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May 6, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:06
WHAT ABOUT SHILOH? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1077
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Coming up, I'll examine the strange controversy over Shiloh Hendricks, the N-word, and the politics of racial conflict.
Harmeet Dillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Justice Department, joins me.
We're going to talk about overhauling the department and also reorienting its priorities.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
My topic for today for the monologue for the opening segment is what about Shiloh?
We're talking about Shiloh Hendricks.
And I will come to Shiloh in a moment.
I want to comment on a couple of things in the news.
The first one being the really comical Pope meme put out by Trump.
Now, the press is really eager to make something of this.
In fact, they went running to the conclave of cardinals in Rome, trying to find...
American cardinals to say they were deeply offended and they couldn't really get enough traction from all of that.
But nevertheless, you have all these guys on the left, including trans people, Antifa guys, all kinds of people.
Posting how offensive it is that, and of course every Catholic Democrat, I put kind of Catholic in quotes here, Ted Lieu and others, as a Catholic, they love this, as a Catholic, I'm really offended.
These are, by the way, guys who pose with, you know, sisters of perpetual indulgence and trans people who dress up with crosses.
They have no problem doing any of that.
They're offended.
Now, one of the guys...
James Surowiecki, who is an author, posted and said, you know, I just don't understand.
Why is this even funny?
Trump is such a megalomaniac to do this, but it's not funny.
And what I posted was, I said, look, here's what's funny about it.
Number one, Trump knows that posting a meme like this is going to send people like you off the cliff.
And he's right.
Number two, you're not particularly religious, but you have to pretend to be outraged.
So you've got to act like you're really offended, even though you know you're not.
And not only do you know that you're not offended, and you're pretending, but Trump knows too.
And you know he knows.
And this is what makes the whole thing funny, that it is a staged, feigned outrage.
And so Trump doesn't really have to worry about it because he knows that there is no genuine emotion or anger behind this.
It is merely a kind of tactical, performative outrage.
That's kind of what makes it funny.
Starting tomorrow, Wednesday, Americans need a real ID to fly.
And some people are predicting there's going to be a little bit of chaos at the airports because people don't really know this.
The word hasn't really gotten out yet.
You can't just show up with your, like, college ID.
You need to have a state-approved, you know, what's it called?
What's the thing that you have on your ID?
Barometrics or...
Well, it's just got to be the real ID.
It has to satisfy kind of government requirements, right?
Now, what I find interesting about all this is that the Democrats are...
On board with all this, right?
I don't hear a whisper of objection, infuriated, nothing.
And contrast this with voter ID.
Somehow to produce an ID to vote, Democrats are like, oh, that's just never going to work.
Black people don't have IDs.
Black people don't know how to get IDs.
Old people, people get married, they change their name.
You expect them to get a new ID with their new name?
Yeah, it's not hard to do, and you need one to fly.
So the gap between airline requirements, which are taken for granted, and voter requirements, as though it's not important when you vote for them to know who you are, very, very telling.
All right, let me turn to this rather confusing but...
In some level, disturbing, but also, I think, illuminating.
My goal here is not so much to, like, take sides in this, but just to highlight what all of this means.
So I'll start with the simple fact that you've got two people, Shiloh Hendricks, and the other one is Carmelo Anthony.
Carmelo Anthony is the black guy who stabbed Austin Metcalf.
And I'll come in a moment to Shiloh Hendricks.
But both of them have raised...
Basically half a million dollars, which Shiloh Hendricks W tells me it's up to now $600,000.
They raised $600,000 for their support, for their give-send-go, to protect them.
In the case of Carmelo Anthony, it's evidently for his legal defense, which, as far as I can tell, based upon what we know, is preposterous.
His legal defense is self-defense.
There was no self-defense involved here, even if what he says is true.
And the other guy, quote, put his hands on him.
It was merely to ask him to move.
His life was not in danger.
There's no reasonable perception that his life was threatened.
And so, there was no justification for him to use lethal force.
Now, had he punched the other guy, had there been a scuffle, a whole different matter?
But we're talking about going to your bag, pulling out a long knife, and stabbing somebody else to death.
So if that's your defense, it's not going to fly.
And I think a wave of public outrage is behind all this, particularly among a lot of younger white people who look at this and go, wow.
I mean, if this had just been flipped around, if a white guy had stabbed a black guy, this would be all over the news.
If that white guy raised $50 for his legal defense, people would be screaming.
They would be treating him like Derek Chauvin.
And so there is a deep double standard built into our culture, even when you have a blatant act of black-on-white violence.
