The Ricochet Podcast - Elephant Trainer

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

Even if it weren’t for voter sentiments over the last few years, a slew of electoral losses might make changes at the RNC seem like a no-brainer. And yet there’s only one member of the committee who’s willing to do anything about the party’s dismal performance. Harmeet Dhillon returns to lay out her impressive list of ideas to break the GOP’s addiction to losing. (Visit her site to support however... Source

Because Premiate Forneria Marconi Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. That's what's boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach one billion in this century. Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees. What about a billion?

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Stephen Hayward sitting in for Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs, and today we talk to Harmeet Dhillon about the RNC and how to get the party back on track. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I agree. You'll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. Welcome, everybody. It's Ricochet Podcast number 626. I'm James Lilacs here in Minneapolis. Stephen Hayward is sitting in for Charles C.W. Cook, who's sitting in for Rob Long. Peter's in California. And we all implore you to go to Ricochet.com. And once you take a look, you're going to say, is there more to this? And you go, oh, there's so much more.

There's the member feed, but you got to join to see that. So many benefits, so many places, so many wonderful people to meet and things to say. But, you know, we'll leave that for the end of the show where we have to beg you once again. But now we've got issues to face. Grip the table, gentlemen. Get a steely gaze upon your face because the World Economic Forum is in session. Klaus Schwab has said that things must change. He said, quote, we are confronted with so many crises simultaneously. What does it mean, said Schwab, to master the future? And this guy who looks just like a grim Norwegian undertaker is telling us that we should listen to that. I don't believe that they're actually the mob of Bahamut who confer once a year to figure out how to shape

humanity. I think they're all just a bunch of self-regarding elitists who are filled with their own importance when actually, well, I'll let you guys say that. You can say that five years later, the stuff they talk about there that sounds nonsensical to us starts popping up in city council meetings. But are you afeard at the moment of what the WF is going to cook up this year? Because I just like the fact that they get out there and tell us what the transnational elite is thinking these days. Steven, Peter, Mueller. Peter's mic appears to be turned off. His mouth is moving, but there's no sound coming out.

So I'll go first, James. You know, the Davoisi, as I like to call them, I don't think I thought of that term, but it fits. I think the disjunction between the verbiage they issue at that thing and the real world grows wider and wider with every year. So you had, and maybe you'll come to this, we had both Al Gore and John Kerry showing up and waving their arms around like maniacs and saying crazy things. Although I will say this, they've been more explicit than they've been in the past about what they want. Kerry said money, money, money, money, money, money, I think seven times saying what's needed on climate. So good for him for being honest about what's happening. But at the same time, Germany is setting new records for its

use of coal to keep the lights on right now. So we're all going to go green. But in the meantime, let's everybody who's been talking about an energy revolution let's open a new coal mines in fact in germany my favorite irony of this is they just tore down in germany a large solar power installation to dig a new coal mine because they're so desperate to keep the lights on having decided that they don't really want to be depend on russia for oil and natural gas after all so good luck to those clowns yeah they are clowns. You asked if we're concerned about them. Did you say frightened? I am a little frightened, I think. I have to say I am a little frightened, and here is my reasoning. I saw, as I guess we all have seen now, that clip of Al Gore. Al Gore really unhinged the emotion, the passion. He was just a kind of half step away from

hysteria. And if you looked at a transcript of what he said, he was saying, he was asserting as factual one point after another that he cannot know to be true. One billion refugees. It's estimated. By whom? How? On what estimates exactly? I offered that just as one example. He really and truly doesn't know what he's talking about. And then it struck me. Where do you hear that kind of fervor? In American history, there's a place where we heard that kind of fervor again and again. Tent meetings. This is a revival. It's Chautauqua. This has now taken on, that is exactly right. Well, it's Chautauqua or we're also

farther south, we're close to snake handling here. In other words, this has now really, truly taken on the appurtenances, the feel of a religion. Now, it's one thing if folks who are descended from the Scots-Irish in Appalachia and who have a particular kind of Protestant religious fervor handle snakes in their hollers in Kentucky, they're free to do that. Al Gore has a gigantic income, sits on boards. People shouldn't listen to him, but they do. These were extremely rich, powerful people. So, they now have a religion which they view as a world religion. And you'd even say, even at that point, you'd say, okay, fine, just let them. Let them be foolish.

Let them engage in virtue signaling as much as they want in that little town of Davos. But here's what they want. John Kerry, as Steve said, wants our money, money, money, money, money, money. He said money seven times, meaning, and we know what that means. Rich as he is, he inherited through his wife a big chunk of the ketchup fortune. That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about my taxes. That's what he's talking about, middle-class Americans' taxes. We saw Tony Blair say that you've got to know in the next pandemic, we have to know who's vaccinated. Well, if you know which of your citizens is vaccinated, you know a great deal else about all of your citizens.

