Bottom Line Up Front:
The assassination and targeting of lawmakers in Minnesota flashes warning signs for America: the vitriolic rhetoric has “jumped the tracks” into violence. But there IS a way out.
WHAT HAPPENED
Hours ago police arrested Vance Luther Boelter, 57, after the largest manhunt in Minnesota history following his murder of Democratic lawmaker and targeting of her colleagues. According to Reuters, police recovered three AK-47s, a handgun, and a target list of MORE public officials with their home addresses.
This past weekend Boelter allegedly donned a police uniform and drove a Ford SUV with flashing lights to the home of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman, the top Democrat in the Minnesota House. Inside, he shot and killed both Hortman and her husband, Mark. Then he drove a few miles to another home and shot and wounded another state senator and his wife.
This was not random. Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz called it what it is:
“A politically motivated assassination.”
WHAT IT MEANS
Not long ago, I wrote about America’s slow march toward political violence:
“The Trump presidency unleashed a domestic extremism pandemic that swept the country. We are still dealing with it today, and it will lay the predicate for future civil unrest...”
This weekend’s assassination wasn’t the beginning. It was a continuation of a pattern we’ve been watching escalate for years:
The Capitol insurrection on January 6;
The attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband;
Assassination plots against the Trump and Biden, judges, governors, and election officials;
Armed standoffs and militia marches across state capitols;
And now, a targeted political murder in a suburban neighborhood.
This is what a powder keg looks like. And it’s not happening in a vacuum. It’s been fed by years of lies, conspiracies, and grievance politics in our country. As I warned:
“During Trump’s first year in office, the FBI investigated roughly 1,000 domestic terrorism cases — about equal to the number of foreign terrorism cases. By the time he left, that number had nearly tripled…
“DHS called domestic terrorism the number one threat to the United States. The ‘Global War on Terror’ had officially shifted from foreign deserts to hometown streets.”
What’s worse: support for violence is no longer fringe. And it is NOT just confined to the right wing of our political system. A national survey in 2022 found that:
“…one in four Americans believe violence against the government is ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ justified. Liberals and conservatives agree in roughly the same numbers. The researchers compared the results to other periods of instability in places like Northern Ireland, Spain, and in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s. They found that ‘community support for violence’ was the warning sign. When people believed physical attacks were justified, all they needed was a “spark”—a major assassination or violent incident. Then the situation would explode.
America is now a powder keg.
WHAT’S NEXT
If public officials don’t tamp down their rhetoric — especially the President — we could be headed toward the kind of conflagration Ulysses S. Grant warned about. After the Civil War, General Grant he was asked what could possibly split the country in half again. Here’s what he had to say:
“The dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.”
We’re not guaranteed to go down that path. But we’re much closer than most Americans think. To pull ourselves back from the brink, the answer isn’t just better public safety or faster response times.
The answer is civic courage. The kind that spreads. The kind that multiplies. People needn’t just avoid violence, they must stand up against it within their own political circles and repudiate it forcefully. Indeed, there is no greater threat to free speech than violence. If we give into the fear — and let it intimidate us into silence — then we are almost as guilty as the person pointing the gun.
So how do we start?
I said it recently in a conversation with Steve Schmidt (video above). We start talking about the danger of political violence around 4min30sec. I’ll repeat here what I said to Steve about combating it — and combating threats to free speech:
“What makes it easier to do the right thing is when you know you have company. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, I tried really hard to get a lot of my former colleagues from the Trump Administration to come forward. And many did. And that made it easier. Because there is strength in numbers. It’s hard to stand up as an individual because you’re afraid of being attacked. You’re afraid of being socially isolated. You’re afraid of having your life destroyed. But it’s a lot easier to do if you have people standing to your left and to your right…”
And most importantly:
“It’s the only way we pull ourselves out of a hole in this country: if we lower the price of dissent by increasing the supply. YOU are the supply. Voters are the supply. The American people are the supply. And we can lower the price by getting out there, together.”
The citizenry has always been the final guardrail of democracy. But only if we show up…only if we speak up…and only if we stand together. This weekend we saw the embers of that collective action, as millions of Americans marched in defense of free speech. We need more of that civic courage — with abundance and regularity.
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