It Doesn't Matter If the Minnesota Shooter Is a Republican or a Democrat

After Vance Boelter allegedly targeted Democrats in an attack, some conservatives jumped to claim that he was actually on the left. Why?

There are many questions to ask after a murder. The most operative: Who did it? Where? When? Who were the victims? What was the perpetrator's motive? 

When it came to the Minnesota shooting on Saturday—during which a man named Vance Boelter allegedly killed Rep. Melissa Hortman (D–Brooklyn Park) and her husband, Mark, and wounded state Sen. John Hoffman (D–Champlin) and his wife, Yvette—many public figures leapt over some of the basics and jumped straight to something else: the shooter's politics.

It's an understandable impulse when considering some of the victims were politicians. But the issue here is less that people asked the question—it's that they went straight to answering it.

"This is what happens when Marxists don't get their way," Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) said on X on Saturday, not long after the news broke. He soon followed up with another post: "Nightmare on Waltz [sic] Street," he wrote, with side-by-side photos of Boelter, one of him holding a gun and the other of him smiling. It was an apparent dig at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who is a Democrat. (Both posts have since been deleted.)

Lee was one of many who floated such assumptions immediately following the murders. "The guy that committed those atrocities this weekend is a Democrat," Donald Trump Jr. told News Nation. "The far left is murderously violent," said tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. "The degree to which the extreme left has become radical, violent, and intolerant is both stunning and terrifying," posted Sen. Bernie Moreno (R–Ohio). Rep Derrick Van Orden (R–Wis.) was one of many to share a photo of someone he claimed was Boelter posing at a "No Kings" anti-Trump protest; it turns out that was actually an image of a Texas man named Brian Trachtenberg. Oops!

The list goes on—and on and on—and does not begin to cover the long list of pundits who also weighed in. But you get the idea.

Those claims were strange, however, since there was no way to conclude—while the blood was practically still drying—that Boelter was on the left or identified as a Democrat, much less one who would go on to allegedly attack a bunch of other Democrats.

In making their case, some conservatives pointed to the fact that, in 2019, Walz appointed Boelter to the Minnesota Governor's Workforce Development Board. (Boelter was first appointed in 2016 by Gov. Mark Dayton.) That group is made up of "key leaders from business, education, labor, community-based organizations, and government," who are assembled to provide input on workforce issues. Like many such organizations, it is nonpartisan.

Meanwhile, details would start coming out that would prove inconvenient for Republicans' narrative. Boelter was a strong supporter of President Donald Trump, his roommate told the local press, something others close to him have confirmed. An evangelical Christian, he had been sharply critical of abortion and said that people who identify as gay and gender-nonconforming do so because "the enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul." Government records show he was registered as a Republican in Oklahoma. (Minnesota voters do not declare an affiliation when they register in that state.)

In other words, unless Boelter experienced a recent, secret political conversion, all signs point to the notion that he was, in fact, a Republican. Does it matter?

In some sense, sure. Prosecutors will be interested in his background in piecing together a motive. And the aforementioned Republicans, ironically, made Boelter's partisan association matter far more than it otherwise would have when they chose to spread what appears to be viral fake news. (Also ironic is that those same people often complain the loudest about fake news. Alas.)

Yet those conservatives simultaneously (and unwittingly) made the case for why Boelter's politics should not matter much at all. The premature posts made clear that their actual goal was not a righteous desire to get to the bottom of things or to bring justice to two people who had just been killed in their own home. It was to score a point in America's never-ending, mind-numbing game of political football. They just went the way of Charlie Brown this time.

One of the ways you win that game, apparently, is by trying to prove your ideological opponents have a monopoly on political violence. That's going to be an easy one to lose.

It is certainly true that some on the left have engaged in political violence. Most notoriously, left-wing extremist James Hodgkinson opened fire on Republican congresspeople while they practiced for the Congressional Baseball Game in 2017, leaving Rep. Steve Scalise (R–La.) critically wounded. And the George Floyd protests in 2020 had plenty of instances of property destruction, as well as violent clashes with law enforcement.

Extremists on the right, too, have contributed to this unfortunate issue. The same summer as the Congressional Baseball Game shooting, James Alex Fields Jr.—a far-right extremist who was registered as a Republican—drove his car into a crowd of people and killed a woman who had gathered to counter-protest white nationalists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The year after the Floyd protests, hundreds of right-wing partisans rioted at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.; several attacked law enforcement officers. Peter Stager, for example, was caught assaulting a cop with a flagpole and was recorded saying that "death is the only remedy for what's in that building." 

Potential political motivations behind some of the recent high-profile attacks are more ambiguous. Thomas Matthew Crooks, who came nauseatingly close to assassinating Trump at a Pennsylvania rally in July, was a registered Republican. Ryan Wesley Routh, who carried out the second assassination attempt against Trump in September, was registered as a Democrat until 2002, after which he switched to unaffiliated; he claimed he voted for Trump in 2016 and supported his reelection before later expressing support for President Joe Biden. And while Luigi Mangione—who allegedly murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—has been embraced by corners of the far left (something I have made clear I find disgusting), his political views as publicly expressed do not at all fit in that camp. (A sampling: He decried New Atheism, advocated for cartoonishly traditional gender roles to address falling birth rates, and wrote that he is grateful for, among other things, Ayn Rand's Anthem.)

That may be counterintuitive in an era of intense polarization, but it shouldn't come as a big surprise. People are not the sum total of their political beliefs. If there's a through line here, it's not ideology—it's instability. The common denominator is far more likely to be poor mental health than party affiliation.

One of the better things about being politically homeless is that the horror of political violence is largely divorced from the partisan identity of the perpetrator. It transcends the urge to default to "Republicans bad!" or "Democrats bad!" because it is bad, period. A person who commits an evil act—politically motivated or otherwise—does not speak for a party. He speaks for himself, and he should answer for it.