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    ‘Our era of violent populism’: the US has entered a new phase of political violence

    It has been a grim couple of weeks in the US, as multiple acts of politically motivated violence have dominated headlines and sparked fears that a worrying new normal has taken hold in America.Last Saturday, a man disguised as a police officer attacked two Democratic legislators at their homes in Minnesota, killing a state representative and her husband, and wounding another lawmaker and his wife. The alleged murderer was planning further attacks, police said, on local politicians and abortion rights advocates.The same day, during national “No Kings” demonstrations against the Trump administration, there was a spate of other violence or near-violence across the US. After a man with a rifle allegedly charged at protesters in Utah, an armed “safety volunteer” associated with the protest fired at the man, wounding him and killing a bystander. When protesters in California surrounded a car, the driver sped over a protester’s leg. And a man was arrested in Arizona after brandishing a handgun at protesters.Later in the week, a Jewish lawmaker in Ohio reported that he was “run off the road” by a man who waved a Palestinian flag at him. Police in New York also said they were investigating anti-Muslim threats to the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.The political temperature is dangerously high – and shows few signs of cooling.View image in fullscreen“We are in a historically high period of American political violence,” Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told the Guardian. “I call it our ‘era of violent populism’. It’s been about 50 years since we’ve seen something like this. And the situation is getting worse.”He said the US is in a years-long stretch of political violence that started around the time of Donald Trump’s first election, with perpetrators coming from both the right and the left.In 2017, the first year of Trump’s first presidency, a leftwing activist opened fire on a group of Republican politicians and lobbyists playing baseball, wounding four people. In 2021, pro-Trump rioters attacked the US Capitol. In 2022, a conspiracy theorist attacked then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer, and a man angry about the US supreme court’s rightward drift tried to assassinate justice Brett Kavanaugh. Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024; the Pennsylvania gunman’s bullet missed Trump’s face by a few centimeters.The Israel-Gaza war has contributed to the tension. Last month a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC; the alleged perpetrator, an American-born leftwing radical, described the killings as an act of solidarity with Palestinians. A couple weeks later a man in Colorado attacked a group of pro-Israel demonstrators with molotov cocktails.Pape directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which studies terrorism and conflict. He noted in a recent piece in the New York Times that his research has found rising support among both left- and right-leaning Americans for the “use of force” to achieve political means.The May survey was “the most worrisome yet”, he wrote. “About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump’s agenda. These numbers more than doubled since last fall, when we asked similar questions.”Americans are not only polarized, but forming into distinct and visible “mobilized blocs”, Pape says. He also notes that acts of political violence seem to be becoming “increasingly premeditated”.Quantifying political violence or “domestic terrorism” can be difficult, Pape said, because the FBI does not track it in a consistent manner. The best proxy, he said, is often prosecuted threats against members of Congress. Those “have gone up dramatically, especially since the first year of Trump’s first term”, he said, adding that the threats have been “essentially 50-50” against Democratic and Republican lawmakers.View image in fullscreenThe US Capitol police, which protects Congress, reported in April that the number of threat assessment cases it has investigated “has climbed for the second year in a row”.While both sides have committed violence, Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, thinks that Republican political leaders carry more culpability for the violent climate. “We haven’t seen the mainstream political left embrace political violence in the same way,” he said.He noted that while Luigi Mangione, the man who allegedly murdered a healthcare insurance executive last year, could be considered leftwing, he was “more of an anti-system extremist” who also hated the Democratic party. In contrast, “when you look at the rhetoric and language being used in neo-Nazi mass shooter manifestos, it’s almost identical to Stephen Miller posts”, he added, referring to the White House aide.Quantifying violence is also tricky because it can be difficult to determine ideological motives or causal relations. People died during the 2020 George Floyd protests and riots, but it is not clear to what extent all of the deaths were directly related to the unrest. In 2023, a transgender shooter attacked a Christian private school in Tennessee, killing three children and three adults; while the attacker had railed against “little crackers” with “white privileges”, investigators concluded that the attack was most motivated by a desire for notoriety.This April, someone set the Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s mansion on fire while he and his family, who were unharmed, slept inside. Although Shapiro is Jewish and the alleged perpetrator made remarks condemning Israel, the suspect’s family members have said that he has a long history of mental health problems.In other cases, acts of violence are ideological but don’t fall on to conventional political lines. Earlier this year, a man bombed a fertility clinic in California; the suspect was an anti-natalist – or self-described “pro-mortalist” – who was philosophically opposed to human reproduction.Pape believes that the current wave of violence and tumult is only partly a reaction to Trump’s polarizing politics.“He’s as much a symptom as a cause,” he said. The more important factor is “a period of high social change … as the US moves from a white-majority country to a white-minority country. And that’s been going drip, drip, drip since the early 1970s, but around 10 years ago we started to go through the transition generation”, Pape said.The closest analogue is probably the US in the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement, the hippy counterculture, the Vietnam war, and Black and Latino nationalism were accompanied by a wave of political assassinations and other violence as white supremacist groups and others harassed and killed civil rights leaders.There was also a wave of leftwing violence. Domestic terror groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground attacked judges, police officers and government offices. In 1972, according to Bryan Burrough’s 2015 book Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, there were over 1,900 domestic bombings in the US, though most were not fatal.Later, the 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of the anti-government militia movement, which culminated in Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma federal building. That bombing killed 168 people, and is the most deadly domestic terror attack in US history.View image in fullscreenLewis thinks that violent rhetoric is now even more normalized – that there is increasing tolerance of the idea that “political violence, targeted hate, harassment, is OK if it’s your in-group … against the ‘other side’”.American political leaders need to condemn political violence, Pape said, ideally in a bipartisan way and in forms that show prominent Democratic and Republican figures physically side-by-side: “The absolute number one thing that should happen … is that president Trump and governor Newsom do a joint video condemning political violence.”After Melissa Hortman, the Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was killed last weekend, Mike Lee, a Utah senator, published social media posts making light of her death and insinuating it was the fault of the state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz. Lee later deleted the posts, but has not apologized.Walter Hudson, a Republican state representative in Minnesota who was acquainted with Hortman, said he has been thinking about the relationship between political rhetoric and violence since Hortman’s death.“I think it’s fair to say that nobody on either side of the aisle, no matter the language they’ve used, would have ever intended or imagined that something they said was going to prompt somebody to go and commit a vicious and heartless act like the one we saw over the weekend,” he said. He acknowledged that rhetoric can be a factor in violence, however.“I don’t know how we unwind this,” he said. “The optimistic side of me hopes that it’s going to translate into a different approach.” More

