Sunday night’s Minnesota attorney general debate was a verbal “street-brawl” from start to finish, as one reporter put it, but at least three glaring lies spouted by Democrat Keith Ellison went unchecked by the moderators.
The first came when Republican Doug Wardlow attacked Ellison for his past support of abolishing the Second Amendment, which Ellison repeatedly said was “not true.”
“Yeah, let me just say that I am a gun owner. I own two shotguns and a deer rifle. I go pheasant hunting, I got turkey hunting. I believe in the Second Amendment,” Ellison responded.
However, during a 2014 appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, Ellison expressed support for the Democratic Party flat-out opposing the Second Amendment.
“Then why doesn’t your party come out against the Second Amendment? It’s the problem,” Maher said to his panel, with Ellison saying that he sure wishes “they would.”
“I sure wish they would,” he said, but called the accusations a lie during Sunday night’s debate.
Ellison also failed to be completely honest about his prior affiliations with Louis Farrakhan, who recently made national headlines for comparing Jewish people to termites.
“I absolutely denounce and dismiss and reject the views of Louis Farrakhan. I’ve said that many, many years ago. In the early 1990’s, Louis Farrakhan was a person speaking to issues of African American civil rights. At that time I thought he had some things he had to offer,” Ellison stated.
But by the 90’s, Farrakhan had already begun to establish his reputation as a prominent anti-Semite. During a 1984 speech, Farrakhan popularly described Hilter as “a very great man,” and later that same year referred to Judaism as a “gutter religion.”
Wardlow later attacked Ellison for routinely “standing up for” people who “have murdered police officers.”
“He’s a cheerleader for cop killers,” Wardlow said, though Ellison called the insinuations “false.”
In 2000, however, Ellison did attend a fundraiser for domestic terrorist Sara Jane Olson, who was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army and arrested for the attempted bombings of multiple squad cars, according to CNN. During the fundraiser, Ellison suggested that Olson was being subjected to “political prosecution,” saying her chances of getting a “fair trial are low.”
He later expressed support for Assata Shakur, whom CNN describes as a “convicted cop killer,” saying he’s opposed to Shakur being extradited to the United States from Cuba.
“I hope the Cuban people can stick to it, because the freedom of some good decent people depends on it,” Ellison said at a separate fundraiser for Shakur.
During Sunday’s debate, Ellison also claimed that he supports national borders, but was pictured in May 2018 wearing a shirt that said, “I don’t believe in borders,” and called borders “an injustice” during a radio interview.
According to the latest polls, Ellison leads Wardlow by five points, though other polls have been showing the race is neck and neck.
Watch the debate:
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Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
