The Ricochet Podcast - Lady Justice Unsheathes Her Sword

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice was founded in 1957 to ensure fairness in a union struggling to become more perfect. Yet somewhere along the way, bad actors saw an opportunity to play with the scales while Justice donned her blindfold. Our new Assistant Attorney General of the division is Ricochet's dear friend Harmeet Dhillon — and she's back to remind Americans that Justice has an enforcement arm. Harmeet gets us up to speed on her team's investigation into the latest riot at UC Berkeley; reports on how they've handled the workload with only one-third of the manpower; and reiterates the righteousness of the division's purpose while clarifying how she and the ambitious lawyers under her plan to balance the scales on a level playing field. James, Steve, and Peter weigh the president's approval numbers on the economy and foreign policy; and they have reason to believe that Democrats will continue to be hardest hit as Epstein files work their way to the public. Sound clip from this week's open: TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet explains how UC Berkeley administrators worked to undermine their event last week. 

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the Rikoshae podcast with Stephen Award. I'm James Lylex. Whoa, Peter Robinson. He's back. And who are we going to talk to, Harmeet Dillon?

So let's have ourselves a podcast. And they're hoping that activists will get those tickets to either disrupt the event from inside or not show up and try and make it look like we have an empty event. There's also a standby line that we usually have in place so that if people with tickets don't show up, that the standby line is able to get in. They refused to let us do that. And they told us, quote, it's not our job to fill the event.

Well, University of Berkeley, it's also not your job to make sure our event is empty. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rickusay podcast number 76. Why don't you join us at Rikoshae.com? And believe me, I got a code later in the show that's going to give you 50% off that. You're going to love it because once you join, you're part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web.

I'm James Lilex in a very overcast and very atumnal Minnesota, Minneapolis. Stephen is, while we're looking at Stephen in a bare room, he appears, it looks like a liminal space from a video game from 1997. We'll get to that in a second. And Peter Robinson is with us. We had Rob Long last week, and now we've got Peter. it's like we could just mash those two shows together and be like old times

but Peter welcome welcome back welcome James it's good very good to be here very good to be here although here in California it's a rainy drippy day it sounds as though it's a similar to the day you're having in Minneapolis why did God give us autumn whoa it's my favorite season of the year

Peter that's heresy excuse me I put that I put that a little loosely why did God give us the last third of autumn oh okay the first a necessary transition from which we go from the absolute chromatic glory that is, well, actually, no, autumn starts in full green involvement, where everything is perfect and everything's alive, and then it

gradually diminishes, which can either look as a shedding of identity to assume a new one, or you can look as death, or you can look at as part of the cycle of life and things. So here, even so, I'll be walking the dog in the creek in the woods in a little bit, and while most of the trees are scratching bare limbs against the sky, there's a few trees that still have some brown leaves on. There'll be a bush here and there, It's still verdant. There'll be a tree there that still is green. And they will carry that into the time when the first snow starts.

And so we will have this wonderful easing into transitions. But you're absolutely right. The end of November is a long, raw, miserable. And Peter, no matter what the season, James Lilex will still wax poetic. So shut up, Peter. So Peter's got behind him a nice little graphic of a beautiful library. And Stephen, you have an empty shelves. And so you look like a place that's going out of business.

frankly. Yeah, I'm in a borrowed office, and that's actually all I should say about and so. Between the suspended ceilings and the empty plywood IKEA, then we wish you a more harmonious place next to you. So what we have going on in the world, we should talk about before we get to our guests and stuff that probably, I don't know, counts. Issues of the day tariffs, the other day I noticed that the tariff, I think I mentioned this last week, the price of bananas had increased by four cents at Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's used a whole banana prices like Costco held their hot dogs.

And now they'd have gone up for a sentence. And I thought, well, there's your tariffs there. I can bear this, but the president has decided to cut tariffs on beef and tomatoes and coffee. Thank God. Bananas. And perhaps a stimulus check.

No. It kind of smacks a Carter-era-Biden-esque stuff, but is not surprising. So guys, tell me what you think of, the stimulus check idea. And what you do with it if you got it? Well, first of all, it's stimulus. These are all liberal ideas, right? Let's split for out money. And the tariff decision reveals the sort of incoherence and contradiction of Trump's claims that tariffs are paid for by the other

countries and not us. But I think there's a bigger point here. Trump has been criticized by many conservatives for not recognizing the affordability issue really has traction and allowing the left to get back in on this. And here's what the mistake is being made, I think, by all of our team, so to speak, is so, you know, Mondami, a socialist and other, and there's also, we've talked about it a few times in recent months, the abundance liberals have shown up. And so they're saying, oh, we're concerned about affordability. And that's when I raised my hand and I make two points. First of all, who created the affordability crisis? Well, liberals did with all their regulations for the last 40 years or longer.

So there's a great chart I've used sometimes. I'll just describe it. It's not hard. If you look at the three sectors of the economy whose costs have increased the fastest overinflation, they are health care, higher education, and housing. Healthcare, higher education distorted by government subsidies and regulations and housing also suppressed and destroyed. distorted badly by government regulation going back 40, 50 years originating in California.