Now, in the case of Shiloh Henricks, you've got this woman with her kid, and they're at a park, and evidently a black kid of indeterminate age.
Some people say it was a black kid who was five years old.
It's not obvious that's true.
If you look at the black kid, he looks about 12, but I'm not going to guess what his age is.
Let's just say that there was a black kid who was evidently rummaging through her bag.
Maybe looking to steal.
Certainly wasn't going through his own bag.
It was going through Shiloh's bag.
And she calls him the N-word.
And then she's approached by another black man, apparently a Somalian, a black man with himself an interesting history.
He's actually been accused of rape and sexual assault of a 16-year-old female.
That's not all that relevant here, but what is relevant as well, I guess it is relevant in the sense that you've got this guy who's at a park with kids, Debbie's saying from the sidelines that that's true.
It's rather interesting that he's on the scene and recording it, and he goes, what did you say?
And this is, I think, where the kind of story takes off, because most white people...
Would start quivering and would back down and would say, oh, I didn't say anything.
But Shiloh basically decides to repeat the N-word multiple times, give him the middle finger.
And even though he says, you can't say that to a kid, and she goes, well, then he shouldn't act like it.
So she does not back down.
She presses the point.
Guess what?
This is the ultimate sort of sin of our time, right?
In fact, even I, in this segment, have got to say she used the N-word.
So, somehow, this word has acquired a certain talismanic type of power, and people can ruin your life for using it.
And they're trying now to ruin Shiloh Henrik's life by basically saying the NAACP has filed a protest, the local authorities are like, we're looking into this.
Now...
This woman has not done anything illegal.
By the way, saying the N-word is not illegal.
And so at the most, it is crude behavior.
It is tasteless.
Do I think she should have said it?
No.
Especially not to, you know, let's even say a 10-year-old.
That is actually not the way to behave.
And so people are saying, well, the white people who have given money to her are obviously racist and are evil.
But I don't agree with that either, because I think that the white people who are giving money to Shiloh are not really defending Shiloh per se.
What they're defending is the idea that you should not have your life ruined for saying a word, no matter what that word is.
And I agree with that.
I agree with the idea that somehow...
There is a moral equivalence between what Shiloh Hendricks did and what Carmelo Anthony did.
No, Carmelo Anthony killed somebody.
Shiloh didn't kill anybody.
And Shiloh didn't harm anybody.
She didn't even walk up with the kid and beat him up.
She just basically called him a name and walked off.
And that should not be an offense.
That is worthy of having your whole life destroyed.
So I think the defense of Shiloh is essentially a statement that this has gone too far.
And that even this word, the N-word, which is not a good word and not a word to be said, it is in fact an epithet.
And a bad epithet with a kind of ugly history behind it.
But nevertheless, it is not an epithet that should give...
A group of activists the veto power over your whole life.
So if somebody says this, say they're forced to withdraw from college or they lose their job or they lose their house or they are prosecuted for it, this is nonsense and this kind of thing has to stop.
Now there are some black MAGA influencers, people I respect who have...
I've been pointing out, and these are people who do not in any way defend Carmelo Anthony.
They are very much for a single standard of justice.
And at the same time, they are appalled that Shiloh Hendricks, who is not really a role model per se, is drawing so much support.
They are reading into it that there are people who are trying to kind of drive a wedge.
Between the races, trying to, quote, create a race war.
I don't think they're trying to create a race war per se, but I do think here that we are creating under Trump a MAGA movement that is in fact multiracial, that has conservative blacks, conservative Hispanics, conservative whites, and this kind of thing, I think, is in fact an unnecessary wedge.
Inside of that movement.
So it's not a good thing for Trump.
It's not a good thing for MAGA.
I understand the motives that are driving really both sides of this debate.
But I think that the area of disagreement between these two sides is not in fact all that large.
The MAGA black guys who are complaining about Shiloh Henricks are correct.
And the people who are giving money to Shiloh Henricks also have a point.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast my friend Harmeet Dillon.
She is the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, and she is the founder of the Dillon Law Group, which she has run for many years.
She's also the former Vice Chair of the California Republican Party.
And as we'll discuss, Harmeet and I go way back to our college days at Dartmouth.
The website of her law firm, dillonlaw.com.
You can follow her on X-A-A-G, Assistant Attorney General Dillon, D-H-I-L-L-O-N, or just Harmeet at Harmeet K. Dillon.
Harmeet, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I'm trying to remember when we first crossed paths.
