#19: Harmeet Dhillon

When Harmeet Dhillon pivoted from a lauded legal career to championing the cause at the Center for American Liberty, she began a journey of profound advocacy. This episode offers a rare window into her efforts, and the powerful, often untold stories of civil rights battles. With a mix of nostalgia and resolve, Niki and I recount our days at Harvard Law School, where we veered off the high-salary corporate path in pursuit of something more. Join us as Dhillon delves into the origins of her nonprofit, filling a crucial gap in secular civil liberties work, and providing a haven for legal professionals to make impactful contributions to civil rights causes.

The legal arena can be as treacherous as it is transformative, and this episode delves into the gritty details of high-stakes battles for justice and election integrity. From the intense courtroom saga of journalist Andy Noe's stand against Antifa, to the Center for American Liberty's pivotal efforts in safeguarding religious freedoms during the COVID crisis, we leave no stone unturned. Dhillon and I, both navigating our unique identities as Indian American women in law and politics, share our reflections on the influence of family, culture, and the pursuit of equal representation in these spheres.

Strategy and engagement are front and center as Dhillon shares her vision for revitalizing the Republican National Committee with fresh leadership and innovative approaches. Our discussion emphasizes the importance of moving beyond the D.C. echo chamber to connect with the grassroots and reshape party dynamics. The show culminates with a clarion call for civic engagement, impressing upon our listeners the necessity of active participation over passive advocacy, to ensure the integrity of our elections and the representation of our nation's core values. Don't forget to subscribe and join us next week as we continue to stand firm for the principles we believe in, alongside advocate Kelly and Niki Tshibaka, in an episode brimming with determination and heart.

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Transcript

Kelly Tshibaka: 0:03

Welcome to another episode of Stand, the antidote of inaction. I'm Kelly Tshibaka, a former government watchdog, and I'm here today with my wonderful husband and co-host, Niki Tshibaka, who served at the Department of Justice as a civil rights attorney. Hey, this is just a friendly reminder. You can subscribe to our show on YouTube at the Stand Show and on Rumble at Stand Show. Our website is standshow. org and we're on all your favorite podcast platforms at Stand with Kelly and Niki Tshibaka. So hit that subscribe button and add your voice to our amazing community of standouts. You can also follow us on social media at Kelly for Alaska and remember, get a family member to subscribe to our show. Follow us on YouTube and on Rumble and on social media and always if you leave a review, you'll be entered to win a hydroflask stand sticker from the show this week.

Kelly Tshibaka: 1:02

We are so excited to have a civil rights advocate with us today, Harmeet Dhillon. She is nationally recognized and an incredibly accomplished lawyer. Following her stint at the Department of Justice and a clerkship on the Fourth Circuit, a decade of practice in prestigious international law firms, Harmeet started her own law practice as well as the Center for American Liberty, which is a nonprofit organization that's dedicated to defending the civil liberties of Americans who have been left behind by the other civil rights legacy organizations. You can find more about their work at libertycenterorg. Harmeet is also a leader in the Republican Party. She currently serves as the National Committee Woman for California and she ran to be the Republican National Committee Chairwoman in 2023. Harmeet, thank you so much for being with us on stand today. Thanks for having me. We're so excited to have you, so I would like to hear more about the story, about what inspired you to start the Center for American Liberty.

Harmeet Dhillon: 2:03

Well, I've been practicing law for about 30 years now, and in that first decade of practicing at big firms, I got the opportunity to help individuals through my pro bono work not just the corporations that the big law firms represent and I really found that work rewarding helping individuals. But what I learned is that if I wanted to help individuals who had civil liberties issues from a more conservative perspective religious liberty and speech issues we were not allowed to do that at big law firms, which are dominated by liberals. And so when you get out there into the world today, you find that a lot of the litigation that's being pushed by the left is done through the guise of nonprofits, and there are almost no nonprofits on the right that have a secular perspective on these issues. There's a handful of Christian nonprofits and they focus on important Christian civil liberties issues, but the whole rest of the world, including election integrity issues, speech issues, the rights of reporters and, of course, the rights of people of other religions, are not really addressed by these groups, and so I wanted to start this nonprofit to help tap the needs of all these people, and basically the premise is pretty simple Lawyers usually go into the law thinking that they're going to do some good.

Harmeet Dhillon: 3:24

And then they get out there and they realize that there's not a lot of good going on there in private practice other than for corporate clients, who of course, have important needs and people want to get back. And so what we do at the Center for American Liberty is enable lawyers who aren't in a public interest law firm to give a portion of their time at a reduced rate to help causes that they care about, and so this allows lawyers at smaller firms who can't afford to do things for free to be able to get grants from our nonprofit and help vindicate important civil rights. And I'm really proud that we've opened up public interest litigation to a whole new cadre of attorneys who wanted to go with their careers. Not everybody can be selected for the Department of Justice like your husband and do important work there, and this really democratizes giving back that way.

