President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division is a woman who flirted with black supremacy, associated with anti-Semitic figures, and entertained anti-police policies — and you’ve probably never heard of her.
Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee for assistant attorney general, has a troubling history that deserves more attention than it’s getting. Last year, she wrote an op-ed for Newsweek titled “I Prosecuted Police Killings. Defund the Police — But Be Strategic.” Three times throughout the piece, Clarke said that “we must invest less in police” and more in “social workers,” “social supports in our schools,” and “mental health aid.” She may not have endorsed abolishing police departments completely, but she did endorse cutting their budgets, which is a key component of the ‘defund the police’ movement.
When asked about this op-ed, Clarke lied to the Senate: “I don’t support taking away resources from police,” she told Sen. Ted Cruz. “The impetus for writing that op-ed was to make clear that I do not support defunding the police.”
Here’s a direct quote from Clarke’s op-ed: “I advocate for defunding policing operations that have made African Americans more vulnerable to police violence and contributed to mass incarceration, while investing more in programs and policies that address critical community needs.”
Clarke was strategically vague about which operations she’d like to see defunded, but her point was clear: Resources should be redirected away from law enforcement and toward other entities. That’s exactly what “defund the police” means.
She also supported the freeing of several radical violent criminals, including convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur (since escaped) when she attended Columbia Law School. She was instrumental in organizing an event that referred to Abu-Jamal as a “political prisoner,” according to a university transcript.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Clarke, who, if confirmed, would direct the DOJ’s efforts to enforce statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, etc., wrote an article while she was in college arguing “human mental processes” were structured in such a way that gave black people “superior physical and mental abilities” and “spiritual abilities” to white people. She now claims the article was a satirical attempt to mock the controversial book The Bell Curve.
“What I was seeking to do was to hold up a mirror,” she told the Senate this week. “Put one racist theory alongside another.”
This would be plausible if Clarke hadn’t explicitly cited a doctor named Carol Barnes as evidence of this “melanin theory.” She also insisted at the time that she was serious, according to several of her peers, which led the Harvard Crimson staff to demand a retraction after searching “in vain for a hint of irony in Clarke’s letter.”
Clarke also invited a Wellesley College professor named Anthony Martin, who denied the Holocaust and taught his students that Jews were responsible for the slave trade, to speak at a Harvard event while she was president of the college’s Black Students Association. She praised him as “an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information of indisputable fact,” according to a Harvard Crimson article published at the time. Martin returned the compliment, thanking Clarke for inviting him to speak “in the face of enormous pressure from the forces of reaction.”
Now, she insists that she opposes “anti-Semitism wherever and whenever it shows up.” But Clarke’s associations haven’t changed much. Just two years ago, Clarke signed a letter supporting Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory, who, like Martin, admires Louis Farrakhan and his belief that Jewish people were responsible for the oppression of black people.
Clarke’s comments and connections speak for themselves. She has no business working for the federal government, let alone running a crucial Justice Department office, and the Senate ought to reject her.
