Police in Minnesota are grappling with two different chases.
The first, most pressing one, is to locate Vance L. Boelter, the man suspected of impersonating a police officer and shooting two state lawmakers and their spouses in a “politically motivated” attack on Saturday.
The other is a race to get in front of feverish conspiracy theories about the incident that are spreading across right-wing corners of the internet.
It didn’t take long for the conjecture to begin after the fatal shootings of state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, as well as the non-fatal shootings of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, hit the headlines.
In regards to Hortman, right-wing conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich wondered aloud on X, “Did [Minnesota Governor] Tim Walz have her executed to send a message?”
Fellow fabulist Alex Jones, meanwhile, used a Saturday broadcast to make a variety of unfounded implications, including that Hortman was killed because she was considering switching parties and joining Republicans, and that suspect Boelter was a “high-level” Walz appointee and “No Kings” protest organizer.
Jones capped off the a misinformation session by reading from a social media post from a seemingly random, pseudonymous account that called the shooting a “professional hit.”
Such claims reached thousands of people, even as they defied common sense and all evidence that eventually became available about the shootings.
Walz was in fact good friends with Hortman.
Boelter was not a high-level ally of the governor, but rather a re-upped appointee from a previous administration on an obscure workforce board with about 60 members.
Hortman was not planning on switching parties, though she did help broker a controversial compromise with Republicans this year to scale back undocumented immigrants’ access to a state health program in order to keep the government open.
Further eroding the narrative of the shooting as a Democratic plot against Hortman, Hoffman, the other targeted lawmaker, voted on the opposite side of the immigration issue.
Evidence found in Boelter’s vehicle reportedly contained a hit list of prominent state Democrats and abortion rights supporters. State officials were worried about safety threats to the protests after finding papers marked “No Kings,” rather than the alleged gunman being a protest leader.
The man’s roommate also described him as a Trump voter.
Such reactions from a right-wing media ecosystem are no longer a surprise, but the Minnesota crisis revealed the depths to which even mainstream, Republican-aligned U.S. politicians and corporate figures were willing to encourage the notion of a violent left-wing plot well before all the facts had come out.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, less than a day after saying he condemned all “political violence” in America after a fatal shooting at a protest in his home state, appeared to mock the Minnesota tragedy, calling it the “Nightmare on Waltz Street” in an X post, an apparent misspelling of the governor’s name.
He also suggested that left-wing ideology had caused the shooting. “Marxism is a deadly mental illness,” he wrote. “This is what happens,” he wrote in a caption for a photograph of the alleged Minnesota shooter, “When Marxists don’t get their way.”
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio took a similar tack, writing on X: “The degree to which the extreme left has become radical, violent, and intolerant is both stunning and terrifying.”
Former White House adviser Elon Musk — who amplified conspiracy theories surrounding the 2022 hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi — again waded into the fray.
“The far left is murderously violent,” he wrote on X the same day he said he was working to reprogram X’s AI program Grok because it was spreading “leftist indoctrination.”
Dan Bongino, a former right-wing broadcaster who joined the numerous voices on the right suggesting something about the official narrative of the Pelosi hammer attack didn’t add up, is now the deputy director of the FBI, which is assisting in the Minnesota manhunt.
“The FBI is fully engaged on the ground in Minnesota and is working in collaboration with our local and state partners,” he said Saturday.
Local officials and media figures called on outside observers to stop speculating about the shooting, given the intense grief associated surrounding the attack and the many unanswered questions about how a man was able to disguise himself as a police office, shoot four people, and escape.
“In a different, saner world, they would be humiliated and slink away,” wroteJ. Patrick Coolican, editor of the Minnesota Reformer. “But the smart money is that during the next moment of national crisis and mourning, they will again lie for profit.”
Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, called on those engaging in such speculation to remember that “we have families that continue to grieve.”
“While everybody wants an easy answer, I would encourage everybody online and in our communities to not speculate on what occurred and what the motivation was for this,” he said during a press conference on Sunday.
“We often want easy answers for complex problems,” he said. “And this is a complex situation that our investigators are going to need time to sift through the information and evidence, and those answers will come as we complete a full picture of our investigation.”
“We must truly focus on what matters beneath all of our differences — political, personal or otherwise,” Mayor Ryan Sabas of Champlin, Minnesota, told reporters at the briefing. “We are all human beings, and every human life has a value.”
