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Sept. 19, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE BUCKS STOP HERE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep667
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Coming up, I'll give you a bunch of concrete reasons to show you why Joe Biden is an integral part of the Biden family international bribery scheme.
I'll discuss the acquittal of three defendants who were charged in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping hoax.
And author Richard Hanania joins me.
We're going to talk about his book, The Origins of Woke.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, or watching on Rumble, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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Now, let's talk about Biden because the left is no longer able to take the position that Biden is in no way involved in this international bribery scheme whose details are coming to light.
We are in an impeachment inquiry, which is By the way, not the same as an impeachment, but of course the one is the starting point for the other.
It's kind of like a federal investigation precedes an indictment.
This is the most serious part of the investigation, and it's uncovered some big stuff.
I mean, we're not talking here about, you know, Biden gets a gift from some foreign government of a, you know, a jeweled horse and then he is favorable to that country and Biden goes on favorable to that country.
Anyway, this is not what we're talking about.
We're talking about over $3 million from Romania, $8 million from China.
$3.5 million from Russia, $6.5 million from Ukraine.
Add it up. We're talking about $20 million plus, and the number may go considerably higher, flowing into the secret LLCs that were set up by the Bidens.
And the money flows into an LLC, goes to Biden.
Flows into an LLC, goes into another LLC, goes into another LLC, then goes to Biden.
Hunter Biden, just like James and Frank Biden, are the funnels for this cash.
So, contrast all this with the Trump impeachments.
No one alleged that Trump took money.
No one alleged that Trump exchanged money for favors.
He certainly didn't get rivers of cash from foreign governments.
Not Trump. No one.
And now people say, well, Trump made money in Saudi Arabia.
Well, he made money in Saudi Arabia by Saudi Arabians going to Trump hotels or going to the Trump golf course.
So, Trump had products to sell.
No one demands that if you become president, you are Businesses need to shut down.
The key point, though, is that the Bidens don't have any businesses.
The only business that they have is access to Joe Biden, the selling of political favors.
Now, let's look at some concrete facts that show the direct involvement of Joe Biden.
And this is not about Hunter Biden.
This is Joe Biden. First, we know that Joe Biden flagrantly and repeatedly lied to the public in denying any knowledge.
If you look at the Biden interviews, I don't know anything.
I'm not in any way involved with my son's business dealings.
I have no knowledge of it.
I'm not part of it.
And that is now exposed as a falsehood.
In fact, that is now being picked up and recognized to be a falsehood But it's being explained as, well, you know, Joe was just eager to please.
Joe was just so attached to his son.
But giving the reasons for why Joe Biden was involved is not the same thing.
It's an admission that Joe lied.
Categorically false.
Number two, we know that some $20 million of foreign funds were paid into the Biden accounts.
Now, there's no imaginable reason why you should have these multiple LLCs if the Bidens were offering some kind of legitimate service.
Let's say, for example, Hunter Biden was offering his legal services.
Well, You just bill it out from a law firm.
Or if Hunter is supposedly a consultant on energy, he knows everything about energy around the world and in Ukraine, then you just create an energy company and you send them an invoice and they pay for the energy services and that's that.
But that's not the case here.
The money is sort of flowing in through the back door.
And that suggests that there is something deeply wrong here.
That what these people were buying is they were buying influence.
And we also know that the people paying the money saw it that way.
They certainly weren't by Hunter Biden's influence, because Hunter Biden by himself had no influence.
In fact, one of the Ukrainian businessmen described Hunter Biden as, quote, dumber than his dog.
So they knew that this guy is just a front man.
He's, in fact, he's the idiotic front man.
He's the idiot son of a corrupt, at that time, vice president.
And so they were looking to go through Hunter to Joe.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the involvement of Joe Biden in the international bribery scheme that was organized on behalf of his entire family.
Now, this is a... Classic mafia operation.
Remember, Don Corleone gets the oldest son, Sonny, involved in the Enterprise.
The younger one wants to stay out of it, and they don't really need him.
But when the Don is shot, then the son, Michael, comes into the Enterprise.
Ultimately, even the sister gets involved, Connie.
And so the Biden operation is very much like that.
It's run in the style of a kind of, well, I guess in this case, it's the Irish mafia, not the Italian mafia.
