Incendiary partisan discourse about the Minnesota murders and shootings ought to have reputational costs.
Just before noon on Monday, the New York Times updated its report detailing “what we know” about Vance Boelter, the alleged suspect in the shooting death of a Democratic state lawmaker in Minnesota and her husband, as well as the attempted murders of another local lawmaker and his wife. As of that writing, “the exact motive for the attack is not yet clear.”
There are, however, plenty of inferences that can be drawn from the suspect’s targets. He targeted Democratic lawmakers. He had in his possession a target list featuring the names of many other prominent Minnesota Democrats. “The shooter’s list of potential targets also included the names of abortion providers and pro-choice activists,” ABC News reported. A roommate described as a “close friend” by the Times indicated that the suspect “voted for Donald J. Trump last year and was particularly passionate about opposing abortion.”
As is often the case with individuals who allegedly execute assassination plots targeting total strangers, Boelter seems prone to disordered thinking. The effort to tease out a coherent ideological framework to which this alleged killer subscribed is likely to end in frustration. Still, it is incumbent (particularly on those of us who have made a project of anathematizing left-wing violence) to denounce what Minnesota elected officials were quick to call a “politically motivated assassination” campaign. If the suspect were a man of the left, as so many other recent political terrorists obviously were, it would be just as essential to confront his crimes and their potential implications. We don’t need to ascribe motives to this killer to condemn his bloody work and the delusions that contributed to it.
For the most part, the American political class responded with prudence and sobriety to this act of terroristic violence. Minnesotans condemned it unequivocally and on a bipartisan basis. So, too, did members of Congress and state-level officials across the country. “Such horrific political violence has no place in our society, and every leader must unequivocally condemn it,” wrote House Speaker Mike Johnson. Administration officials were quick to condemn the horrors in no uncertain terms. Indeed, Donald Trump himself agreed that such “horrific violence” cannot “be tolerated,” even if he took the opportunity to accuse Minnesota Governor Tim Walz of being “terrible” and “incompetent” while doing so.
The lack of any “buts” designed to dilute the intensity of these condemnations is noteworthy. If anyone sought to valorize this alleged killer’s attacks or excuse them because he was reportedly contending with some financial hardships, they do not occupy high office. At the very least, that is an improvement on the reaction to the premeditated slaughter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December.
In a report published in Axios detailing the extent to which the shootings have rattled Democrats and made them fear for their own and their families’ lives, one unnamed House Republican urged observers to “not jump to conclusions” before a motive is established. If “it ends up being politically motivated,” the source said, “ALL Republicans need to come out swinging against political violence.” Why wait? It seems rather clear that this individual sought to terrorize Democrats. Whether he had a comprehensible political program attached to his terrorism is no reason to keep one’s powder dry.
Condemning these actions with the vehemence that shows a genuine appreciation of the horrors of political violence isn’t just basic political hygiene and a prophylactic against more political violence. It also signals to one’s compatriots that the incendiary discourse encouraged in the social media age will have reputational costs.
What sort of discourse? Well, this sort:
Senator Lee might be forgiven for drawing overly broad conclusions from the early reports indicating that the shooter was once appointed to a state economic board by former Democratic Governor Mark Dayton. Many assumed that this must mean that the alleged shooter, too, must have been a Democrat. The accused killer’s inclusion on that panel, along with one of his victims, might speak to his motives. There are, however, few additional indications that this appointment was reflective of the suspect’s ideological affinities.
Lee isn’t the only lawmaker who has attempted to leverage this shooting spree for political gain. Stung by the weeks in which it became obvious that the most acute threat to social harmony was coming from the left’s fringes, America’s most irresponsible Democratic lawmakers are attempting to flip the script.
Murphy had company on his descent into the sewers. “I feel like Trump has really popped the lid off of the rhetoric and the sense of hate and violence,” Senator Jeff Merkley told CNN, “and promoting this type of environment is profoundly disturbing for all of us.”
This reaction was not reflective of the Democratic Party writ large. Even Representative Jasmine Crockett had the good sense to rely on her communications staffers for messaging in this sensitive moment. There is a difference between highlighting discrete acts of political terrorism forthrightly and without fear of recrimination and waving a bloody tunic before the crowd in the pursuit of political advantage. The former sacrifices social harmony in the pursuit of personal aggrandizement.
All the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, if the alleged killer turned out to be a devoted progressive, not one generic condemnation of the political violence in Minnesota over the weekend would need to be altered. What they lack in specificity, they make up for in the moral authority enjoyed by those who reject political violence in all forms. Only if you see violence as a means to an end would you adopt a different approach. That doesn’t describe many prominent Americans, but the fact that it does describe some is certainly less than ideal.