Kelly Tshibaka: 4:11

I love that story. So Niki and I met in law school Harvard Law School and our first class, first day, we had a seasoned professor, shall we say, who went on an hour and a half long dialogue about, or monologue about, how Harvard produced the walking wounded. He said all of you have come in here as the best students in the nation with great dreams about how you're going to help people, and the whole design and program of this school is to tear down your sense of self and then build you back up in the image of the law school, so that you will take the high dollar offers from big law firms, just like the ones you're talking about, harmeet, and they'll pay you these huge corporate salaries and you'll never do a lick of good in your life, but you will give a lot of money back to the law school and don't do it, don't fall for it. It's all documented psychology you can read about in journals and law reviews. Instead of doing great things, you'll go do corporate law things.

Kelly Tshibaka: 5:11

I listened to it and I thought oh, I'm just a kid from Alaska and bad grades still get degrees. Because you said we're going to give you all these bad grades so that you lose your sense of identity. And first semester I worked really, really hard and I got all the grades he said we'd get and I was like, oh, it's just an indoctrination process, like he said. And I graduated from Harvard Law just like every other Harvard Law grad and I went off and did great things. I didn't become a corporate lawyer, but that's what I hear you saying too, is that you decided to go off and do great things and you're finding other lawyers. Where did that motivation you could have had a super cozy life right? You went to a great law school. We all know the law school you went to. You could have gone to and been one of these McMansion lawyers that we, all of our friends, became. Why didn't you? What inspired?

Harmeet Dhillon: 6:02

you.

Harmeet Dhillon: 6:03

I mean I am idealistic and I come from a family of physicians and so, and a few of my relatives are also in the military in India and so they kind of have ideals and they went into vocations to help people.

Harmeet Dhillon: 6:19

I broke away from that family tradition but I still wanted to help people through my career and I found that there are really limited opportunities to do that in big law. And in my later career I fought up against big law firms who represent Planned Parenthood for free, who represent National Abortion Federation, who right now I'm up against the one of the most elite law firms in America representing the Hastings Law School which we're suing for woke changing of the name there. They just lost with their top partner, they just lost emotion with two lawyers from that law school under 10 years of practice. So it is a great equalizer in theory that anybody can go into court with a good training and a judge is supposed to hear both sides evenly. In reality we've seen if you're very famous that may not be the case, but it still is an opportunity to vindicate important rights where the government might ignore them or legislators don't care about them.

Niki Tshibaka: 7:28

Permit, you've talked a little bit about sort of that passion for civil rights and given us a really good overview of what the Center for American Liberty does. Could you talk maybe a little bit about one or two of the cases that have been most personally significant to you in terms of some of the victories that you all have won?

Harmeet Dhillon: 7:51

Sure. Well, our nonprofit is only about four years old, going into our 50 year now, and I started it after a number of times when I, as a head of my own law firm in San Francisco, was asked to step in and help an important cause, and there's usually no funding attached to that request, and so I did finance the many cases and I finally found that there were donors who were interested in helping with these cases and causes, but they only wanted to give to a nonprofit, and so when we laid the table and started the nonprofit, that was the premise, and I'd been doing a lot of work in the free speech area and involving college campuses, and so we started thinking that was the kind of work that we were gonna do, and Mark Trammel from the Young America Foundation they're acting general counsel he joined me, so there were really just two of us in this nonprofit. To start with, our first case that we handled was the case of journalist Andy Noe, who was viciously attacked by Antifa in Portland and you know, thank God he survived. But he was in the hospital for traumatic brain injuries for being assaulted for the crime of reporting there against these thugs, and the local police did nothing about it. Andy is very idealistic and he wanted to hold these people accountable. We lawyers know that. You know, one of the first things we do in private practice is figure out is the person I'm speaking, did they have any money in case I win? Can they pay me? And you know that's the usual analysis.

Harmeet Dhillon: 9:16

And then suing basically a terrorist organization of Antifa is obviously challenging because they're amorphous, they hide behind masks, they, you know, our society's sort of dispossessed, they don't have assets to sue over for the most part. But Andy wanted to pursue it, to make a point, wanted to get discovery because clearly someone was funding Antifa, providing them with material and weapons and masks and all of that stuff. And so we engaged in four years of litigation, ultimately, you know, having a trial where, disappointingly, two of these Antifa thugs who you know stayed in through the end they were, they were acquitted by a Portland jury, but we did settle one of these claims. And then, importantly, the same judge who presided over the trial granted default judgments in the amount of $300,000 against three Antifa people who were not there. So, even though a jury acquitted two of these people on the evidence, the judge, who was more objective, saw that the evidence had clearly established that. We had video evidence showing that these people had assaulted Andy, and so now collecting on that as a challenge. Only a nonprofit could have indicated the principle that an American journalist should not be attacked by a bunch of thugs who put Antifa on trial, probably deterred them from some of their behavior, and showed that you can get judgments and also hold people accountable if they have insurance policies in the case of the one who settled. So I'm really proud of that case.