And by the way, one of the differences between the Irish and the Italians ethnically is that the Italians went in the private sector, but the Irish went into government.
So think about that.
Italians would start restaurants in America, or they would, well, I guess, join the mafia, which was a private organization, and they did other things, of course.
The Irish went into government.
They became cops.
They went to City Hall. And that's the Biden family.
So this is a corruption racket established inside of the government, an influence-peddling operation.
All the people buying favors knew this.
They made very specific demands of the Bidens.
They were like, listen, Hunter, we're going to pay you this money, but here's what we're going for.
There's a prosecutor who's looking into corruption at Burisma.
We need to get that guy out of there.
And Hunter's like, I can deliver that.
Obviously, he didn't mean I can deliver that.
He meant my dad can deliver that, and his dad did deliver that, and the guy was fired, so Burisma got what it paid for.
This is the key point.
Next. Hunter stated repeatedly in emails, more than once, that his dad got half of what he earned.
So, all the money going into Hunter was not kept by Hunter.
Half of it went to his dad.
And that means that Joe Biden was himself directly paid.
Now, Joe Biden does not need to be directly paid for there to be a bribery operation.
The definition of bribery in the U.S. statute is pretty clear.
You can benefit directly or indirectly from an influence-peddling operation or from an illegal scheme, even if you didn't get the money directly, but your family members did.
Imagine if I was running some corrupt scheme and all the money went to Debbie.
And I go, well, I don't have anything to do with it.
Debbie got all the money.
Debbie's like, yeah, wait, what's the money?
I haven't seen a penny. Debbie's basically on her phone, and then she just hears the words Debbie and money, and so her ears perk up.
She's like, wait, what?!
This is a little bit when I told her that I've reached one million on Twitter.
She's like, one million dollars?
I'm like, no, one million Twitter followers.
She's like, oh. Anyway, back to the Bidens.
Joe Biden clearly benefited from money going to his extended family.
The Hunter Biden paid bills.
How do you think Joe Biden on a government salary enjoys the lavish kind of centi-millionaire lifestyle that he enjoys now?
Answer, foreign money that was funneled through the Bidens, various Bidens, to Joe.
And then a final point, taxes.
When you make all this money, you disclose it.
Hey, we got $20 million, and we need to pay taxes on $20 million, or at least on the net profit of that money.
Not to mention the fact that if the Bidens, these members of the Biden family, are serving as agents of foreign governments, they need to register as a foreign lobbyist.
They didn't do that here.
So all of this here is, there is room for prosecutions directly right here.
A prosecution on the failure to register as a foreign agent.
A prosecution on tax fraud.
Tax fraud that, by the way, involves all the Bidens.
And so you can see the organs of government desperately trying to protect the Bidens.
Okay, we'll slap Hunter on the wrist with a gun charge, but let's stay away from all the tax stuff because that would open up the files.
So the Essentially, the House GOP is all we have.
And I'm so glad we have a House GOP. Imagine if the Democrats had the majority.
All of this would be completely swept under the rug.
There would be no looking into it at all.
So a lot of times when we get public information, we've got to think about it.
There's not some automatic mechanism by which facts come to light.
Whether it's the accusations against Russell Brand or the fact that we don't have the Epstein list or the fact that we don't know what the Nashville trans shooter said in her manifesto.
So, there's reasons why we know things and there's reasons why we don't know things.
And here, what we see is an effort to cover up for the bad guy, Joe Biden, because they want to keep him in office.
Now, there's a school of thought that the Democrats are souring on Biden, that they're going to start looking soon for an alternative, that they've realized that this has kind of gotten out of hand.
We'll wait and see if all of that is the case.
But right now, they're circling the wagons around Joe Biden, and it's up to the House GOP to show that this guy is as corrupt As they come.
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Don't forget to use the discount code, which is AMERICA. Every day it seems I hear about outrageous convictions of conservatives, whether it's January 6th, protesters who are getting sentences far disproportionate to what they did.
And, you know, my old position on this was, look, you got violent guys and you got nonviolent guys, and the nonviolent guys weren't doing anything egregious, and they should get slaps on the wrist, if anything at all.
In some cases, nothing is appropriate.
But the violent guys, the guys who got into a fracas with the cops and so on, do need to...
Do need to be held accountable.