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    Suspect in Minnesota killings accused of being ‘prepper’ preparing ‘for war’

    The man charged in connection with the recent shootings of two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses was a doomsday “prepper” who instructed his family to “prepare for war” as he tried to evade capture, according to new court filings.Vance Boelter, 57, faces multiple federal and state murder charges after allegedly shooting dead the Democratic Minnesota state house speaker emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in the early hours of 14 June. Boelter is also accused of shooting and seriously wounding the Democratic state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, about 90 minutes earlier.In a newly unsealed affidavit first reported by the local news station WCCO and seen by the Guardian, law enforcement pulled over Boelter’s wife and four children hours after the shootings near Lake Mille Lacs, about 75 miles (120km) north of the Twin Cities, apparently en route to Wisconsin.Boelter’s wife consented to a search of her vehicle, where law enforcement located a revolver in the glove box and a semi-automatic pistol in a cooler. Police also found a safe, Boelter’s and the children’s passports, and at least $10,000 in cash, according to the affidavit by FBI agent Terry Getsch.Boelter’s wife told investigators that her husband had recently sent a message to a group text thread with their children, which “stated something to the effect of they should prepare for war, they needed to get out of the house and people with guns may be showing up to the house”, wrote Getsch.According to the affidavit dated 14 June, Boelter and his wife were preppers – a term which refers to people who stockpile materials such as weapons, food and gasoline. Preppers’ purpose for doing that is to survive a future major disaster or catastrophe such as war or economic or political collapse.At some point earlier, Boelter had given his wife a “bailout plan” – instructions of what to do and where to go in case of “exigent circumstances”. The plan specified that the family go to her mother’s residence in Spring Brook, Wisconsin.She also told investigators that her husband “has a business partner from Worthington” who lives in the state of Washington. The two were “partners … in Red Lion, a security company and fishing outfit in Congo, Africa”, the affidavit states.The deadly shootings took place as millions of people prepared to take to the streets to protest against the Trump administration and its assault on free speech, peaceful assembly and due process rights embedded in the US constitution.Getsch wrote the affidavit during what became the largest ever manhunt in Minnesota state history, when he believed the gunman may have fled state lines. Boelter was eventually captured two days later while trying to evade arrest by fleeing into a wooded area close to his home.The affidavit does not imply that Boelter’s wife knew about her husband’s alleged plans to attack the lawmakers. She has not been charged with any crime.Boelter was disguised as a police officer and drove a black SUV with a license plate that said “police”. He allegedly ambushed the lawmakers at home in the middle of the night, banging on their front doors armed with a 9mm handgun, and wearing a black tactical vest and silicone mask.He exchanged fire with police at about 3.30am on Saturday outside the Hortmans’ home but managed to flee the scene, according to a federal criminal complaint.According to separate court documents obtained by WCCO on Friday, law enforcement found a storage locker rented by Boelter in Minneapolis on 10 June. He had last “used his access code” for the locker the day before the shootings.Investigators later found empty rifle cases, gun-cleaning supplies and a bike inside the locker.Law enforcement found a “hit list” of individuals inside what they believe was Boelter’s vehicle. It included Hortman, Hoffman and several other Democratic lawmakers, as well as reproductive rights advocates.In a statement released on Thursday, the Hoffman family recounted the terrifying attack. The statement said: “We are grappling with the reality that we live in a world where public service carries such risks as being targeted because someone disagrees with you or doesn’t like what you stand for.” More

