It Doesn’t Matter If the Minnesota Shooter Is a Republican or a Democrat
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
Article from Reason.com
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