Cayler Ellingson: A One-Off Or A Sign Of Things To Come?
Catastrophe and upheaval often have innocuous beginnings.
A horrific act of political violence occurred in North Dakota just days ago, but strangely, the media hasn’t covered it much, nor has the Regime had much to say about it:
A North Dakota man charged with killing a teenager using his vehicle has reportedly admitted to intentionally hitting him after a political dispute, claiming the boy was part of a Republican “extremist group.”
Shannon Brandt, 41, killed 18-year-old Cayler Ellingson early Sunday in McHenry with an SUV in an alley, KVRR-TV reported. He is charged with vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of a deadly accident.
Brandt reportedly called 911 to report the crash, authorities said. Authorities said he was allegedly drunk at the time.
Court documents said he told a 911 dispatcher the teen was part of a Republican “extremist group” and was calling people to go after him following an unspecified political argument.
Ellingson’s mother told police her son called her before the crash, asking if she knew Brandt. She said she did but that she did not believe her son knew him.
An official stated there was no evidence Ellingson was any kind of extremist, though this doesn’t matter much, unless being an extremist alone warrants a death sentence of the extra-judicial kind.
If these were normal times, the handling of this case would shock me. But given these aren’t normal times and we’re living under anarcho-tyranny, it doesn’t:
Can you believe it? A homicidal savage ran over an 18-year-old intentionally, admitted to doing so, and is out on bail. How do you justify this? Don’t bother. We all know how this case would be handled if the roles were reversed. Remember this incident from 2017? From a retrospective on the incident earlier this year:
Five years ago, 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Heyer was part of a crowd of counter-protesters that filled a narrow, one-way street in downtown Charlottesville when an avowed white nationalist deliberately drove into the crowd. Heyer's mom, Susan Bro, recalls how it happened.
"He sat there a minute, he backed up, and then he sped forward across two speed bumps into a crowd of counter-protesters,” Bro says.
The impact sent bodies flying. Several people were injured. Heyer died.
Unlike Shannon Brandt, Cayler Ellingson’s killer, Heyer’s killer, James Fields Jr., was denied bail. Fields is currently serving a lifetime prison sentence for his crimes. Though he was hit with far more charges than Brandt, the death of Heyer alone and the context in which the killing took place most assuredly would’ve resulted in a long prison sentence, if not for life.
The Charlottesville attack sparked a serious moral panic in the country concerning right-wing extremism and White nationalism. It was a horrendous attack and so was the killing of Cayler Ellingson. President Donald Trump addressed the Charlottesville attack, condemning the assault. However, his trademark awkwardness and the media’s animus towards him created yet another moral panic where the president was viewed as giving cover to White nationalists - the infamous “both sides” remark. Unsurprisingly, the president didn’t say what he’s accused of saying, at least not in the way the Left tried to spin it. But the president did address the matter and the media spent a considerable amount of time painting a picture of a country in a fight for its soul.
As for our current president, Joe Biden (some folks need to be reminded daily Trump is no longer in office), what did he have to say about the politically-motivated killing of Ellingson? Well, nothing, except something-something-something-MAGA:
With each passing day, Biden comes to more and more resemble Ian Paisley, the fundamentalist evangelical minister who came to represent the Ulster Loyalist cause in Northern Ireland’s struggle between the mostly-Protestant unionists who wanted to stay with Britain and the mostly-Catholic Irish nationalists who sought communion in a United Ireland. Paisley stirred up extreme Loyalist sentiment against the Irish nationalists and is viewed as a major contributing factor in the outbreak of hostilities in the 1960s. Unlike Biden, however, Paisley never held command of the world’s most powerful country and military. And Biden, almost 80, will likely not be around long enough to partially redeem himself as Paisley did in old age, playing a major role in the peace and power-sharing agreements which ended the conflict in Northern Ireland.
I’ve talked about The Troubles at length to cite what I feel to be a good example of what the burgeoning American civil conflict will look like, but the causes and politics behind The Troubles have no real parallel with the U.S. However, the manner in which the conflict unfolded and took place, I think, has potential parallels. After all, Northern Ireland was part of the developed world, even if it were well behind the U.S. in terms of development.
