FILE PHOTO: Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon speaks at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 7, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura/File Photo
Republicans turned on one another after a college Republican group vowed that “demon worshippers” won’t be tolerated in the party, targeting President Donald Trump’s departing civil rights chief.
The post, from an X account calling itself the Georgia College Republicans, appeared Friday.
It quoted news that Harmeet Dhillon, a Sikh American lawyer, had resigned as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. However, the post did not drive Dhillon from the administration. She says she chose to leave weeks earlier.
“Demon worshippers will not be tolerated in the Republican Party,” the group wrote.
Attorney General Todd Blanche had announced her resignation Thursday, about a year and a half after the Senate confirmed her as Trump’s nominee. Dhillon told Fox News Digital she made the decision weeks before Republicans’ midterm losses.
Dhillon challenged the account’s right to speak for Republicans, and a campus chapter that defended it fired back at her.
“What are you children going to do about it?” Dhillon wrote on X Saturday. “Also, who are you? Show your faces and tell us how you are going to control who gets to be a Republican.”
In a later post, Dhillon called the account’s operators “incel groyper losers,” using a term for followers of white nationalist Nick Fuentes, according to The Algemeiner.
In the same post, she shared a rival statement from the Georgia Association of College Republicans thanking her for her service.
“You’re crashing out on college students and the same people you’re clutching your pearls for care more about a title in Washington than ever standing by their convictions,” the College Republicans chapter at Georgia Gwinnett College replied.
The account belongs to a far-right splinter group that the Georgia Republican Party does not recognize, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Monday.
The paper said the group had attacked Dhillon as a “devil worshipper” and that state party Chair Josh McKoon made clear the recognized group is the Georgia Association of College Republicans.
Yet the splinter group’s website features a photo of McKoon at Kennesaw State University in October 2025, according to its caption.
The state party is distancing itself from a group whose website features its own chairman.
The account’s X profile also lists the College Republicans of America, a national campus network, as a partner.
That network’s political director, Kai Schwemmer, appears in the Georgia group’s photos at Georgia Tech in April. He spoke in 2022 at Fuentes’s “America First PAC” conference and has praised Fuentes, The Algemeiner reported in March.
“This is blasphemy,” Fuentes said of Dhillon’s Sikh prayer at the 2024 Republican National Convention, The Guardian reported. “This is total blasphemy.”
The account’s national partner chose an admirer of the man who condemned Dhillon’s prayer in 2024 as its political director.
Dhillon is not the first Indian American in Trump’s circle to be branded a demon worshipper, and at least one of her attackers has done it before.
“Demon worshipper,” right-wing pastor and podcaster Joel Webbon wrote on X about Dhillon on Saturday. “Get out of my country.”
“Go back home and worship your sand demons,” Webbon wrote in October 2025, after FBI Director Kash Patel posted a Diwali greeting, Salon reported. “Get out of my country.”
“You are not an American, you are a demon worshipping foreigner,” one X user told Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican then running for Ohio governor, during the same holiday.
Former Justice Department attorneys have accused Dhillon of abandoning the division’s traditional civil rights mission in favor of conservative causes, The Associated Press reported.
Under Dhillon's leadership, more than 75% of the division’s staff left last year, according to CBS News.
“We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls’ sports, and so much more,” Dhillon wrote on X as she announced her exit Thursday.