I'm a little older than you, so I went through Dartmouth before you did.
But do you remember when I met you for the first time?
It would have been in the sort of 1986-1987 time frame when I was active as an editor of the Dartmouth Review and you were on the board.
As a former editor-in-chief.
So I eventually succeeded you and, you know, some of our friends as the editor-in-chief of that publication, but we met before that.
And then, Harmeet, after Dartmouth, you went to law school and you plunged yourself into a complex world of law, voter laws, all kinds of other laws, a very successful law practice.
How did you come into...
How did you connect with the Trump campaign or the Trump people?
Well, you know, you actually may not remember this, but you helped me get a job at the Heritage Foundation, you know, back in the day at Policy Review Magazine.
So that was really the last time I actually lived in D.C. full time.
And I've not lived in D.C. for the last 30 years.
So I've kind of done my career in law for over 30 years in New York, London, Silicon Valley and San Francisco, starting that firm 18 years ago, which I've now stepped away from to do this work.
But throughout this process, I've always been engaged in the conservative movement and conservative ideas and constitutional issues and some of the First Amendment and civil liberties work that we did.
At Dartmouth, including suing Dartmouth over suppressing the speech of my fellow colleagues on the campus and trying to suppress our newspaper, that actually led me towards a career in law instead of medicine, which had been my focus when I came to Dartmouth.
And so at Dartmouth, my first...
My first political campaign was Dartmouth Students for Jack Kemp in 1988.
I was the head of that and drove him around.
That was my first political campaign.
And so I've always been engaged in politics as a young adult and to today.
And so I've been actively involved in the campaigns of most of the presidential candidates over the last 24 years on the Republican side and was with my husband.
We're both big supporters of President Trump when he stepped up to run in 2016.
So I've been a volunteer in the Trump campaign over the years.
I've had the incredible privilege of representing the president as an individual plaintiff, defendant, in some cases, plaintiff and defendant.
And my law firm, the Dillon Law Group, represented his campaign and him as an individual.
It was the thrill of a lifetime to get a call from the president and our attorney general back in November asking me if I would step up and do this role for this administration.
And I've jumped into it head first.
It's been quite a learning curve after 30-plus years in private practice and running my own nonprofit and my own law firm to be part of the government.
And so we're really enjoying this new role.
Harmeet, flashing back to our youthful days, it is remarkable how some of these core issues like free speech, racial preferences, the whole kind of metastasizing gender ideology, it wasn't exactly the same in our college days, but it almost is like those seeds were being sown that subsequently have...
Born fruit over the years.
How would you see the campus today as opposed to, let's say, 30 years ago?
Well, I'm setting the table.
You're absolutely right.
So the scene in the late 80s when I was on campus at Dartmouth was professors pushing the Sandinista movement actively.
Liberation theology.
You had the spokesperson for the college actively suppressing student speech and threatening us.
We invited William F. Buckley Jr. to come speak on the campus.
I introduced him.
There was heckling and booing to one of the most important minds of the 20th century.
I'll never forget that.
And very few professors on our side.
And so it was a...
And then we had the shanties on the campus, and then that time the shanty subject matter was divestment from apartheid-involved companies.
Today, also shanties on the campuses, literally the same kinds of structures.
The sort of subject matter has changed to Gaza and Israel, but a lot of the same activity.
It's become more violent on many of America's college campuses, and at the Civil Rights Division, I'm working with a lot of lawyers throughout the administration on some of the most fraught campus hotspots.
I don't think it will surprise anybody, but our fellow Ivies, not Dartmouth, are among some of the most dangerous places for Jewish students to be in the United States, and so those are issues that we're focusing on.
What I found very interesting in a meeting I had last week with the current leadership of Dartmouth, President Sean Belloc, she came to D.C. to talk to members of the administration.
I think she had some meetings at Department of Education, but she came to meet me.
And that meeting was very interesting because it was introduced to me by someone I know.
So the current general counsel of Dartmouth, believe it or not, I can't believe I'm saying these words.
Is the recent acting general counsel of the Republican National Committee.
And he was invited to be a, you know, teach at Dartmouth for a semester.
And he went there to do it.
And they had a vacancy in the council role.
And he's a friend of mine.
I worked closely with him through my years at the RNC.
So he asked me if I would take this meeting.
And I was curious.
I frankly, after I did go to my 25th reunion some years back, but I...
Haven't spent a lot of time on the campus.
You know, we had a mixed bag of an experience there.
I will just leave it at that.
And so I did take the meeting.