Harmeet Dhillon: 10:44

But the other category of cases I would say that were successful, relatively speaking, is the COVID litigation. So we started Center for American Liberty in 2019 when nobody had heard of COVID, and took Andy's case, and then COVID hit. Everything got locked down and we were the first and the most frequent lawyers in America at the Center for American Liberty to sue governors for violating our civil rights using unconstitutional and overly expansive executive orders. Many of these cases were filed in California. I've got various clients versus Gavin Newsom.

Harmeet Dhillon: 11:19

Ultimately, courts really shut the courthouse doors to us, except for in one area, which is religious liberties, and so we're proud to have won three cases at the United States Supreme Court, where the court summarily ordered the state of California to stop interfering with Americans' rights to worship together, be it Bible study or evangelical prayer. And we're really proud of those cases. And the third of those cases, tandon versus Newsom, is being cited regularly throughout the First Amendment Bar, as we speak, as a landmark case on religious liberties because it really elevated what Justice Scalia ironically had really relegated religious liberties to a sort of a second class status in the bundle of rights in the First Amendment jurisprudence. And I think this ruling of this case that we brought went some way to correcting that balance and really elevating First Amendment religious liberties rights as clearly part of the important bundle of rights that's amazing.

Niki Tshibaka: 12:19

We're gonna pick up on the other side of this break with Harmeet Dhillon. Stand by, folks Simple serious.

Kelly Tshibaka: 12:33

Welcome back to Stand with Kelly and Niki Tshibaka. We're talking to Harmeet Dhillon, who's a civil rights advocate. Harmeet, I wanted to jump into some of your personal story. So you're an Indian American, you're a woman, you're a super high profile lawyer, you're also a leader in the Republican Party and then you live in California. So I would like to hear a little bit about some of the biggest challenges that you've faced and then how you've handled them. It could be in any one of those particular areas.

Harmeet Dhillon: 13:04

Well, I grew up in a religious family. My parents brought us here from India in the 1970s, when India was really a socialist Soviet client state and you couldn't get electricity all day and you couldn't get anything done unless you were well connected, which we were. But they didn't want to live that way or have the government tell them how many children they could have, and so they brought us here. My dad finished his medical training as an orthopedic surgeon in New York and then he wanted to bring his family to a rural community so that we could grow up with more traditional values. So I grew up in rural North Carolina where my dad was the only orthopedic surgeon in the whole county, and at home we used to pray together and be very focused on our values, but also education, as excellence was important in my family as well as many Asian immigrant families, and so when I was growing up I was always told you can do or be whatever you want. This is America, nothing will hold you back. And also in my religion we believe in equality between the genders, and so my mother was very active in our religious organization there in North Carolina nationally, and so that was kind of how I was raised and then you kind of get a rude awakening when you go to college and everything is really.

Harmeet Dhillon: 14:17

I went to Dartmouth College and people are very stratified and already back there in the 1980s sort of flying the badge of victimhood and women's oppression and not spelling woman W-O-M-A-N but various versions of that. So it was really an eye-opener nothing like rural North Carolina for me. I became active in the newspaper there, dartmouth Review, and went on to have a pretty sort of career focused on conservative politics after that. But I'll tell you, the first big challenge I would say in a career setting was, frankly, being a young attorney. To this day, women in the litigation field are far behind men in terms of equality, in terms of being able to achieve partnership, in terms of, frankly, law firms being respecting of unique aspects of womanhood, including having children, being part of a supportive marriage, and so I would say that was really my first experience of glass ceilings, if you will, and it wasn't from being an Indian American and I don't even really use the hyphenated language, it was just from being a woman, and I think that problem still persists to this day. And so all the slights and the harassment, sexual harassment and otherwise, and all the other things I experienced in these big law firms.

Harmeet Dhillon: 15:41

I took those lessons and when I built my own law firm, which I'm the head of, I tried to make it a place where we put family first and we respect people from their different backgrounds. I have a more diverse law firm I hate that word, but I have a more diverse law firm with Orthodox Jews, muslims, hindus, christians, sikhs than any of the law firms I ever worked at, and we really focus on excellence and on, you know, kind of those American ideals and you remember what this country was founded on. This country was founded on equality and was founded on not discriminating against people because of their views. And I tried to take that lesson as I built my own successful law firm which has now got 24 attorneys and five offices around the country and multiple jurisdictions, and so this really is exciting. This last few years it has allowed us to help a lot more people and, you know, have a lot of job satisfaction in being able to pick and choose what we do as a career.