I've written a lot about this over the years. And so why isn't Trump and other Republicans saying affordability, you guys caused it? The only way we're going to fix it is that for you guys to get out of the way and let us fix your messes. Instead, we're doing these gimmicks. Oh, we'll send out a stimulus check. We'll take the tariffs off that you're not paying anyway. And so I think it's been a ham-handed response by Trump and our team when we should be going in for the kill about what are Mondami's ideas? Oh, let's have more rent control and government-run grocery stores. Oh, that's going to work. I agree with absolutely every word Steve said. There is, and so why is Trump doing all this? And I'm afraid I have to come to,

I have to state the conclusion that he doesn't actually know better. He, I don't mean to condescend to the chief executive who is in all kinds of ways an astonishing figure and has done more good than harm by a lot, by a lot. But he doesn't really know his way around economics. He knows his way around business. He knows how to do deals, but he doesn't know his way around economics. There is exactly one justification for imposing tariffs. It might apply in the case of China, and the justification is that we are in a long-term conflict with China. We have only two levers. One is military, and the other is trade, and we'd all rather pull the trade lever than the military lever. Even that needs to be hedged around with all

kinds of qualifications. You have to be extremely careful about what to impose tariffs on and so forth. As for the rest of it, it's a drag. We can disagree about how much of a drag, but it's a drag on economic growth. Oddly enough, I don't know, we'll see where the spokesman for capitalism and free markets come from. But I don't, it felt to me as that, it felt to me is that though a great debate has just gotten launched on the island of Manhattan. Two big events

took place this past autumn. Steve mentioned the first. New Yorkers elected a socialist, and that's not us calling names. He calls himself a socialist, a socialist mayor. The other event got most noticed on

editorial pages of the Wallst, I beg your pardon, on architectural pages, the arts pages of the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times, but I think that it will prove, or it could prove, a very significant political and economic event, and that is that Jamie Diamond opened the $3 billion cathedral to free markets, the new office, the new skyscraper office in the middle of Manhattan. Manhattan has a way of putting arguments in Masonry. So we have 30, but we have the old Rockefeller office.

We have the old New York Stock Exchange trading floor. These are down on Wall Street. But this is incomparably the grandest monument to free markets that anyone has ever erected, even on the island of Manhattan. It's taller than the Empire State Building. The lobby apparently is a couple of hundred feet tall. And in the same season in which New York elects a socialist mayor, Jamie Diamond, the season, the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase says, no. I'm doubling down. I'm tripling down on this island, on enterprise, on America's capital markets. We'll see how all this goes. But that is one tough,

articulate, ambre, in my opinion. It is. And I cannot stand the building. I have been watching it go up for years. I have been trying because I love skyscrapers and people who make that commitment and say, yes, we're going to stay in Manhattan. I do there. A lot. of super talls going up. There are a lot of other buildings proposed. There's the Commodore Tower, which actually I kind of like an awful lot better, even though it sadly overshadows the Chrysler building. But I do not like the J.B. Morgan building. The great cross-bracing of it reminds me of the John Hancock, which is okay. The way it's sort of stacked up like decks of cards and the rest of it. I'm not crazy about the color. I really don't like the

way it meets the street. It meets the street by swooping inward in a way that puts the mass in the bulk above you. And I don't think that that's a great. I think it makes people sort of uncomfortable, but I just don't like it. I don't like the hue. I don't like the brusqueness of it. It is a broad-shouldered building, and that's great. Probably would be better in Chicago. People call it Art Daco or Dairn.

It's nothing of the sort. It's a throwback. And again, glad they built it. Good luck with it. And I like the fact that they're saying, now that we built this palace, everybody's back in the office. Thank you. Monday.

See you then. Well, James, I mean, what do you expect from late capital? capitalism, but buildings like that, right? And, and Peter, the big question to when you get sharper is they're going to have people back to the office and they'll spend their first weeks packing up to move to Florida. We'll see. Yes. Yes. What do I expect from late capitalism? I expect a lot more baroque and fru-frew stuff. Yeah. I expect things like you saw in Billioners Row along Central Park where they have those, these ridiculously tall apartment buildings where people are on the 85th floor and they take a bath and the water sloshes up because the building's swaying in the wind. They're welcome to it. Anyway, So, yeah, Peter, that's good. We like that. That's fine. But you're right. If he sat down and talked to some people, I'm willing to take, you know, eat the 4% of bananas,

but I'm wondering exactly why we have a tariff on the banana countries at all. Is it to get them to buy more of our stuff? The point you made about tariffs on China, about reshoring, about reducing our dependency, all that's good, and let's have more of that. But, you know, less of the coffee tariffs, really. On the other hand, coffee comes from what? from other countries. When it comes to foreign policy, the approval of the administration is way up.

Now, I'd like to know why you guys think that is. He's at 43% today approval in foreign policy versus 35% about this time of last year. And that's above where Obama and Bush were at their respective administrations. What do you think it is? Do you think it's the Hamas, Gaza? Do you think it's the Ukraine handling? Or do you think that people are saying, finally, war with Venezuela? Or is that just not on people's mind yet?

Because there seems to be something going on there. Well, you know, I actually think these polls are misleading. I put you this way. Peter may remember this, that back in the Reagan years, the pollsters always said Reagan himself is very personally popular, but his individual policies are unpopular. By the way, that was mostly wrong, but, you know, they remind that for another time.

And I think with Trump, we see the opposite. I think a lot of his policies, and some of the polling does show this are popular. But Trump remains a lightning rod, because he's so abrasive, right? I actually, so my point is, I actually think his political strength

is understated by these polls that are taken, because I think you can't really pull Trump accurately for the purposes that we usually try to do these things. So, I always kind of like about, you know, Trump always,

I won in a huge landslide. I did not true. You know, I remember totally popping and all the stuff he says, it strikes people, says, oh, there he goes again, he's bragging and being weird and all rest of that.

I kind of like all that myself. It's fun. So, Steve, I want to make sure I understand this. So in an ordinary job approval poll, and the question is some version of, do you approve of the job the president is doing, people can't hear that. They can't answer that question without making some comment on whether they like him. And we know that something like a little over half the country just cannot stand him. Right. That's your point.

