WI-SEN: Likely candidate David Clarke (R) claims Jamal Khashoggi was a terrorist, not a journalist
Probable Wisconsin Republican Senate candidate David Clarke went on a rant during an appearance on “The Godzilla Wins Picks Show” earlier this month, where he falsely asserted that deceased journalist Jamal Khashoggi was not a journalist.
While discussing the merger between the Pro Golf Association (PGA) and the LIV Golf organization, the latter of which is funded by the Saudi Arabian government, Clarke took a hard pivot to comment on the death of Khashoggi.
“Everyone should just stop with the self-righteousness about blood money and this [Jamal] Khashoggi,” Clarke said. “And first, I wish people would stop calling Khashoggi a journalist. He was not a journalist. He would write guest op-eds for the Washington Post, and that’s it.”
Khashoggi was in fact a reporter for several news outlets in Saudi Arabia, working for several news outlets in the Middle East including Al-Watan and Al-Arab News Channel before joining the Washington Post in 2017 as a guest columnist.
https://heartlandsignal.com/2023/06/15/likely-wisconsin-senate-candidate-david-clarke-falsely-claims-jamal-khashoggi-was-a-terrorist-not-a-journalist/
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Words like fascist and authoritarian get thrown around too promiscuously. But there is no other way to describe David Clarke, who today announced that he was named assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. (The Department has not confirmed Clarke’s appointment.) Clarke occupies the extremist, anti-democratic fringe of far-right officials, even by the standards of the Trump administration.
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Clarke, a Milwaukee sheriff, rocketed into national prominence as a conservative provocateur by virtue of his rabid opposition to Black Lives Matter. Clarke is African-American, which has given him broader license to attack protesters in unbridled terms that thrill Republicans. He calls the group “Black Lies Matter,” or “black slime,” railing against its members as dangerous thugs. Clarke argues that not only does BLM go too far in its advocacy of criminal-justice reform, but that the cause itself is categorically illegitimate. He has lectured protesters to “stop trying to fix the police, fix the ghetto.”
Clarke’s ironfisted beliefs about criminal justice can be explained in part by his own career. He oversees a prison that is notoriously brutal. Four people have died of mistreatment and torture in his custody. One newborn baby died while its mother was shackled during childbirth; another prisoner died of dehydration, after the water in his cell was shut off for seven days. In 2013, one of his deputies ran a traffic light and T-boned the car of a civilian driver, who was badly injured. Clarke’s department charged the driver, who was actually sober, with drunk driving in order to cover up its own culpability.
It is not surprising that Clarke rejects out of hand any criticism of police misconduct. But his disdain for criminal-justice reform is not merely avocational. Clarke’s mind is organized around a worship of the virtues of physical force, combined with a seething intolerance for democratic dissent. In his book, Clarke proposes that the Department of Homeland Security — the department that he has been nominated to serve — assume police-state powers to round up internal enemies. “I suggest that our commander in chief ought to utilize Article I, Section 9 and take all of these individuals that are suspected, these ones on the internet spewing jihadi rhetoric … to scoop them up, charge them with treason and, under habeas corpus, detain them indefinitely at Gitmo,” he writes. Clarke estimates that the number of people to be rounded up in such fashion runs into “hundreds of thousands,” or “maybe a million.” Clarke is clear in his belief that the legal principles that have served as a bedrock against state abuse for centuries should be discarded. He would “hold them indefinitely under a suspension of habeas corpus” because “bold and aggressive action is needed.”
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Trump-loving 'Sheriff Clarke' implies Joe Biden used to get raped in high school showers
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/trump-loving-sheriff-implies-joe-biden-used-get-raped-high-school-showers/
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