Kelly Tshibaka: 16:41

Something I appreciate and how you answered that question is you didn't ignore the problem, Like these problems exist. It's not like we're just going to gloss over it and say everything's fine. But you also didn't paint it in a picture of victimhood, Like problems happen. So then the question is how do we solve them and make improvements and then move past that to make things better, instead of wallowing in? Oh, poor Harmeet, Right, it's yeah, nobody should feel sorry for me.

Harmeet Dhillon: 17:10

I work around those problems. I'm happy where I am.

Kelly Tshibaka: 17:13

Right. Well, if you could have Americans take a stand with you on any issue today, what would it be? You're on the front lines of so many things that you are championing. What's the number one thing that you think is so important for people to step up for and take a stand on?

Harmeet Dhillon: 17:30

So that's a difficult question because there are so many issues. Every day when I open up my X or Twitter, I look at you know what's at the forefront of the news, and I would say the existential crisis right now in our country is a bipartisan failure of elected officials to be responsive to their voters. We're seeing that with the speaker's race on the Republican side. We're seeing it with people getting into office making promises and then they just ignore their voters. Lobbyist capture by both parties on K Street. Lobbyists who just, you know I mean so many Republicans in my own party are making decisions based on their future lobbying contracts and, you know, defense industry issues as opposed to what the voters of their district want. And so now then you ask why? Well, there are a couple of reasons. There's a lot of money in politics and a lack of transparency.

Harmeet Dhillon: 18:27

For most of my career, I've been opposed to term limits because, you know, I do believe that voters should have the right to choose outstanding candidates. But I wonder this seems to be an intractable problem in DC that once people get elected, if they survive their first election, then they're there forever and you can't really get rid of them. It's virtually impossible. So that's a challenge, but I would say what we've seen in the last few years, and particularly the 2020 election, is the huge amount of money the left has put into corrupting the integrity of our elections, with no corresponding response from the right. That exacerbates this problem because, if you have you know, it's almost unilateral disarmament by the Republican Party, not innovating in litigation and law fair and technology, in putting forth our own radical, disruptive methods of making sure that elections are both widely accepted in terms of outcome and fair and auditable and accurate, and so I don't think our elections are fair right now. I don't think it is appropriate that many millions of Americans experience multiple ballots being sent to their homes. That is a recipe for fraud.

Harmeet Dhillon: 19:47

I saw with my own two eyes what happened in the Arizona election of 2022, and machine failures and judges shrugging and doing nothing about it, and so that's a problem I'd like to solve is that, regardless of party, I want every citizen to feel like if they vote, their vote will be counted and it will matter, and we don't have that right now. We just don't have it. So that needs to be fixed before just about anything else. So you know, john Eastman, for making some Questions and giving private advice to a client is about to lose his bar license in California. If I had to guess, that is tragic. The point of that is to deter lawyers like those in this conversation from getting involved, from representing clients. So the chilling effect on attorneys right.

Harmeet Dhillon: 20:36

In relation to election integrity. Litigation is itself a crisis, and I represent President Trump at my law firm. My partners do, and you know. Those efforts by judges and prosecutors are aimed squarely at lawyers like us right.

Kelly Tshibaka: 20:51

Yeah, it's a really fascinating point. So, as I was talking to someone who's working on election integrity and I talked about Some of the efforts that he's doing and I mentioned a state that happens to do well Electing Republicans, and I said, you know, aren't? Aren't they doing a good job? And he said no, there's a lot of corruption and Issues with their election system. That isn't, their election system isn't in order. And he made an interesting point. He said we aren't focused on the outcomes, like getting Republicans elected. We're focused on the system. We want the right results. That what to your point, harmeet? Who the people are electing, like what the vote outcome is. That's what we want. So, if the people are selecting Democrats, democrats get elected. If the people are selecting Republicans, republicans get elected. We're not trying to game a system. We want integrity in the system.

Kelly Tshibaka: 21:44

He said, for four years, Hillary Clinton went around and said the election is stolen, the election is stolen. And then we had 2020, and now Republicans are going around saying the election is stolen. The election is stolen. He said are we just going to keep playing this ping-pong game where you don't like the outcome and so then the other party starts screaming there's problem in the system, or are we going to actually start fixing the systems? So everybody has confidence to your point, harmeet that the existential crisis facing our country is that we no longer have confidence in the underlying system and that's starting to erode the absolute fabric of the nation that the elected leaders, who know this as well, aren't actually accountable to the people, because maybe, deep down, they know the people aren't the ones fundamentally electing them right.