He is right there, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, the birthplace of what we view as the traditional notion of rights and limited government, going back to the 13th century and Magna Carta. There he is, the former Prime Minister of Britain, talking about establishing a social credit system in the West. They are coming for us. They are coming for us. And because this has now required, all the features of a religion, because it is now their animating belief, it's what gives them purpose and meaning. John Kerry said in his speech, just think of it. I suppose you might have seen a little thrill on his face if he weren't so heavily Botoxed. Just think of it. We're saving the world. We in this room are saving the world. Well, when you start thinking that,

then you of course assume that whatever you do is justified. Coming after Peter Robinson's taxes is justified. Establishing social credit system in the United Kingdom, if you have to know who's vaccinated, that implies that you're going to do something to the people who aren't vaccinated. Cut them out of their bank accounts? All right. So yeah, this concerns me. Steve did use the correct noun on them. They are fools, but they're rich, and they're powerful, and they are utterly certain of their own justification. They are utterly self-righteous, and they are coming after us so yeah i don't like it it was a little more than a clown show this year i feel the fact that they're coming after us

indicates that there's something askew in their in their plans because coming after us is not enough you can come after us and you can meter our electricity and you can make us all give up our gas stoves and our cars and the rest of it. I mean, in the complete fulfillment of their utopian dream, everybody has the social credit, which is not intended to limit us in any way. No, it's intended to maximize the freedom for all through this narrow little prison through which they view the world. So we may not be able to get in our car and drive, you know, 160 miles, you know, 200, 400 miles on a pleasure,

but we ought not to, and we'll all be happier once we don't. So in other words, 160 miles, you know, 200, 400 miles on a pleasure, but we ought not to, and we'll all be happier once we don't. So, in other words, in the total dream of the half, where we live in the pod, and we eat the bugs, and we don't own everything, and everything, they regard this as the recipe for human happiness, just the way that the architects of 1920s German housing believed that what the proletariat really wanted was to sit in a white room and regard the works of Mondrian and, you know, and consider the purity of the mechanically inspired new world. But even if they get all of us into that world that they believe, what of China? What of India,

which is now going to be the most populous country, if it isn't already? There's a brilliant little speech that was made in the House of Commons. I don't know if you gentlemen saw it. It went around the web. I can't remember the guy's name, Russian-born, Emma Gray, who was talking about the fact that all of you woke kids here who want to save the world, you have to realize that the climate, which he did not really worry about very much, is going to be affected, if it will, by the people of the world who are poor and do not want to be poor, by the people who want to rise up their living standard, which requires the expenditure of energy, which means that no matter what we do in the West, Britain, he said, is 0.02% of the whole emissions of the world. What counts is China. What counts is India. What counts are the

developing nations in Africa. So why is it that the Daboisee, then, are always lecturing us and wanting to put us into little ceramic pods when the rest of the world seems to get a pass? It's almost as if they know the limits of their power, but it's almost as if a whole catastrophe befell India and China, and climate actually did wipe out millions upon millions upon millions of people in those parts of the world. I'm not so sure that they would care. Oh, that's probably a bonus. Yeah. By the way, quick footnote, James, that person you're referring to, it wasn't the House of Commons. It was one of those Oxford Political Union formal debates.

Right, right, right. A young guy named, I'm not sure his name, Cassine is his last name. Cassine, is that how it's pronounced? Right. And it was one of those formal Oxford that's it constantine it it was one of those formal debates where they have a motion the motive the motion was wokeness has gone too far i think and i kept looking around trying to find out how did the vote turn out you know the oxford union always casts a vote on who wins. In past debates on climate change, and they've had a few over the years, the so-called skeptic side has always won the vote.

I couldn't find a single news story that told the outcome of the vote on the debate, which in my mind means that Kassin and our side won, but they don't want to report that in the media. Yeah, well, this will probably be noted as just as the Oxford Debating Society once said, said resolved we will not fight for king and country here they said resolved we will not fight for the climate uh just as moral identical points uh well you know when we said that when you said that it's probably seen as an advantage if there's massive die-offs and

decrease the surplus population and all that. What does that say then about the fact that these transnational utopians turn out to have a cultural bias against the very other nations that, well, as long as, you know, those kind of China, India can send somebody to Davos, I'm sure they don't worry. But what does that say about their cultural precepts? Is this not at the heart of it, the very essence of Western colonial imperialism, the demand of these people that they bow to the Western notions of sustainability? It's just new colonialism, isn't it? Well, I've been using the term eco-imperialism for quite a while, but it is interesting that— Good for you, Stephen. Well, okay. I mean uh certain things

keep coming around and by the way a quick story here i don't know peter remember this the very first time i ever met i think peter robinson in person was almost 20 years ago when he had me on common knowledge with paul erlich oh and by the way i went back and i had forgotten that yeah well i went back and re-watched it Peter, and you look very young, and I still had hair. But, you know, Parler, it's been back recently. You know, in the old days, you used to be able to catch these guys saying, you know, they have too many people, and too many people being born in a developing world, and, you know, a famine and a die-off would be – they'd really say these really callous things.

