Harmeet Dhillon has two mugs in her office at the Justice Department. One says “FAFO,” the acronym for “Fuck Around and Find Out.” The other says “The Tears of My Enemy.” Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, drinks those tears with relish. “Our opponents are wailing and gnashing their teeth every day,” she recently told the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, “and it’s a beautiful thing to see.”
Dhillon does not come off as a firebrand in conversation. She is more often heard speaking in the measured tones of a lawyer. When she isn’t working, she loves to garden and to knit. In 2012, she opened a business in her native San Francisco offering organic, hand-knitted scarves. But in the six months since she arrived at the Justice Department, she has launched a quiet revolution that is, in many ways, more radical than anything her predecessors—Republican or Democrat—have dared.
The Civil Rights Division, created in 1957, has generally been immune to the vicissitudes of electoral politics. For Dhillon, however, these hallowed halls are an Augean stable in need of clearing. As she sees it, the legal regime created to end racial discrimination has itself become discriminatory: a corrupt spoils system for favored minorities.