But when I see these sentences that are ridiculously disproportionate, even to what those guys did, I think that what January 6th represents is massive civil rights violations of these defendants.
And I think all of them deserve to be set free.
All of them deserve to be pardoned.
Because think about it.
Sometimes when you have a violation of your basic rights, you did do something wrong.
But the cops had no right to search a car.
They had no right to arrest your whole family.
They had no right to subject you to torture.
They had no right to forcibly interrogate you without a lawyer.
And guess what? The resulting admissions, even if true, are then thrown out of court.
And I think that's what we have here.
We have such violations of due process, not to mention equal justice under the law.
Just today, I read, and I'll probably talk about this tomorrow, a couple of pro-lifers in their 70s are facing long prison terms.
I'm talking about 10 years plus.
For what? For basically protesting and attempting to blockade an abortion clinic in the Washington, D.C. area.
So, yeah, did these guys do it?
I guess that they were, out of conscience, trying to do their best to save infants from being aborted.
That was their motivation.
And you might not agree with the motivation, and you might think, well, okay, listen, they were trespassing, they were interfering with the legal process, in this case, the women who are going in to get abortions.
And so, but...
To lock them up in their 70s, to give them essentially each of them a death sentence for this, in the wake of the kind of sentences that are handed out to violent offenders in our country every day, this is absolutely outrageous.
In any event, all of this is a little bit of a backdrop to saying that I do have a piece of welcome news, and that is that the three last defendants who were charged with being part of the Whitmer kidnapping.
Remember the Whitmer kidnapping?
We know that now to be the Whitmer kidnapping hoax.
And I say that because even though Whitmer went on TV and breathlessly announced, oh, a plot has been uncovered to kidnap me and so on, this was right before the 2020 election.
It was an election interference of its own.
The media was all over it.
Turns out Governor Whitmer knew for months about that plot.
She knew for weeks about it.
She knew who was involved.
She knew that the FBI was on it.
She knew that they had infiltrated these groups.
So her performance was entirely a stage act.
It was essentially a complete sham on the American public.
And unfortunately, many people fell for it because they're like, oh, this poor woman.
And she's just found out that she was a target.
No, she didn't just find out.
knew all along. And she knew all along because the FBI had not only infiltrated this group called the Wolverines, but the FBI was driving the whole plot. The FBI was organizing conferences, paying bills. They had FBI agents as well as informants involved. I think Julie Kelly points out there were more informants and agents involved in the operation than there were so-called criminals who were doing it. The criminals were put up to it by the FBI.
Now, a couple of them, Adam Fox and Barry Croft, were convicted.
And they were convicted, really, by a judge who didn't allow the entrapment defense to be really considered by the jury.
He acted like that has got nothing to do with it.
And even if they were entrapped, the very fact that they went along means that they are part of the problem and they need to be held fully accountable.
I mean, just think about the precedent of that.
Think about the precedent of the government committing crimes, organizing crimes, setting people up to do crimes, and then when people agree to do them, busting them.
But nevertheless, they got those two convictions, but they also have failed more often than they've succeeded.
Initially, there were two defendants who were...
Who are exonerated by the jury, who are acquitted, including Brandon Caserta.
And now the last three guys who are charged, William Null, his twin brother Michael Null, and a third guy, Eric Molitor.
And all of them were charged with participating in military-style drills, traveling to see Whitmer's Michigan vacation home, and being part of a plot.
Well, guess what? The jury considered the evidence, and the jury ruled, in the first case, acquittal.
In the second case, acquittal.
In the third case, acquittal.
But here the jury was like, no, these men are walking free and you could see the overwhelming sense of relief when they heard the results.
So I'm delighted to say I think justice is done in this case.
These men walk free. I wish that the other two guys who were convicted would also walk free.
The people who really need to be in jail are the FBI guys who organized this fake heist.
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Guys, I'm pleased to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is Richard Hanania, and we're going to be talking about his new book.
It's called The Origins of Woke.
Now, Richard is a research fellow at the University of Texas.
He's also president and founder of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.
He's a graduate of University of Chicago Law School.
He got his PhD in political science from UCLA. And his website, richardhanania.com.
Richard, welcome. Great to have you.
I've been following you on social media.
And I finally had a chance to read your book, which I really enjoyed.
And it's called The Origins of Woke.
