Joe Biden’s choice to lead the Department of Justice’s enormously powerful civil rights division has a long and troubling history of pushing a radical, anti-white, and anti-police agenda.
Kristen Clarke has shared “crackpot theories” about black supremacy, defended unrepentant cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, partnered with anti-Semites, pushed Jussie Smollett’s absurd hate crime allegations, and called for defunding the police—and that’s just for starters.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson brought to light the bizarre racist views espoused by Clarke while she attended Harvard as an undergraduate in the 1990s. Her arguments pushing black supremacy were so offensive, even the famously left-leaning Harvard Crimson had to push back.
As the president of the Black Students Association, Clarke wrote a letter to the Crimson in 1994 detailing her unorthodox views on race science. “Please use the following theories and observations to assist you in your search for truth regarding the genetic differences between Blacks and whites [sic],” Clarke wrote:
One: Dr. Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.
Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin—that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.
Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites.
Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities—something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.
“The above is not an editorial from the Final Call, Louis Farrakhan’s free newspaper,” Carlson noted. “That is a direct quote from the person Joe Biden is about to put in charge of this country’s civil rights laws.”
Dabbling in Anti-Semitism
Even at Harvard, crackpot theories like that were considered deranged and dangerous. After an outcry on campus, Clarke suggested she didn’t necessarily believe what she had written. The left-wing Harvard Crimson didn’t buy that explanation. “Well, does she or doesn’t she?” wrote the editors. “So far, she has given us every indication that she does.”
Just a month later, Clarke invited the noted Trinidadian anti-Semite Tony Martin to speak on campus.
Martin, a tenured history professor in the Africana Studies department at Wellesley, was notorious for assigning as a primary textbook for an African-American history course an anonymously written work called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume I.
The book advances the conspiracy theory, propagated and spread by the Nation of Islam, the Black Muslim group led by Louis Farrakhan, that Jews dominated the slave trade. The three-volume set, published by the Nation of Islam, has been widely criticized as anti-Semitic.
Martin’s assignment of the book caused a backlash at Wellesley, and he responded by publishing a deeply anti-Semitic manifesto called “The Jewish Onslaught.” In it, Martin described a Jewish “conspiracy” against him, and an “escalating Jewish onslaught” against black people.
For Martin’s fans like Clarke, his Harvard speech did not disappoint. He attacked both Jews and Judaism as a religion. Martin, who retired from Wellesley in 2007 and died in 2013, spent his final years giving speeches to Holocaust denial groups on topics such as “tactics of organized Jewry in suppressing free speech.”
Clarke strongly approved of Martin, telling the Crimson: “Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.” According to Clarke, Martin’s anti-Semitism was based on “indisputable fact.”
Defending a Bona Fide Cop Killer
Kristen Clarke has never shed these views. They’ve simply become more sophisticated. Just last year, Clarke was fighting for the crudest kind of racial discrimination in college admissions, saying it was “madness” for the federal government to take the side of Asian applicants who had provably been denied college admission on the basis of their skin color.
Clarke is also notorious for organizing a conference to defend convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal in 1999.
Abu-Jamal brutally murdered Officer Danny Faulkner in 1981. As described by the Officer Down Memorial Page:
Officer Faulkner stopped the driver of a light blue Volkswagen at the corner of Thirteenth and Locust Streets for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Officer Faulkner had the driver exit the vehicle. As the officer was speaking with the driver, the driver struck him in the face. Officer Faulkner struck the driver back and attempted to take him into custody. As the officer was attempting to subdue the driver, the driver’s brother came running to the scene from a parking lot across the street. While Officer Faulkner’s back was turned, the brother opened fire, shooting him in the back four times. Officer Faulkner fell to the ground but was able to return fire, hitting the suspect. The wounded suspect was able to fire again as he stood over the fallen officer, shooting him in the face.
The suspect attempted to flee but fell to the ground several feet from where he had just shot the officer. When back-up officers arrived, they found Officer Faulkner mortally wounded and the suspect, murder weapon in hand, laying several feet away.
