According to Ellison, Soliah/Olson was a social justice warrior fighting the good fight. The case had nothing to do with the attempted murder of police officers; that was but a pretext. The Los Angeles district attorney was pursuing the case in bad faith: “This is not about justice. This is not about accountability, this is not about public safety. THIS is about SYMBOLISM. This is about MAKING A POINT. This is about saying to you and to me that we are going to get you if you ever try to stand against what we’re about. WE’RE GOING TO GET YOU. And we’re going to lock you up and we don’t care how long it takes, we’re going to get you. There might be people who get book deals, or there might be private revenge, there might be all these things, but no prosecution like this would really float unless it had a very important, symbolic meaning that tied it together for the people involved in it. And it is the idea that the people who fought for social justice and to elevate humanity in the 60’s and 70’s were WRONG! They were wrong and we’re going to prove it because we’re going TO LOCK HER UP. That’s what it’s about.”
In 2006 Greg Lang dug up the text of Ellison’s speech as edited by Ellison himself and posted it on a site Lang dedicated to the Soliah case. Fearing that the site might disappear, as it has, I posted the speech in its entirety here on Power Line. The whole thing is indeed worth reading. To say the least, it reveals Ellison to be hostile to impartial enforcement of the law and indifferent to the lives of police officers. It is a shocking speech that betrays his unfitness for any public office, let alone attorney general. Then Star Tribune metro columnist Katherine Kersten devoted a column to Ellison’s National Lawyers Guild speech at the time Lang dug it up. When she sought out Ellison he declined to comment on his current view of Soliah/Olson or Chesimard/Shakur and he has not been asked about it since.
From the time of his third year at the University of Minnesota Law School (1989–1990) through the 2000 National Lawyers Guild speech Ellison was a hustler peddling the toxic Nation of Islam line. By 2002, when he ran a second time for office as a state legislator, he had jettisoned the Nation of Islam baggage. The vicious radicalism remained.
Vicious radicalism, you say?