Now, Let's start with the term woke, because as you know, there are people on the left who act as if, I guess they treat woke kind of like Antifa.
It's a myth. It doesn't really exist.
And they're like, we challenge you to define the idea of wokeness.
And, you know, sure, probably there's some people who use the term loosely, but you have here on page four a very precise definition of woke.
So let's tell us what woke means.
Yeah, so they do do that.
I mean, if they can, you know, it's a gotcha question.
If one person doesn't have a good answer, you know, that'll go viral.
I know, you know, my background is in social science and law.
So anyways, I like to define my terms.
So, you know, I give you three just pillars of wokeness, right?
It's disparities are caused by discrimination if blacks or women don't do as well as whites and men on some measure.
We don't care about other disparities.
We don't care if women are doing better than men at something.
But, you know, these problematic disparities are On top of that, you have speech restrictions in the interest of overcoming the disparities.
The minority group must feel welcome or they must not be stereotyped or whatever.
That's all in the service of fighting inequality.
And then finally, there's this sort of institutional aspect, which is there's a bureaucracy, private or public sector, that's necessary to enforce number one and number two.
Okay, now that's a very clear definition and I think a very important one for a couple of reasons.
Well, one of them is quite simply that it identifies not simply the ideological, but also the bureaucratic or enforcement mechanism.
That this isn't just some pie-in-the-sky idea that they're talking about or having a seminar about.
They're carrying it through policy and through law.
But let me highlight and ask you a question about the second part of that definition, which is the censorship aspect, because you seem to be suggesting that speech restrictions are essential to the idea of wokeness.
It isn't just that they have reached a point where they want to go after disinformation.
Censorship is built into woke ideology.
How so? Yeah, I mean, because, you know, whenever you see sort of, you know, complaints about this stuff, people will say, well, discrimination is, you know, is the cause of disparities.
And as soon as you have a different argument, and I think it's probably because the alternative arguments are so good.
Look, men and women are different.
Like, oh my goodness, right?
Like, you know, if you allow any free speech on this issue, then you're going to sort of expose this idea that disparities cause discrimination is absurd.
So, you know, I think it shows sort of the brittleness of the intellectual sort of foundation of this stuff that discrimination explains all disparities in the world because, I mean, these arguments on a level playing field, and we see this a little bit with Elon Musk buying Twitter and, you know, the censorship not being so strong.
we're seeing a lot of people, you know, politically incorrect ideas on race, sex, on crime, get out there. So yeah, I don't think it's accidental. I think it's, you know, essential to what they're doing. It does, though, seem to me to be an escalation.
And I say this because although concepts like hate speech go back to the 1990s, when I think back to the 80s and 90s, Even the left would make a distinction between racism and discrimination.
So, racism is the ideology and discrimination is the practice.
That, at least, was the mantra that we heard.
And that would be an argument for allowing free speech, because the idea was that you can't police people's thoughts and ideas.
Now, you can prevent their actions.
So, if somebody says, a black guy and a white guy apply for a job, the black guy is better qualified, the white guy gets...
That's discrimination, that's action and conduct, and that can be restricted.
But it's interesting to see how that has now metastasized into the idea that even the expression of the idea is now controversial, and not just racism.
I mean, they treat merit like it is a disguised form of racism, don't they?
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
I mean, and this is not new.
I mean, that's one of the ideas I stress in the book.
You know, some of the things, like you say, you know, the escalation and the speech restriction, that's new.
I think that probably has something to do with the internet.
I mean, people can look up their own facts now.
They can't really build a narrative on these, you know, like I remember the Trayvon Martin, the George Floyd thing.
I mean, things come out now that they can't just, it can't just be the three networks in the major newspapers telling you what to think.
Yeah, but a theme in the book, like I said, is the idea that merit is discriminatory.
I mean, that comes from a court case from 1971.
That wasn't something that was invented in the summer of Floyd.
That's not something that came in the second Obama administration.
That's something that the law has basically been doing and assuming for a very long time.
And, you know, we almost, I think, you know, sometimes I think we have to give credit for the wokes to, like, at least being more honest than the sort of 1980s, 1990s version of civil rights, which was to pay lip service to, you know, the 1964 ideals, but then at the same time, you know, have this sort of what today would be called Ibram Kendi equity sort of ideology.