I had an open mind, and I was incredibly impressed with what I heard from Dartmouth's president.
For one thing, I heard that she cleared the shanties last year.
Students who refused to follow reasonable, neutral principles about the line between protected speech and unprotected interference with fellow students' ability to get their education were arrested.
The shanties were cleared away.
The emphasis academically was on academic disciplines from different viewpoints, Middle Eastern studies and Jewish studies, kind of working together and co-teaching and cooperating with each other and making sure that all viewpoints were heard on the campus.
I heard that at Dartmouth, applications from Jewish students...
We're way up over 100% since the last year.
And you can see, you couple that with what's happening at some of the other higher institutions.
And you see that that is a very impressive statistic.
And you hear that the campus life for Jewish students is very lively.
And of course, that means the campus life is good for all the students there because there is a culture that's being fostered there of intellectual curiosity.
It is exactly what you expect to find.
On a college campus.
And also a lot of very impressive statistics about how they're deploying aid to students and grants as opposed to loans and just really having a really, really rich campus life.
I almost wish that I was a student now going back to Dartmouth and having a very different experience than what I had.
And it's not only Dartmouth.
As you probably have seen in the press, the Civil Rights Division under my leadership and the current DOJ have sent letters to over 50 institutions of higher learning.
To inquire about both these anti-Semitism issues as well as DEI in general.
As you know, the president has a focus on eliminating racial discrimination in institutions of higher learning, of learning, period, actually, and in corporate America.
And so we're getting responses back from many that are defiant in your face, and there's some that are doing a great job.
One of the ones is not...
On my favorite list is my other alma mater, University of Virginia.
I went to law school there, and there have been some horrific incidents there against students with backgrounds that should be protected, and they're not being protected at UVA, so we're investigating that.
But one impressive feat of moral leadership by Dartmouth's leadership is our refusal to sign on to this form letter by all these college...
Deans in campuses.
Harvard led this effort.
UVA has signed on to it and a bunch of others.
She respectfully declined to sign that, saying, you know, I don't sign form letters.
Like, I'm happy to sign a letter that I participated in, but...
We have to ask some questions in academia as to whether we are doing everything correctly or not.
Introspection is part of this intellectual curiosity.
As opposed to knee-jerk and reflexive defense of our position, maybe we might be able to learn something.
And so I thought that was very mature and impressive.
So I got to give kudos to our alma mater for Vox Clemantus and Deserto being a voice crying out in the wilderness, which is their motto.
And they're really doing that today.
I mean, that is certainly great to hear.
I think what's going on, Harmeet, is that you really have a fundamental divide or clash over the meaning of civil rights.
In other words, if you look at the president of Harvard, part of their pompous indignation is based upon the idea that they see themselves in a straight line with Martin Luther King.
Even though their policies are the exact opposite.
They're engaged in racial discrimination.
They condone racial segregation.
So their policies are the opposite of what kings stood for.
But nevertheless, they see themselves as the true inheritors of the king.
And I think what's going on is the Trump administration is saying, listen, you can't discriminate in any direction.
We need to have a level playing field.
We need to have a colorblind approach or a race-neutral approach.
And that is like throwing holy water on these guys, right?
Yeah, they're absolutely running scared while, as you say, putting this pompous face on the whole picture.
Look.
The history of Harvard includes discriminating against Jewish students explicitly in decades past.
They just had policies that, you know, like New York co-ops, you know, very explicitly just doing what they were doing historically.
And it isn't Trump that is saying that they're discriminating.
It is the United States Supreme Court through the case Students for Fair Admissions, where the court found that, indeed, That's what they had been doing and that they needed to stop.
In 2024, 2025, it is no longer legitimate to use race as a proxy for anything, really, certainly not fitness for admission into higher institutions.
And so what the administration has done, you saw a letter yesterday come out from the president that's pretty hard-hitting about funding issues that's subject to litigation, so I won't talk too much about that.
But I will say that the lawsuit that Harvard filed makes it look like, just to your point, Harvard is the victim.
Harvard is curing cancer.
Harvard is putting humans on Mars.
Harvard is doing all these amazing things.
And if we don't keep up the flow of billions of dollars into the most well-funded institution of higher learning in the world, we will be killing children.
The reality is there are many fine institutions of higher learning in the United States that do research, that do some of this work, that get federal funding, and maybe...
They should be the ones getting this money as opposed to places that are explicitly discriminating on the basis of race, allegedly in violation of a Supreme Court ruling that requires them to do otherwise.
And they released a shocking report just a few days ago about anti-Semitism on campus.
