President Joe Biden’s nominee to serve as assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has a history of supporting anti-Semitic figures and making anti-police and black supremacist comments.
Kristen Clarke, who faced the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, wrote an op-ed for Newsweek last year in which she endorsed the “Defund the Police” movement.
The headline of the piece said, “I Prosecuted Police Killings. Defund the Police—But Be Strategic.”
Three times in the opinion, Clarke said “we must invest less in police” and more in other social services that don’t involve law enforcement.
However, when confronted about her anti-police op-ed by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, this week, Clarke denied ever backing the controversial leftist policy.
“I do not support defunding the police,” she said. “The impetus for writing that op-ed was to make clear that I do not support defunding the police.”
She added that she just wanted to “channel resources to places such as mental health treatment.”
Clarke also made black-supremacist comments while a student at Harvard, arguing in the Harvard Crimson that the human brain is structured in a way that makes black people superior to white people, and that “human mental processes” in the brain have chemicals that give African Americans “superior physical and mental abilities” and “spiritual abilities.”
When asked about this op-ed, Clarke claimed it was a satirical piece meant to mock the controversial book, “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 work that argued a strong predictive correlation between measured intelligence and subsequent socioeconomic conditions.
“What I was seeking to do was to hold up a mirror,” she said. “Put one racist theory alongside another.”
But during that same time period, Clarke organized an event featuring Anthony Martin, an anti-Semitic professor at Wellesley College.
Martin assigned textbooks that blamed Jews for the slave trade and was praised by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Clarke introduced him as an “intelligent, well-versed black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”
Now, however, Clarke insists that she denounces “anti-Semitism werever and whenever it shows up.” But just two years ago, Clarke signed a letter supporting Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory, who has a long history of anti-Semitism, arguing that Jewish people bore a “special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people.”
