Connor Clegg, a former Fox News producer who was ousted from his school’s student government over accusations of racism, is working in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s communications department, according to a current and a former EEOC employee with knowledge and a screenshot of the agency’s personnel directory viewed by Talking Points Memo.
Details about Clegg’s precise role at EEOC are unclear. The former EEOC employee told TPM that while she was at the EEOC, Clegg was overseeing some press and social media duties, which meant he was reviewing the work of career staff. He also compiled media lists made up of “conservative to rightwing media,” such as Free Beacon and Breitbart, and offered interviews with the Acting Chair Andrea Lucas to such outlets, the source said. The Free Beacon ran what it called an exclusive interview with Lucas in early August. Clegg and the EEOC did not respond to requests for comment or clarification on Clegg’s role.
Clegg, who has a history of posting racist and provocative content on social media, is an unlikely — but increasingly common in the second Trump administration — hire for a federal agency created as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and tasked with protecting American workers from discrimination, including racial and gender-based discrimination. In 2018, while a student at Texas State University, Clegg was impeached as student body president over uncovered social media posts in which he mocked Asian tourists. The Instagram posts were of Clegg taking photos of himself with unsuspecting tourists who appeared to be Asian with hashtags such as “#pearlharborwasbad,” “#assholes,” and “#kimjongil.”
Last year, Clegg posted a long rant to his Twitter account about an interaction he claimed he had with a traffic enforcement officer who was attempting to tow his car. He said the person “barely spoke a lick of English” and spoke in “an accent and diction so thick and faulty it was nearing aboriginal levels.” He also claimed the traffic enforcement officer had “no concept of western rites and tradition.” Clegg said he then got in his car and left because “that is my birthright and there’s not a damn thing a foreigner with a tin badge and poorly tailored pants can do to stop me.” He lamented that “foreigners are given the privilege to enforce this nation’s ‘laws’ unto citizens.” He also reposted a tweet from MAGA influencer and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk saying, “There is an undeniable War on White People in The West.”
After the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked in May 2022, Clegg posted to Twitter, “If you’re dumb enough to stick a coathanger into yourself AND you happen to be doing it in the name of murdering your unborn child, you won’t get an ounce of sympathy from me if something goes wrong there in your ‘back alley.’” He also called a hypothetical person who gets an abortion a “murderous scumbag.”
Before working at the EEOC, Clegg worked for Kirk and was a producer of “The Ingraham Angle,” a Fox News show hosted by longtime Fox employee Laura Ingraham.
Clegg appears to have also recently done work at the Department of Labor, and he posted a story to his Instagram account in April that featured a picture of him being sworn in on a Bible with Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling with the caption, “Labor? I hardly know ‘er!” It is still unclear what work he did or is doing for the department. The department did not respond to TPM’s request for comment or for clarification on his role there.
Working with someone who has such a background was very “unsettling,” the former EEOC employee told TPM.
As the Trump administration has aggressively gone after diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and trans rights, the EEOC has tailored itself to that agenda, focusing on policies that advance those initiatives and on rooting out discrimination against men, white people, and Christians. The source said that Clegg was part of what she saw as a new, highly partisan environment at the agency that differed from her previous years working there.
In May, Lucas directed EEOC officials to compile a list of cases that lined up with her priorities, including “defending the biological and binary reality of sex,” “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” protecting workers from “anti-American national origin discrimination,” and “protecting workers from religious bias and harassment.” She dismissed pending agency lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers and sent letters to 30 law firms requesting information about their DEI programs, which she said “may entail unlawful disparate treatment.”
“I would say [Clegg] just fit in with the new direction of the agency and the administration,” the former employee said.
He’s not the first unusual hire at the agency; in April, Lucas hired long-time Christian conservative activist Shannon Royce, who also previously led a lawsuit against the EEOC over its defense of trans employees’ rights.