For decades, Abu-Jamal has been a hero and a rallying cry of the anti-police Left, despite the fact that Pennsylvania courts repeatedly have refused to overturn his murder conviction. Nevertheless, Clarke calls the convicted cop-killer a “political prisoner.”
She locked arms with noted anti-Semite and Nation of Islam minister Conrad Muhammad, giving him a speaking slot at the conference.
After graduating from Columbia Law School, Clarke joined the legal team defending Abu-Jamal. She went to work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund working for one of Abu-Jamal’s most prominent lawyers, Dego Adegbile, who ran the organization’s litigation department and led the effort to appeal Abu-Jamal’s conviction.
Barack Obama in 2013 nominated Adegible for the same position Clarke is seeking today. In March 2014, the Senate rejected Adegbile’s nomination in no small part because of the controversy surrounding his defense of the cop-killer.
Tucker Carlson had Maureen Faulkner, the slain officer’s widow, on his show Thursday night to talk about Clarke’s nomination. Faulkner said she didn’t think Biden had “done his homework” and looked at Clarke’s background when he nominated her.
“She does support the man who murdered my husband,” she said. Faulkner also told Carlson that after reading up on Clarke and her ideology, she has determined that “she hates white people.”
“That’s my honest to God true feeling,” she added. “And she wants to defund the police. She’s a vile woman, and she’s dangerous.”
https://youtu.be/35xmswtaZLA
Disseminating Hate Crime Hoaxes
More recently, Clarke disgraced herself by pushing actor Jussie Smollett’s patently absurd hate crime allegations in January 2019, criticizing the police as they handled the case.
Smollett, a gay black man, claimed that two white men wearing pro-Trump hats attacked him near his home in Chicago while shouting “this is MAGA country.”
The now-former “Empire” actor said that the attackers hurled anti-gay and anti-black slurs at him and wrapped a noose around his neck.
The “attack” was said to have happened in the wee hours of the morning while Chicago was experiencing sub-zero temperatures.
In fact, Smollett had hired two Nigerian friends to help him perpetrate the hoax, which was supposed to be caught on a surveillance camera, but wasn’t because the camera was facing the wrong direction.
As implausible as Smollett’s allegations were, Clarke pushed them on Twitter to her thousands of followers.
“Jussie Smollett was subjected to a racist and homophobic attack,” Clarke tweeted on January 29, 2019.
“2 white men wearing ski masks attacked him, put a rope around his neck, and poured bleach on him and as they yelled slurs.”
“Prayers to @JussieSmollett for a speedy recovery from this hate crime.”
Clarke also accused the Chicago Police Department of “demonizing survivors” when police investigators tried to access Smollett’s cell phone during the Chicago PD’s probe of the attack.
“To be clear—This is a BAD move by the Chicago Police Department. This is NOT how you treat survivors of a hate crime,” wrote the future Biden nominee.
“Stop demonizing survivors and casting doubt on their claims if you want communities to trust that you will take [hate crime] seriously.”
Smollett eventually was indicted on 16 felony counts for perpetrating the hoax, but far-Left Cook County State Attorney Kim Foxx declined to prosecute. He was later indicted by a grand jury on six counts of lying to police.
Clarke published a tweet in late February in defense of Foxx, linking to an opinion piece from Paul Butler entitled, “The Real Target of the Jussie Smollett Charges Is a Progressive Prosecutor.”
“Prosecutors use their discretion every day,” wrote Clarke. “But when a duly elected Black prosecutor, Kim Foxx, uses her discretion to move on from the Jussie Smolett matter, it’s a different story. A special prosecutor is brought in to undermine her power.”
Defunding the Police
It will surprise no one that Clarke is also a proponent of Black Lives Matter, and last year called for defunding the police.
“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,” she wrote in an op-ed for Newsweek last summer.
“We need to defund the mass deployment of cops inside our nation’s schools,” Clarke tweeted during nationwide riots that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year.
“About 45% of public schools had at least one SRO [School Resource Officers] during the 2017/18 school year,” she continued. “This feeds the school to prison pipeline and disproportionately harms Black and brown students.”
Clarke, who is currently the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, has yet to renounce any of her past radical positions.