So I think that's, that's like, you know, sort of helped in pushing back against it.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, we're going to dive more into this stuff.
Richard Hanania, the book is The Origins of Woke, the website RichardHanania.com.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with author Richard Hanania.
We're talking about his book, The Origins of Woke.
Richard, you alluded to, and in the book you emphasize, I think, a very important point, and that is you say that all of this, the roots of this, go back to the 60s and 70s.
Now, there are some people who say that they go back ideologically to Gramsci, or they go back to Herbert Marcuse, And I think a point you make is that, look, there might be those intellectual kind of threads that lead up to this, but ultimately what we're dealing with is a transformation of law and practice and public policy that infiltrated through the bureaucracy.
And you mentioned the court decision of 1971.
I'm Yeah, so if you go back to the debate around the Civil Rights Act, and, you know, none of the scholars or nobody who looks at this denies this.
People did not think they were creating disparate impact standard.
They thought they were outlawing discrimination.
And, you know, I mean, the quotes from the congressman who voted on this and the senators are just so, so explicit.
And everything is just very clear.
And even the amendments they put into the Civil Rights Act, that they thought discrimination meant intentional discrimination.
Now, like on a dime, sort of the civil rights movement and a lot of people that were involved in the original, you know, ending Jim Crow in the Civil Rights Act.
They turn straight to racial quotas, and they turn straight to doing things like attacking standardized tests because they see there's a racial disparity.
You know, you could almost think, I don't know, it depends on who you're looking at, but you could think that the colorblindness, that non-discrimination sort of, you know, the line that they went with before the Civil Rights Act, you could see it as sort of strategic.
But after the Civil Rights Act was passed, the bureaucrats, the government lawyers, the judges, they all basically rewrite the law.
The Griggs v. Duke Power Company says that any practice, anything you do where whites do better than blacks, it puts the burden on the employer to prove that they needed to have that practice.
And that means literally everything.
That's not just tests. That's, you know, checking for criminal records.
That's any kind of promotional evaluation.
If all the races are not equal, if men and women are not the same, this became the law.
And this is sort of radical. And so people like in 2020, they see some crazy person saying, you know, punctuality is racist or, you know, brushing your teeth is racist or God knows, you know, what else they come up with.
This is not new. This has been 50 years, and now the culture is just sort of catching up with what government did first and what government imposed on the private sector.
Why do you think, Richard? I mean, there's something just kind of mind-boggling about what you just said, which is here you have the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
And like you say, the idea here was very clear, and that is to outlaw obvious and intentional discrimination using relevant measures.
So, in other words, if someone is better qualified by the relevant measure and they don't get the job because they're black or because they're Hispanic, that's what the court needs to look at.
You're saying that just seven years later, 1971...
Not just that the government tried to change the definition, not just that the activists tried to do this, but that the courts went along with it.
Now, why do you think that is?
Didn't the judges believe in the Civil Rights Act?
Didn't they see what the context of it was?
Couldn't they look at the history of it?
Didn't they hear? I think it was Ted Kennedy who said something to the effect of...
Hey, listen, if this is used for reverse discrimination, I'll start eating the pages of this act myself.
I remember this quotation from a prominent Democrat.
I'm not certain it was Ted Kennedy, but it was somebody like that.
It was Hubert Humphrey. There you go.
That's right. So my question is, how did this sort of transformation occur in such a short time and why?
You know, it's a really interesting question.
And I look back, you know, I do a deep dive, I have an entire chapter on, you know, the Republicans and sort of what conservatives have been doing since the 1960s, sometimes abating, you know, what the liberals were doing on civil rights, sometimes, like in the Nixon administration, going beyond what the liberals had previously done.
And I just, you know, look back at the time, and really, there was this, you know, my reading of the history is that there was sort of this moral tsunami of the civil rights movement, right?
And then courts on racial matters, and this is not just like directly civil rights, but also they do this on voting rights.
They do this on like school busing, which is also from the Civil Rights Act, but not exactly related to the disparate impact stuff.
They just throw out the law. I mean, it just becomes like we have a moral obligation to achieve racial equality.
And, you know, there's no conservative media at the time.
The Nixon administration has trouble finding even conservative judges to put it.
It's not all Nixon's fault. There wasn't really that conservative sort of intellectual elite that was able to go in and do something else.
