Why Doesn’t The Media Care That Rep. Keith Ellison Still Has a Relationship With Louis Farrakhan?

It’s pretty remarkable how much Keith Ellison can get away with.

Ellison is certainly a prominent Democrat. As a congressman from Minnesota and more recently the deputy chair at the Democratic National Committee, he’s clearly an influential figure in the Democratic Party.

But his journey to becoming one of this country’s top Democrats didn’t come without controversy. As a former member of the Nation of Islam, which was founded by anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, Ellison defended the bigoted leader in columns he wrote as a student at the University of Minnesota, referring to him as a “role model for black youth.” He once called for a separate country for Black Americans. He reportedly ranted to classmates that Jews were “oppressors” to minorities and expressed hostile rhetoric towards Israel.  He also defended convicted domestic terrorist Sara Jane Olson and convicted cop killer Assata Shakur (and also praised Fidel Castro for giving her asylum in Cuba).

Miraculously, Ellison managed to clear up his controversies, at least the ones regarding his involvement with the Nation of Islam and his relationship to Farrakhan, with a simple letter he wrote to Jewish leaders back in 2006 when he first ran for Congress.

“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,” Ellison wrote at the time. “I reject and condemn the anti-Semetic statements and actions of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammed.”

That was apparently a satisfactory denunciation of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam because he was ultimately elected as a representative and repeated such a defense in late 2016 when campaigning to become the next DNC chairman, which he landed the #2 position.

Yet, Ellison didn’t completely cut ties with Farrakhan in the 90s like he said he did. In fact, they attended a private dinner together in 2013.

Unveiled in an op-ed by The Wall Street Journal last week, an article from Farrakhan’s own publication The Final Call documented a dinner Ellison and Farrakhan attended with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during his visit to the United States and included photographs of all three of them at the event. It’s now being reported that Ellison has met with the anti-Semite on at least an additional three separate occasions since taking office — including one private visit to Farrakhan’s hotel room that Farrakhan himself recalled occurring as recently as 2015.

If you’re not familiar with him, Louis Farrakhan is essentially a black David Duke. He’s called white people “potential humans,” Adolf Hitler a “very great man,” and has a history of extreme anti-semitism (he once literally blamed Jews for 9/11) The man is so politically toxic that even a journalist knew that sharing a 2005 photograph of him that recently surfaced of him and then-Senator Barack Obama would have possibly derailed his 2008 presidential campaign at the time. Farrakhan even took credit for “raising [Ellison] spiritually” into a “higher level of consciousness.”

So why is this a news story? Well for one thing, Ellison said he was “distancing” himself from Farrakhan when he first ran for office in 2006, and had “disavowed” him again in 2016 when he campaigned to head the DNC.

“These men organize by sowing hatred and division, including anti-Semitism, homophobia and a chauvinistic model of manhood,” Ellison wrote. “I disavowed them long ago, condemned their views and apologized.”

Well, you can conclude one of two things; either Ellison does not remember meeting with Farrakhan several times as a congressman or he’s a flat-out liar. My money is on the latter.

There’s been literally zero coverage about Ellison’s dinner with Farrakhan and Rouhani from the prestige media. Outside of conservative sites and various Jewish news outlets, this story has been neglected by the same organizations — from CNN to MSNBC, The New York Times and Washington Post — that tout their mission to seek the truth in the era of Donald Trump. Sure, it’s been a chaotic news cycle between the Florida shooting, the latest Mueller indictments, and Trump’s reported affair with a Playboy playmate, but we shouldn’t pretend that the media can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

It’s been now over a week since this story broke and the media’s silence is inexcusable.

Just think how the media would react if the deputy chair at the RNC had dinner with David Duke. Or how they’d react if a prominent Republican on Capitol Hill like Trey Gowdy, Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, or even Speaker Paul Ryan had frequent contact with the former Grand Wizard. It would cause a media firestorm that would surely end with a resignation.

However, Keith Ellison has so far been immune to such criticism by the mainstream media.

This is the same congressman that recently took a selfie while holding up an Antifa handbook with pride in an attempt to troll the president. He literally aligned himself with a group that has been classified by the Department of Homeland Security as a “domestic terrorist organization.” And even for that, he faced no blowback whatsoever.

And when asked by the Minneapolis Star Tribune about his 2013 meeting, Ellison’s spokesman said the following:

“Rep. Ellison knows Minnesotans understand that standing in a room doesn’t mean you endorse every view of everyone else in that room, and wishes the space being used to print this story was instead spent calling more attention to the scourge of white nationalist gun violence, or the deportation threat facing hundreds of thousands of young immigrants across our country.”

If Paul Ryan used that excuse about a meeting with David Duke, there’d be wall-to-wall coverage on CNN.

Is it simply the fact that Ellison’s a Democrat that the media is treating him with kid gloves? Perhaps. Maybe they fear retaliation of him or his supporters using the race card or even the anti-Muslim card against them. Whatever the case may be, Ellison deserves to be chastised and the lack of coverage only reflects on the out-of-touch media that’s been tainted with bias and double standards.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.