What did you all think was going to happen?
When every election and every political debate is life or death, it only makes sense we'd start seeing political assassinations.
Another week, another politically motivated assassination:
The man accused of shooting two Minnesota lawmakers went to the homes of two other state officials the morning he launched a targeted "political assassination," a federal prosecutor said Monday.
Joseph Thompson, the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota, did not give the names of the two lawmakers but said the suspect, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, drove to their houses after he shot and wounded State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in the early morning hours Saturday.
Boelter, wearing an orange jumpsuit, appeared in a federal court Monday afternoon in St. Paul, Minnesota, and said he has $20,000-30,000 in savings and can't afford a lawyer. Magistrate John Docherty ordered public defense for him and granted prosecutor Bradley Endicott's request that Boelter be detained in federal custody pending a trial. Docherty also set a combined detention and preliminary hearing for June 27.
A federal affidavit released Monday says Boelter, who was impersonating a police officer, "embarked on a planned campaign of stalking and violence, designed to inflict fear, injure and kill members of the Minnesota state legislature and their families."
The suspect's final stop was in Brooklyn Park, where he shot and killed Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, inside their home, Thompson said.
As usual with this kind of thing, many partisans' immediate response on social media was to predict, with near-absolute confidence, that the shooter belonged to the other team.
And, for a while, it looked like this shooter might have been a left-winger and/or a Democrat, despite targeting Democratic politicians: he was appointed to a political commission by Minnesota governor Tim Walz - Kamala Harris' running mate in 2024 - and some "No Kings" flyers were reportedly found in his car, a reference to the theme of last weekend's anti-Trump protests.
Nope: turns out this guy was MAGA through and through, and his hit list included other Democratic politicians and even abortion providers:
Vance Luther Boelter, the 57-year-old that authorities have identified as the suspected gunman wanted for allegedly shooting and killing a state representative and shooting and wounding a state senator in a targeted act of violence, allegedly had dozens of Minnesota Democrats on a target list.
Those on the list included Gov. Tim Walz, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, U.S. Sen. Tina Smith and state Attorney General Keith Ellison, according to law enforcement sources familiar with the matter.
Police said the list -- which was retrieved from the suspect’s vehicle -- also named Hortman and Hoffman. Both victims are Democrats and Hortman was formerly the Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives.
The shooter’s list of potential targets also included the names of abortion providers and pro-choice activists, several sources told ABC News. Many of the Democratic lawmakers on the list have been outspoken about pro-choice policy positions, two sources said.
So, a Trump supporter went on a rampage against the very people his idol accuses of trying to destroy the country.
This is my shocked face.
Now, the fact that this guy idolized Trump doesn't make Trump directly responsible for the killings, any more than J.D. Salinger was responsible for the murder of John Lennon. Crazy people gonna do crazy things.
But I'd like to think it would result at least some soul-searching among Republicans, as to whether their party's increasingly hostile and conspiratorial rhetoric might be contributing to an atmosphere where political violence is the norm.
If the Based Senator from Utah is any indication, not so much:
Scarcely 24 hours after a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota was assassinated in her home, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, posted a pair of politically charged messages mocking the attack.
“This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” Mr. Lee wrote on Sunday on his personal X account, a message accompanied by photographs of the suspect released by law enforcement officials.
An hour later, in a second post showing the suspect, Mr. Lee wrote: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” in an apparent reference the Democratic governor of the state, Tim Walz.
By the afternoon, amid outraged responses to his postings, Mr. Lee issued a very different message on his official Senate account in which he hit all of the sober notes one would expect from an elected official reacting to a political assassination.
“These hateful attacks have no place in Utah, Minnesota, or anywhere in America,” Mr. Lee wrote on X. “Please join me in condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families.”
As for left-wingers and Democrats, well, congratulations on this particular shooter not being on your team. Have a cookie.
When Luigi Mangione was arrested for shooting health-insurance CEO Brian Thompson in the back, he became a folk hero with his face on T-shirts. A few months later, when Elias Rodriguez murdered two young Israeli embassy staffers in the name of a "free Palestine," Mangione was dismissed as soooooo 2024 in the fever swamps of the very online left, for whom a new revolutionary icon had emerged.