Right. Although, I mean, one more level of refinement, it is true that you need to sort of wait the issues that are most important in people's minds. So the approval rating is important if the key issues are things that the president's on the wrong side of. Like affordability, we were talking about a moment ago. I did just see an analysis by that very interesting, progressive surveyor, David Shore. And what he shows is that Trump's still very strong on the economy, on immigration. He's very strong on that. very strong. And to the extent that immigration is a high, important issue, like it was a year ago, and still into this year, then he does very well on it. But one of the things that is a declining issue for Democrats is climate change, the environment, right? We can do a whole episode on how the climate change movement is over. And Republicans are now trusted on energy. That is all Republicans are trusted more on that. So the point is, so that all new mix, have an election tomorrow. Depends on the Democratic candidate. I still think Trump wins. So what do you guys think about moving the USS Gerald Ford into the Caribbean and the attacks

on these gunboats off the coast of Venezuela? Where does that come into the polling? Not yet. I don't think it enters yet. You don't think it enters yet? All right. So may I try out my own feelings on this are mixed? Because I take every word that Rand Paul says But if you're going to be killing people, if you're going to be attacking boats in where this needs to be done under coloration of law, even if it's by the chief executive of the United States, he's not, okay, so there's that. On the other hand, it feels to me as a lot of people say, wait a minute, drugs have been a problem in this country for half a century and finally somebody's doing something. about it. I mean, at that level, it just feels to me as though a wide

swath of ordinary Americans say, yeah, good for him. How do you, how do you, do you feel both put tugs in that? I do absolutely so. I mean, I'm sure that somebody is going to say, well, there was a joint military resolution, whatever you want to call it, that was passed after 9-11 to go after terrorism, and these guys are terrorism in this extent,

and therefore we're going to, nah, it's just a bunch of, of stuff. I too would prefer, as I do with continuing resolutions and all the rest of these things, a bill, a vote, the way it ought to be, instead of wrapping it into some vague thing and saying, let the courts later hammer it out. But, Peter, you're absolutely right. On the other hand, people look at this and say, wait don't you, hold on. Isn't this what a country should do without really having to apologize for anything, that people are bringing nauseous substances? I mean, if they're bringing in enough fentanyl to kill a million people, And it's going to be cut down, of course.

It seems to me to be something of a weapon of mass destruction, even if people willingly themselves ingest it. And it's like the border situation with Biden, where they would say, well, yeah, these people are streaming over, but what are you going to do? I mean, most people look at this and say, well, there are a variety of things that you can do and that you used to do.

And all we need, basically, is Sergeant Joe Friday, who's got a gimlet eye about these things and looks coldly upon it and does what has to be done. And then, you know, let the law take its course. if there's a law here. But yes, you can do something, and something is being done, and they seem very serious about it.

And we don't know exactly what's being taken to the cartels. We don't know whether or not there is a Delta Force or some guys with some smeared on, you know, paint on their faces and no underwear who are sneaking around there and doing some very, very serious things to some very bad people. We don't know.

The pressure on Maduro is interesting. What's happening in Mexico City is, Mexico, as people are protesting their own government for cartel involvement is interesting. So I think there is an opportunity here. Of course, if Americans didn't want it, it wouldn't be a problem, but a lot of Americans do. Well, can I make a larger, I think a larger point about this? By the way, I'm having a running argument with John U about the legality of it all.

He has doubts about it. But let me suggest there's a larger strategic dimension that is not being recognized by the media and commentators, and that is item one, as Peter likes to say. there's been nonstop flights from Tehran to Caracas for many years now, and I don't think that's for tourism. I don't even think it's just about coordinating the OPEC and oil market stuff. Venezuela is a bad actor, and they're getting worse, I think. And second, I think the other player that is on the mind of the Trump strategist is China. China would love to get close to Venezuela.

It's just another market for them, an oil source. And I think that that's on the drug thing is totally legitimate. and so forth, but I also think in the back of their mind, this is the Monroe Doctrine, baby, and we're going to stop Venezuela from getting closer to our enemies. Exactly right. Monroe Doctrine's back, baby,

which means it's about time for the Brezhnev Doctrine to come back somewhere. Let's see how to that work out for us. Well, listen, lots of stuff we can talk about forever and ever and flap our jaws and amuse ourselves, but hey, we have a guest, and what a guest. And now we welcome to the podcast,

Harvey Dillon, again. the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. She was nominated by the President in December, sworn in by A.G. Bondi in April, and prior to joining the administration, she ran her own private practice, Dylan Law Group. And she founded the Center for American Liberty, a nonprofit organization dedicated to pursuing Civil Liberties legal claims. Welcome. How are you today? I'm great. Thanks for having me again. Let's go right to Berkeley. Civil Rights Division has been busy.

