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The rhetoric and ideologies of right-wing extremists can lead to violence, and that appears to be what happened this past weekend.
Vance Boelter was charged with killing Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman (D) and her husband. He also shot and seriously injured state Senator John Hoffman (D) and his wife, and went to the houses of two other Democrat lawmakers who were not home. Notebooks with the names and addresses of over 45 government officials were found in his car.
"Political assassinations are rare. They strike at the very core of our democracy," said acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson for the district of Minnesota. "... His crimes are the stuff of nightmares."
There is still much to learn about what motivated Boelter, but we do know that Boelter is an evangelical Christian who consumed a lot of right-wing extremist content, exactly the sort of content we've been warning about here at AVC.
David Carlson, Boelter's roommate, who says they've been best friends since childhood, was shocked at the news, comparing it to "getting struck by lightning."
"There was a darkness that was inside of him. He must have kept it hidden," Carlson told Associated Press.
Boelter was "just a regular Christian and kind of outspoken," Carlson said.
Boelter's church condemned the shootings, pointing out that his actions are "the opposite of what Jesus taught his followers to do."
Boelter also attended an charismatic evangelical Bible college, which also condemned the shootings, saying the college "unequivocally rejects, denounces, and condemns any and all forms of violence and extremism, be it politically, racially, religiously or otherwise motivated."
Carlson also said Boelter was a Trump supporter who listened to a lot of the InfoWars, a far-right extremist and conspiratorial website. Its founder, Alex Jones, lost a $1.3 billion lawsuit by the families of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting for making false claims. Just this week, another suit was filed accusing Jones of fraud for trying to hide his money to avoid paying the Sandy Hook families.
Given Boelter's media diet and religious background, I encourage journalists and prosecutors to look into the extent to which apocalypticism and Manichaeism were part of his ideology. Certain politicians and religious leaders have been using this sort of language, describing political differences as ultimate battles between good and evil, God and Satan, with Republicans on God's side and Democrats fighting for Satan. As I warned in this newsletter just over two years ago, "The apocalyptic language being used to describe the 2024 presidential election could contribute to more extremism, including violence."
Beware Apocalyptic Politics | ||||||
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The apocalyptic language being used to describe the 2024 presidential election could contribute to more extremism, including violence. | ||||||
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I spoke about Boelter in a video posted to our social media channels this week, along with my reaction to attending the No Kings Protest, and a response to some criticisms we heard from some MAGA-evangelicals on X. I said,
My message to my fellow conservatives and fellow evangelicals, is this: While there is certainly extremist ideology and rhetoric coming from the political left, we desperately need to understand and address the corrupting influences coming from within our own tribe.
You can watch the whole video here:
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What Else We’re Reading
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Campbell’s group appears to be doing good work. As might be expected, it is also making waves in the conservative/MAGA-ish wing of American evangelicalism.
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This is showing us that for states with fewer college graduates (and perhaps more working class folks), the relationship between increasing levels of Christian nationalism and vote share for Trump is at its strongest.
These findings show that state-level Christian nationalism is part of the broader social context for Trump's populist appeal.
Christian nationalism is most powerfully associated with Trump support in states with populations who will have less economic mobility, that is, fewer opportunities to take advantage of higher paying, tech-related, white-collar jobs that require college
As of midnight on Sunday, June 15, we have data from about 40% of No Kings Day events held yesterday, accounting for over 2.6m attendees. According to our back-of-the-envelope math, that puts total attendance somewhere in the 4-6 million people range. That means roughly 1.2-1.8% of the U.S. population attended a No Kings Day event somewhere in the country yesterday. Organizers say 5m turned out, but don’t release public event-by-event numbers.
Study: “Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X’s Community Notes”
Abstract
We use crowd-sourced assessments from X’s Community Notes program to examine whether there are partisan differences in the sharing of misleading information. Unlike previous studies, misleadingness here is determined by agreement across a diverse community of platform users, rather than by fact-checkers. We find that 2.3 times more posts by Republicans are flagged as misleading compared to posts by Democrats. These results are not base rate artifacts, as we find no meaningful overrepresentation of Republicans among X users. Our findings provide strong evidence of a partisan asymmetry in misinformation sharing which cannot be attributed to political bias on the part of raters, and indicate that Republicans will be sanctioned more than Democrats even if platforms transition from professional fact-checking to Community Notes.
PsyPost: “Conspiracy believers tend to overrate their cognitive abilities and think most others agree with them”
A series of eight studies has uncovered a consistent pattern among people who believe in conspiracy theories: they tend to be overconfident in their cognitive abilities and significantly overestimate how much others agree with them. The findings, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggest that conspiracy belief may be fueled less by active motivations and more by a mistaken sense of certainty.
NBC News: “Some far-left groups have encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent, experts say”
The post wasn’t an anomaly. Since the start of the demonstrations against immigration raids in Los Angeles, the Unity of Fields X account has been pumping out messages urging people to wreak havoc in the streets and “give 'em hell.”
It’s part of a far-left online ecosystem that has proliferated in recent years, experts say. Some of the groups behind the accounts express contempt for peaceful resistance and glorify acts of violence — and even murders, like those of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and two Israeli Embassy staffers.
The leftist networks tend to be different from right-wing groups in that they are typically decentralized with no leadership structures. But they can be highly adept at using social media, and some have been working hard to amplify and celebrate the acts of violent protesters in Los Angeles.
“Whether they directly threw a Molotov cocktail is actually not as essential as the ecosystem of encouragement and coordination they have created,” said Joel Finkelstein, a co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that tracks online extremism.
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