Harmeet Dhillon: 22:30

Yeah, I think that's a real problem and, you know, I would love to see more Americans voting. I have a lot of young relatives. They don't feel like their vote really matters, they don't care, it just seems like a video game to them. And so, you know, and that's our fault as leaders who, you know, kind of Shrug and think it's okay. I mean, to this day, although I think there were gross irregularities in the 2020 election, including, but not limited to, in Georgia, wisconsin, michigan and Pennsylvania, and Arizona and Nevada, I can just reeling them off.

Harmeet Dhillon: 23:04

As a volunteer, I was involved in some of these, from not allowing observers to observe, to openly defying state law as to who could vote by absentee ballot looking at you Wisconsin To the use of drop boxes and the abuse of them Georgia. But elected officials, including Republicans in Georgia, will continue to gaslight the public and say everything was fine. There's no evidence of irregularities there. There's. There's plenty of evidence and I think people need to be a little more honest with the voters if we want them to vote. We do want them to vote right.

Kelly Tshibaka: 23:38

The voter drop-off was the highest ever. Alaska had the lowest voter turnout in history in 2022, and we're gonna I think we're gonna continue to see that, and disenfranchising people's votes is a huge threat to you know. Voter suppression is just a huge threat to our system. We want people to be active and engaged. A nation of sofa surfers isn't going to change anything, but when people do their part, we can move the nation. All right, stay with us. We'll be back after this break. While you're on break, head to Liberty Center. org and see more about what Harmeet Dhillon is doing. Please support their work. We're at stand show. org. We'll see you in just a minute. Welcome back to stand. Today we're with Harmeet Dhillon, a world-renowned lawyer and civil rights advocate, but also someone who ran for chair of the Republican National Committee. Harmeet, what inspired you to do that?

Harmeet Dhillon: 24:40

I've been a member of the Republican National Committee since I was elected in 2016 by 1500 California Republican delegates, who, in turn, represent 5 million California Republicans. So among the members of the RNC, we have some who represent Pretty small number of people, and I represent a lot of them, and I take the fact that I represent 5 million California voters very seriously, and I frankly, you know, saw that we had lost a number of elections, and that's no one person's fault, but when you lose games season after season, typically the coach Changes to give confidence to everybody involved in the system, and so that's just the way it is. And you know our chair. I'd promise that she would leave after her third term and and then she announced for fourth term, and I Was the voice of many Republicans around the country who wanted to change, and so that's why I ran. I firmly believe that I could do a better job, and I thought that it was important to have a change. More importantly, nothing personally against ronah, and so you know that's why I ran, and it was an amazing. I think for the first time I can ever recall in my life, there was a grassroots interest in who's running the RNC, so that's a good thing that people cared and wrote their representatives. The representatives themselves did not particularly love to hear from the voters, so that's a that's a fact that I think we need to work on at the RNC.

Harmeet Dhillon: 26:04

I personally love, love it. Of course, I'm in the public eye. I've been a media commentator and, you know, lawyer who invites People from the public to contact me with their problems. I'm kind of like the answer desk for a lot of issues. So I'm I'm used to hearing from citizens all day long and I usually can't help them. Sometimes I can, but at least I know what's going on because I'm listening and seeing my text messages and emails. But some of my friends didn't really like that, so you know it was a very interesting experience.

Niki Tshibaka: 26:31

So, but what's your? What's your vision? I mean, you ran because you wanted. I hear you saying you ran in part because you wanted to to reverse the trend of this losing so many elections up and down the ballot. But what's your? What would you say your vision is for the future of the republican party Going forward. And how do you, how can we achieve that?

Harmeet Dhillon: 26:58

Well, I hope the future includes winning a lot more elections than we have in the last few years, and again, that's no one person's fault. A lot of my colleagues would point the finger at the former president, donald Trump, who I'm proud to represent, but In reality, these are simplistic answers to complex problems. I would say Issue number one is money. The left Vastly outspends us and has been doing so since they had they had their hat handed to them in 2004. So today, 19 years later, almost 20 years later, they have many billions of dollars sloshing around in hundreds of nonprofits and impacts and in the pockets of lawyers like mark alias, whereas republicans are still quaintly expecting that Volunteers are going to show up like a militia of lawyers with their laptops and drop what they're doing and go like do work for free. This or, oh, you know, I see some conservatives criticizing Paid voter registration efforts or paid ballot harvesting or engagement efforts to target low propensity republican voters saying, oh, we don't need to, you know, spend a hundred dollars to do that. We can, you know, do it for free. We can get some volunteers to do it. I, of course, the ceo will get paid, but these, you know, worker bees will do it for free. This is naive and, frankly, a recipe for losing and that's why we keep losing is we are totally outdated in the model Uh and we're not even copying effectively what the left is doing, and so it much less innovating ahead of them, which is what we need to do. So that's what I would like to see.

