Legacy media paints Harmeet Dhillon as plucky underdog fighting ‘woke ideology’ 

To the legacy media, Harmeet Dhillon has spent her career as an underdog — bravely swimming against the liberal tide to stand up for her values, no matter the consequences.

In a largely admiring profile, Politico explains that Dhillon — the Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights division chief who’s reported to be in line for a promotion — has a “personal familiarity” with what she calls “woke ideology,” as a San Francisco Republican “vastly outnumbered by Democrats.”

“The entirety of my career has been a minority, conservative viewpoint in a very liberal profession,” Dhillon says, providing a framing for the story that Politico does little to challenge. “I’m not here for a popularity contest.” 

Democracy Docket’s coverage of Dhillon’s tenure at DOJ has been very different. 

We’ve understood Dhillon’s effort to turn the Civil Rights division away from protecting, um, civil rights as part of the Trump administration’s bid to undermine democracy on behalf of existing powerful interests — not as a bold example of independent thinking.

We’ve highlighted Dhillon’s hiring of numerous lawyers with records of working to overturn the 2020 election — including naming an acting chief of the voting section who has collaborated closely with election deniers. 

We’ve revealed the numerous basic lawyering errors — from missed deadlines to failure to properly serve defendants to a seemingly unending string of embarrassing typos — that have hamstrung the division’s effort to grab state voter rolls. 

We’ve even explained how Dhillon’s extremely active social media presence has at times appeared to undermine DOJ’s cases.

You won’t find any of that mentioned in Politico. 

If you needed more evidence that legacy media isn’t equipped to meet the challenge to democracy posed by our current moment, you don’t have to look much further.  Luckily, that’s why we’re here.