Kristen Clarke accused of stabbing ex-partner and deceit, but it’s not her most egregious act

According to The Daily Signal, there is a strong indication that Kristen Clarke, who now leads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, lied during her confirmation process in 2021. In written questions, Sen. Tom Cotton had asked Clarke: “Since becoming a legal adult, have you ever been arrested for or accused of committing a violent crime against any person.” Her answer was “No.”

Clarke, who was arrested in July 2006, allegedly attacked her husband with a knife, “deeply slicing his finger to the bone.” Her pedantic argument is that her record was expunged. But the incident meets all the criteria of being “accused” of a “violent crime.”

Listen, we have no clue how the knife incident went down. It’s a personal matter. Clarke says it happened after years of domestic abuse. Maybe her then-husband had it coming. Maybe not. She still lied to the Senate. And it’s not the only thing she lied about.

Clarke, recall, was ahead of the curve in spreading the racist pseudoscientific quackery that has popularized on modern campuses. As president of the Black Student Association at Harvard in the 1990s, she authored a wild letter to the Crimson, arguing that the structure of the black person’s brain made them superior to other races. Chemicals in the brain, Clarke went on, imbued the black race with “superior physical and mental abilities” and “spiritual abilities,” and “[m]elanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”

For context, Farrakhanites were gaining entry into the academic world in the late 1980s and 1990s. A few years earlier, Harvard’s Black Students Association had invited Leonard Jeffries, a proponent of the same melanin theory Clarke claimed was satire, to speak. Jeffries’ big addition to public discourse was theorizing that the Mafia and American Jews — “dogs” and “skunks” — had a secret cabal to destroy black Americans.

(Leonard, by the way, is the uncle of Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. The nephew is, of course, not responsible for the uncle’s sins — even if the nephew happened to defend his uncle and Nation of Islam grand poobah Louis Farrakhan when he was in college. No doubt, the skills he learned would come in handy defending Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.)

In any event, many of us flirt with stupid ideas in our youth. Instead of admitting to a youthful dalliance with phrenology, Clarke claimed the letter had been a parody mocking the controversial book The Bell Curve. The left-wing media, naturally, repeated this contention as fact even though there was zero evidence the letter was anything but earnest. No contemporaneous account calls it satire, and the Harvard editors who called her out for bigotry didn’t view it as such.

Indeed, only a month after writing the letter — by sheer happenstance — Clarke invited a Holocaust-denying fraud named Anthony Martin, then a professor at Wellesley College, to speak on campus. Martin argued the ancient Greeks had stolen culture from African blacks and that Jews were predominately at fault for the American slave trade, among other fictions. Clarke called Martin, the author of a book titled The Jewish Onslaught, an “intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”

That was all a long time ago. But 2019 is not so long ago. That’s the year Clarke signed a letter supporting Farrakhan fangirl Tamika Mallory — who reportedly believes many of the same things Martin did — a year after we learned that the Women’s March co-founder was spreading the kind of racist ideas Clarke embraced during her Harvard days.

In 2020, Clarke also penned a Newsweek op-ed titled, “I Prosecuted Police Killings. Defund the Police — But Be Strategic.” And, of course, she is free to take any position she likes on law enforcement. But when asked by Congress if she supported defunding the police, Clarke claimed that her column — which, incidentally, repeatedly features the words “we,” “must,” “invest,” “less,” “in,” “police,” in succession — was not about “defunding the police.”

None of these are big lies. Just a string of small, obvious ones. Of course, if you switched the words “black” and “white” in this post, Kristen Clarke wouldn’t get in the door of any respectable law firm, much less get through a Senate confirmation hearing. Rightly so.

Instead, this lifelong unhinged leftist, who spent decades pushing identitarian ideas after college, was confirmed by the Senate. To the surprise of no one, she abused her power and weaponized the DOJ, which targeted elderly peaceful pro-life protesters while giving leftists and antisemites a pass. That’s the real problem.