President Biden’s rhetoric is certainly more measured than that of Paisley, but that’s not saying much, because the message comes through loud and clear: these people are a threat and the full force of state, military, and society needs to be mobilized against them. For all the outrage over Trump’s rhetoric towards immigrants, it’s an objective truth that it didn’t extend to the American people. Biden, however, has a history of speaking in a belligerent, often threatening, manner towards Americans:
Of course, anyone, whether left-wing or right-wing, thinking about taking on the government is courting disaster. That’s not up for debate. The issue is that a democratically-elected president who’s supposed to represent the American people, sees them as a threat, though having committed no crime other than insisting on having their liberties. On the other hand, Biden doesn’t take anything close to this sort of hard line against violent criminals who routinely violate the rights of innocent, law-abiding Americans. Nor has the media tried to force Biden to condemn or disavow the actions of others the way they constantly attempted with Trump.
Back to Cayler Ellingson, his murder must be viewed in light of Biden’s speech on the “MAGA threat” from Independence Hall in Philadelphia a few weeks back. I’ve shared my thoughts on it already, so I’ll just add that if we’re going to be consistent, Ellingson’s killing should never be divorced from this moment:
For a country so sensitive to the power of rhetoric, the idea that the killing of Ellingson would go unnoticed by the national media and that Biden’s rhetoric has been given a pass is telling. I’m old enough to remember when incidents like the 2011 assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was blamed on the rhetoric of figures like Sarah Palin and right-wing talk radio hosts. There’s an obvious double-standard being employed and it’s one that’s going to cost lives and further unravel this country.
It’s already cost the life of an 18-year-old, whose only offense seems to have been embroiling himself in a political argument with a real, as opposed to imagined, extremist. It’s bad enough, but the reason Ellingson’s killing is so disturbing is because it sounds eerily reminiscent of the murder of a young Catholic in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1966, an incident, which in retrospect, portended the literal troubles to come.
On the night of June 26, 1966, Peter Ward, who was also 18, like Ellingson, went drinking at a Belfast pub in a Protestant area of town. As he left the bar, he was shot and killed by a member of the newly-formed unionist extremist paramilitary group Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) for being a Catholic in the wrong neighborhood. I’ve recommended it before and I’ll recommend it again: watch the excellent BBC documentary series Spotlight On The Troubles: A Secret History. It opens with Richard Leppington, a friend of Ward, recounting the incident over 40 years later. As he says, “This is not good memories:”
At the time, Ward’s killing certainly shocked, though it didn’t drive the nation into a panic over impending civil war. But as I’ve tried to explain repeatedly, within two years, Northern Ireland had become convulsed by serious civil unrest. Within three years of Ward’s death, British troops were deployed to maintain order, resulting in the biggest and longest single military operation in UK military history, ironically on their own soil. Within six years of Ward’s murder, Northern Ireland was on the verge of civil war. It didn’t materialize, but what instead did was a low-intensity conflict taking places inside four decades which millions were forced to live with and suffer the consequences of.
Some readers may note that Northern Ireland had a more, shall we say, “robust” recent history of armed conflict without precedent in the U.S. This is true and, again, The Troubles aren’t a perfect parallel to our country. In 1966, a low-level insurgency by the IRA had concluded only several years before. It’s worth noting, however, that Northern Ireland had a large number of those with either fleeting or no memory of the previous bouts of conflict and unrest. For many of those who ended up fighting within the ranks of the IRA, UVF, or British security forces, The Troubles of the late-’60s-onward were their first and only direct experience with the eons-long conflict.
Obviously, hard feelings were more palpable in Northern Ireland in the ‘60s due to the relative recency of armed conflict, but a society can also become rife for conflict because it becomes too far divorced from the realities of violence. Sometimes, it’s easier to pick fights without considering the consequences because you’ve never experienced the consequences firsthand. Catastrophe and upheaval often have innocuous beginnings.
It isn’t the intent of this blog to frighten, but warn. Ellingson’s murder may end up being just an isolated criminal act, but we know the Regime wouldn’t see it as isolated if the the perpetrator a Republican and the victim a Democrat, a woman, a Black person, LGBTQ, take your pick. It’s hard to see how Ellingson’s death translates to bigger, more devastating events down the road, but neither did Peter Ward’s murder in June 1966. Everything seems fine until it isn’t, then the connection is clearly made.
Life comes at us slowly, then all at once. For now, rest in peace, Cayler Ellingson and Peter Ward. May your lives so cruelly cut short still have left your loved ones with cherished memories.
Max Remington is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentLoyalist.
If you liked this post from We're Not At the End, But You Can See It From Here, why not share? If you’re a first-time visitor, please consider subscribing!
When things like this happen, it should be understood that the family of the violent criminal is not off-limits. I'd hate to be related to Shannon Brandt right now. Terror is the only thing the left recognizes, we can use it.