They don't say that anymore, and now they're trying to offer bribes. So all these UN climate conferences promise huge, multi billions of dollars every year, which no developed country is going to cough up because we if we have a debt ceiling problem already. So, yeah, we're not going to be giving lots of money to develop world to go along this agenda. But so there you know, that's where things will rest i think you know when i was when i was a kid of course when all these air likey and notions were about and the four horsemen who stalked the globe and the rest of it i would think famine this is ridiculous i here i am in north dakota there are fields of wheat as far as the eye can see so we're not talking about you know uh that kind of stuff overpopulation crash in the food supply but when you look around now at shortages and supply chains

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use the code RP to get 10% off. That's 4, number four, fourpatriots.com, code RP. Start building your own stockpile today. And we thank Four Patriots for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Now we welcome back to the podcast, Harmeet Dhillon, the former vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party

and a national committee woman of the Republican National Committee for California. After the GOP's performance in November's midterm elections, she launched a bid to replace RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. Welcome back. Hey, Harmeet, thank you for joining us. Just to declare my sympathies right up front,

I find you tough, smart, unbelievably articulate, and whatever Harmeet's project is today i'm for it we want to get to your agenda what you want to do with the position harmeet but who are the electors who votes the electors are the 168 members of the republican national committee so that's the entire body it's like a leadership race in the senator of the house those are the people so the the general public's opinion about it of which there is a pretty unanimous opinion that we need to change is not relevant in this race what really matters is uh those those voters and so they're hearing from republicans around the

country their opinions about the performance of the rnc right now got it all right So why would you run? Look, here's your alternative life, Harmeet. Your life right now works pretty well. You've got a law firm which has paying clients. I happen to know it's a growing law firm. You also have a law firm which satisfies your perpetual urge to get into a good and holy fight because you're always doing pro bono work for freedom of speech and so forth. You're on Fox News every time there's a legal issue explaining to a large number. That's a pretty good life you have right now. Why are you running for chair of the RNC? Well, yes, right now I have three CEO positions. I'm the head of my law firm

with 22 lawyers and 40 employees in five offices around the country doing mostly conservative-based litigation. We also are the head of this nonprofit, the Center for American Liberty, that won three cases at the Supreme Court during COVID over restrictions on religious liberty. And finally, I'm the chairman of the Republican National Lawyers Association, which is the lead organization that Republican lawyers who do election litigation are part of. The reason that I ran for this position is we are losing elections and we've lost repeatedly over the last six years. And our leadership seems not to be geared to winning in 2024. In fact, the Republican National Committee seems to really right now serve mainly the interests of political consultants who get paid whether you win or you lose elections. There's no concept of success as a metric.

And we make excuses for losing. We blame Dobbs. We blame candidate selection. We are failing to acknowledge that Democrats have managed with their absolutely brutally efficient election ballot harvesting and delivering machine to elect Joe Biden, the biggest liar in D.C., which is a really fierce competition, to elect John Fetterman, who could not even speak and had a stroke during his campaign, to elect Katie Hobbs, who has bungled repeated elections as Secretary of State in Arizona and didn't debate. And the reason is that they vote and the Democrats are voting for 30 days, 35 days in these states. Their candidates don't matter. It is the machine. And why can't we have a better machine? We have donors. We are lacking in the will to stand up and say sorry until we can change those laws back to a less loose system of bloated voter rolls and early voting and ballot harvesting none of which i like we've got to compete under the system that we have we don't have a choice

and we currently don't have a leader we have a you know nice lady although this campaign has gotten very nasty including religious bigotry and other terrible things we haven't we haven't we have a a nice but ineffective rnc and that doesn't work and listen just getting back into basic politics when a president wins the white house they usually get to anoint and insert their favorite person to the RNC. That's what happened. I mean, if she wasn't elected in a popular election, she was selected, okay? And then he selected her in 2018 after we lost the midterms in a disastrous fashion. We lost half of our seats here in California, Peter, as you know. And then she was selected, oddly enough, after we lost the White House. That's

unprecedented. Normally, when you lose the White House, you leave. You say, thank you very much. Thanks for the opportunity. Goodbye. And let somebody else do a better job. But in fact, here we are looking at another fourth term. And I'm sorry, I am not here for the cocktail parties, for the title, or for the pat on the back for losing nicely. We're here to win. And so if we're not winning, what am I doing at the RNC? So nobody else stepped forward. So I stepped forward to run and I have a platform. In Daily Wire yesterday, we published our 2,500 word piece about election integrity and how that needs to radically change in order for us to win elections. How do we get the ballots into the ballot boxes and not, you know, emotionally appeal to voters to show up maybe on election day?

We can't leave it to chance. So I think it's really pretty basic, and I think I can do a better job. Yeah, Harmeet, it's Steve Hayward in Los Angeles. A two-part question that's a follow-up to what you just said about the problems with our election process these days. One is that my perception studying these things is that the Democrats have been one cycle ahead of Republicans for a while. So, you know, for example, the Obama campaigns in 2008, 2012 were very skillful at exploiting social media and the reach of social media. And it took us four years to catch up, which was largely an RNC project in 2016 that got Trump over the finish line. And now, of course, you raise the magic words that the Democrats are doing ballot harvesting

and exploiting the lax election laws that have been adopted in too many places. As you know, there's a lively debate on our side about whether we should get good at that or whether we should make our emphasis trying to have more sensible laws. My, not my opinion, it's my fear is that we're not going to go back. We're not very much. I think this new regime is what we've got for quite a while. And so I think we need to get good at it. And so that's the second part is how can we not just catch up, but how could we get ahead of the Democrats in reaching out and maximizing the voting turnout for Republicans? Okay, so Steve, I'm going to disagree with you a little bit. So first of all,

