His name was Cayler Ellingson, and he was 18 years old when he was run down by a drunken 41-year-old driver who later told police he killed the teenager because he was a Republican.
It is a crime eerily similar to the murder of Heather Heyer, the young woman who was murdered by a neo-Nazi in during unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 when he plowed his car into a left-wing march. The difference: the media will never blame Joe Biden the way they tried to blame Donald Trump.
Just last week, Biden commemorated Heyer’s death at a “unity summit” at the White House, which brought left-wing groups together to oppose the “MAGA Republicans” that Biden called a “threat” to America in his prime-time address in Philadelphia on Sep. 1.
Biden, who used Heyer’s story on the campaign trail throughout his 2020 presidential run, told her bereaved mother at the summit that “you’ve found purpose worthy of the life that Heather lived and purpose to help us stand united as she did.”
Biden also repeated his false claim that Trump called the neo-Nazis “fine people” in the aftermath of Heyer’s murder — a lie that has become known as the Charlottesville “fine people hoax.”
In fact, Trump said that the neo-Nazis and other violent extremists should be “condemned totally.” But Biden, the Democrats, and the media have blamed Trump for inciting hatred and violence nationwide based on the fact that he simply acknowledged some of the protesters on both sides were peaceful.
How, then, to judge Biden for his remarks in advance of Ellingson’s murder, in which he described a “continued battle” for the nation’s very “soul” against “MAGA Republicans” who “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”?
Trump did not wait to speak out against Heyer’s murder: he did so on the day it happened, and two days after that, and three days after that, when he called it an act of “terrorism” in the same press conference as the “very fine people” remark.
Biden has said nothing about Ellingson’s murder, nor has he been asked to do so, even though his rhetoric was echoed by the driver who killed the young man over a political argument. The alleged murderer “told State Radio that the pedestrian was part of a Republican extremist group and that he was afraid they were ‘coming to get him.'” Allowing for the man’s drunken state, and possible mental illness, it is hard to avoid the fact that his words and sense of alarm reflected Biden’s own rhetoric.
In the days leading up to Biden’s Philadelphia speech, after he told Democrat donors that Trump supporters were “semi-fascist,” the Biden White House refused to distinguish between “extremist MAGA Republicans” and ordinary GOP voters, because they were “supporting an authoritarian figure.” There is a more of a direct connection between Biden’s words and Ellingson’s murder than there ever was with Trump and Heyer’s, yet the media have not, and will not, hold Biden to blame.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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