Civil Wrongs Division
24th February 2024
The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (CRD) was established through the 1957 Civil Rights Act. In the ensuing years, its attorneys prosecuted important civil rights cases at the end of the Jim Crow era. Today, though, that respectable past is ancient history. By the early years of this century, CRD had become a dumping ground for aging attorneys desperately seeking and crushing the dying embers of actual civil rights infractions, even as the supply dwindled past the point of irrelevance for the department. As we demonstrate below, by the time Obama was elected, there simply were not enough civil rights offenses—even in a nation of more than 300,000,000—to justify CRD’s continued existence, at least not on the same grounds that justified its creation.
Given the dearth of real civil rights offenses, CRD had no choice but to transition from prosecuting real hate crimes to serving as the enforcers of the regime’s divisive racialist agenda. To do this, it had to manufacture a supply of fake hate crimes and so-called civil rights offenses because, as Glenn Reynolds observed, “the demand for hate crimes far exceeds the supply.” It also had to staff up with regime apparatchiks. By Obama’s second term, CRD had filled its ranks with radical partisan ideologues to pursue the regime’s identity politics goals without recourse to any coherent definition of “civil rights” or “hate crime.”