"Be ready to get your dukes up."
That's Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a sitting state law enforcement officer, on far-left podcaster Dean Obeidallah's show — telling his audience that if Republicans win the midterms, they should prepare to physically confront the results.
If a Republican AG had said that on a podcast three weeks before an election, the clip would already be Exhibit A in a congressional hearing.
Ellison's full remarks, transcribed and circulated after the interview surfaced on October 7, leave very little room for the "taken out of context" defense his office will inevitably attempt. "Don't act like, oh, they couldn't mean that. They mean it," Ellison said of Republicans, before adding: "So be ready to get your dukes up."
He then pivoted to the language that matters most — the part that sounds exactly like the rhetoric Democrats spent four years criminalizing. "But if they try to take our vote away, we should absolutely be in the street," Ellison said. "And I'll be right out there with everybody else."
This is not a random state legislator or a cable news panelist. This is the chief legal officer of Minnesota — the man whose office has filed 73 lawsuits against the Trump administration, the man who claims to have kept $7.3 billion flowing into Minnesota through legal action against federal policy. He's running for re-election on the premise that he is the last line of legal defense between Minnesota and the Trump agenda.
And his closing argument is: get in the streets.
The Gateway Pundit reported on the video, which shows Ellison casually deploying the same framework — election denial plus street mobilization — that the January 6th committee treated as evidence of criminal conspiracy when it came from the other side. Ellison suggested Trump would try to "steal" the midterms, then urged supporters to respond with physical presence. That sequence — claim the election is being stolen, call for people to take action — is precisely the narrative structure Democrats used to prosecute rally attendees, social media posters, and political figures who weren't within five miles of the Capitol on January 6.
Ellison did include the phrase "I'm one who believes in peaceful protest, First Amendment" — the same rhetorical insurance policy Democrats mocked when Trump used nearly identical language on January 6. Trump said "peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." Ellison said he believes in peaceful protest. One of them got impeached. The other got an MSNBC segment.
His opponent in the Minnesota attorney general race has been direct about the contrast. "Ellison doesn't represent Minnesota," the Schutz campaign stated. "He represents the radical left."
What makes Ellison's remarks something more than standard campaign bluster is the office he holds. Attorneys general don't just file lawsuits. They decide which laws to enforce and which to ignore. They set prosecution priorities. When an AG tells supporters to take the streets over an election outcome, that's not a protester's fantasy — it's a promise backed by the selective enforcement power of a state legal apparatus. Ellison has already demonstrated he'll use that apparatus aggressively against federal policy through his 73-lawsuit campaign. The question is what he considers legitimate when the streets he's calling people into produce the kind of confrontation he's clearly anticipating.
Every Democrat who voted to impeach Donald Trump over January 6 cited the danger of a political leader urging supporters to act on the belief that an election was being stolen. Ellison just did both — floated the stolen election claim and issued the call to action — on a podcast, three weeks before Election Day.
Trump said "peacefully." Ellison said "dukes up." One of them is still facing legal consequences.