Donald Trump is already signaling the direction he wants to move our country with the team he has assembled around him: backward. His cabinet appointments include a climate change denier to head the Environmental Protection Agency, an anti-public education zealot as secretary of education and a cabal of Goldman Sachs executives to regulate Wall Street.

His most shocking choice so far though is Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general. A former U.S. Attorney, Sessions is an old school southern racist (though he denies it), the kind of man who opposed the civil rights movement in the 1960s because the federal government shouldn’t be telling states what to do.

Sessions was actually blocked from becoming a federal judge back in 1986 because of his attempt to prosecute three African-American civil rights activists in Alabama on phony charges of voter fraud the year before. (Actual voter fraud is quite rare, but it’s a favorite conspiracy of the far right.) During his confirmation hearing, witnesses testified that Sessions casually used the word “nigger,” joked about the KKK and referred to a black subordinate as “boy.”

Sessions is a conservative “culture warrior,” who has opposed LGBT rights every hard-earned step of the way.  He called Islam a “toxic ideology” and supports blocking immigrants from Islamic countries. He has labeled both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as “communist inspired” and “un-American.” Sessions also said that “good people don’t smoke marijuana,” and has refused to deny he would prosecute people in states like California where marijuana is now legal.

As head of U.S. Justice Department, the attorney general is one of the most powerful positions in a president’s administration.  He/she acts as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and chief lawyer, with control over the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the immigration courts. The attorney general’s real power though, comes from the authority to decide where and how to allocate the department’s limited resources.

The Justice Department of the Obama Administration chose to investigate law enforcement agencies that violated civil rights in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Missouri and San Francisco. Sessions believes that “law enforcement as a whole has been unfairly maligned and blamed for the unacceptable actions of a few bad actors,” and that the “political leadership of this country [has] abandoned them.”  He is opposed to any mandate that would reform law enforcement and has said he supports mandatory sentencing policies, which disproportionately affect people of color and clog up our already overcrowded prison system.

He opposes women’s rights including funding for contraception and other health services for low-income women, and has been quoted as saying Roe v. Wade was the worst Supreme Court decision of all time. As attorney general, his Justice Department would be responsible for suing states like Texas and Ohio when they break federal statutes such as attempting to ban trans people from bathrooms or attempting to defund Planned Parenthood or make abortions inaccessible.

While it’s true that the Justice Department under Obama deported more people than it did during any previous administration, the Obama Administration did give us DACA and DAPA. In 2007 Sessions led the the charge to defeat bipartisan immigration reform and he has remained a central obstacle in the Senate to reform ever since. He’s fought against legal immigration as well—guest worker programs for immigrants, visa programs for students and tech workers. He appears ideologically opposed to immigrants who don’t look the way that he does.

He backs unnecessary voter ID laws passed by states like North Carolina, even though Obama’s Justice Department found that such laws intentionally disenfranchise black and Latino voters. At his confirmation hearing he refused to admit that Donald Trump’s claims of  mass voter fraud were false. Trump says he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million because of voter fraud, though there is no evidence to support his claim.

Many fear that by denying the real effects of voter ID laws and endorsing the voter fraud myth, Sessions could be paving the way for voter disenfranchisement on a scale not seen since the civil rights era. Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow, Coretta Scott King, wrote a letter to congress during his 1986 hearing, stating that Session’s appointment would “irreparably damage the work of my husband.”

To put it another way, Jeff Sessions is a disgrace, an old throwback to a shameful era in the history of our nation. He was a nobody, politically speaking, who happened to endorse Trump from the beginning and who is now being rewarded with a job which is far beyond his moral and professional capability. Placing this bigoted little man at the helm of the Justice Department represents a giant step backward for our society. It’s an insult to all of the people who have worked tirelessly to secure equality for women, blacks, Latinos, Muslims and LGBTs, and to everyone who believes the rights outlined in our constitution should be extended to all as opposed to only white Christian landowning men.

Shortly after Trump named Sessions as his nominee, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, of Illinois summed it up: “If you have nostalgia for the days when blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible and women stayed in the kitchen, Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man.”