just Russia under the Soviet Union.
Now, Solzhenitsyn lived most of his life under Soviet occupation or Soviet rule, but he knows a lot about what happened before.
There's a remarkable section we'll get to in the Gulag where he compares the tyranny of the Soviets With the tyranny of the Tsars.
And his point is, the tyranny of the Tsars was nothing compared to the tyranny of the Soviets.
He uses, for example, the way that the Tsars treated Lenin with such leniency, such an easygoing.
Lenin was incarcerated, but he had all kinds of privileges and facilities, and he was allowed, even at that time, to have meetings and Be reunited with family.
He was allowed to keep his journals, in fact, even get his journals published.
So Solzhenitsyn was like, we are now seeing, under socialism, tyranny of a completely new dimension, of a completely new order.
So we're going to be plunging into the Russian-ness of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, but at the same time, the universal moral value of this jumps out at you.
You begin to realize there's nothing going on here that, first of all, doesn't occur in other police states.
You'll find similarities, for example, to fascist Germany, even fascist Italy.
You'll see similarities to what happened in China under Mao's Cultural Revolution, in a smaller sense, in Cuba and Cambodia under Pol Pot.
So the Soviet story is unique in a way, but in another way, it's not unique at all.
Now, let's go to the beginning of this work, where Solzhenitsyn begins in a really interesting way.
He starts by talking about some archaeological discoveries about frozen fish that had been frozen in the ice for hundreds of thousands of years.
And they stayed there, apparently remaining fresh in the ice, so that later when archaeologists and anthropologists were able to sort of dig this stuff out, and they found the fish, the fish was so fresh, you could actually eat them.
And Solzhenitsyn uses this as a sort of a interesting metaphor because he says, you know what?
We are sort of like those fish.
And what he means is that we, and he means the we who have been in Soviet prisons...
He goes, we have preserved our stories like the fish through a long period of time.
When everybody forgot about those fish, nobody even knew that they were being frozen in the ice.
Solzhenitsyn goes, same with us.
We were forgotten. In fact, nobody wanted to talk about us.
There was a giant network.
He calls it, the archipelago crisscrossed and patterned the country in which it was located like a giant patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets.
Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence, and many, many others who had heard something vague.
And only those who had been there knew the whole truth, but, he says, as those stricken dumb on the islands of the archipelago, they kept their silence.
So this is the revolutionary importance of this book.
One man, Solzhenitsyn, breaks the silence and tells his story, and nothing in the Soviet Union, nothing in fact in history, nothing in the annals of historical and literary investigation would ever be the same.
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