They also released, by the way, people don't know about this so much, a parallel report about the supposed horrible discrimination against Middle Eastern students on the campus.
So it was like...
You know, whataboutism, if you will.
But what I read in that, I could only read it for a few pages at a time and put it down.
It was pretty heavy stuff.
And it's shameful in 2025 that...
That's what's happening in our Ivy League institutions today.
So I'm confident that President Trump, working with all of the fine leaders in the Cabinet, we have a whole-of-government approach to addressing these issues.
And we are doing it at so many more levels than the media even knows about.
I mean, I can't talk about everything we're doing, but it is a daily focus of this administration to eradicate the use of race in our society as, like I said, a proxy for admission into anything.
Harmeet, it seems to me that you're confronting a little bit of a double infestation.
And what I mean by that is that you're dealing on the outside with institutions that have been habitually discriminating for years, have a kind of twisted understanding of what civil rights is, and you have to hold them to account.
But you also are dealing with a bureaucratic establishment in the government that has created, if you will, the problem that we are dealing with now.
There was a little bit of a mini revolt.
You had people who were quitting.
You had people who were reassigned.
The media had all these big reports about how people were flying out of windows and this sort of thing.
I'd like you to describe, if you will, a little bit the challenge of cleaning house inside of the Justice Department in the Civil Rights Division because you had a lot of predecessors who had a very different understanding of civil rights.
Well, absolutely, Dinesh.
I mean, I was warned before I took this position on that you don't know what you're getting yourself into, Harmeet.
You're used to being the queen of your law firm and you do whatever you want and, you know, this government's different.
I accepted the challenge and I came in and, look, I'm...
I've been practicing law for three decades.
I've been doing civil rights law for three decades.
Now, it isn't, and I had members of the Senate and, you know, all these civil rights groups condemn me.
Oh, she's not a civil rights lawyer.
In fact, I've absolutely obtained tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars of damages for victims in civil rights cases in my career.
So, yes, I am.
And so here we come, and we find that, yes, the arbiters of civil rights think that only they get to define it, and only in a very narrow way.
Against that backdrop, you have to understand that prior Republican administrations have chosen to view the Civil Rights Division as too tough a nut to crack, and all we can do is maybe slow down the crazy extremism as opposed to actually using this important department that enforces our federal civil rights laws, which I firmly believe in, for the good.
And so we've just simply been sort of babysitting it.
And that was not my approach.
I got...
And, you know, in coming to Senate confirmation and so forth, I pledged I would enforce the civil rights laws equally and fairly, and that's what I intend to do.
And unfortunately, when I came into office, I found, yes, there was quite a bit of resistance, and what resistance takes the form of, and this was not a surprise, it was publicly announced on LinkedIn and other forums, there were former government lawyers coaching current government lawyers how to resist.
And that is, if your lawyer or supervisor gives you an order, well, Ask for clarification.
Ask for more clarification and send a bunch of emails asking for some even more clarification.
And then write a memo two or three weeks later explaining why you can't do what you were asked to do.
And then undermine.
Borrow in and stay there and resist for four years because they're going to go away after four years.
You will still be there as a mole and come back up and keep doing what you're doing without interruption.
That was the plan, frankly, publicly announced.
So not too smart to put it out there, but I knew that's what I was dealing with.
And so I came in and I'm a no-nonsense person, Dinesh.
I think no one would call me a, you know, I would not be getting any diplomatic awards in the world.
But I came in and I made it very clear because we have a little time to lose.
Civil rights violations happening all over our country.
So I came in and I said, look, guys, there are 11 sections in the Civil Rights Division.
I wrote a memo for each of those sections laying out, first, the statutory framework.
I've seen some fake news in the media saying, oh, Harmeet didn't even mention the Voting Rights Act or civil rights laws.
Lie.
I put it in the statute, whether it be Title VI, Title VII, the Voting Rights Act, Help America Vote Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, RELUPA.
The FACE Act, other federal statutes that we administer, say these are the statutes, this is a constitutional framework, and then these are this administration's priorities.
And guess what?
We won an election, and the president and his administration and his attorney general get to determine, with prosecutorial discretion, the types of cases under these categories that we're going to take.
And I made reference to the executive orders and to the views that I publicly testified about that I think are the important priorities of the Civil Rights Division.
Well, all those lawyers who were planning to borrow in, write me memos, defy their supervisors and resist, they did begin quitting en masse.
But to be clear, they didn't just quit.
They were offered severance packages that was being offered government-wide, not just to civil rights, not just to the DOJ.
