MICHAEL THIELEN: DOJ Lawyers Wanted To Fight The Police, Not Antisemites

Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. love their pompous, virtue-signaling yard signs.

Long after the rest of the country was trying to figure out how to get kids back in school and resume normal lives after COVID lockdowns, well-manicured lawns in neighborhoods just outside D.C. posted signs proclaiming, “Thank you, Dr. Fauci!”

Now, those affluent homes display yard signs announcing they “Stand with Our Federal Workers.” The implication is that poor, career civil servants are being forced out of jobs that provide critical services, and that their lost job is a loss to us all.  The reality is that some of these career federal employees are not serving the government, or the taxpayer, or the American citizen, but rather the worst aspects of a bigoted, anti-American, far Left political agenda.  In no place is that more evident than the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.

Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, has publicly stated that when she asked for volunteers to fight against antisemitism, not only did almost no one volunteer, but many employees at the Department of Justice actually quit their jobs.  These career attorneys (which, in some divisions, historically all come from far left “non-partisan” groups) don’t think that Jews deserve protection and would rather be unemployed than fight antisemitism.

What many of these same career DOJ employees were enthusiastic about was taking over local police departments by way of “consent decrees” to force local police departments into accountability contracts that, in many cases,  effectively “defunded the police” and are not geared toward core functions of maintaining safety and preventing crime.

Neither of these department philosophies are surprising when you consider Dhillon’s predecessor was Kristin Clarke, who literally advocated for defunding the police in her Newsweek article, “I Prosecuted Police Killings. Defund the Police—But Be Strategic.”  That is what she effectively was doing at DOJ, strategically defunding the police through consent decrees which made doing their core jobs more difficult.

But at least Clarke’s writing was “strategic” on defund the police.  Her writing on race would make a grand dragon of the KKK happy, if you reversed the races.  Clarke once wrote: “Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities.”  Such an abhorrent statement would never be acceptable if you replace “Black” with “White”, yet it comes straight out of the black supremacy racist playbook.  While her supporters tried to pass it off as irony, others at the time pointed out “she has given us every indication that she does” believe blacks are racially superior.

Even while she seemingly felt blacks were superior to other races, she seemed to consider other non-Jewish races human.  While Clark was at Harvard and President of the Black Students Association, she invited infamous anti-Semite scholar Tony Martin to speak.  She called him a “well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”  Martin and other supporters of Louis Farrakhan literally view Jews as a non-human or sub-human race. Farrakhan infamously addressed his hatred of Jews as, “not antisemite but anti-termite.”  It was written at the time that Clarke “ knew that Tony Martin was going to come here and talk about Black persecution by Jews.”

Republican Senators tried to point out problems with Clarke’s nomination, but the Left literally didn’t care.  No Democrat or liberal group could possibly withhold support, let alone criticize, a black woman such as Clarke in 2021.

The Left became so radical that the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) definition of racism did not include antisemitism. Only following a public backlash to one of Whoopi Goldberg’s racist rants on “The View” did the ADL admit that the definition of antisemitism should include hatred of Jewish people.

Of course, the Left has a problem amongst its elected officials, too.  No one should forget how the infamous Squad wholeheartedly supported Kristin Clarke’s mission for “civil rights” at DOJ: defund the police and forget about the Jews.  And of course, Rep. Ilhan Omar was literally named Antisemite of the year, but even she pales in comparison to Rep. Rashida Tlaib when it comes to Jew-hatred.

So it should surprise no one that DOJ was full of lawyers who were more opposed to the police than threats and acts of violence against Jews.

Just as millions of Americans now realize we shouldn’t have placed so much faith and trust in Dr. Fauci, many may not want to stand with all federal workers as they learn that Department of Justice employees were working to “strategically” defund the police.

How many Americans (outside The Squad) would knowingly place a sign of support in their yard for civil rights lawyers who would rather quit their jobs than fight the rising tide of antisemitism in the county?

Michael Thielen is President and Executive Director of the Republican National Lawyers Association. www.RNLA.org

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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