So it's like you have the MSM, you have this sort of elite monocultural racial issues, and it's not just civil rights.
Anything that went before the courts, I mean, it was basically lawlessness for 20 years or so after the Civil Rights Act.
You have blacks who had been discriminated against for many decades, certainly in the era of segregation.
And it would not be surprising if, when they first start competing with whites—let's leave out the Asian Americans for a minute—that they would be behind, not because the rules are biased.
Even if you implement fair rules, here's a group that's starting out behind.
So it seems to me that there was a road not taken because it's quite possible that our society could have said, okay, listen, let's focus on raising the intellectual standards of this group, which is behind not because they're inherently deficient, but because of a long period of discrimination and segregation.
But interestingly, I think what you're chronicling is that they didn't go that way.
They basically said if blacks aren't doing as well as whites and let's just say admission standards to Yale, it's got to be because Yale is using discriminatory tests and we've got to figure out a way to attack the test or at least establish separate tracks so that blacks can compete only with other blacks and whites will compete only with other whites.
Isn't that what in fact happened?
Yeah, you're correct.
I think that, yeah, it's not like nobody never tried to equalize test scores in schools either.
So one of the theories behind affirmative action is, okay, you give the first generation of blacks, or one or two generations, a leg up, then they have the nice jobs, they have the connections, they can get their kids, whatever, test prep or whatever liberals they make for good test scores.
And then you had the No Child Left Behind era during the Bush administration.
There was always this idea that we're going to close all the racial achievement gaps.
I think that they found that even when they tried that, it wasn't within the capabilities of government to do that.
Whatever the federal government is good at, it's something going on that's not what people in Washington or the Department of Education is going to be able to impose on the rest of the country that's going to change that.
And so, yeah, you sort of have these like...
There's these deep cultural issues and there's these deep causes of inequality, and we can't face that, so we keep ping-ponging.
One decade, it's getting rid of all tests, and the next decade, it's changing the schools and making sure, redistributing money to the poor schools, and nothing ever works.
It's just because liberalism is just false.
It can never be that. There's something else we need to try.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with Richard Hanania, the book The Origins of Woke.
The website, richardhanania.com.
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I'm back with author Richard Hanania.
We're talking about his book, The Origins of Woke.
Richard, you mentioned in the last segment the idea of these enduring differences of achievement.
Now, you're very familiar with this, but an attack on you in the Atlantic magazine, and I think a caricature of your work, but they basically seem to suggest that you are talking about a white-black racial IQ gap And so they're acting like this has been completely debunked.
Richard Hanania is sort of trafficking in age-old myths and stereotypes.
I'd like you to talk a little bit about the...
I mean, I was almost chuckling as I read this paragraph in The Atlantic because to refute you, they're referring to social theorists like Karen and Barbara Fields and so on.
These are basically sort of fanatical ideologues of the left.
But talk a little bit about...
The fact that you're being accused, at least by The Atlantic, of trafficking in this sort of biological racism.
Is that, in fact, your position?
And if not, where do you think these differences of achievement come from?
Yeah. So, I mean, they do two strange things in this article.
I mean, first of all, they say that the IQ gap itself has been debunked, which is obviously not true.
Everyone agrees with that.
That's why it's illegal to give IQ tests for all practical purposes, because even the liberal lawyers understand what happens when you give standardized tests, right?
So this is not disputed, and it's a very strange sort of critique to make.
And he actually cites people who say the gap is environmental in origin, and then he cites people.
So the citations he goes to actually acknowledge that the gap exists.
So it's a pretty incoherent argument.
I mean, look, you have these differences in...
You know, out of wedlock birth rates.
I mean, you know, the majority of black births are out of wedlock compared to a minority of white births.
It would be, you know, hubris to say we know exactly the causes of all group disparities.
What we can say is that, you know, we have had government attempts to fix these disparities, and we've had government attempts to do so at the level of schools and at the level of getting rid of standards in the workforce.
And that hasn't worked. I mean, the gaps are still there.
So whatever we're doing is not working.
I don't take a position in the book on the origins of the gap because the book is not about that.
I mean, the gaps do exist.
And given they exist, what should government policy be?
That's the question. I mean, I remember reading a tidbit from Tom Sol many years ago, and he was talking about why Vietnamese people in the United States own donut shops.