And they chose to quit and take their friends with them.
That was like a revolution, as you say.
They decided they didn't want to do the mission that they're getting paid to do by our federal government.
And I think that's okay, because we need lawyers willing to accomplish this administration's goals within the statutory framework within which I pledge to work.
And so as the dust is settling, people are riding their long-winded, teary-eyed...
Bye-bye memos, you know, undermining the mission of what we're doing here and pledging to resist from the outside.
We will get the opportunity at a certain point soon, hopefully, to refill the coffers with lawyers who are dedicated to the mission of enforcing our federal civil rights laws in an even and fair and pro-America fashion.
I'm really looking forward to that, but I'm happy to report to you and your listeners that's already happening every day.
Anyone who watches and follows our Twitter feeds of the official DOJ civil rights and our Department of Justice, the Justice Department, and my personal feeds will see that on a daily basis we're opening up investigations.
We're filing lawsuits.
There will be hate crimes charges that are going to be unveiled.
And we are going to do this until we're done.
So it's an amazing time, an exciting time to be at the Department of Justice, and I'm so proud to be honored to be the head civil rights enforcement lawyer of the United States.
Harmeet, before we go, tell us about the business of Hennepin County, because that is one of your first publicly announced investigations.
What are you investigating, and what is the issue there?
The issue there is the District Attorney of Hennepin County, which is, I think, the most populous of the counties in Minnesota, Mary Moriarty, recently announced a plea practice, which was that prosecutors should take the whole person into consideration when offering plea deals, including their race.
She did carefully caveat it by saying, you know, not exclusively race, but consider their race in sentencing.
It's ironic because the whole point of the civil rights movement in our country and all the laws that we had to put into place that, by the way, I grew up in the Deep South, Democrats resisted those laws pretty hard, was because Black men were being lynched and treated differently because of their race.
Literally, justice was meted out differently to people.
Because of their race.
We found this as a country morally abhorrent, and it's illegal, and it's also unconstitutional, and it's a violation of equal protection under our laws.
And so for a prosecutor to come out and say...
This is how we're going to do it, to right some former wrongs.
Well, it doesn't right any former wrongs.
We have former wrongs in our country.
We used to consider people not full human beings.
We used to have different laws and different water fountains, and they sat at the back of the bus.
That's all wrong.
But today, sentencing a black man less than a white man for the same crime is not going to right that wrong.
It is simply perpetuating a new wrong on everybody in that county and certainly on the victims of those crimes.
So this is illegal.
And we are going to investigate it and put a stop to it.
What I learned after announcing that our investigation was ongoing, I already began to hear from victims.
And what I learned is this policy has already been going on, apparently, sub Rosa, even before it was publicly announced.
And so I've got some shocking testimony from victims that we've heard about here.
And, you know, people are going to hear about that.
Worse.
I've heard that this sub-Rosa type policy is happening in other jurisdictions around the United States, where quietly prosecutors are being told, go easier on certain people because of their race.
This is grossly improper, and we will put a stop to it.
I mean, I remember a speech that was given.
This is not so much in the prosecutorial context, but in the context of university discrimination.
And it was the famous...
California constitutional professor, Erwin Chemerinsky, and he was saying something to the effect of, hey, listen, if you guys want to discriminate on the basis of race, like, don't write it down, you know?
In other words, you can do it.
Just don't say you're doing it.
Watch the kind of documentary record that you're...
So, in other words...
Encouraging, as you say, sub-rosa, a kind of quiet evasion of the law.
And I'm delighted to say, Harmeet, you seem to be on to all this and not only willing to stop it, but ready to use the tools that are available to bring this sort of injustice to an end.
Guys, I've been talking to Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
Follow her on X at AAG Dhillon.
Harmeet, thank you very much for joining me.
My pleasure.
Thank you, Dinesh.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
I'm continuing my discussion of Reagan, the chapter called Mr. Reagan Goes to Washington, the book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
I think a very good book to capture the essence of Reagan and now available in paperback, so get a copy if you like.
Now, as I mentioned last time, Reagan was...
A guy who said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party left him.
Quote, So from Reagan's point of view, there's a continuity in his political formation.
Not to say that he is the same man at 50 than he was at 30 or at 60 than he was at 40, but what he's saying is that he has moved in a straight line.
He hasn't converted.
He hasn't come on over.
He hasn't changed his fundamental convictions.
Now, Reagan's idea is based on the notion that the Democratic Party used to be okay before it went off the rails.
So the Democratic Party...
