For a man who once proudly posed with Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sure seems confused about whether Antifa exists.
In recent comments, Ellison dismissed the notion of any organized Antifa movement, framing it as a “myth” peddled by right-wing media. Which is curious, considering he was photographed grinning ear-to-ear with the group’s unofficial manifesto — a moment that aged about as well as milk in August.
It’s not that Ellison suddenly discovered nuance. It’s that the line between denial and collaboration has become the preferred real estate for blue-state bureaucrats. If a group helps destabilize your political opponents, the smartest move is to pretend it doesn’t exist — even if it once had a book club in your honor.
Minnesota has been ground zero for Antifa’s street-theater politics since 2020. The riots, the fires, the “autonomous zones” — all conveniently reframed as “mostly peaceful.” But when the heat died down, the same politicians who winked at the flames insisted there had never been a match.
Sound familiar? It should. We’ve seen this pattern before in Antifa: Money Never Lies, where the financial scaffolding behind chaos somehow escaped the fact-checkers. Or in The Franchise Model of Chaos, where decentralized networks of violence magically turned into “grassroots protests.” By the time we reached Pritzker: Facts Don’t Matter, it was clear — this isn’t ignorance. It’s orchestration.
Ellison’s denial fits perfectly into that choreography. It’s not just about memory-holing a movement; it’s about laundering credibility for a political class that thrives on selective blindness. These are the same governors and mayors who called in the National Guard after businesses burned, then insisted the destruction was “understandable.”
Ellison’s Antifa amnesia didn’t appear in a vacuum. In 2018, he tweeted — then deleted — a photo holding The Antifa Handbook with the caption, “At a bookstore and found the book that strikes fear in the heart of Donald Trump.” He later claimed it was a joke. The joke, it seems, was on Minneapolis.
The aftermath of that tweet has become political archeology — a fossil from a time when Democrats flirted openly with the fringes they now pretend don’t exist. When pressed, Ellison insists he condemns “violence from all sides,” a line that plays well at donor luncheons but dissolves under scrutiny. His state, after all, still bears the scars of what happens when denial becomes doctrine.
The real danger isn’t that Antifa “doesn’t exist.” It’s that the people tasked with protecting law and order now specialize in looking the other way. Bureaucrats like Ellison serve as the middle managers of chaos — too cautious to light the match, too complicit to put it out.
That’s the modern Antifa paradox: an invisible army that somehow keeps reappearing wherever there’s a camera and a city to burn. And every time the smoke clears, another official like Ellison steps forward to assure us it was all in our imagination.
Citations
- Trending Politics News – “Blue State AG Claims Antifa Doesn’t Exist After Openly Supporting the Group in the Past” (Oct 12, 2025)
- CBS News – “Minnesota AG Keith Ellison Faces Criticism Over Antifa Handbook Tweet” (Aug 2018)
- Snopes – “Did Keith Ellison Pose with Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook?” (Aug 16, 2018)
- Times of Israel – “Ellison Tweet on Antifa Handbook and Trump Draws Criticism” (Jan 4, 2018)
- AFP Fact Check – “False Posts Claim Minnesota AG Ellison Colluded with Antifa” (Jun 2020)