Harmeet Dhillon: 28:26

Um, typically, when you win or lose the white house, that's a time when there's a change over in leadership, and so If we win with a Republican candidate in 2024, that Republican nominee slash president will tell us who's the next chair of the RNC, and the RNC members will go along with that. If we don't, then it gets interesting. So I have many jobs, and one is the head of a law firm with 24 attorneys. The other is the head of an important nonprofit that does a lot of important work, and I'm a volunteer in politics. So I'm not planning to run for election again as the RNC chair. I hope somebody else steps forward and has a great vision to win, and I hope they're not a DC swamp creature. But this work doesn't need to be done in DC.

Niki Tshibaka: 29:16

Yeah, I mean that's a really. That was really helpful in clarifying to hear that, as Republicans, what I'm hearing you say is we really have to rethink how we approach elections and innovate and perhaps think differently about funding and be equally aggressive in how we approach our strategic objectives in the battleground states as our political opponents are.

Harmeet Dhillon: 29:50

I mean I'm more aggressive is what I would say. So just to give you one example, the left can see that the abortion issue, which we finally won at the United States Supreme Court on the federal level, motivates a lot of voters. First, they tell the lie that the federal decision somehow affects their rights in their states. That is a lie. But they're very effective at communicating that. We're not very effective at pushing back. We pay political consultants I won't name names here, I'm trying to not be ugly but we play some people a ton of money at the RNC every month to give us help with messaging and messaging is terrible, frankly and so what the left has done with that issue is not just talk about it. They've motivated their voters by putting ballot measures on their ballots to turn out the vote in 2024. They qualify them, they put the money behind them, they get the signatures, they get the propaganda going and they're gonna motivate left-wing voters to turn out to vote on this pet issue and also, by the way, cast a vote for whatever morally bankrupt leftist happens to be their candidate.

Harmeet Dhillon: 30:48

Where's our opposition to that? It doesn't have to be the abortion issue. It can be transgender issues, it can be parental rights issues. It can be the open border. It can be the fentanyl crisis in our country. Why aren't we funding and putting on the ballots of every state that we could possibly win ballot measures to turn out voters? Because voters are less and less motivated by the star power of some candidate. I mean there are some who care about that. They're more concerned about $200 worth of groceries every week at the grocery store. They're concerned about fentanyl. They're concerned about in San Francisco. You're concerned about taking a child on the streets or walking your dog, let's say, die of a fentanyl overdose, from touching something on the street. We have open borders. We have crime rampant in our communities. These issues motivate voters, so why don't we use them to turn them out? These are some of the failures I see that we really need to fix.

Kelly Tshibaka: 31:44

That's a really good point, Harmeet. Niki and I were talking about this, one of the questions we wanted to ask you. We're concerned about the fact that the last three cycles have largely been a losing streak for Republicans. I think at best we can say we've significantly underperformed up and down the ballot and you may have just answered it in what you just said, but what would be your best advice for how Republicans can win in 2024? It's kind of a desperate situation where the Democrats and by Democrats I would say the leftists I think there's a little bit of a difference between those two terms hold the White House, they hold the Senate and they virtually are controlling the House of Representatives, because Republicans have a hard time keeping their caucus together. So how do we shift the balance of power to where the Republicans can win, both at the federal and at the state levels?

Harmeet Dhillon: 32:36

Well, one of the things I promised to do if I'd been elected as chair of the RNC is basically do a top-down review of all consultants and fire the ones who don't perform. They are the big problem. So when you see RNC posting outstanding numbers and fundraising which we did throughout the Trump years, that's great and, by the way, fundraising is hard. I don't wanna underestimate how difficult it is to go talk to people, but a lot of that money came in automatically through fundraising. But what happened to it? That's the question. So it's not. Oh, did I raise $2 billion? How did I spend that $2 billion? Did I spend it on research on ballot measures and helping qualify those? Did I spend it on lawyers to equalize? We did some of that. I and a couple of other lawyers pushed very hard for that. We're not really doing it this cycle.

Harmeet Dhillon: 33:27

And so how is the money spent? Is a really critical analysis. And what you find when you dig and you dig and you dig is the money is spent on a handful of failed political consultants to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And they get hired, win or lose. They attach themselves to powerful members of Congress or Senate, nrcc, nrsc, no matter who's the head. These consultants are like the deep state of politics. They're like cockroaches. They survive any turnover and power and we keep paying them. That's crazy, it's ridiculous. It's a betrayal of our donors to use their money that way. And that's the number one thing I would have changed. And guess who combined forces to make sure that I didn't win RNC chairs, every political consultant in DC.

Kelly Tshibaka: 34:22

That's really illuminating.

Harmeet Dhillon: 34:24

Yeah, but luckily I don't make my career in politics. I don't pay my mortgage with politics, so I could say whatever I want, but most people involved in the political system are afraid to criticize those consultants because they control whether they get nominated, whether they get the money they need and whether they win.