They've been investigating a disturbance, said Berkeley. It involves threats of and shows a actual violence at a TPUSA event, which many people may have seen on their social media feeds. It seems this case reminds us of a classic problem we have in campuses, the hecklers veto versus the right of people to speak, especially on elite campuses. We're supposedly free information supposed to flow. But this one has an added frequency given the killing, the assassination of Charlie Kirk last September. So tell us what happened at UC Berkeley and why it matters to your team and what? to being done. You're absolutely right. I mean, I dating back to my days in college at Dartmouth, we had these free speech issues on campus. And, you know, I remember bringing William F. Buckley,

Jr. to come speak on the campus and all the drama surrounding that and introducing him when I was when I was an undergrad. I sued UC Berkeley in 2017 for preventing conservatives to come and speak on the campus, including Anne Coulter and David Horowitz. And we reached a settlement where they agreed that they were not going to impose higher security fees for conservative speakers and they were going to protect them. And, you know, during the course of that litigation, Ben Shapiro came. And indeed, there was a big massive police force to protect him and deal with all the silly protesters. So when I saw the news last Monday about this violent reaction to the speech on campus of Rob Schneider, the comedian, I was very disappointed because I personally negotiated that this

would not happen again. And so the president got engaged in this. He and I spoke on the phone about it. He's very concerned about violence on campus and asked me to personally handle it. So I flew out to Berkeley last Wednesday and met with the U.S. attorney and the special agent in charge at the FBI and gave them some direction as to what I think they should be looking at. But so far what we found is that Antifa related groups, in this case, the name of the group that I'm very familiar with from prior litigation at Berkeley is by any means necessary. been advertising that they wanted to attack this event for as much as two weeks, according to witnesses, before the event.

And there were also five student or quasi-student organizations, some recognized, some not recognized, that have been openly fomenting trouble on the campus around this event as well. And then finally, the campus itself participated in, I think, disrupting the event by forcing the student group to allow online reservations for the ticketing instead of how to how most student groups, particularly conservative student groups, prefer to do the ticketing, which is send out an email blast to their members, let their members sign up first so that we don't have the pernicious signing up for tickets and not attending the event that you see on many campuses. Berkeley forced them to do it this way, so the event was half empty.

And we will be investigating the criminal aspects of this, the violence, the material support for terrorism potentially, that may be part of these types of circumstances on campus. and potential First Amendment retaliation, as well as other civil rights claims. And so Civil Rights Division is kind of running the show on this, but with significant support from our criminal FBI and DOJ components. It says something when they're willing to go black shirt over Rob Snyder, I mean, wait until the heavyweights of the intellectual movement get up there and have the audacity appear on stage.

When I was in college, there was a brouhaha and a threat of violence and all people getting upset because Gene Kirkpatrick, was coming to speak. And then a little while later, somebody who sailed in with open arms and was warmly welcomed by the college was Angela Davis. So this is an old, old, timeless issue, alas. Peter. Well, Harmeet, your old friend Peter Robinson here, civil rights division has an honorable inception. It goes back to civil rights disturbances in the South when there was a more than plausible argument that African Americans needed, particular protections or particular oversight in Washington, make sure they voted, their rights

were respected, and so forth. But by the time Donald Trump takes office for the second time, we've been through the Me Too movement, we've been through the Obama years, we've been through the Biden years, and it was perfectly plausible, I think, and I came to this view myself, that the civil rights division had long ago been captured by the deep state and was a tool of the progressive or the left in Washington. You don't look at it that way, and I know you don't because I know you, and I know you would never have taken the job if you did look at it that way. What is the right way to look at the Civil Rights Division?

Both ways are correct. The fact of the matter is that the personnel are the policy, a famous phrase, and when I showed up here, what I found was over 400 attorneys and other... I mean, there are, like, gobs of statisticians and other non-attorney staff here at the Civil Rights Division, who, you know, it's like that Obama photograph when the Obama White House was on their last day and the Trump folks were moving in in 2017, you know, that sullen and menacing resentment kind of look, that was kind of how we were greeted here when we showed up. And I had to do my training, all kinds of HR training, and how to handle sensitive documents training, and don't sexually harass people training. And then the second week, I put out memos to the heads of all the different sections in the civil rights divisions. I think there were 11 or 12 of them. And I said, these are the federal civil rights statutes that we enforce.

And they're Title VII, Title IX, Americans and Disabilities Act, and Raluppa, and UOCA, and Haba and NBRA. are we going to take our priorities under these laws that we are definitely going to enforce, because I swore I would enforce them from the president's executive orders, okay? And I put that in writing, and I put it out there, and this caused over 200 attorneys to quit. And some of them, no, mind you that under the- Roughly half the staff, half of your staff? By now, more than two-thirds of them have quit, and frankly, a few more need to quit, because they don't really, aren't really really with the program.

But I haven't fired a single person. I just told them their job was different than how they wanted to do it, which is absolutely how the executive branch of the government needs to work. And I think they thought some of them were featured in a New York Times article whining about our change priorities just a few days ago. And I think they thought that this would somehow cripple us and we weren't going to be able to function. And that hasn't turned out to be the case.

First of all, I'm just sorry to say, as a person, who had two CEO roles and worked around the clock just a few months ago. People in government don't work as hard as those of us in the private sector on average. Now, some of them do have some great, you know, wonderful career attorneys here who work very hard, and they're the ones who you go to time and again, and they're just a bunch who take four years to do an investigation and never reach a conclusion that is supportable in court. And so we weren't crippled.

We started hiring again. There was, you know, there was some hiccups in that process. I'm still understaffed, but that's a supply problem at this point. Conservative lawyers are not stepping up to come and do this work throughout the government. We're having problems in staffing the U.S. Attorney's offices, other sections of the DOJ, we're all kind of overwhelmed. But those of us who are here are doing the job. And we have actually, I would say, pound for pound, done more enforcement actions in the

Civil Rights Division in the eight months, not even eight months that I've been here, than most administrations, perhaps all administrations do in four years. I include the last administration and I include the prior Trump administration. administration. I do not view it as my job to simply slow down the bad. A lot of the people who were far left left. And so now we have an opportunity to enforce our federal civil rights laws on campuses, protect children with disabilities who are being mistreated with autism and so forth, protect the rights of the disabled in our country, which is a law passed by and signed by Republican president. And our voting rights laws, I am the first assistant attorney general

to bring Help America Vote Act and NBRA enforcement actions, I think at all, but certainly in the volume that we've been doing them. And so, you know, we are just flipping the script and doing civil rights from a conservative perspective. And I love my job. So, Hermit, it's Steve Hayward today actually just down the street from you here in Washington, D.C. And I'll just say in passing that I'm not surprised that Berkeley came apart because John, you and I are taking this semester off. And if we were there, we wouldn't have let it happen. So you can blame us. And then when I hear that two-thirds of the career lawyers have quit, the first thing I want to say is, congratulations, how did you do it? I mean, I know how you did it. But it does raise this point.

