Every year, there are a number of terrible incidents in this country that, due to boiling polarization, leave everyone scrambling to quickly determine who they can blame. Most of the time, it’s a mass shooting or an assault on a government official. This past weekend, we got another such incident: Someone dressed like a cop gunned down a longtime Minnesota congresswoman and her husband in the foyer of their home. Now, authorities claim they have found the culprit, and the war to pin down his exact political leanings has taken off online.
Vance Boelter is accused of killing state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, as well as seriously injuring Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. Boelter, who is said to be the CEO of a private security company, surrendered to police after a brief standoff at one of his Minnesota properties on Sunday.
In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, rightwing accounts unsurprisingly sought to depict Boelter as a leftist. Rightwing Senator Mike Lee, who has a habit of saying really stupid stuff, referred to the suspect as a “Marxist.” Other conservative accounts seized upon the fact that some fliers for the anti-Trump “No Kings” protests were allegedly found in his car. Boelter’s appointment to a state working group by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz also gave red-pilled accounts ammunition to imply that the suspect was a radical leftist. Prior to Walz’ administration, Boelter had been appointed to a previous iteration of the same working group by a former Democratic governor. “So a Tim Walz appointee with ‘No Kings’ flyers in his car went on a shooting spree today and murdered and injured lawmakers?? Holy shit,” said LibsofTikTok on X, fanning the flames of conspiracy theory.
On The Benny Show podcast, Donald Trump Jr. similarly sought to cast doubt on the notion that the assailant was a Republican. “I have a feeling that leftist Tim Walz isn’t exactly appointing conservatives,” Trump said, during his appearance. “Apparently, he had the No Kings flyer in his thing. But he went after someone that didn’t just blindly follow Democrat, radical leftist dogma.”
The internet is obviously an ideological battleground and the victors are typically the ones who can spread their message faster (and more virally) than their opponents. Luckily for rightwingers, they have a platform (X) that is owned by a rightwing nutjob and Trump donor (Elon Musk) to help them out with that. It doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that when MAGA influencers insist that America’s latest spree killer is a deranged Joe-Biden-loving Communist, they’re really just hoping to hijack X’s algorithm and thus ride the viral content wave into users’ feeds before reality catches up with everybody.
However, in the case of the Minnesota shooter, the rightwing war on reality seems to have fizzled almost immediately. Indeed, the facts released by law enforcement have quickly eroded MAGA’s narrative. Authorities now say that Boelter was a registered Republican and had what appears to have been a hit list of other Democratic lawmakers. Police also claim that Boelter visited the residences of two other Democratic lawmakers, but was unsuccessful in targeting them. Authorities now suspect that the “No Kings” fliers may have been in the suspect’s car because he wanted to target those protests, the Washington Post reports. Trump’s own Justice Department has announced that it plans to charge Boelter with stalking and murder. Similarly, new facts to emerge about Boelter make it obvious that he is anything but a “Marxist.” A new report shows he was raised evangelical, owned his own private security company and has espoused “far right” views critical of abortion.
There are still a lot of hanging questions, like why Boelter—a married man who owns his own company—had a “roommate” that reportedly works at Papa John’s Pizza. That roommate, a man named David Carlson (who has also professed to be Boelter’s “best friend”), has been interviewed extensively by the press and has said that Boelter is “very conservative” and “would be offended if people thought he was a Democrat.” Carlson has also claimed that Boelter was an InfoWars fan.
Having lost the initial partisan blame game, right-wingers swiftly embraced a more conspiratorial view of the shootings that affords them a path towards denying any political responsibility. Alex Jones has argued that Boelter’s arrest is actually some sort of fall guy for the real killer. “Evidence Mounts that the Reported Minnesota Assassin Vance Luther Boelter is a Patsy Who is Being Framed to Cover Up a Larger False Flag Deep State Operation” reads a video on the professional conspiracy theorist’s X profile. Jones has also accused the “Democrat Machine” of trying to “To Tie [the] Minnesota Assassin To Infowars!”
“Democrat shills are insisting that Vance Boelter lived in a small house with a Papa John’s delivery guy who swears he’s a Trump supporter,” another account said, conspiratorially. “The reality is, he’s married with a family and owns on a sprawling property and a very large home.”
Democratic accounts, meanwhile, have wasted no time in capitalizing on the terrible optics for conservatives. “Buried 30 paragraphs down in this NY Post article about Vance Boelter is the fact that the Minnesota murderer who killed 2 DEMs, and planned to kill more including Gov. Tim Walz, is a registered REPUBLICAN,” wrote one notably Democratic influencer.
As the conservatives lose the battle for the political narrative, however, it’s unclear how the killings themselves may impact the actual balance of political power in the state. By targeting Democratic lawmakers, the assassin may have altered the state’s bitterly divided legislature, whose Republican and Democratic factions have been in a tug-of-war over the past year. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has until next February to fill the seat of the slain congresswoman.
