San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon did well when she was elected the next chair of the Republican National Committee on Friday, and what may be most surprising is that she lives in San Francisco. Currently.
How can someone who lives in a city that doubles as a Fox News punch line — and is a former ACLU board member and Kamala Harris campaign donor — lead the Republican Party?
The answer has more to do with Dhillon’s legal career than her political career.
She found her way into the Republican base by filing a lawsuit that originated in California and sought to misrepresent “wokeness” and expose “cancel culture,” making her deeply felt by those who are anxious and angry about the changes that are taking place in the country. A favorite of conservatives.
Her lawsuits, and the favorable coverage they’ve gotten from right-wing media outlets, have pushed her beyond her roots in the California Republican Party, where Dhillon has led the party for more than a decade.
This is no easy journey. California has not elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006, the legislature is overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats and the state has half as many registered Republican voters as Democrats.
Dhillon, 53, one of three representatives to the Republican National Committee in California, has never held elected office. She was defeated in 2012 against Democratic state Senator Mark Reynolds, who won 85 percent of the vote. Representative Tom Amiano, a Democrat, defeated her roughly 5 to 1 four years ago.
Unlike Dhillon’s main contender for the RNC job, Sen. Mitt Romney’s niece, current Chairman Ronna McDaniel, she has no ties to prominent Republicans.
Dhillon, the daughter of a conservative Sikh, was born in India and grew up in a rural North Carolina town where a sign on the city boundary encouraged passers-by to “join in support of the Ku Klux Klan.” She was so bright that she was accepted to Dartmouth College at the age of 16.
She and her second husband moved to the Bay Area more than two decades ago. Their marriage ended in 2003.
In the xenophobic days following the September 2001 terrorist attacks, she joined the board of the Northern California ACLU chapter after establishing herself as a national leader in legally protecting fellow Sikhs from attacks.
Years ago, she told me, she paid $250 for Harris’ 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney because Harris was “the more conservative candidate” compared with Terrence Hallinan. Republicans in San Francisco often support the lesser of two evils. “
When she married her third husband, Sarvjit Randhawa, in Angel Island in 2011, they had traveled by boat to Angel Island in a wedding attended by members of the Green Party and Democrats.
When she ran for vice chair of the California Republican Party in 2013, the ultra-conservative California Republican Congress called her a Bay Area liberal who “doesn’t represent our values at all.” Other opponents handed out leaflets mocking her as the “Princess of the Taj Mahal” and whispered that she would kill a goat if she was elected. Still, Dhillon won the race, becoming the first woman of color to hold the position.
Since then, the more established Dhillon has become a Fox News favorite — in large part because of her performance in court.
She took over big tech companies that conservatives say have unfairly silenced their voices, claiming that Google has redirected Republican emails to spam folders. Google’s lawyers responded Monday by calling the allegations a “dark conspiracy.”
She backed parents who want more control over their children’s education, claiming schools were “brainwashing children into identifying as bisexual and transgender”, something LGBTQ advocates called bigotry. She backed religious leaders who say the government’s harsh pandemic restrictions have prevented them from worshiping in person.
Moreover, Dhillon amplified the voices of aggrieved conservatives who believe the courts are their best option when Republicans struggle to hold power. The case of the Dhillon champion offers a window into Republican psychology at a critical time.
Her work — including leading the 2,500-member National Republican Bar Association — has endeared her to America’s most powerful Republican, former President Donald Trump, who has lived almost forever in a state of discontent middle.
Her firm represented Trump allies before the Jan. 6 committee, including his former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Flynn invoked the Fifth Amendment several times before the committee, even when asked if he “believed in a peaceful transfer of power in the United States of America.” Dillon’s firm called Flynn’s questioning “political drama” and “harassment.”
Although Dylan Raising funds for Trump after the election Legal defense on Twitter — “Stop stealing! Please invest in our Trump Election Defense Fund,” she tweeted — Trump has yet to take a stand publicly in the RNC chairmanship battle. Privately, he is known to support McDaniel. (There is no evidence of widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 election.)
Dhillon promises RNC chair voters she’ll move from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. if she wins race Friday
If that happens, legal cases like Konen v. Spreckels Union School District, which her firm filed last June, could lay the groundwork. She is suing school officials and teachers at Salinas Valley Middle School on behalf of a mother, alleging the school hurt her by failing to notify her that her child had chosen a different name and pronouns.
For Dhillon’s company, it amounts to “brainwashing children into identifying as bisexual and transgender” behind the parents’ back.
Regardless, California law does not require teachers to inform parents of a student’s gender identity. Under a law passed in 2014, school personnel are prohibited from disclosing information about a student’s gender identity without the student’s permission, the state Department of Education said.
Still, it became a good friend of Fox News, fueling right-wing attention and vilification of the transgender community. According to the Human Rights Campaign, lawmakers introduced 340 anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures last year, including 140 pieces of anti-transgender legislation.
When asked by Fox News host Laura Ingraham whether educators were involved in the “recruitment” of transgender students, Dhillon said, “One hundred percent…these aren’t the only kids affected. Other kids. I got to know hundreds of families across the country.” She then encouraged viewers to contact her law firm.
California’s pandemic-related restrictions are another target of Dhillon, which has filed numerous lawsuits to undermine them. That has enabled her to turn draconian administration officials — chief among them Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom — against religious institutions, an influential part of the Republican base.
Newsom, Dhillon told CalMatters, “went from ‘let’s flatten the curve for two weeks’ to ‘let’s put everyone under house arrest until we find a cure.'”
One case alleges California’s insistence that all religious services should be conducted at home via live broadcast while “assuming that all Californians have access to high-speed Internet, computer equipment, and desire to add invasive data-collection applications to their computer equipment, and Willing to suspend worship for a lifetime at government order.”
Note the reference to a “data collection app,” a tool of another sworn enemy of conservative America, Big Tech.
Which brings us to the lawsuit Dhillon filed against Google last October on behalf of her potential future employer, the RNC. The lawsuit, filed weeks before the California recall election, alleges that the Mountain View company sent millions of RNC fundraising and organizing emails to users’ spam folders “because of the RNC’s political affiliation and views.”
Dhillon’s legal work appeals to conservatives, who loathe what they call performative political correctness — and progressives, who see it as a struggle to advance equality and multiculturalism. In October, she represented the descendants of law school founder Serranus Hastings, formerly UC Hastings. They challenged the state’s decision to rename the school the UC San Francisco School of Law because the founders sponsored the massacre of Indigenous peoples.
“Despite the Academy’s success as the state’s first public law school and its long history of educating lawyers and encouraging public service, modern day cancel-culturalists have set their sights on the Academy’s name,” the lawsuit says.
Defending the school’s founder, Dhillon said, “Hastings was a civil rights leader in his day.” She tore up “a smear effort orchestrated by politicians for their own purposes.”
The case hits all the happy spots in the Republican Party. It called for “woke” attitudes and name-checked “cancel culture”. It allowed Dhillon to denounce “sloppy and poor legislation in this state.”
If Dhillon becomes RNC chairman, she may continue her legal battle.On Wednesday, during the debate between the candidates — in which Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren replaced Dhillon, who did not attend — Wren said Dhillon wants to work Lawyers focus full-time on election work. “Why don’t we go to (mostly Republican) districts to sue and get automatic registration? Put a drop box at every Cabela’s.”
Joe Garofoli is a senior political writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @joegarofoli