And then I've got a big question to present to you. You may know the history of this. Your predecessor, way back in the Reagan years, William Bradford Reynolds, they were trying to make some course corrections on a civil rights, a scene of distortions of civil rights that were minor compared to what we've seen in the last 10, 20 years. And I think then something like 200 lawyers threatened to quit. I think they ended up not quitting, but they made some accommodations and also made some important progress in the 80s. And that's an interesting story. But now things are so much worse. And Peter was too nice. I mean, look, to restate what he said is the left thinks the civil rights or establishments in enforcement processes belong to them wholly, right?

We're not entitled. That's really what they think, right? Correct. So here's my big roundhouse We now, you're the first Republican civil rights assistant attorney general since the Harvard and North Carolina cases, which reversed, you know, for than 40 years of complete corruption of the Civil Rights Act rightly understood. Steve, some of those cases. Remind people what those, well, these were the, you know, the race-based affirmative action admissions at Harvard and North Carolina and any place else that practices it, which was essentially everywhere. And by, on principle, I believe, Harmeet, and correct me if I'm wrong, and also the principle, clearly extends to an awful lot of private sector activities, you know, hiring corporations and schools and so forth. Now, the parallel is being drawn is that this is as monumental as the Brown versus Board of Education decision in the 50s. And as everyone knows, who knows the history, massive resistance to it, and we're seeing massive resistance now to students

for fair admissions by elite universities and so forth. And it took at least 15 years of subsequent litigation by the Civil Rights Division, by private lawsuits under the statutes to enforce Brown versus Board. And a lot of people are saying, you know, Edward Bloom's a very good friend of mine. The same thing's going to have to happen now. So I wonder if you comment on whether that assessment is generally correct. And what do you think are some of the priorities for how to extend, well, enforce that decision and then extend the principle of it in other domains? Right. Well, when you add students for fair admissions to Ames, versus Ohio, which applies an equal standard for majority plaintiffs versus minority plaintiffs

in Title VII litigation in the private workplace, you absolutely have a sea change in the way that people are looking at this. And they have to. And so what we've done, as you know, the signature, I think we're going to look back at this first year of the Trump administration and his signature accomplishment is going to be the letters that I sent out literally the first Friday of my job here in the first week of April to 50 of the top 50 universities in the United States. And then I added the top medical schools and the top law schools. And then we added a few more in there as well. And we've gone down. We like 70, 80 investigations open into these institutions. And we reach settlements with several of them. I personally have negotiated the

settlements in Columbia, Cornell, University of Virginia, my law school alma mater. And I've also I met with university presidents at Dartmouth and UNC and some other schools that were not going after because, you know, they are in a dialogue with us and showing us their homework, what they have done to combat anti-Semitism on campus, to dismantle DEI, to bring their websites and their programs in compliance with the law. But it is very, very deep-seated. It has been decades. There's a couple of different threads here that are problematic. First of all, the academic vogue for decades has been this concept of affirmative action in hiring and in faculty and even my goodness footnotes in law review articles and law review selection. They measure that and in admissions. So it's a culture.

And, you know, the liberals who go into this field feel like it's deeply offensive to them and their moral code to have to change that. It's repugnant to them. Just as it would be repugnant to us to, you know, go back to the 1960s and 50s and separate water founts, it's repugnant them to dismantle this system. So they have a moral conflict. And secondly, generations of young people have gotten useless degrees in gender studies and race hustling, is what I call it. And who's going to hire them? You know, an AI company's not going to hire them.

Google's not going to hire them unless it's for the diversity office. their jobs have been imposing these frameworks in academia and in the American corporation. And now what? Their jobs have effectively been eliminated if these institutions are being honest. So people, their friends don't want them to be out of a job. They like Susie down the hall. And so they're rebranding Susie's job as the DEI officer or the equity officer as the Opportunity Office, Office of Opportunity.

And whatever, and they're doing the exact same things, and they think that we're not going to find out. Well, thanks to the Internet, whistleblowers are calling that out in five minutes, and we know about it. We send a letter, and it usually gets shut down. But it is whackable. That's why I could use 100 or 200 more lawyers to do this enforcement work, and it's not going to be easy. But it is necessary, and it is our mandate. It is our duty to enforce these laws equally. one of the things you mentioned there before were the people who come out with useless gender degrees

useless in this unless of course they go right to to another university and get hired to teach it there but the re-evaluation of the gender ideology that's flowed through the society in the last five 10 years has been one of the emphasis of the administration as a matter of fact if you go right now to google and you ask about the civil rights division and the trump administration and transgenderism What you find, according to Google's AI interview, AI summation, is that the civil rights division, under you, has been accused of weaponization against civil rights principles in pursuit of a politicized agenda. That's how Wikipedia frames it, when in truth, we've been dealing with a politicized agenda for many years, and this is the pushback to it. So what do you see as the end result, say, after the end of your tenure, when it comes to managing what many regard as the madness at the general? or ideology that swept through the institutions?

