Tappin’ on Ellison’s door

As we have pointed out a few times over the past 12 years that he has served as Minnesota’s Fifth District Congressman, Keith Ellison is not an apostle of peace and love. He made his name in Minnesota as an advocate of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. When he first sought legislative office in Minnesota, he ran as an acknowledged member of the Nation of Islam under the name Keith Ellison-Muhammed. It was his third version of a name expressing his allegiance to the Nation of Islam.

I laid out his history for the record in the Weekly Standard article “Louis Farrakhan’s first Congressman” and the companion Power Line post “Keith Ellison for dummies.” I took a look at Ellison’s treatment of the Nation of Islam in his 2014 memoir My Country, ‘Tis of Thee in the Weekly Standard article “The Ellison elision.”

Ellison denies all this readily documented history. He refuses to account for it. Worse, he lies about it. Ellison was still talking up “Minister Farrakhan” at a National Lawyers Guild fundraiser for former Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olson in 2000. He denies having kept up a friendly association of some kind with Farrakhan despite the ocular proof to the contrary. See Jeryl Bier’s Weekly Standard column “Has Keith Ellison Really Distanced Himself From the Nation of Islam?”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Hawaii v. Trump represented a victory for President Trump and another occasion for Democrats to continue the hysteria over the president’s iniquity. Ellison appeared as vice chairman of the DNC with Jake Tapper on CNN to denounce Trump as a bigot. Tapper took the occasion to consider the contradiction posed by Ellison’s association with Farrakhan. Ellison is not used to this kind of treatment; he was not pleased. “I came to talk with you about the Muslim ban and now you’re trying to put me on the spot,” Ellison complained. “That’s not fair.”

Ed Morrissey has posted an extremely fair-minded account of the exchange in “It’s On: The Epic Tapper-Ellison Battle Over Farrakhan.” I have posted the video below. It is too bad that Tapper had quickly exhausted his fund of knowledge by the time Ellison unleashed this monumental whopper: “I worked on the Million Man March and I was proud to do so. That’s it.”

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