they're not ahead of us by one cycle. They're ahead of us by two or three cycles, number one. I'll accept that, yeah. Number two, they got good at it because back in 2004, after they lost, George Soros gathered all the billionaires and, you know, crony capitalists together and said, we are losing. We must win. You are all now going to write fat checks to the following 200 organizations. And you can pick a few of them, but you got to write checks every year until we beat them. And they did that. And they have a whole different way of doing it. They have almost an investment bank, which they use to invest the extra proceeds back into their system of corrupting America. And so they've done it very efficiently. What are we doing? We're, you know, some political

consultants rent their list to us for $100 million. And we're good with that. It's a ridiculous crony capitalist system on our side, lacking competition, lacking a focus on results. And if you ran a business this way, the business would be bankrupt. But the RNC has managed to, you know, shambolically, you know, go from election to election because of the fact that we have to have some system of running elections and there's no accountability. So it is also a false choice that we have to pick between getting better at it and defeating the existing laws. Why can't we? I mean, I do multiple things at a time. I just described it. Why can't we do more than one thing at a time we have to be investing

our billionaires and multi-millionaires and small dollar donors have to be investing in electing republicans who will change the laws to better laws there's only one way to do that elections in america are decided by stateatures, and then a governor signs the bill, and then you get a better law. Secondly, you can also have lawyers go to court and file lawsuits. That's how the Democrats have, even today, I think there was a law that was passed in Washington state, and Mark Elias went in there, it's a voter ID, Mark Elias went in there and said, you know, I don't think it's even a voter ID, it's something else. Mark Elias said, that's racist. you know, I don't think it's even voter ID. It's something else. Mark Elias said that's racist.

It's racist to try to make everybody comply in Washington state. I mean, come on, there's no legacy there. And you're saying it's racist to have tight voter laws. It's absurd. But if we don't show up with lawyers, I don't mean volunteer shambolic, you know, lawyers that are volunteering. I mean, lawyers who you're paying at the par of the other side to show up and fight that, you lose. When we do show up with that, I mean, I had a case in

Virginia, the RNC wouldn't fund it, but I went to the Virginia party, I got a Republican donor to fund it, and Mark Elias lost. Mark Elias tried to say that that Social Security numbers as a as a security measure for ballot applications was was a violation of civil rights. It's a longtime measure in Virginia that all nine digits of the Social Security number are part of the application. We went to court without the RNC's help and we defeated that and they had to slink away when we show up they actually lose most of their lawsuits are nonsense but if you don't show up you're going to lose and it's a one-way ratchet down and so i think at the mean in the meantime we're not going to change there's no chance of electing a republican legislature and republican governor in california anytime soon so we just have to be better at it and guess what we. Where we have the resources and we have competitive districts in California, the Republican Party in California, ballot harvests. We ballot

cure. We have our own drop boxes and gun stores and churches during the pandemic. We gathered ballots where Republicans show up. And you can do it if you have the if we had more funds, we'd be doing it in more places and we'd be winning more races. But it's sort of a, you know, we're circling the drain in the sense that if you don't win elections, donors don't invest in the party. If donors don't invest in the party, you don't win elections candidate selection, we blame Donald Trump, we had no voice of our own. How are you going to get any donors to support the party? I think we're on life support right now, quite frankly. I have to interrupt you for a second. It's lots of fun. I mean, listening to her, unlike the warm pat you get from most people, is like a bucket of cold water dashed in the face.

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And that is, I'm so old, I can remember the midterm election of 1978. Unpopular president, high inflation, and Republicans did very poorly. And so you can see the parallel with the one we just went through. After that, the Republican National Committee became a node of ideas. In addition to nuts and bolts, they said, we need to be talking more to the American. And so what I'm getting to is, can the Republican National Committee still be a vehicle today with all the practice? You mentioned that the Senate has their own campaign committee in the House, the National Governors Association, and the chair of a party has to herd cats. Is there a way in your mind that the Republican National Committee can be a vehicle for the general party making general appeals to the population on our better ideas?

Absolutely. So what you're talking about is the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. My first campaign that I participated in was Dartmouth students for Jack Kemp in 1988. Remember Jack Kemp? We used to have ideas and bright, charismatic leaders in our party who had ideas, both not just the charisma, but also the ideas and the ability to try to make things happen. Then I worked at Heritage for a year. Again, in 1988, 89, Heritage was still an engine of ideas and energy. And so one of my ideas, it's a radical idea, is we decentralize the Republican National Committee out of D.C. So we have a D.C. headquarters, but we actually have regional offices in different places where we have fundraising. Maybe fundraising shouldn't be in D.C. Maybe it should be in West Palm Beach. Maybe there should be a tech incubator for Republican get out the vote apps and it should

be in Austin, Texas, where Republican programmers live. And then we should be having field offices in places where we need to have Americans vote for us. That's a novel idea. Maybe we should be hiring from the communities we're trying to win over and have not just a D.C. consultant class running the party. We might get some better ideas. In fact, I was just speaking to a chair who just got elected in one of these swing states. And, you know, they win elections there where they have a lot of new ideas and tools and innovations. And we're not using some of those at the Republican Party in California. We used to do selective registry of mailing absentee ballot applications in Texas to older, high propensity voters. We outperformed Democrats when we did that. But, you know, if you had this bias that, oh, you know, everything is rigged, machines are rigged.