Well, I'm clutching my pearls, so let me unclutch them after the horror of a politicized agenda in the Civil Rights Division is difficult to contemplate. But look, I'm a woman in the workplace, and it just blows my mind that feminists have so easily given up the hard-fought rights of girls and women in this country and handed them over to dudes and dresses. It is outrageous. And on top of that, I think the sexual mutilation of children in this country is a civil rights crisis, and it is the abortion of our time. And we're going to look back on it as a shameful period in our history. And so I feel very comfortable weaponizing, if you will, the current laws enforcing them to protect the rights of women and girls and boys.

I fact, we just filed in a case in Loudoun County, Virginia, authorized the filing in a case where, well, we have an investigation pending in the reverse where a girl comes into the boys locker room. And boys have rights too. Boys have privacy rights also. It's an equal problem as far as I'm concerned. And so I don't think there's any problem here. Now, what's going to happen in the next administration is going to depend on who's the president? Obviously, if it's a Republican president, I think we're going to see the same trend continue. If it's a Democrat president, I don't know because what I'm hearing from a lot of my Democrat friends, dads who have kids and care about them, they don't like this stuff either.

It's not normal. It is fringe, and the left has really been captured by the far left extreme of its own party. And so I think you may see a course correction. I'm not sure that Democrats in 2028 are going to be running on the agenda of boys and girls' locker rooms. for some of that other gender madness that we've seen at that level, I hope that people are coming to their senses. Will Marr will give cover to the older boomers. Joy Reid will give cover to other people,

but it's going to have to be somebody from the younger generation that actually breaks with it and says, no, this is anti-scientific nonsense. Peter, I think you have something. Yeah, Harmeet, I'd like to go back to something you mentioned in passing a few minutes ago. You've got a couple hundred lawyers you need more, but you added conservative lawyers,

They're not stepping up. They're not putting their resumes in. So my question is not to the rights and wrongs of what you're doing. Needless to say, I'm totally behind you. The question is the structure of legal careers for young lawyers, so to speak, to put it crudely, on our side. The old structure was there were going to be some lawyers who were perfectly content to go to the civil rights division and make an entire career there because they felt comfortable with it

because of the stability of government employment and then there were going to be other lawyers again on the Democratic or left or progressive side who understood that they could spend a couple of years at the Civil Rights Division because there would be big-time law firms right there in Washington that would be happy to hire them right out of the Civil Rights Division.

Young talent on our side doesn't want government as a full-time career might be, I'm guessing, I'm putting this to you as a question, might be happy to go to work for Harvey Dillon for a couple of years. But then what do they do? The big-time law firms in Washington are going to be nervous about them, aren't they? How do you make this permanent? How do you change the incentives for talent, young talent, on our side?

So let me break it down. First of all, when I refer to conservative, I'm talking about the front office political staffing. Of course, when we're hiring for career attorneys, we don't take politics into consideration. That said, I've very clearly articulated what my agenda is, and it's to enforce the Trump administration's priorities. So I think people can get the clues. They're not going to be coming here and doing consent decrees on trivial differences in arrest rates in some city and then, you know, making a city pay tens of millions of dollars to a monitor for that. We're not doing that anymore, and that's what a lot of these folks have been doing. But the lecture I've been giving to people is if you want to come and pick up some new skills, This is a great place to work.

You know, think of it like the Peace Corps or something or teach for America or something like that. Young lawyers today in the movement, well, when I got out of law school 32 years ago, 33 years ago, there was no opportunity to go work at a nonprofit like the one that I founded six years ago, the Center for American Liberty, which provides jobs for several lawyers who enforce our federal civil rights laws and state civil rights laws. But now there are. Now there's an ADF and now, you know, there's foundations like the foundation Steve's talking about having a meeting today at give grants to those nonprofits and they do good works. If you wanted to do good for your career, you could do that. You don't have to be a young lawyer.

I want to make this very clear. Unlike my predecessors who really put a premium on hiring young people, I offer jobs to lawyers at the end of their careers. Lawyers who made their millions, lawyers who want to end their careers by doing some good for their country. Some fellow members of the Republican National Committee, one of my fellow colleagues in the RNC, this is going to be his last job in his career, he quit and wound down or sold his law firm and came and joined us. And he is doing what he calls the reverse Sherman March. He is shutting down consent decrees from the 1970s and 1960s all over the south. We have school districts under consent decrees where everyone is,

dead who did the discrimination, and yet there's still some lawyer getting paid to monitor the school district. That's nonsense, and we're stopping it. He's overjoyed every time he comes into my office. He's like, for me, we filed another motion to dismiss and a stipulation on a consent decree. So I would say, and secondly, setting aside this context, the days of someone joining a law firm at the beginning of their career and then having the cravath march when they die at the end of their career are over. People hop around like free agents all day long. I was at four major law firms before I started my own in New York, London, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco, and people are free agents. So I would encourage people to come get the skills to be a plaintiff's

lawyer in civil rights litigation. That includes election litigation. It includes DPI litigation. It includes DPI litigation. It includes this gender discrimination and gender mutilation litigation and others. You can make a lot of money doing that. You know, I was a plaintiff's lawyer for the last 20 years in my private practice, and it was a satisfying and successful career. I started my firm with two people, and now they're 40 people at my law firm. So I built up business doing good, and every day I get up in the morning, and I do good all day, and then I go to bed, and I don't feel guilty about what I did. And I couldn't feel that way when I was in big law, you know, representing, to me, you know, the polluters, the sexual harassers, the napalm manufacturers. Like, that wasn't satisfying for me.

