It irritates me too, I swear there is an ever increasing tendency for people to say the opposite of what they intend to say. Grade school teachers used to have a fit when we country kids said something like, “I don’t know nothing about that”. Now people with college degrees say something similiar or even worse and not an eye is blinked, when did we stop speaking English?
During Carter administration we established the rights of illegal aliens to free public education. Just a guess.