The New York Times just reported that the Department of We Don’t Need No Education has decided that the United States no longer needs to have much of a civil rights office. A memorandum written by Candice E. Jackson, acting head of the civil rights division, has effectively removed federal oversight in all civil rights matters and will allow individual states to decide how to deal with their cases. You know, because there’s no such thing as racism, sexism or prejudice in Trump’s America anymore.
During the Obama presidency, the department attempted to identify and address systemic issues in education whether it was racial, gender, gender identity etc. This in-depth approach and a lack of funding from Congress caused a backlog of cases. With Trump’s budget proposal to starve the department and further cut 46 more full time positions, Betsy DeVos has decided to do what all rich, entitled white people do and simply walk away from the problem, pretending it doesn’t exist.
What this means to you and your children is that your states will now determine how to handle civil rights complaints. So, if your teen is transgendered and you live in North Carolina, he/she gets to hold his/her pee all day. If your daughter is date raped at a university that cares more about the careers of its football players or swimmers, it will be labeled as consensual sex. If you think your for-profit charter school district is purposefully segregating students based on the color of their skin, be sure you’re a citizen before you complain or ICE will deport you.
But what I find enlightening about this memo is who wrote it, because it’s when we look at the author and who she is, we see just where all this nonsense is coming from.
Candice E. Jackson is a right-wing nut job busily retweeting every Alex Jones, David Horowitz (Holocaust denier) and Anne Coutler keyboard vomit she can find. And just like all the other Trump administration jokers, she’s never worked in government or managed a group of people. Yet she was hired by Trump to lead a large civil rights department…er…I mean destroy the Department of Education’s civil rights department, and that’s the whole point, right? Right.
In her senior year at Stanford University, after having lived the hard life of being raised white in Washington state, in a doctor’s family, Candice wrote:
“In today’s society, women have the same opportunities as men to advance their careers, raise families, and pursue their personal goals.”
Wait it gets better:
“College women who insist on bonding together by gender to fight for their rights are moving backwards, not forwards.”
Candice also did a summer fellowship at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an economic think tank founded by Llewelyn Rockwell, Jr. The Institute states that it is based on an Austrian economist’s teachings that promotes free markets and that government interference is the absolute worst idea, which is interesting since it is a 501c3 nonprofit benefiting from not paying taxes on its donations. Apparently, that type of government intervention on their behalf is just fine. And speaking of donors: the Institute is funded by the Koch brothers’ Donor’s Trust foundation which is funded by the Mercers and…wait for it…the DeVos family!
Perhaps it was at the Institute that Candice became a minority hating bigot. I say that because the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s founder, Rockwell and a researcher, Jeffrey Tucker are also founding members of The League of the South, a neo-Confederate white supremacist organization that thinks the southern states should secede from the United States. Tucker has written articles for the League and many of the League’s members have been speakers at the Institute’s conventions. In fact, the Institute has argued that, “Desegregation in the civil rights era, resulted in the ‘involuntary servitude’ of (presumably white) business owners.” The Institute has been labeled a white supremacist hate group since 2000 by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Think about that for a moment. The acting head of the civil rights division of the Department of Education of the United States under the Trump administration attended a fellowship at a neo-Confederate, white supremacist institute.
Candice is also a lawyer who got her start at the ultra-right Judicial Watch, but it’s not through law that she’s made her name known among the right-wingers. She’s best known for writing a book, Their Lives: Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine. As the title suggests, it is an account of abuses alleged by the women in President Bill Clinton’s life. After releasing the book in 2005, she held events at the Clinton library to try and sell herself as the expert on this subject.
As you may have already guessed, it was Candice and Roger Stone who conspired to use PAC money to pay to have these women flown in for the 2nd debate of Trump vs. Clinton in the 2016 election. Additionally, she runs the Their Lives Foundation that claims Hillary Clinton mistreated women throughout her career. On her Facebook page, which she scrubbed, she called the Trump sexual assault accusers fake and said they were merely doing it for “political gain.”
In other words, Candice has made a living from using the stories of Clinton’s accusers, but says Trump’s accusers are frauds. Candice E. Jackson has made a career, if you can call it that, out of being the judge and jury of women’s sexual assault allegations against famous men, spreading lies about a woman who was a 1st Lady, senator, secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president. This and making sure that minorities have no recourse for when their civil rights are violated in our education system have been her contributions to our society.
Bravo Candice, bravo.
Jenn Budd is a freelance writer. You can follow her on Twitter @jenn_budd.
