The Minnesota political killings and shootings had the earmarks of a professional hit in a streaming video thriller. The alleged assailant, Vance Luther Boelter, sported a creepy rubber mask and a phony police uniform. Armed with five guns —including assault-style rifles and plenty of ammunition—his black SUV was outfitted with police-style lights. He ran a private “security agency” called Praetorian Guard Security Services, which held itself out as being “involved with security situations” worldwide, including the West Bank and Gaza. In social media posts and websites, Boelter claimed experience as a security professional with “training by both private security firms and by people in the U.S. Military.” There is no evidence to support these claims. It shows how Boelter was marketing his skills, possibly to others or maybe just to himself, in a killer-for-hire style smacking of cinema verité.
The plan claimed four victims: Melissa Hortman, a former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives and a current member of the chamber, and her husband, Mark, were shot dead. Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot multiple times and seriously injured. The elected officials were Democrats, as were other politicians on the alleged shooter’s list. Boelter’s hit list of persons, presumably potential victims, numbered in the dozens.
Missing from the usual scenario were an escape route and accomplices. Boelter disappeared into the woods near his residence, where he was hunted down like a mad dog. Crawling on his hands and knees like an animal, he begged for a few minutes of repose and then appeared to cooperate with the arresting officers. Professional criminals rarely resist arrest. They are submissive and silent, except to lawyer up.
Minnesota Democratic Governor Tim Walz said that the shooting “appears to be a politically motivated assassination.” The U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Joe Thompson, appointed by President Donald Trump, said that “this was a political assassination, which is not a word we use very often in the United States,” calling it an example of a wave of increasingly violent extremism in the country.
It’s irresistible to discern what political rhetoric or forces might have encouraged someone to do this. But that’s usually a fool’s errand. Reporters scrambled for political motives in the wake of a gunman shooting Representative Gabby Giffords, the Arizona Democrat, in 2011, but in that case, he turned out to be deranged, and his motivation was not determined to be some social cause. In this case, we still don’t know a lot.
But we do know the alleged shooter was in his late 50s, not a young man like the many infamous shooters of the 20th Century, like John Hinckley, Mark David Chapman, and Lee Harvey Oswald, presenting signs of mental illness. Boelter may have had a screw loose, but he, at least so far, didn’t seem like a ranting schizophrenic. His crimes had a meticulous quality. His list included prominent Democrats like Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota. There were also at least 11 Democratic legislators from Wisconsin, as well as others from across the Midwest, including Michigan, Illinois, and Iowa, according to investigators. Also, in the car were “No Kings” signs of protest against Trump and his policies. Did he intend to pose as a parader and then start shooting? Did he have a collaborator? Precisely, what was the motivation? We may get some answers in the coming days.
Acquaintances say he was a virulent opponent of legal abortion. The overwhelming number of persons in the “right to life” camp oppose violence, but it’s worrisome that, if this proves to be fetus-driven rage, it’s not the only incident this year. A bomber killed himself trying to blow up a Florida clinic that provides in-vitro fertilization, which some opponents of legal abortion oppose because it usually involves discarding unused embryos. It’s worrisome if the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, so cheered by legal abortion opponents, left some unbalanced sorts feeling that violence is their only solution.
But whatever the answers, the speculation over the shooter’s motivation has become deeply politicized. Senator Bernie Moreno, the Ohio Republican, was quick to blame “the extreme left.” Senator Mike Lee of Utah, also a Republican, said, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.”
Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat, noted that the MAGA movement has been “bathed in political violence” for the last five years. Trump’s encouraging the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and pardoning of the January 6 rioters, including those convicted of extreme violence, “became a clear endorsement of violence committed in his name.” When Trump or any public figure seems to condone or encourage violence, the crazies listen. Conceding that people of all political persuasions commit violence, Murphy nevertheless adds that no Democratic leader encourages violence as Trump and MAGA have done, citing “a straight line from January 6 to the pardons to the assault on Sen[ator] Padilla to Minnesota.” Alex Padilla, the U.S. Senator from California and a Democrat, was forced to the ground by federal agents after he addressed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at an event.
There’s no question that Trump has normalized attacks on the judiciary, so much so that Chief Justice John Roberts felt compelled to condemn the attacks without naming the 47th president specifically. Courthouses across the country are tightening security. Jodi Kantor’s recent New York Times piece on Amy Coney Barrett noted the myriad threats the Supreme Court justice has faced, some coming from the right by those who consider the Trump nominee a MAGA traitor. Is a wave of lone wolf assassins coming for those like state senators and judges who usually do not have security?
The abortion rights advocates and abortion facilities that Boelter had written down make the incident resonate with the Birmingham abortion clinic bombing, where Eric Rudolph, a Christian Nationalist, killed a police officer and seriously injured a nurse. He was ultimately convicted of that bombing and others in Atlanta and elsewhere.
Minnesota is a legal abortion state, but although it is the only state not to vote for a Republican in the presidential contest since 1972, it is a battleground state and closely contested. So, it was somewhat heartening that the state’s congressional delegation felt the need to release a non-partisan statement on politically motivated shootings: “Today, we speak with one voice to express our outrage, grief, and condemnation of this horrible attack on public servants. There is no place in our democracy for politically motivated violence.”
Former President Joe Biden condemned the atrocity, while Trump coupled his condemnation of the murders with a dig at Governor Walz, carping, “I think he’s a terrible governor. I think he’s a grossly incompetent person.” Perhaps it was Charlottesville in reverse—not “fine people on both sides.”
During the 1960s civil rights movement, a young black militant named Rap Brown went about the country urging armed resistance, saying that “violence is as American as cherry pie.” He wasn’t wrong in some sense. American political killings go back to Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy.
This time, too, it has a menacing feeling. As Hennepin County District Attorney Mary Moriarty put it: “It is a frightening time we are living in,” she said. “Political violence is prevalent, and the way that we talk to and about each other has raised the tension to unfathomable levels.”
Boelter faces federal and state charges for the killings. The state charges against the alleged gunman, murder in the first degree, may result, in the event of conviction, in life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, as the state, like most in the Upper Midwest, lacks the death penalty. The federal charges, depending on several factors, including motivation, could bring a death sentence.
As for accomplices, at a press conference last Saturday, Drew Evans, commissioner of Minnesota’s state Bureau of Criminal Apprehensions, said investigators aren’t yet confident Boelter acted alone. “We still don’t know if other people may be involved,” Evans said. “This individual is the person of interest right now, but there may be other people with him.”
Between the shootings that killed two and injured two others, Boelter reportedly had stopped at the homes of at least two other Minnesota lawmakers. Finding no one at home when he went to one, he moved on to the next on his list. An officer allegedly observed Boelter outside the home of the other elected official and caused him to go away. After an attempted assassination of Trump last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a politically motivated hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, the octogenarian husband of then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, at their San Francisco home, no one can be entirely sure if we have entered a new age of political violence or are just at another band on a long, broad spectrum.
It’s said that art imitates life. Here, life seemed to imitate art. But this was no movie by Francis Ford Coppola. People died at the hands of a monster.