Kelly Tshibaka: 34:41

Yeah Well, this has been extremely illuminating and inspiring. It sounds like we could kind of sum this up with people should get involved. You can make a difference. Be sure to vote, get involved in the election integrity efforts in your area and hold your government leaders accountable. That would be like when you said people need to take a stand. That's the number one thing. Support your efforts at libertycenterorg, because you're getting involved in the cases that really matter, where people who otherwise don't have representation or a voice can help. Is there anything else you would add to the takeaways for today?

Harmeet Dhillon: 35:18

I would say to every citizen tweeting is an advocacy. If you really care about what's going on in your community, put down the phone, the computer. Go to a school board meeting, speak out, vote, go, volunteer for a campaign that you like Doesn't have to be a presidential campaign, it can be anything local, but get out there and do something about it. Don't fool yourself that rage tweeting or replying, being the reply guy, is activism. It isn't.

Kelly Tshibaka: 35:44

That's good. Don't make a stance. Take a stand. Yeah, we appreciate it. Harmeet Dhillon, thank you for being with us today. This is On Stand with Kelly and Niki Tshibaka. We'll be right back after this break. Go visit libertycenter. org and help them out. Hit subscribe at the Stand Show. We'll see you right after this break.

Niki Tshibaka: 36:10

We are back on stand. We just had a phenomenal interview with Harmeet Dhillon Really interesting insights that she had to offer. Kelly, First of all, I love how you started off the show and say that Stand is the antidote to inaction Very clever, but that also went with the theme of the show too.

Kelly Tshibaka: 36:39

Yeah that's how she closed the show.

Niki Tshibaka: 36:41

Exactly, but the whole discussion and what she talked about was essentially activism and volunteerism taking action to do what she sees and what millions of Americans like her and us see need to be done to continue to protect our republic and the principles and the values that we are passionate about and that make America the greatest and most prosperous nation in human history. Now, one of the things that I wanted to ask you about and get your thoughts on I really thought that the work that she said that they're doing in terms of election integrity the way she phrased it as an existential crisis for a country I thought was really powerful, and I'm not even talking about 2020 or any of these other things For those of you out there who'd be like oh, election deniers? No, that's just a way of dismissing legitimate questions and concerns about things that are happening right now in our system of elections. Now, the truth is America. From the get-go, we have struggled and had to fight. Every generation has had to fight to remove rot in our election system process or to remedy injustices. We know blacks were denied the right to vote For a long part of our nation's history. Women were denied the right to vote for part of our nation's history. There have been seasons throughout our nation's history where there have been significant issues with our election system that have had to be remedied. This isn't the first. So we have a history of overcoming these challenges. We need to do it again, and the way that we do it again isn't by Calling people who are asking legitimate questions or pointing out legitimate issues.

Niki Tshibaka: 38:58

You're just an election denier. We're all in this democracy together and if we don't get it right Democrat, republican, left, right, conservative, liberal All of our freedoms are in jeopardy. We're no longer going to be governed by People that we've elected. I mean, our whole republic is founded on consent of the governed right, and if you, if you, can't have an election that's easily auditable, easily verifiable, where you can't remedy any issues that may have transpired in the process, then, strictly speaking, you can't say with strict confidence that you're its government by Consent, and when the people begin to lose trust in that system, things start to unravel. So we all need to take it very seriously now.

Niki Tshibaka: 39:50

On the other hand and then I'll pass it on to you we also need to be careful about well, because we lost, that meant something Bad happened or something unfair happened or whatnot like we need to learn to be gracious losers when we when we lose right, because if we believe in consent, government by consent and Democracy, then we're going to lose sometimes and that's okay. What's not okay is when we see irregularities and things happening that caused us to question the outcome, and then when people in power who have the ability to do something about it just dismiss it and just say you're being a sore loser or you're being a conspiracy theorist or whatnot. Anyway, I thought that was. I mean, she was just. That was such a powerful point she was making about that as an existential threat.

Kelly Tshibaka: 40:45

Yeah, all the things you know she. So she's the person who's suing Twitter for canceling conservatives. She's on the front lines of so many issues. When you go on their website, it's fascinating the various things that they are taking on. She talked about the COVID cases with with Gavin Newsom in California, which they've actually have COVID cases on different issues From hospitals to places of worship, etc. First Amendment issues across many states. Of all the things I I didn't know how she'd answer the question, but for her to say as someone on the front lines of civil rights and civil liberties, that's the issue, and I think it's because of what you just touched on.