So you can be a lawyer and make money and do good and have choices, and that's how I would tell people to look at it, is give yourself the opportunity to pick up some new skills. I've argued four cases in the federal courts of appeals as the assistant attorney general, which is also very rare. I don't know that my predecessors did one, much less four, and I'm hoping to do a lot more, but there's nothing more satisfying than standing up in front of a federal court and saying, I'm Harmeet Dillon for the United States. And, you know, I encourage people to come get that experience.

A career doesn't mean you have to spend your whole career doing it. You can have a career position at the DOJ and leave after two years. That's what people have often done, and they may get trial experience. They get experience investigating hate crimes, interviewing witnesses, protecting people from anti-Semitism, protecting people from zoning discrimination, and all the other things that we do here. And election law, I mean, you know, these are transferable, valuable skills. Great, thank you.

When you add something to add before we let her go, we understand we're coming up against the time at which she has to get back to the business of the country. Well, let me try and cheer her meet up real quick, and you have the very last word for, we don't have to let you go. I understand the frustration you and other people have finding people who can go do these jobs. On the other hand, the conservative legal movement, to me, is so impressive these days. But it's been the different mode. I mean, who wanted to go to the Civil Rights Division before you got there, right?

So there was your law firm, right? Of course, sort of a private civil rights organization. Our friends at Conceboy McCarthy, I know you know, Phil Hamburger's New Civil Liberties Alliance. And so it's not take a while, but I think we should take heart that the talent is there in depth and that the frontiers of activism on the side of the true and the right are been advancing on many fronts. I mean, at Bloom, we mentioned already once, right? And now you're there. And I know you're like you're fighting surrounded and you don't have enough troops, but I say take heart, Peter, Harmeet, I think we're going to win.

Yeah, Harmeet, I would just ask you one thing. Please don't be such a shrinking violet, you know? Right. Stand up for yourself, Harmeet. Will you once in a while? Well, what a pleasure. One thing I didn't expect when I took this job is to see my name dragged through the mud viciously by a federal judge at Chap's Week.

That was pretty bad 36 hours until another federal judge stepped in and bench slapped the other two. But, I mean, this was not a thing in Los Angeles. school. Everyone was very polite. Everyone wanted to be a federal judge. And when I got up close to it, I was like, I don't think I want to do this. But the lack of decorum from the bench is something new and alarming. And it is not a trend that we see because I can't fight back. I have to go, I have to go in front of these judges again and again and again. So I can't say, I can't say, nah, nah, and call them names, but they can do that to me. It's just, it's wrong. And I hope that the court

step in and discipline what is happening here in our courts right now. Anyway, that was my extraneous thought. Write it down for the inevitable book, and we'll be sure to buy it and enjoy. Remy, Dillon, thanks so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure, and we hope to speak to you again in the future, and good luck. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Armid, thanks.

You know, it's entirely possible that somebody out there is going to want to say, happy holidays to somebody, or maybe even Merry Christmas. Will they be brought up in charges by HR for using alienating language during this Christmas season? I'm sorry, during this holiday season. I don't know if that's something that actually the, you know, the Harmeets Division would get around to talking about, but it is something you think about, right? I mean, I had a little Christmas tree in my desk back at the office when I used to work at the office in the previous life. Nobody complained because, really, frankly, it's not that big of a deal. But the holidays are coming, Christmas is coming, and that is a big deal, especially if you're looking around and saying, oh, what am I going to get everybody this year?

What am I going to do? I've been married for 38 years as no possible thing I can possibly. possibly think of that I missed. Well, listen, when the holidays get busy, then a little overwhelming, what is the gift that you'd like to give your loved ones the most? And that's right, serenity. The gift of slowing down and feeling cozy and making home your sanctuary to ride out those bitter winter months to come. That's exactly what cozy earth delivers. Now, if Charles was here, Charles C.W. Cook, Charlie, he'd tell you all about the sheets. And one of these days, I think he's going to have to drag his wife in

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after selecting your membership tier. That's Thanksgiving 25, all camps, all one word, and all one big hunk of joy as you get ricochet, 50% off for the rest of the year. Wow, that's incredible. All right, gentlemen, before we go, lots of stuff that we haven't talked about, actually. We have, oh, I can't get interested in the Epstein story.

I just, I don't know why. You think that somehow this would peak all the prurient interest and memories of Bill Clinton in a dress with red shoes and a painting in the foyer. But, you know, where do you stand on this? I'll be really interested to hear what you guys make of it. I can't...

Oh, that's a great win at Dodge. Yeah, well, no, see, so I am sort of interested in it, but I'm interested in the part that nobody else seems to be interested in, which is a puzzle to me, just as the whole thing is a puzzle to you, James. In as much as the sex stuff I don't find that particularly interesting on what seems to me the invincible grounds that Donald Trump has been a major figure in this country

for a decade, and if there were stuff in those files to use against him, it surely would have leaked long before now. And in fact, what has leaked has rebounded against leading Democrats, most notably Larry Summers, who now has been forced to leave...

More off in public life. Yes, exactly. Well, first he withdrew from public life, and now he's announced that somebody else is going to finish the last three lectures of his course. He's even been removed from teaching at Harvard, which is, I mean, as Harvard things go, that's quite a, quite a blow. Okay, so that's the sex stuff. What nobody seems interested to me and what still makes absolutely no sense is the money side. this guy started out as a high school math teacher and ended up living in the biggest private residence on the island of Manhattan with a private island in the Caribbean and a big ranch, I think, in New Mexico. Where did this money come from? That's what I haven't seen. Honestly, even journalists don't seem, I say even journalists.

