Trump selected a hard-right lawyer, Harmeet K. Dhillon, as assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice. She is the former vice-chair of the California Republican Party. Born in India, she is a practicing Sikh. She was leader of Lawyers for Trump in 2020, which tried to overturn the election.
In standard Trump fashion, he has selected a hard-right lawyer who has never fought for traditional civil rights issues, but will vigorously support his anti-“woke,” anti-DEI agenda.
She has opposed corporate diversity programs, COVID safety measures, and gender-affirming care for transgender people.
In sum, her own priorities are exactly the opposite of the division she was chosen to lead. Under Trump, the civil rights gains of the past 60 years will go dormant or be reversed.
Trump said in a press release:
“Throughout her career, Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.”
Dhillon founded a law practice, Dillon Law Group Inc., and a nonprofit firm called the Center for American Liberty. She gained notoriety filing free speech-suits on behalf of conservative clients, including the Berkeley College Republicans and a Google engineer who was fired for his memo blasting the company’s diversity policies. She led multiple lawsuits against the state of California in 2020, challenging Covid-19 policies like stay at home orders and mail-in ballots.
In the lead up to the 2024 election, she led the effort to prevent Colorado from knocking Trump off the ballot.
On Dec. 28, 2023, the day after the Colorado Republican Party asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to disqualify former President Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s primary ballot, Harmeet Dhillon tweeted: “Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history, right before our eyes, as government officials avert their eyes to the mockery of the constitution and our laws. This is a low point in American history.”
It’s a typical statement for Dhillon: defending Trump, bashing Democrats and alluding to a crime they’re committing that didn’t actually happen. The kind of statement her biggest client, Trump, would tweet. Lately, Dhillon’s been busy with Trump’s effort to remain on the ballot in the 2024 presidential race. The Dhillon Law Group is one of the law firms representing the former president in his legal fights in Maine and Colorado to remain on those state’s ballots.
Over the past few years, Dhillon — a conservative lawyer and the Republican national committeewoman from California — has become a fixture in Trump’s GOP, appearing on Fox News to rail against Democrats, cancel culture and the “woke” liberal agenda and representing the likes of Tucker Carlson, Andy Ngo and other far-right personalities in headline-seeking free speech lawsuits…
Dhillon and her namesake law firm she founded in 2006 has become one of the leading legal groups working to roll back voting rights across the country. In the past few years, Dhillon — or an attorney from her law firm — has been involved in at least 16 different lawsuits in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. challenging voting rights laws, redistricting, election processes or Trump’s efforts to appear on the ballot in the 2024 election, according to our case database.
And, much like her biggest client, the lawyer who’s representing the former president and asserted herself as a legal crusader to roll back voting rights has her own sordid history of controversy. That includes promoting baseless conspiracy theories, connections to controversial right-wing groups like the Federalist Society and Turning Point USA and questionable financial dealings involving her nonprofit, the Center for American Liberty.
Democracy Docket reported in a post yesterday that Dhillon has a history of opposing laws to strengthen voting rights:
In the past few years, Dhillon — or an attorney from her law firm — has been involved in more than a dozen lawsuits challenging voting rights laws across the country.
How will she defend voting rights when she opposed them in private practice? Will she defend equal treatment of women and oppose discrimination against racial minorities? Will she defend LGBT persons who are discriminated against?
Don’t be surprised when she doesn’t. You have been warned.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
First, lawyers can argue a case from any direction as the rules of mere logic can apply to any situation. (It’s a person’s foundations that matter and it’s where one’s authenticity or not is most evident.)
Second, the “woke” thing has really gotten to me. It needs to be “called out” as the blatant sign of deliberate ignorance that it is.
That is, to be NOT woke means to be anti-intellectual, which is very close to shooting oneself and one’s children, btw, in the foot or saying: “I may not be stupid, but I’m shallow and ignorant by choice,” instead of realizing, OMG, I’m intelligent and a thinker which means I am really rich! CBK
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The anti-woke need to wake up.