And now I'm expected to be shocked that the "bad" people have resorted to political assassinations, too? Get outta here with that noise.
To be fair, "left-wing" and "Democrat" are not synonyms. If anything, extreme-left-wingers come across as hating the Democratic Party even more than it hates Trump and the GOP, presumably because heretics and apostates and despised much more than nonbelievers. It doesn't appear that Mangione was a partisan Democrat, and Rodriguez actually belonged to an extremist fringe party.
But this ain't turning down the temperature:
And neither is this:
California Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell faced outrage on social media Saturday after a clip of him from a “No Kings” protest rally went viral on the right for his opening line about President Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump is America’s Hitler,” Swalwell said as his first sentence upon taking the mic at the D.C. “No Kings” protest event. The protest crowd cheered.
A seven-second clip of that moment was shared on X, and went mega-viral all day Saturday and into Sunday, with many of those responding or re-sharing remarking on his rhetoric in the context of the murder of an elected Democrat and her husband in Minnesota, and the attempted murder of two others on Saturday in a targeted attack.
Swalwell was quoting none other than Vice President J.D. Vance (in his pre-soul-selling days), mind you, but he sure doesn’t seem to disagree with that comparison:
Swalwell’s assertion that “No Democrat has even said that” about Trump is incorrect, however. Many comparisons of Trump to Hitler and the Nazis have been made, almost routinely, by Democrats, including by the former President and Vice President.
South Carolina Democrat Rep. James Clyburn, for example, is among those who has repeatedly made such comments, including that he sees Trump as “another Hitler.” And Swalwell himself has made many such comparisons over the years.
It’s also worth pointing out that by adding, at Saturday’s rally, “he ain’t proven us wrong in these first 150 days,” Swalwell implicitly endorsed Vance’s past description and applied it to the actual events of the current presidential term. He followed up on that by listing the ways in which he and the crowd see Trump as embodying the Hitler characterization.
You know my feelings about one Donald J. Trump. You know I really, really, *really* dislike Donald J. Trump. If you've been here from the beginning, you know I started this humble Substack newsletter in no small part because of my disdain for Donald J. Trump. And if you've been reading me since his inexplicable re-election, you may have noticed I often end my Substack pieces by saying how many days are left until his second term in office is up and we can breathe again. (1,303 as of this writing.)
Donald Trump is a buffoon, an ignoramus, an authoritarian, a reactionary and a wannabe fascist.
He is not Hitler, and if Swalwell actually believes he's not just a bad President (he is) or a corrupt President (he is) or even an authoritarian President (yep, he is) but the literal equivalent of Adolf Hitler, I have to ask what the hell he's doing wasting time with speeches when he should be working on his own assassination plot.
I'm serious. Well, I'm serious about this if Swalwell is serious about this.
If you legitimately, in your heart of hearts, believe President Trump is the equivalent of Adolf Hitler, the man who carried out industrial-scale genocide, brutally occupied and suppressed much of Europe and started a world war resulting in tens of millions of deaths, well, you've either taken up arms to stop him or fled the country before it's too late.
If you have done neither of these things, you are a poseur who's trivializing the horrors of Nazism for partisan applause and/or too dim to think of another authoritarian ruler with whom Trump can be more fittingly compared. (Viktor Orban is right there, you know.)
But maybe I’m being too hard on Swalwell, if such a thing is possible. It’s not like he’s the only person on the left who’s compared his opponents to Hitler. And it’s not like people on the right are shy about comparing their opponents to Hitler.
On the internet, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes.
I don’t want to romanticize the past. America has gone through many periods of political upheaval resulting in bombings, shootings, street fights and in one case an actual Civil War. (And wipe that smug look off your face, Europeans. It’s not like political violence and assassinations haven’t been a regular occurrence on your side of the pond for generations.)
Maybe what we’re seeing now is just long-standing practice, updated for the age of social media, and maybe that’s yet another reason no one should be surprised by any of this.