If there were people who are real journalists left, nobody seems to be. digging into exactly what this guy did to end up a very, very rich man. So that puzzles me, but it doesn't seem to be the story. Yeah, he's Jay Gatsby, right? There was always that mystery that Gatsby would do these parties, right? It's kind of an insult to Fitzgerald Gatsby, I think, in this case. But look, I can't resist some James Lyleck's bait and say this whole scene, you'll see why. This whole business reminds me of the scene in the wrath of con where Kirk taunts con

by saying like a bad marksman, you keep missing the target. Because this reminds me of a rerun of Me Too. Remember the whole Me Too business, precipitated, to be sure, by Harvey Weinstein's grotesqueries, if that's a word. But pretty clearly, the left grabbed onto it and ran to it, hoping it was going to take down the bad orange man because of what he'd said and, you know, about grabbing parts of anatomy. And instead, it took down liberal after liberal in the media and in politics.

You know, it ended the – Charlie Rose and Al Franken. He got kicked out of the Senate. So, in other words, it mowed down a ton of liberals and Democrats. And now all of a sudden, the Epstein files, they think are going to bring down Trump. Instead, you mentioned it's already taken one scalp of Larry Summers. By the way, I found it amusing that he used the same language that the Royal – the House of Windsor used in England about Prince Andrews is going to step back from his royal duties. Yes, exactly.

Larry Summers is going to step back from his duty so a whole lot of stepping back going on here and you know I I don't know if prompt there's a genius to method to his or a genius to his madness it's not really madness but the point is is I won't be surprised this is another boomerang that comes back and hits Democrats squarely ahead because that's certainly what all the circumstantial evidence looks like well yes the walls are closing in I think I saw that actually the other day. This is going to be the one that does it. And I mean, anybody who was a conservative

during the Clinton years remembers that every six or seven months or so, there was something that was going to put this guy away. If it wasn't Whitewater, if it wasn't Vince Foster, if it wasn't this, it wasn't that. The walls were always closing in on Bill Clinton. He was just always this close to finally being revealed to all, and it never

happened. And when you see it happening to the other side, you can say, I've been there, brother, I know exactly how it feels. The walls are not closing in. When I look at Reddit, for example, which is coded way to the sort of bubble left, very much blue sky, very much of their own creation, there's always mega panic, mega panics. Trump furious. Megapanics, and Trump is furious over mega panics.

And it's all because apparently the mega movement and conservatives in general have fled from Donald Trump because of the Epstein thing and his positions on it. And I look at these people and I say, I don't know anybody who cares about that. I mean, I don't know anybody who doesn't think that Donald Trump was a, who was a, who was a, was a bit of a, you know, Studio 54 kind of guy maybe back in the 70, except part about doing Coke and drinking. You can see a straight arrow that way. I don't think anybody would be surprised of the liberty and nature of the life did you live.

The guy's on the cover of a playboard, for if and sakes. So, no, there's no maga panic, and there's no walls closing in, and there's no fleeing in the rest of it. It just kind of is a dull thud. I may be wrong. The people who are really interested in this are the people who have a close connection to those who believe that a huge pedophile ring runs through Washington, and a river of adrenachrome that goes back to the pizza gate thing

and all the rest of it, they're very much invested in this. But yeah, I mean, how did Epstein get its money? By, you know, by arranging things. I just think he was a great arranger in an era that had a disgustingly curdled sort of sexual politics that came from the inevitable result of the sexual revolution as it worked its way from hippies into the Bush. class. I mean, go on. Well, you know, I can

if I have an irresponsible person, I could make up a unified field theory that says Epstein got his money by arranging the cocaine shipments to the MENA airport. And that would bring us... That would bring us full circle back to the glory days of the Clinton scandal. There you go, where his brother arranged for the assassination

of the two youth who were found by the railroad tracks. I get it. Absolutely. I was there too. Thank you, David Brooks for that hard hitting stuff. But you know, one of the interesting things that I've seen in the last couple of days is that Epstein files reveal that Epstein hated Donald Trump and thought he was a bad man. And they're holding this up like proof of something. Like, I mean, like the guy who's the worst man in the world thought

that this guy was a bad guy. What does that necessarily tell? Does that mean that he's lower on the ranks or he didn't like him because he was trying, he was indifferent to him and his blandishments and the rest of it? I don't think the 2026 elections will revolve. around this. I do know, however, that unless you guys have something sparkling and bright to add, we'd best get out and leave these people with a nice, tight, one-hour podcast. Peter, anything you'd like to tell us about your long absence and where you've been and what you've done? I've been minding my P's and Q's, James.

I have nothing entertaining to say about that. Oh, okay. Oh, I've been informed, of course, there was David Brock, not David Brooks. Who am I thinking of? I'm thinking of James Brooks, the Simpsons. Well, they all blend together, right? Sorry. Sorry, I don't have coffee or too much. And Stephen, you've got Thanksgiving coming up as well. We hope everybody has a good one. And remember that Thanksgiving code.

Thanksgiving 25 will get you half off ricochet for the year. And, of course, if you use the ricochet code at Cozy Earth, you get up the 40% off. If you go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five-star review, you can't believe what's going to happen. I can't tell you. That's not as if Glinda, the Good Witch, is going to come out in a bubble and tap you with a wand. Could happen. Not saying it won't. probably won't. But in any case, what you need to do is come back next week when we won't be

here. No. Come back in a fortnight when Charles C.W. Cook will be able to tell you precisely which version number of ricochet we are on, but I'm pretty sure it's still on the fours. We'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet for point whatever. Happy Thanksgiving. Bye-bye. Happy Thanksgiving.