Not Reagan.
Reagan was raised in the era of the New Deal.
His father worked for the New Deal in one of the, it was called the Works Progress Administration at that time.
And Reagan realized that his father was a bit of a dubious character.
He was an alcoholic.
And so this job kept the family afloat.
And I think Reagan credited FDR and the New Deal for essentially Supporting his dad through a job in this time.
Even later when Reagan became a Republican, and Reagan became a Republican quite early on.
In fact, he became a Republican in the early 1950s.
But nevertheless, he retained a soft spot for Roosevelt.
And Reagan liked to quote things that Roosevelt occasionally said.
At one point, Roosevelt said something like, we must and should quit this business of relief.
He even talked about people being, quote, on the dole.
And he said that that was a narcotic and a, quote, subtle destroyer of the human spirit.
So, Roosevelt...
He was aware of the limitations of the New Deal, but hey, this didn't stop him.
He pushed ahead with New Deal programs.
He laid the foundation for even bigger welfare programs that came later.
So I don't give Roosevelt too much credit, as Reagan does, for saying, Really, once in his life, hey, this is a narcotic.
We've got to be a little careful here.
Government needs to get out of this business of relief.
Well, if government needs to do that, why didn't you make the government do it?
You had four terms in which you could realize your convictions, but you evidently didn't do that.
So you don't deserve too much applause for this point of view.
Let's remember that Roosevelt also...
Roosevelt laid out a vision in 1944 to vastly expand the New Deal to such a degree that it goes beyond anything we even have now.
Roosevelt said he thought that the Constitution needed, in effect, to be amended to create a second Bill of Rights.
He said that the old rights were just limitations on the government.
But the new rights would be good things the government could and must do for you.
So like a right to a, quote, useful and remunerative job.
Hey, if you don't have a job, the government has to give you one.
A right to recreation.
A right to freedom from unfair competition.
A right to be free of the, quote, economic fear of old age sickness, accident, unemployment.
Again, For Roosevelt, the government was the guarantor of rights.
So think of how different this is.
For the founders, the government is the enemy of rights.
For Roosevelt, the government is the friend of rights.
This is the guy that Reagan nevertheless, as I say, retained a soft spot for, and I think it has entirely to do with Reagan's own childhood and his own experience with his family.
It should also be said in Reagan's defense that in Roosevelt's own lifetime, The level of government intervention was quite limited.
So Reagan later could point to and say, well, listen, you know, the Social Security program was a widows and orphans program.
Yes, there were job creation programs, but guess what?
We were in a Great Depression.
Something had to be done.
Roosevelt recognized that and created a modest safety net.
I agree with Reagan here that the New Deal is somewhat defensible as a response to the Great Depression.
Contrast the New Deal, by the way, with LBJ, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
While the New Deal was at a time of depression, the Great Society came at a time of affluence.
The Great Society came in the 1960s.
America was flush with money.
It was the only big economy standing after World War II.
There was a wave of prosperity surging through the country.
So the question was...
Why did you need this massive expansion of government?
Well, as it turned out, the progressives of the time argued, precisely because America is wealthy, it needs to do more.
Precisely because the country is affluent.
John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist, left-winger, wrote a book called The Affluent Society, where he said, hey, listen, we can now afford to do all these ambitious things that we have long wanted to do before we didn't have the money, but now we can.
And for Galbraith, the government wasn't limited again to...
Unemployment or poverty.
He thought the government should be involved in producing art.
The government should be involved in the music industry.
The government should be involved in this and that.
Essentially take on anything that you think is worth doing, why not have the government do it?
And so you had an expansion of programs in the 60s under the Great Society.
Things that were previously...
It's not that they didn't happen before.
They did, but they were in the private sphere.
In the early 1950s, Reagan began to have doubts about staying a Democrat.
He did campaign for Harry Truman in 1948.
That was the last Democrat he really supported.
And then he moved over to support Eisenhower, although in 1952...
Reagan called himself a Democrat for Eisenhower.
Now, interestingly, in 1960, Reagan went to the Nixon campaign and said, I'm really a Republican.
I don't really agree with the Democratic Party.
But the Nixon people, crafty characters, though they were as they were, they told Reagan, listen, don't tell anybody.
It sounds better if you say you're a Democrat for Nixon.
So they wanted Reagan tactically to stay in the Democratic Party because it sounded better.
And so Reagan agreed to do that.
Obviously, by 1964, when Reagan gave his famous Goldwater speech, he came out.
He was a full-blown Republican by 1964.