And he makes the point that, number one, there are not...
The Vietnamese people aren't known for eating donuts in Vietnam.
But he says that some of the early immigrants that found a kind of market niche that they could get into to sell donuts and then subsequent immigrants who came sort of joined in.
And so the point being here that there's nothing...
Sort of sinister or malicious about why an ethnic group might concentrate in a particular area.
It's kind of like asking, why are so many Asian Indians doctors?
Why do so many of them run motels in the Midwest?
Well, the answer is probably because the early guys got started there, probably because there may be factors like, you know, speaking the language, you only need one guy in the front of the counter to speak English.
The other guys can all work in the back.
So there's a multiplicity of factors that produce what we now call legally disparate impact.
not the job of the government to get in the middle of that.
I think that's really what you're saying, isn't it?
Yeah. And it's, you know, it's also very strange because we have this sort of idea there's multiculturalism or at least there's like there's a black culture, there's a Hispanic culture. Okay. If there are cultural differences, it means that every group is going to value the trade off between, you know, studying hard for years and going in one kind of blue collar profession versus going in a white collar profession.
No, different cultures in a diverse country implies that even if groups started out exactly the same, they would have different values and that would go into their life choices.
So the idea, you know, it's sort of, it's coherent.
Like, whatever group is scoring higher on the standardized test, that's the standard.
And we have to make everyone else live in that exact way.
I mean, it's a very strange thing, especially without sort of a assimilationist ideology that says, okay, we're going to make you all the same, we're going to be different, but then when we find differences in outcomes, we're going to be upset about that and the government's going to try to fix that.
It really isn't coherent. I mean, think about the Irish and the Italians.
The Irish became cops.
They went to work in City Hall.
They became part of the government.
Italians didn't do that.
Italians started Italian restaurants, maybe some of them went in the mafia.
The point being that ethnic groups are different.
They have different priorities, different habits.
So, there's a kind of craziness to what we're dealing with, and it's now become part of our society.
Let's close out, Richard, by talking about, do you think that this Supreme Court decision outlawing affirmative action in college admissions, I mean, it seems to be only the first step, but is this going to produce a legal counter-revolution, which will now invade the workplace, will invade even ultimately government contracts?
Are we going to be able to stop this monster once and for all?
Yeah, the premise of the book is that we can.
The premise of the book is that the culture was in effect downstream of law, and it can go in the other direction.
And even though the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action was only about universities, there's articles right now that in the private sector, they're looking at and they're saying, okay, this doesn't apply directly, but it's a hint of how the Supreme Court is thinking about these issues.
So yes, I mean, there are a lot of decisions here.
The Disparate Impact Act, a lot of these things were created by executive order or judicial decision.
That means they could be undone in the same way.
It doesn't require the hardest thing to do in Washington, which is to pass legislation.
And I'm confident.
We've seen some of this.
We saw that Trump abolished the Title IX tribunals on college campuses just by withdrawing some dear colleague letters. There were some things at the end, in the very last days, the very last weeks of the administration, to do something about disparate impact. There was a story in the Washington Post about a DOJ starting a review with potentially getting rid of disparate impact as a standard they use in government.
Hopefully, you would do that in the first weeks of administration, not the last weeks of administration. But yeah, I'm very confident that these things can change and there could be a cultural change as a result.
Richard, this is an excellent book and also very easy to read, very eye-opening, and with a practical bent that I really like.
Richard Hanania, the book, The Origins of Woke, his website, richardhanania.com.
Richard, pleasure having you on the podcast.
Thank you very much, Sinesh. I'm in the opening section of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and he's writing at this point about why people who are arrested by the authorities, often with no cause given, no reason given, in fact, in some cases, no reason to be given, and nevertheless, they don't resist.
He goes, resistance, why didn't you resist?
Today, those who have continued to live on in comfort scold those who suffered.
So Solzhenitsyn here is talking about all the people who never were in the gulag, and they're like, well, why didn't you put up a fight?
And then Solzhenitsyn goes, yeah, resistance should have begun right there at the moment of arrest itself, but it did not begin.
He says, you aren't gagged when you're arrested.
You really can and you really ought to cry out, to cry out that you're being arrested.
The villains in disguise are trapping people.
The arrests are being made on the strength of false denunciations.