Everything like, you know, a lot of litigation that occurred in 2020 after the election, the key word being after the election instead of before the election, it should have been, has permanently, has damaged the name of election integrity. There are a lot of lawyers in the country who simply won't go into court to fight these things because they're afraid of their reputations being tarnished by the left. And so, look, we have to just confront, first of all, it's like with a person with some kind of addiction. I think we're addicted to losing, quite frankly, and making excuses for it. So first, we have to acknowledge the problem. We have a problem, and the problem is we're addicted to losing, and we're making excuses for it.

Instead of making excuses for it, let's admit that we need help. And we need help. We need to get up off the ground and start one day at a time making things better. And if we don't admit that, we will not get better. And what we have right now is a leadership that is saying everything is fine it's that guy over there's fault who hasn't been the president for two years it's his fault it's his fault that he made you know bad endorsements and we have nothing to do with it we have no message of our own or no like core platform of our own we're powerless

that's ridiculous we're the republican national committee we're the head of the head of the organization we should take responsibility and if we made mistakes we should fix them We're powerless. That's ridiculous. We're the Republican National Committee. We're the head of the head of the organization. We should take responsibility. And if we made mistakes, we should fix them. That's that's what I call leadership. You mentioned new ideas. What are they? Sometimes it seems that the party is best suited to taking a look at the other side's new ideas and saying these are destructive. These are bad. These are contrary to the american experiment um that's not a new idea that's asserting you know conservative ideals right well i'm like if i were in congress i would say instead of back when we were talking about obamacare i would have said what's your plan like what is our plan for fixing a clearly rotten system i just got it you know i have a medical

issue i just got a call from my assistant saying hey the drug is three thousand dollars three thousand dollars a month are you kidding me like Like that's broken. That's something that's broken with that because I know people in India are probably paying three bucks for it. That's ridiculous. Like what was the Republican response to that? What was the will to fix it? So many of our politicians are just captured by the same lobbying interests that there's little difference between the parties in many ways on many days. Look at the omnibus bill that we just had. But I'm not in Congress. I'm in the Republican National Committee. And so in the Republican National Committee, we don't have a lot of influence over policy. We have influence over getting people elected. And so I would say the new ideas there need to be,

how do we persuade Republican voters? First of all, how do we attract younger voters? Let's face it. The demographics of our party are that older white voters are aging out of existence that's a fact and we must replace them you know like a vampire we must seek fresh blood we must replace them with new uh voters but we don't use social media effectively at the party level at all? Where are the videos being made by young social media influencers to get our candidates elected? We don't pay them. We don't employ them. We don't use them. We don't want to hear from them. And so that's ridiculous. Democrats are investing very heavily in this cycle in two things, in social media and in data. The data part is critical. Now, the Republican Party, I'm going to bore you with some details here, but we began centralizing our data in an organization called Data Trust.

The idea was all the Republicans are going to have economies of scale in using that data. But if you're not knocking on doors and then getting accurate data and feeding it back into the Data Trust, you're simply relying on algorithms. Algorithms are imperfect. And in fact, what we're finding is a lot of our campaigns are going out there and 25 or 33% of the doors they're knocking on are not the right doors. That's a huge waste. And that's because our data is inaccurate. Our data is inaccurate because we're outsourcing a lot of the functions that we used to. Normally, conservatives think outsourcing is good, you're going to get efficiency. That's only true if you're actually doing it in a competitive way. If you're giving contracts to your buddies and you're not regularly bidding them, you aren't going to get competitive products and competitive results. So we have to

apply some of those basic concepts of capitalism that we know. And if the Republican Party is simply captured by cronies, which I'm sorry to say it is right now, you don't get the efficiencies that we need. And so, again, I think recognizing what the issues are, it's not that hard. We have to convince Republican-leaning voters to get their ballots into a slot. And we have to have some humans who we pay to do that. And we have to have some services that we use to message that. And we have to have the resources necessary to use to message that. And we have to have the resources necessary to pay for all of that. That's really the basic machine. And it's lather, rinse, repeat. Now, outside of that, we can have other organizations that pay for litigation using

nonprofit funds. So, you know, tax advantage. We can have political action committees that pour dark money into our races as well as the other side's races. Right now, a lot of our candidates in this last couple of election cycles were selected by Democrat donors pouring dark money into our primaries to select our candidates. Nobody's talking about that on our side. We have a few donors who are organizing and doing something about it, but for the most part, we are sitting ducks. So we have crappy candidates we have to then go defend in the general election and we we lose so how about trying to break that model now if we had donors who trusted us we might be able to lead on that issue but we are losing the trust of our donors because of our failure to execute the basics much less the frills which

include playing in their primaries playing in our primaries. So these are the boring mechanics of politics. Sorry, I think I'm getting into the weeds. No, I mean, you're talking a lot about mechanics, but you're talking about them in a way that I feel I recognize. I'm going to say the parallel I see here. And when you leave us, because you are running a campaign, Steve Hayward is going to tell everybody why I see this parallel. Here's the parallel I see. This is Margaret Thatcher taking on Ted Heath. This is the moment when a great historic party is about to be re-energized. That's what I see. Okay. Another couple of questions, if I may, while I've got, unless you have to go knit a sweater or make a phone call. I see all this. One thing I see for sure is donors saying, wait a minute, Harmeet is not going to waste my money. Maybe she won't win, but she's going to learn things

from the money I give her. And then the next time we'll... I mean, I can just see the dynamic changing. People are going to be willing to give you money because you're tough and you're smart and you're not going to waste. I get all that. Two questions. Candidate selection and primaries. So in the last cycle, we had Kevin McCarthy, God bless him. I'm pro-Kevin McCarthy. But Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, who are not always on the same page, and Donald Trump, as far as I can tell, those three people played the central role in recruiting large numbers of candidates. And the Republican Party just stood back and said, well, you let us know when you get the candidates. We'll start writing checks to them. And that doesn't strike me as quite the right way to go about it. Let me ask the second question right now to get it done.