Now, in 1966, Reagan was approached by a group of wealthy California business guys.
One of them I actually knew, Henry Salvatore.
But these were just guys who had made a big fortune through business.
One of them was a parking lot millionaire.
Another guy who had done well in the energy industry.
A third guy in finance.
So these guys come to Reagan and they say, listen, you should run for governor.
The governor then was a Democrat, a liberal.
His name was Pat Brown.
And he was favored to win.
So Reagan was running as a kind of a dark horse Republican candidate.
But these guys told him, listen, you don't have to worry about money.
If you agree to run, we will raise the money for you.
So it made it easy for Reagan.
The money was available.
But it was not going to be an easy race.
Pat Brown basically took credit for the massive expansion of the California highways in the 1950s.
And early 60s, he basically said, I did that.
He was also credited with expanding the state university system, the UC system, which made the California universities rank very high in the United States and, in fact, in the world.
In 1960, Pat Brown had defeated Richard Nixon in the 1962 governor's race.
So Nixon ran for president, lost in 1960 to JFK.
And then Nixon ran for governor in 1962, lost again to Pat Brown.
So Pat Brown was seen as a very tough guy to beat.
And Pat Brown thought that Reagan would be easy to beat.
In fact, there was another guy in the race running in the primary, and Pat Brown wanted that guy.
So the Pat Brown people were actually kind of helping Reagan behind the scenes because they wanted Reagan to be their opponent.
They thought they could easily beat him because they could portray him as a loser, a washed-up former actor.
And in fact, they would run ads.
One of the ads Pat Brown ran was, he described it this way.
He goes, you're sitting in a big jet.
You're ready to taxi out.
A nice-looking middle-aged man in a uniform comes up.
You stop him and you say, you're a little nervous because it's your first flight.
And the pilot goes, yeah, mine too.
I'm a citizen pilot, but don't worry.
I've always had an active interest in aviation.
So for Pat Brown...
This was Reagan.
Reagan was like, quote, interested in politics, but knew nothing about it.
He was a, quote, first-time pilot.
And Pat Brown was like, you really want this guy to be flying the plane?
Very interestingly, Reagan, and this is very much a Reagan move, instead of fighting against that and saying, oh, no, I know a lot about it.
I'm actually a pilot, too.
I got my license.
Reagan turned it around.
And he goes, He goes, I don't know of anybody who was born holding public office.
He goes, the man who currently has the job has more political experience than anybody.
Hey, that's why I'm running.
Meaning, we need somebody new.
We need a fresh face.
This guy is supposed to be the great expert, but he doesn't know what he's doing.
So Reagan was running against the establishment, despite the fact that the establishment was powerful.
And thought it had everything figured out.
Reagan also flaunted his California background and his acting background.
Reagan's view was that people like Hollywood.
They like going to the movies.
Let's remember, Hollywood in those days is not the same as Hollywood today.
It was the Hollywood of Pat Boone and Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Bob Hope and John Wayne.
And by the way, all of these guys endorsed Reagan.
So Reagan had conservative Hollywood.
And conservative Hollywood was probably not the majority of Hollywood, but these were genuinely big stars.
And these guys traveled with Reagan.
They made commercials on his behalf.
So Reagan was able to run a formidable candidacy.
And the final point I want to make about his race was he ran against the counterculture of the 1960s.
Now, the counterculture of the 1960s had not...
Gone full-blown by the early 1960s.
It developed really in the mid-60s.
It exploded in 1968.
But it was getting underway, and it was getting underway in California.
So you saw more of it on the California campuses than you would see elsewhere.
But Reagan understood, I'm going to run against this kind of hippie culture.
I'm going to run against bohemianism.
I'm going to run for common sense and decency and the ordinary man and traditional cultural values and patriotism and free markets.
So you see how Reagan, in a sense, here is creating, even before he runs for president, he is kind of formulating what would become the conservative and the Republican agenda.
Really, for the next 75 years, you've got to remember that before Reagan, there really wasn't conservatism in an organized sense in this country.
There was a Republican Party, but the Republican Party had not had any clear ideology, really, almost since Lincoln.
So in Lincoln's day, the Republican Party, which was new, was an anti-slavery party.
But since then...
It was unclear what the Republicans really stood for.
They were sort of against the welfare state, but not really.
They were for fiscal responsibility.
They were for balanced budgets.
They were the party of small business.
But there wasn't a coherent ideology, a way of putting all the ideas together into a vision that made sense.
So Reagan here is developing that in California, and later he will take that onto the national scene.
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