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Diane: Exactly that. But I also gained further insight into what’s going on with the obviousness of that idea (of waking up as a good thing–as an element of a developed intelligence) from reading the Richardson article you posted here a few days ago.
Namely, and if true, the GOP has apparently abandoned the ideas of truth and reality itself, along with the ideal of reasonableness, and so of the basic empirical tenets of science, not of its content, but of its evidentiary method still also portrayed in the uncorrupted courts.
The Project 25 mandate is a written acceptance of that abandonment (of reality as something to need reasonably evidence for making claims about) and so it comes with the “ring” of the writer’s/speaker’s self-vacuous arrogance as an outcome of the idea that, “if I think it, it must be so.” To hell with reasonable evidence. (And if you don’t agree, there will be blood.)
You also might recognize in this basic philosophical issue Maga’s easy and uncritical embrace of conspiracy theories. So, it appears that the GOP’s abandonment of the truth/reality complex, through Fox et al, has eked itself into the careless thinking of their Maga followers. CBK
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Great points, CBK!
I think you’re right, it’s probably more about ignorance and values than intelligence. Though many don’t know it, at it’s core, anti-woke means being against The Enlightenment, that period in history when our nation was born and our country’s founders valued rational thought over superstition & following religious dogma. The anti-woke people today are taking us back to the days before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, to when being a white Christian was what mattered most. They tried to convert those who were different then, like indigenous people. They did not value people who had alternative beliefs, thoughts, actions and lifestyles because there was just one right way that was acceptable and approved –so discrimination against others & slavery were easily justifiable to them. And today, they want to be assured that whites will remain in the majority (as I mentioned earlier this week, the Census predicted that they won’t be in 2045: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/ )
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ECE Professional: I am aware–but also of what goes missing in that thinking–for instance, the idea of people as a comprehensive identity-with, etc. as having but also as distinct from skin color, country of origin, bloodlines or smaller-group identities.
Also, it’s not difficult to understand the relationship of “enlightenment” to “wokeness” and “light” and both to the principles of intelligent thought and the achievement of excellence, both of which are central to the survival of anything named “culture” as in “to cultivate.” These emerge in ANY group identity, though they are still people, even if ignorant, sick, or young, or old, or identified again with any smaller group.
Also, the freedoms-of in the First Amendment, et al, enable one to follow one’s own group, to speak and to listen to anyone, and even to follow a particular religion, from under the political and lawful umbrella of all of “the people;” so it is from an intelligent awake mind that we get a governmental set of principles that makes plenty of room for the principle of generation, which underlies blood/family, kingships, religious identities, etc., and its flow, and for anyone to find their place in such a culture.
And there is no critical meaning in anyone’s idea of “wokeness.” They just make it up as they go along on principle. I just take the word in its generic meaning–to be awake rather than asleep or dead, of mind if not of body.
And if anyone is less human than another, it’s those who have nothing but contempt for intelligence and put that forward as a suicidal excuse for their own ignorance. CBK
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BTW, I think all that talk from Vance about there needing to be more women having babies is specific to white women, in order to avert or delay when whites become a minority. But since shaming them is not working, I’m wondering if they’re trying to devise a scheme for forcing white women to do that, like outlawing contraceptives and/or creating some kind of under the table organization which will pay them to have babies.
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ECE: I don’t know if that’s the case (I certainly hope not) though it would not surprise me if it were., at least for the most extreme version of what’s going forward (Margaret Atwood-like ideas).
Also, banning abortion is one thing; but banning contraception is quite another. Though I am “pro-choice” I still understand why many detest abortion.
But banning contraception? That seems closer to the extreme of controlling both men and women–in a totalitarian political environment.
I still have one note to you in moderation, CBK
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ECE, they won’t do anything under the table to encourage white women to have more babies. Musk and Vance will figure out a way to encourage more white births without accidentally encouraging nonwhite births.