You will hear over and over and over again, and it depends a certain amount on what you think of Donald Trump and what we've been through these last years. But it's a live issue again as we come up to a new presidential nominating process, that the primary process was out of control. And that the idea that we had 13 candidates for as long as we did, and then six or seven for as long as we did. And then at the end, when it was Trump versus, it was clearly it was going to be Trump or other, we still had three candidates, two guys, who went, all right. And editorial after editorial in the Wall Street Journal or elsewhere, Republicans need to take charge. Of course, there was no structure. There was nobody who could take charge. I just put that to you. Do you see yourself, can somehow, under Harmeet Dhillon, can the party as a party do a better job of attracting

winning candidates? And part of that is designing a primary system that is going to select for winners. Right. Okay. So let me address the first one, which is the Donald Trump and candidate selection issue. So first of all, who is attracted to being a candidate for political office? There's a certain sociopathy in that. I'm just going to be very blunt about it. Like, you have to have a very healthy ego. And, you know, I mean, I've run for office twice. Yes, you speak as someone who's been a candidate herself, right? Yeah, I mean, you have to. So's been a candidate herself right yeah i mean you have to

so so that that that's a that is a characteristic that exists in nature and so there's always going to be people who want to run for office okay that's a fact of life and they want to look at the george santos character my god like like unbelievable unbelievable by the way that democrats had a singularly rare failure in opposition research there. Maybe they did it on purpose. I don't know, but whatever. But people select themselves. That's a reality. And the question is not candidates like finding humans to run for office. It's filtering out the riffraff and picking the good ones and supporting those ones. And so what Kevin McCarthy got in trouble with that Freedom Caucus is he actually invested against some of the America first candidates because he doesn't like them or whatever. And some of them could have won. I think Joe Kent could have won in Washington state.

He was pretty close to that race and whatever. You know, we we we wanted to support a weak, you know, rhino candidate instead. And that's what happened. And, you know, in other cases, yes, President Trump made some endorsements and the party was like, OK, whatever. You know, maybe we should have had if we had a strong person at the leadership of the party who did not owe their job to President Trump, who I who I supported in two campaigns. But I don't owe my job right now to President Trump. OK, so that's a fact. And so maybe I have my own opinion and I would say maybe we shouldn't be running candidates in two states for Senate who don't live there. That would be a good starting point as a sort of a basic. And maybe we should try to find candidates who. So I would have something to say about it. But ultimately, it's the voters who pick the candidate.

But money is poured in on one side or the other. The Republican Party can't pour money in. Kevin McCarthy's leadership committee can and and Mitch mitch mcconnell's leadership uh committee can pour money into a republican on republican race in alaska blow the money there instead of supporting one of the republican candidates against a democrat so i think that was a you know you make promises to lisa murkowski over the years you vote for me and i'll support you no matter what this is the outcome of that No matter what means you blow and you lose a couple of Senate races and other places to support Lisa Murkowski against another Republican. That's a broken system that has to do with the power of incumbency. OK, and I think that much as I've over the years been against term limits, I'm beginning to come around because

there seems to be no other way to break the death grip of the same people becoming captured by the DC swamp. And so I'm answering your question in a roundabout way, but a more aggressive and independent party leader would have more to say about that earlier in the process. And maybe we wouldn't have the situation that we had in 2022. On the primary system, it's the same problem. You want to run for president of the United States? You're almost a psychopath. there is a healthy amount of ego involved in that and so there's always going to be 200 people who think that they're the cat's meow and only they can save the republic from the asteroid you know or they want to do you know x y or z different thing our job as a party is to filter who gets to the debate stage okay and so i think that's just a basic thing that we can do

and so instead of having 17 people on the debate stage maybe Okay. And so I think that's just a basic thing that we can do. And so instead of having 17 people on the debate stage, maybe you put in place as a party criteria, how many states have you qualified in? How much money have you raised? Some kind of objective criteria. I don't mean subjective smoke-filled backroom party bosses, but there are objective criteria that we can use regarding money raise and, you know, how big is your staff? How many states do you have headquarters in? Like, are you for real? And if you're for real and we set that bar high enough, you can limit it to half a dozen people in a debate. The debates themselves have been captured by this, you know, cabal of lefties. And, you know, even though Frank Ferenkoff, former RNC chair, was part of that debate commission, it was terrible.

