Keith Ellison’s Ties to Louis Farrakhan

Congressman Keith Ellison, Deputy Chair of the Democratic Party, has long been friendly with the Nation of Islam and its leader Louis Farrakhan. Rep. Ellison has denied it, but the ties are finally getting mild media attention. It’s not hard to imagine the frenzy that would erupt if it turned out that the second in command of the GOP were friendly with, say, American Renaissance.

Rep. Ellison and the Nation go back a long way. At a recent conference, Louis Farrakhan bragged that the congressman used to be a member, and sold the group’s newspaper, The Final Call. And Rep. Ellison does have a long history as an out-and-out black nationalist.

On February 2, 1990, writing under the name of Keith E. Hakim, the future Congressman wrote a column calling for a “black state” to be established in Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. He said blacks should “have the option of choosing their own land base or remaining in the United States.” Of course, having “their own land base” would mean dissolving the Union.

Five years later, in 1995, now writing under the name of Keith X Ellison, he called Mr. Farrakhan “a role model for black youth” and “not an anti-Semite.” In 1998, he was sporting the name Ellison-Muhammad and said he was “affiliated” with the Nation of Islam.

Today, of course, Congressman Ellison no longer talks about a black ethnostate and is content to live among white people and lobby for more wealth transfers from us. Yet his relationship with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation did not end once he entered public office as a Minnesota state representative in 2002.

In 2006, when he was first elected to Congress and evidence of his old ties resurfaced, he renounced the Nation, writing “I have long since distanced myself from and rejected the Nation of Islam due to its propagation of bigoted and anti-Semitic ideas and statements, as well as other issues.”

The “distancing” didn’t go very far. The Daily Caller reports that the congressman and Mr. Farrakhan appear in a video taken at a reception, in which they stand about six feet away from each other, casually talking to others at the reception. The video, posted by the Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia, is of a meeting that reportedly took place some time after 2010.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Congressman Ellison and Louis Farrakhan attended a 2013 dinner in Manhattan hosted by Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. The Nation of Islam’s own website covered the event and ran photos of both Mr. Farrakhan and Rep. Ellison.

Mr. Farrakhan says he had a private visit in his hotel suite in 2015 with both Congressman Ellison and Congressman Andre Carson of Illinois — the only other black Muslim in Congress. Rep. Carson has confirmed he was there; Rep. Ellison denies it. Someone is lying. Even the Washington Post thinks Congressman Ellison is dishonest in claiming to have cut Louis Farrakhan since 2006, awarding him “four Pinocchios.”

Rep. Ellison still denies everything. On March 18, in a note on the website Medium, he wrote, “I do not have and have never had a relationship with Mr. Farrakhan,” though he admits, “I have been in the same room as him.” The Daily Caller is laughing at this denial.

According to “The Muslim Program” on its own website, the Nation calls for a separate black state. It adds: “We believe that intermarriage or race mixing should be prohibited.” Imagine what would happen to a white politician who had even the most tenuous connection to a group that wanted a white homeland and an end to miscegenation.

Yet for Democrats, it’s no problem. Only a few weeks ago, a 13-year-old photo of Barack Obama posing with Louis Farrakhan was made public. The reporter who took the picture hid it so as not to hurt Barack Obama’s political career. Would it have made any difference if he hadn’t?

The Daily Caller reports that Congresswoman Maxine Waters attended a Nation of Islam conference and was even recognized from the stage. The paper also reports that Louis Farrakhan has met with several other members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Even the mild public hand-wringing over this sounds mostly pro forma. Everyone seems to understand that black racial consciousness is more or less universal. Needless to say, during the presidential campaign, Donald Trump was repeatedly accused of being a “white nationalist” — and a “racist,” “fascist,” “sexist,” etc.

Of course, I agree with racial self-determination. Every race needs a home of its own. Evidently, almost everyone else agrees, except for whites. But the Nation of Islam goes much further than that. Everyone knows about Mr. Farrakhan’s criticism of Jews. Far less well known are his remarks in 2015, when he said whites “deserve to die,” and his speech in February this year when he said “white folks are going down.”

The Nation of Islam also claims whites are inferior mutants created by a mad black scientist named “Yakub.” About the only thing sillier would be pretending race is a social construct. Of course, the mainstream media don’t seem to care about attacks on whites, and when Congressman Ellison is trying to repudiate Mr. Farrakhan, he criticizes anti-Semitism — not assertions that whites “deserve to die.”

White advocates don’t say other races are “devils” or were created by a mad scientist. We believe race exists, that it has consequences, and that whites have the right to pursue their own interests, just like anyone else. That should make us far more “mainstream” than the Nation of Islam, but that’s not the case. Our upcoming conference from April 27 – 29 will be filled to capacity, but so far, no congressmen have registered.

Even if we were to believe that Rep. Ellison has cut ties with the Nation of Islam, his extremism is hardly a thing of the past. He recently tweeted out a picture of himself seemingly endorsing a book promoting antifa, the far-left group that assaults its opponents. The book’s author, Mark Bray, explicitly endorses violence against Trump voters:

Our goal should be that in twenty years those who voted for Trump are too uncomfortable to share that fact in public. We may not always be able to change someone’s beliefs, but we sure as hell can make it politically, socially, economically and sometimes physically costly to articulate them.

Sixty million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Is Rep. Ellison endorsing a man who wants to inflict pain on all 60 million? You don’t even have to be a race realist to be a potential antifa target.

Our views will eventually be mainstream. They are in conformity with history and human nature and are morally unimpeachable. Hypocrites in the media have no right to tell us we can’t take our own side. Neither does Keith Ellison.