Trump’s pick for civil rights can doom DEI racism The nomination of Harmeet Dhillon as assistant attorney general for civil rights could be a turning point in the battle against woke indoctrination and antisemitism. Jonathan Tobin
Compared to some of the choices for posts in President-elect Donald Trump’s new administration, this one isn’t likely to garner nearly the attention that some of the others have generated. Trump’s decision to name Harmeet Dhillon as assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has already attracted some of the same kind of bitter criticism dished out to other more prominent picks as articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post have demonstrated. Still, compared to the storm of controversy surrounding his selections of people like Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense or Kash Patel to lead the FBI, Dhillon is a much smaller target.
That means she may be able to fly beneath the radar of both Democratic and Republican senators who are not Trump supporters, looking to demonstrate their unwillingness to do the incoming president’s will. Yet those who want to thwart Trump’s vows to not only “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., but roll back the woke ideological tide inside the government and throughout the country will be making a mistake if they underestimate the importance of this nomination. Having someone like Dhillon—an ardent opponent of the left and a proven legal fighter—in charge of what is arguably the DOJ’s most prominent and influential division is as much of a game-changer as any other appointment Trump will make in the next four years.
The head of the Civil Rights Division is not a member of the Cabinet. But it will allow Dhillon to fundamentally change not only how the U.S. Department of Justice operates but also to begin the process of reversing the left’s long march through American institutions. The question of whether the pervasive influence of the divisive and inherently discriminatory teachings of critical race theory and intersectionality will continue to dominate the education system—at the college level and in K-12 schools—could well hinge on Dhillon’s determination and success. The same applies to the widespread imposition of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) throughout society.
The power of the DOJ is enormous. When the lawyers who work in the Civil Rights Division—a group that, like most of those who are career federal employees, lean hard to the left—set upon a government agency or private institution of any kind, their investigations and lawsuits can cripple the ability of any entity to function or even survive.
In recent years, the Civil Rights Division has set the tone for the government’s position on racial questions. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the DOJ played a key role in the work of healing the nation’s wounds from its troubled discriminatory past. But under the Obama and Biden administrations, it was the engine of an effort to exacerbate racial divisions and advance extreme ideological agendas promoted by the left. By supporting leftist causes like the Black Lives Matter movement’s attacks on law enforcement, DEI and gender ideology, in addition to opposing election integrity laws passed by the states, the Civil Rights Division did as much, if not more harm to the country than any other part of the federal government.
As was the case with many government departments during Trump’s first administration, he was unable to do much to reverse the DOJ’s left-leaning tilt. Much of the attention of both of his attorney generals—Jeff Sessions and William Barr—was focused on fending off attacks relating to the Russia collusion hoax or in playing defense on issues like immigration. Democrats managed to delay the confirmation of his choice to be the head of the Civil Rights Division—Joseph H. Hunt—until late in his second year and he, too, was bogged down by a successful campaign to sabotage the administration.
Kristen Clarke, Biden’s pick to lead the Civil Rights Division, had no such problems, though she was confirmed by the Senate on a largely party-line vote of 51-48 in which only one Republican—Sen. Susan Collins of Maine—supported her. Yet hers was a controversial nomination because of her record as a hard-core leftist ideologue.
As I wrote in JNS, the New York Post and The Federalist in 2021, she was on record as both an enabler and supporter of antisemites and black supremacist racists. Her writing, in which she endorsed the crackpot theory that “melanin endows blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities—something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards” was defended as a youthful indiscretion. So, too was her invitation to a racist antisemite like Tony Martin to speak at Harvard University. But both were important indicators of the direction of her future career in the law and public policy in which she supported, among other causes, efforts to defund police departments.
On her watch, the Civil Rights Division used its power to back up the spread of racially discriminatory DEI rules throughout the government and American society. It opposed the efforts of Asians to sue Harvard for discriminatory admissions practices because they, like Jews, were not a DEI-approved minority. She also failed to protect women’s sports against transgender advocates who sought to destroy Title IX rights of women.