Millions are being subjected to silent reprisals.
Now, would it make any difference?
Maybe not. Solzhenitsyn says, if many such outcries had been heard all over the city in the course of a day, would not our fellow citizens perhaps have begun to bristle?
And would arrests perhaps no longer have been so easy?
He goes on to give an example. He says, in 1927, when submissiveness had not yet softened our brains, two Czechists, two cops, tried to arrest a woman on Sarpulikov Square during the day.
She grabbed a hold of the stanchion of a street lamp and began to scream, refusing to submit.
A crowd gathered. There had to have been that kind of a woman.
There had to have been that kind of crowd, too.
Passersby didn't all close their eyes and hurry by, so the woman went berserk.
And because she was so loud and hysterical, the crowd began to be, what's going on?
What's going on? The quick young men immediately became flustered.
They can't work in the public eye.
They got into their car and fled.
Right then and there, she should have gone to a railroad station and left...
But she went home to spend the night and during the night they took her off to the Lubyanka.
So here's Solzhenitsyn, and you can just see this kind of wise old man looking back on this and going, wow, the woman actually was successful.
She organized a resistance.
She's like, I won't go.
She starts yelling and screaming.
The crowd comes to her aid.
These young men who are supposed to arrest her kind of freak out.
They don't want to be noticed.
They don't want people to start talking about who they are, identify them perhaps.
Maybe show up at the station, let alone create a demonstration or some kind of a countermarch.
And so they run away.
They take off. And so Solzhenitsyn's point is now the woman had bought some time for herself and she should have just gone to the train station, forget about all her stuff, get out of there, let them try and find her.
But no, what does she do?
She's like, oh, wow, I got him.
I'm going to go home and rest now after this ordeal.
And sure enough, they show back up in the middle of the night.
They arrest her. Off she goes to the Lubyanka, to the prison.
And then Solzhenitsyn says something kind of striking and very unusual and untypical for the Gulag.
He goes, I myself often had the chance to cry out.
And now we're going to go into a section where he's uncharacteristically going to talk about himself.
I say uncharacteristically because at the end of the section, he says, this is not going to be a volume of memoirs about my own life anymore.
And he virtually never mentions himself again.
So this is a rare case where Solzhenitsyn is talking about the very time when he was arrested.
And he says,"...on the 11th day after my arrest..." So kind of odd.
He doesn't begin with the arrest in the beginning.
He's going to come to that. He goes,"...on the 11th day..." He goes,"...the bad guys brought me to the Belarusian station in Moscow." He says they were carrying some suitcases, but he goes on to say, I myself lugged a fifth suitcase with no great joy since it contained my diaries and literary works which were being used as evidence against me.
So they were going to look at his writings and go, listen, you're a critic of the Soviet government.
And all those papers were in a suitcase and they were like, you carry this suitcase.
So he's carrying in a way the very documents that are going to get him ultimately or at least be used as a pretext to get him locked up.
Not one of the three knew the city.
So here you've got these provincial officers.
They've grabbed Solzhenitsyn.
He was, by the way, he was fighting in the Russian army in World War II. So at the time he was arrested, I believe 1945, he was a soldier.
And so they bring him to Moscow.
He knows the city, but they don't.
Not one of the three knew the city.
It was up to me to pick the shortest route to the prison.
He's leading them to the prison where they're going to lock him up.
I had to personally conduct them to the Lubayanka where they had never been before.
And which, in fact, they confused with the Ministry of Foreign.
They didn't even know where the prison is.
And then he says,"...I had spent one day in the counterintelligence prison at Army headquarters, three days in counterintelligence at the front, where my cellmates had educated me in the deceptions practiced by the interrogators, their threats and beatings.
In fact, that once a person was arrested, he was never released, and in the inevitability of a tenor, a ten-year sentence." So Solzhenitsyn, when he's first locked up, there are other guys who have already been in the lockup, who are also being interrogated, maybe for multiple times, and they tell Solzhenitsyn what's going on.
They go, listen, they're going to charge you, they're going to lock you up, nothing you say is going to make any difference, and for what you've done, which is the offense of criticizing the Soviet government, I think at one point Solzhenitsyn said something critical about Stalin, you are going to get a 10-year sentence.
And in fact, Solzhenitsyn ended up serving eight years.
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