Kelly Tshibaka: 41:28

When the people lose trust that a government that's supposed to be led by we, the people is no longer led by we, the people, then what are we doing here? Who's actually leading this system? And I think, to your point, the, the people who have the greatest interest in making sure that it's not led by the. We, the people, are the people who are in charge. That's really, you know, as you start to peel back, what's happening here. When the voters lose trust in the system and they start to become suspicious, who do they become suspicious of? Right? And when you start to peel this back. Who are the people who quote? Always seem to win the election, and that's where you start getting people who go wait a minute. I don't trust this outcome. I don't trust what's happening here. The people in charge always seem to be the ones who win, the people who controlled the system. Right, it's the Secretary of State or the. They're the ones who seem to win, and these are both Republicans and Democrats. These things are documented by the people who are tracking voter fraud and voter election complaints and lawsuits that have been won and stuff, and so these are on both sides. That's when you see this kind of collective distrust by the voters of what's happening here, because the people who have the most Gain in making sure this system doesn't work, or the people who get to preserve the power, and that means that we're no longer that American government that was set up to be of the people, by the people, for the people. We, the people you know, to form a more perfect union. We don't want Autocracy, a king, a patriarch or whatever. We want a government led by us. So if we're not making the decisions anymore, who is? And that's where you see the voter drop-off, the voter suppression, etc.

Kelly Tshibaka: 43:29

And I agree with you that this is something as a system that we've struggled with for a long time. But it didn't just end when certain groups were given the right to vote. Even after people were given the right to vote, we've struggled with this right. This is why we have National Voter Registration Act and these voter, the Equal Rights Act, all these acts that have tried through time to Protect and preserve, get rid of gerrymandering, get rid of voter suppression techniques here and there, and I think for a couple decades we thought we pretty much mostly worked it out, only to stumble into modern age for this issue to raise as kind of a issue of first impression for a lot of people in this current generation. But in our Maybe our parents or grandparents generation, this isn't new. What we've people who lived in the civil rights movement saw this play out Right. It's just being resurrected and I agree with you, the least helpful thing to do is to point fingers and call names.

Kelly Tshibaka: 44:27

The most helpful thing to do is to ask questions, and when people get extreme on either sides, we start to lose debates and arguments. We need to ask open-ended questions like what did you see? Where is the evidence? And we need to be careful with words. So someone was talking to me about voter fraud the other day and I said, yeah, I have a long history of investigating fraud.

Kelly Tshibaka: 44:50

Fraud is a crime and it has evidence and it has intent and it has to be provable. That's a lot different than irregularities, or there's there's problems in the system, or we have suspicion, or there might have been. You know, we didn't have good chain of custody. There's all kinds of other words. We can put around things that Mean that our system needs to be improved, but that's not the same as fraud. So we've got to be careful with our words, in our terms, as we talk about cleaning up systems. But we do want to make sure, all together, that our system maximizes trust and minimizes vulnerabilities and opportunities for things to be corrupted or taken advantage of, and that we get a Voter turnout that represents and reflects the will of the people and that can't be corrupted, abused, where fraud can happen, etc.

Niki Tshibaka: 45:41

Yeah, I mean as long as they're transparent and auditable. I think that's what you know most.

Niki Tshibaka: 45:47

I help build just that's that builds trust, and so I think this is something that a lot, of, a lot of people in power have used to try to divide us, but it really should be something that Unites us, because if our votes are going to count on either side, we all need to be sure that the process is being followed well and accurately and it complied with, and if it's not, that we have a Remedy to make sure that you know things can be fixed. So I just I think I think she's right, that's a major issue for for our country going forward, and I my hope and prayer is that Americans on both sides of the aisle, politicians on both sides of the aisle, will take it seriously and Be willing to make those changes and fix those issues, because what might be Advantages to one person and, you know, one situation, won't necessarily always be, and so us working together to make sure this is all buttoned up and people can trust the system isn't everybody's interest.

Kelly Tshibaka: 46:56

Oh, that's the nature of civil rights, right? They'll flip on you real fast. You got to protect them for everybody or they're protected for nobody exactly. Another thing I really liked about what she said is being on the front line of innovation. That going back to the same old things doesn't help anybody. That will always be behind. I thought that was a really key thing too, and that that isn't left for just leaders. That's left for all of us that there's always going to be people who want the same old, but we have to be the ones who will push forward and do something about it, right? So getting in front of your school boards, being active in volunteering, doing something, is always better than not doing something and not being afraid of the new. So embracing new methods and new ways of doing stuff that's the key to winning, that's the key to progressing, moving forward into new areas all really good.

Kelly Tshibaka: 47:45

So this has been another awesome episode of stand with Kelly and Niki Tshibaka. Thanks for being with us today and taking a stand for the things you believe. We stand for freedom, we stand for truth and we stand for government led by we, the people. We'll see you next week on stand hit. Subscribe. Make sure to leave review to be entered to win a stand hydroflask sticker. We'll see you next time.