In the past four years, the division has been zealous in seeking to hinder police departments from doing their jobs and helping to promote BLM’s myths about a large-scale epidemic of shootings of unarmed and innocent African-Americans. She also joined in a specious lawsuit against Georgia’s election laws, which Biden falsely claimed were “Jim Crow 2.0,” even though they expanded voter access and resulted in greater turnouts in subsequent elections than in the past while also protecting the integrity of the ballot. And in actions that demonstrated the way that Clarke’s activist agenda superseded the law, the DOJ opposed removing non-citizens from the roll of voters in Virginia and Alabama, and sought to suppress the right of abortion opponents to conduct legal and peaceful protests.
Cleaning out the DOJ
It will be Dhillon’s job to reverse all that. If that means clearing out the department by forcing the resignations or the firing of liberal career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division who are, as they have in the past, determined to slow walk, sabotage or outright oppose the policies of conservatives, then that is what she is prepared to do. In contrast to Trump’s first term, he and his nominees are prepared not to be diverted from enacting fundamental change by attacks from the corporate press or Democrats who falsely claim that their policies are racist or anti-democratic.
Dhillon is being bashed by liberals for her record as a Trump loyalist though, like many of his appointees, she used to support Democrats like Vice President Kamala Harris earlier in her career. But their opposition is rooted as much in her championing conservative causes than in her legal efforts to defend Trump’s challenges to the results of the 2020 election.
She founded the Center for American Liberty, a nonprofit legal organization to defend the civil liberties of Americans who have been left behind by civil-rights legacy organizations that no longer care about individual rights. She opposed restrictive, and as it turned out, counterproductive and harmful COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and has defended religious liberty against state censorship and discrimination. She also fought mandatory corporate “diversity” programs and rules that imposed gender ideology on companies and institutions.
By placing her in charge at the Civil Rights Division, Trump is seizing what may well be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to undo all of the damage leftist ideologues have done not only at the DOJ but at institutions throughout the nation. It is expected that Trump will use executive orders to reverse the ones signed by Biden that mandated the imposition of DEI policies and the hiring of woke commissars for every government agency and department to enforce them. But, if with Dhillon’s leadership, the DOJ uses its power to oppose racially discriminatory policies like DEI that have been put in place throughout the education system, the corporate world and the arts, the impact could be enormous.
Defeating DEI
Such lawsuits would raise the real possibility that any college, university, K-12 school system, corporation or arts organization that used DEI to determine hiring or admissions would lose federal funding, and be subjected to sanctions in the same way that institutions that enforced racial segregation and discrimination were punished. In the face of a DOJ determined to oppose these toxic policies, it is entirely possible that support for DEI—something that is not just current liberal intellectual fashion but a new orthodoxy that seeks to suppress and punish all those who dissent from it—will be rolled up like a cheap carpet.
No other measure undertaken by private or governmental initiatives could do more to reverse the dominance of woke ideology. It would also go far in stemming the surge of antisemitism that was enabled by DEI policies and racial ideologues, and that has swept across the nation since the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The opposition to such an effort from not just congressional Democrats but the mainstream media and those who now rule so many of our institutions will be ferocious. Pursuing the end of DEI will take a keen legal mind, courage and willingness to fight, as has already been demonstrated by Dhillon. Her confirmation should be treated not just as a test of loyalty to Trump, but of support for the values of Western civilization and American liberty that the left has been so eager to undermine under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And Jewish groups who purport to care about the fight against antisemitism, even those that are dominated by liberals, should stand with her.
While cynics often say that politics and elections don’t affect much in our everyday lives, putting someone like Harmeet Dhillon at the helm of the Civil Rights Division could be a crucial turning point that marks the moment the tide was turned against a destructive ideology threatening to change America for the worst for the foreseeable future.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
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