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Please see Time Magazine’s article: “How American Women Could Lose the Right to Birth Control” https://time.com/6977434/birth-control-contraception-access-griswold-threat/
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Diane, Yes, precisely, the problem with banning contraception and abortion is how it will impact non-whites and tip the scales toward increases in births amongst people of color. That, and their billionaire donors, is why I think money targeted at specific populations of women will somehow be involved in their solution, though I’m not sure how they’d do that legally for some women and not for others.
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Diane, I don’t know for sure but, on the other hand, maybe they’re planning on stacking federal (and state) government agencies and departments, such as the DOJ, as well as courts, in their favor so much that they will just never investigate or prosecute discrimination cases again.
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ECE, that’s their plan,
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OMG. I had to think like a criminal to figure that out –which I am not accustomed to doing!
And this is the guy who did not understand the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and said he wanted us to INCREASE the number of nuclear weapons we have, not decrease them. He is so ignorant that he had to ask why we have nuclear weapons if we can’t use them! Do you believe that nincompoop is once again going to be the “leader of the free world,” when we ourselves are not going to be a free country for much longer because of him?
Now I’m more concerned about him using nuclear weapons against blue cities and blue states– his perceived enemies– than his plan to call in troops on the ground against civilians who disagree with him. I’m also very worried about him pulling us out of NATO and forming alliances with other dictators, which would put us on the wrong side of WWIII! This is so despicable…
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ECE: Unfortunately, worrying does no good. Half the country supported a known criminal and major conman, believed everything he said, and now I read on Truthout about all of the campaign promises he plans to break, including the one about not messing with Social Security.
The only promises he plans to keep, apparently, are the ones that will damage what’s left of the country when he and his boy-cronies get done with it. And if the clowns he has nominated get cabinet positions, worrying is what we will do when things fall apart even more quickly.
And now Trump is “Man of the Year” . . . AGAIN, a title which he doesn’t understand, considering the criteria of choosing those he shares it with from the past.
I don’t know which is the best symbol of our national hypocrisy:
Donald Trump taking the oath of office while trashing the U. S. Constitution
OR
Donald Trump deporting immigrants in undiscerning fashion while the Statue of Liberty still stands in the New York harbor.
OR maybe it is just Donald Trump as also a national disgrace. CBK
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Thanks, CBK. It’s difficult for me to not worry, since I care so much about people, the country and our planet. It’s also challenging because I must rely on my poverty level Social Security Retirement Income (SSRI) to survive, since I’m retired and can’t work anymore because I’m 72 & have several health problems. (My SSRI is low due to the decades that I got minimum wage as a teacher working primarily in non-unionized schools and childcare centers –teaching Special Ed, Kindergarten, Preschool & developmentally delayed students from birth to age 3). Eliminating SSRI literally feels like a death sentence to me because I personally have no other resources. I’m going to try again to not read about what’s happening in the world, though that’s been a challenge because I get so many email notifications about it all…
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ECE: I have imposed limits on myself about several news outlets–since the election, where before that, I let myself become overwhelmed. I’m trying to get my life back.
My guess about Social Security, however (and I am no clairvoyant), is that Maga is “invested,” as you and I, and a lot of other people are also, if not in oneself, in one’s parents’ financial security, etc., (such as it is) and if so, they won’t be able to ignore it. And he cannot bribe or sick his strongarm brown shirts flunkies on that many people.
If SS isn’t a political bombshell, there are none to be had. I mean think: cabinet picks. CBK
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George W. Bush appointed a hairline conservative attorney to run the Civil Right Division in the early 2000’s. As a result thr Division experienced the loss of experienced career attorneys.
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The exodus of veteran officials from government agencies is predictable. How likely are they to work for someone who wants to dismantle the agency?
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This is very consistent. Every appointment Trump considers is someone who wants to undo any and all effective government. His people want weak government (remember drowning it in the bathtub?) so he and the rest of his corrupt crowd can grift without interference.
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