And we had terrible. I mean, it's not the 1990s anymore. We don't have to have boring network TV hosts trying to make their reputations doing our debates. We are doing most more, more and more of our lives online. Why not have innovative formats where you have innovative you know sort of situations people can type questions or whatever online i think the format needs to change but the good news is republican party has broken away from the commission on presidential debates and so we're not doing that anymore we're negotiating ourselves directly with the networks for and cable news for our debate um situation dave boss, part of the Trump campaign,

is in charge of that at the RNC. So, you know, in my view, the RNC needs to be absolutely neutral in the debates. And so I'm not sure that's the right, you know, signal to be sending, but we'll be doing our own thing this time and we'll see how that goes. And I think that I am committed as a as a candidate to chair

that we'd be absolutely neutral in this debate i haven't sought the endorsement of president trump or any other of the presidential candidates i've spoken to some of them and you know given them my assurances and and so has so has rana i believe but i mean she's put into place by president trump and so i you know i think i think there will be a lot of influenceoked in the process. I mean, I was a delegate in 2016 and he had the best ideas for me as a traditional conservative movement conservative. He just he couldn't couldn't do it. And so, you know, when he dropped out, I became a Trump delegate and got 100 percent behind him. And he had wonderful ideas. And, you know, the execution was what it was. And so in 2020, we let COVID screw up our whole system. And we have been for decades behind the Democrats in the mechanics of elections and getting people elected. And as a

result, we failed. We failed to execute. And if we don't radically change in the next two years, Joe Biden or some other stooge, you know, God forbid Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom becomes the next president of the United States, it'll be because the RNC failed at doing its job. Hey, Harmeet, last question. You said the people who will vote for you, the electoral pool is 168 members of the Republican National Committee. If listeners want more harm meat, if people who are listening to this want to help you, what do they do? Where do they go? Well, you have to understand that some of the members of the RNC don't want to hear

from you, the voters. That's an arrogance and that needs to change. So I've heard a lot of chat back about that, but they could contact the delegates of their party, or if they're a delegate who votes for the members of the RNC. So, for example, in California, if you were one of the 1500 delegates of the California GOP, you should contact the three members. I'm one of them. So don't bother to contact me. I'm voting for myself. But the other two are voting for Ronna. They're on record voting for Ronna. They think everything is fine. You know, so if you're a California delegate, you should have a have a word with them. And the same is true in other states. If you're in Wisconsin, contact the Wisconsin folks. If you're in some other state, contact them. And so I think that's the way to go. And so look,

I love our party. I love our country more importantly than our party. And our country is suffering because our party is not doing its job. And so I hope we have a vigorous, spirited, fair, open debate this year. And we select the best candidate for president. That may be the former president. It may be somebody else. But we have to have a fair and open situation. And then whoever that is, we have to have the machine that will get them elected, give them a House and a Senate to work with, hopefully with some fresh blood in it, and also help us have some state legislatures where we can change those laws back to how they should be to be fair so that everybody has an easy time voting and that the outcome is trusted by people on both sides. We don't have that right now in America. Well, if vigorous and spirited is what they're looking for, you're the person. Good luck. Good luck with all of this. And we hope to talk to you again in the future to see how it turned out.

All right. Thank you. Bye-bye. Goodbye. You know, we're just so used to being told that things are going to be different. You mentioned the debate, Peter. It's a perfect example. People say, we're going to have this year's debate is going to be much more moderate. And then when we show up, it's the panel from The View that is not interested in conservative message. I wonder if the end result of that is that the message is tailored to their ears, to assure them that somehow these ideas are not going backwards, they're going forward. When in fact, as I was saying before, asking her about new ideas, a lot of the new ideas

simply move the party, the Overton window, more to the left because we keep refining our opposition to leftism instead of trying to root out root and branch for what's been placed into our society that's the problem isn't it i mean how do we exactly go about telling people that the it's it's it's not that we're opposed to education we're opposed to a department of education that educates absolutely nobody, spends no money, imposes particularly ridiculous standards. And somehow we educated people before this. But all they hear is you want to get rid of the Department of Education because you want everybody to be unschooled idiots. Hey, I got to tell you about something else, though. And I want to ask you if you're a business owner. If you own a small or medium-sized business that kept employees on payroll through that whole COVID thing, you may have a big cash refund waiting for you.

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Before we go, a couple of things here. One of my favorite stories that came up this week, it was maybe a couple of weeks ago. One, they said there was one school that wasn't telling the kids that they were national merit scholarship winners, right? Because what they wanted, they didn't want the ones who didn't get it to feel bad, and they didn't want the ones who did get it to go around lording it over everyone else, which they wouldn't have. Seven schools in Fairfax County have now admitted that they failed to inform students, and I think that there's probably more to come. Turns out that there was this overall attempt not to tell everybody that they were a national merit scholarship because it abrades with the idea of equal outcomes for all students at all costs. Now, Glenn Youngkin comes out and talked about the district having a, quote,

maniacal focus on an equal outcomes for students of all costs, which is probably spin by the media saying that he opposed their idea of having equal outcomes. Again, as if he is opposed to everybody doing their best. No, he's opposed to this Harrison Bergeron. I'm sorry, I forget the name of the world. Bergeron. Bergeron, thank you. Yes. A world in which everybody is dumbed down to the same level.

