A few days ago, right before the Easter holiday, when no one was paying attention, Betsy DeVos, our public education hating Secretary of Education, announced that she’d be bringing on a 39-year-old attorney by the name of Candice Jackson to be her deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights. Here, if you’re unfamiliar with Jackson, who, for what it’s worth, considers herself to be a victim of discrimination, having been turned away from a tutoring program at Stanford intended for minority students, is a clip from ProPublica.
…Although her limited background in civil rights law makes it difficult to infer her positions on specific issues, Jackson’s writings during and after college suggest she’s likely to steer one of the Education Department’s most important — and controversial — branches in a different direction than her predecessors. A longtime anti-Clinton activist and an outspoken conservative-turned-libertarian, she has denounced feminism and race-based preferences. She’s also written favorably about, and helped edit a book by, an economist who decried both compulsory education and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Jackson’s inexperience, along with speculation that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will roll back civil rights enforcement, lead some observers to wonder whether Jackson, like several other Trump administration appointees, lacks sympathy for the traditional mission of the office she’s been chosen to lead…
And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this once again, but it’s absolutely no coincidence that the administration has chosen an anti public education activist to run the Department of Education, a man who once said he wanted to destroy the Department of Energy to run that agency, and a climate change denier to run the EPA. This is all being done by design. As Steve Bannon told us himself, his agenda is the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” and there’s no faster way to achieve that than by handing agencies over to those who have vowed to destroy them. As Bannon himself said at CPAC this past winter, “If you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.” And, with that as the objective, putting Candice Jackson, someone who has demonstrated a clear disdain for civil rights in her life, in charge of defending the civil rights of our youngest and most vulnerable citizens, makes perfect sense.
Jackson is to civil rights what Scott Pruitt is to global warming. She’s a civil rights denier. And, like Pruitt, she’s been given this job to do as much damage as possible to her institution.
For what it’s worth, while Jackson will technically be the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office for Civil Rights, she’ll actually be serving as Secretary, as DeVos has yet to hire anyone in that role. If I were the suspicious type, I’d say that this was done by design, as the Secretary position requires Senate confirmation, whereas the Deputy Assistant Secretary position does not. In other words, this was an end run around the Senate to place someone absolutely unqualified for the job in the position as Secretary. [As the acting head of the department, Jackson will be in charge of about 550 full-time staff.]
So, if you’re a white student who has a grievance, now’s the chance you’ve been waiting for… Did you lose a school election to a Hispanic classmate? Did someone tell you that you weren’t allowed to wear a “white power” t-shirt to school? Were you made uncomfortable by a discussion in History class about slavery? Well, you might find a sympathetic ear at the new Office of Civil Rights.
Oh, and while Jackson doesn’t have any experience when it comes to civil rights, unless you count ranting about how civil rights protections are unfair to white Americans, she does have some experience running an organization. Apparently, prior to taking this position, Jackson ran an organization dedicated to telling the stories of women “abused” by Hillary Clinton called the “Their Lives Foundation”. She is also the author of the 2005 book, “Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine.”
And, yes, this is why we fought so hard to keep Betsy DeVos from the Department of Education.
5 Comments
They are undoing 100 years of work.
When will this administration make a correct decision? Don’t the law of averages come into play?
Rick, these are all the correct decisions, if the objective is to destroy public education.
And once again, people will whine and curse this decision over coffee and do nothing. Also, while everyone was busy praising Trump for the bombings, DeVos undid the way student loans were handled under Obama so students are at the mercy of the lenders again, Planned Parenthood is being dismantled, LGBT rights are threatened at every turn including in the DOE, housing, the Supreme Court and elsewhere, and so much more. AND…..we still have not seen Trump’s current TAX RETURNS or heard any more news about the women who are/were suing him. Remember Trump University? I was sickened by the morning news programs yesterday where people of all political strips were saying Trump was “…growing into the office”; the new terminology for his lack of policy, and his commitment to only those things that make his narcissistic ass look good. The people on the programs just say “Oh that Donald!!! He is such a Twitter-comic! So goofy, but he’s now starting to turn into Mitch McConnell so that’s good!” People, be you Republican or Democrat, we need to remember Trump’s history and fear this regime! He cannot even remember what country he bombed two days after he did it yet, he eats his chocolate cake and we pay millions for his and his families security every day. We contemplate building a border wall using taxpayer money that would fix every falling down bridge in the USA. I say “we” because as long as he is in office he is the president of the USA, our president. Notice that I did not use the words “let him eat cake”, “nepotism” or “regime change” anywhere in this post.
An excerpt from NY Magazine-
Jackson seems to have spent some subsequent time in private practice, though there are no obvious indications she worked on discrimination law. But she characteristically popped back into public view last October when (as Gabriel Sherman explained at the time) she worked with Roger Stone, alt-right blogger Charles Johnson, Steven Bannon, and Jared Kushner to organize the then-scandalous appearance at a Hillary Clinton–Donald Trump debate of a number of “victims of Bill and Hillary Clinton,” and proudly sat with them in the front row. Nor was it surprising that having helped stage this over-the-top response to the allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Trump, Jackson referred to Trump’s accusers as “fake victims.”
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[…] staffer pushing this change, is Candice Jackson, a woman who, as a graduate student at Stanford, claimed that she was being discriminated against for being white and then went on to start an organization dedicated to telling the stories of women “abused” by […]