What do you guys think about this exactly? I think this is one of those issues that, you know, it's not a new issue. This is not a new issue. This is a historically new issue. This is a historically sort of conservative issue for the last 20 years that we can run on and get some traction on or not. The best comment on this was on Twitter from our friend Christopher Scalia of the American Enterprise Institute. Christopher noted that he went to school in Northern Virginia, graduated more than two decades ago, and he's still waiting to be told that he won any awards.

Right. Yeah, I was glad, James, you mentioned the Kurt Vonnegut classic short story, Harrison Bergeron. For listeners who have never read it, you can find it on the internet. It's very short, and it described a world... I've never read it. Oh, you must, Peter. Oh, it's chilling. And the point is world i've never read it oh you must peter it's it's oh it's chilling and it the point is as james puts his finger on it our schools are now run by oh the key uh evil person in the story is the handicapper general this is a federal cabinet agency in his short story and the handicapper general is designed to make sure that everyone comes out perfectly equal and so talented people

in the story have to be held back uh elegant dancers and ballerinas have to dance with weights attached to their limbs uh the extremely intelligent have to have headphones on with blaring noises into them to disrupt their concentration so they don't demonstrate their it describes perfectly the way these schools in fairfax County have been run. And I'm sure that mentality is spreading and is actually deeply embedded elsewhere because the entire education establishment from kindergarten through college is now thoroughly rotten. And that's a long story, and it's going to be hard to fix. Well, if any unequal outcome is proof of a bias in the system against the people, then the way to extirpate that is to show that everybody

has the same, which will never happen. You'll never have a school system where everybody has an equal outcome, which means there is an eternal process of investigating the rot in the system, and paying for this, and paying for that, and vilifying this, and vilifying that. I mean, it's job security for these people. There's absolutely no way an equal outcome will ever be achieved unless grades are given without reference whatsoever to performance. And we already see that. We already see great inflation. We already see people being passed through the system with social promotion and ending up with a high school degree that means nothing. So the end result is just to simply

abolish grades entirely. And the whole intellectual framework is already there. It simply is that there are step away from reducing grades in any sort of evaluation of performance. They have this pre-existing idea, argument into which they can plug all of these things. The end result, of course, is not going to help the kids who are coming out of the system. The end result will be to privilege further the kids who are able to be outside of the system. So it seems to us then that the obvious thing to do is to dismantle the entire system, let the money go with the student, let the parents put their kids in schools that will teach them, and that we, at the end of the day, have a pretty good idea of who can do what. But we can't do that because the minute you say we have to get rid of the public school system,

you're immediately portrayed as being an enemy of the poorest kid when actually you are trying to help those who have absolutely no means whatsoever to advance their position. And it's illustrative of every single social problem virtually that we face, is it not? I know how to solve the problem. What would that be, Peter? I know how to solve the problem. And it would take maybe 18 months to solve the problem. What would that be, Peter? I know how to solve the problem. And it would take maybe 18 months to fix every problem. Clone Harmeet Dhillon and put one or two of her on every school board in America, and then just wait. That would do the trick. Hey, Steve, was I right about that when we had Harmeet on? Was I right

about the parallel between Harmeet now and Margaret Thatcher in 70-something when she was taking control of the Conservative Party in Britain? Oh, yeah, that's right. I mean, remember that first she challenged Ted Heath, who'd been prime minister, and beat him. So she was then the premier opposition person. And my favorite story about all that is she went to Conservative Party headquarters in London. I forget where it is, but Conservative Party headquarters, that's their version of the RNC. Their prime function at the time seemed to be sending out fruit baskets, and their campaign literature was pablum about how the Tories were for puppy dogs and dewy spring mornings and thatcher came in she pulled out of her legendary handbag a copy of friedrich hayek's constitution of liberty which

is a big book and she slammed it down on the table and she said this is what we believe in other words she said we are now going to be a party of substance we're going to say what we think we're going to argue with the left we're not going to rely on Pablum. And, you know, that was decisive, right? And, you know, we know what came after that. Something similar happened here in the U.S. in the late 70s as Reagan was gearing up, but the RNC then, between 78-80, really did become a party of ideas and pushing broad messages out to the entire population and not just confining themselves only to the technical aspects of things. I love the story of Thatcher. That's great. I imagine her zooming up to the office in a Lotus Super 7, the yellow one, striding through darkened hallways like Patrick Magoon at the opening of The Prisoner and slamming down the book and slamming his fist and making the teacup jump.

That's great. Now every time I hear her, I will think of that theme, that wonderful jangling prisoner theme. Well, I have no idea what music we're going out for because that's left up to the Eddie and our wonderful producers. I do know, however, that we're going to go. But before we do, we have to thank Bowl and Branch. We have to thank Refunds Pro. And we have to thank 4Patriot. You will find your life immeasurably better if you patronize those people. And, of course, that helps the show as well.

And if you could go to Apple Music and give us 1,600 stars, we'd like that. What? That's too many? Sorry? Well, then just give us five. See? 1,600. That's an onerous chore. Giving us five? That's nothing. Don't know if Rob will be back next week. Last we heard, he was in some Armenian monastery. So, you know, like it's, you'll have tales to tell when he does return. But until then, we thank, as ever, Stephen Hayward, a fellow with whom I share an affinity for prog rock, which may result in a podcast, you've been warned. And of course, Peter Robinson, who maintains a sensible distance from all of this nonsense.

Gentlemen, it's been great fun. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.