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    How the right spread ‘brutal and cruel’ misinformation after Minnesota lawmaker killings

    Tina Smith, a Minnesota senator, confronted Mike Lee, a Utah senator, on Monday to tell him directly that his social media posts fueled ongoing misinformation about a shooting that killed her friend.Lee’s posts, which advanced conspiracies that a Minnesota assassin was a “Marxist” and blamed the state’s governor for Melissa Hortman’s death, were among many threads of false or speculative claims swirling online after the killings.Smith told Lee his posts were “brutal and cruel”, according to CNN. “He should think about the implications of what he’s saying and doing. It just further fuels this hatred and misinformation,” she said. She wanted him to hear from her directly how painful it was to see his words after the brutality her state endured. Lee didn’t say much, according to Smith, and seemed surprised to be confronted.Within hours of the shootings, rightwing social media accounts with millions of followers manufactured false conspiracy theories about the suspect and his motives, falsely portraying the man whose friends say he is an evangelical Christian Trump supporter as a radical leftwing assassin and attempting to paint him as a political ally of Tim Walz, the Democratic governor and former vice-presidential candidate.It was the latest example of a rightwing media ecosystem that swiftly spins up narratives that serve their political agendas after tragic events, regardless of accuracy, and does not correct them after further information shows them to be untrue or incomplete. Elected officials such as Lee and others often share in the spreading rumors, lending legitimacy to these claims.Vance Luther Boelter, 57, was captured on Sunday after he allegedly killed Hortman, a Democratic house speaker, and her husband, and wounded John Hoffman, a state senator, and his wife.Collin Rugg, an engagement farmer on X, advanced a debunkable theory to his followers on X that Hortman was killed over healthcare policy for undocumented immigrants, implying the violence came from the left. He shared a video that ping-ponged around the rightwing internet of Hortman, emotional, describing a vote to repeal healthcare eligibility for undocumented adults.Missing from the post was the context: Hortman supported this care, only voting for its repeal to pass a state budget deal in an evenly split state House. Hoffman, the state senator, had not voted to repeal the provision.Rightwing social media personality Mike Cernovich, with 1.5 million followers, escalated the lie by suggesting Walz ordered the assassination. He hasn’t taken the post down and has continued to advance the claims, posting on Monday that “Democrats know they are now seen as the party of political violence so their propaganda agents are trying to shift the blame. It won’t work.”Laura Loomer, the far-right conspiracy theorist and Trump whisperer, posted that “Walz’s goons are now assassinating lawmakers who support legislation Walz opposes” and called the Democratic party “a terrorist organization”. Loomer and others on the right also tried to tie Boelter to the “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration. Officials found rudimentary signs in the suspect’s vehicle that said “No Kings”, an indication he knew of the event, not that he would attend it as a protester.Elon Musk, a frequent poster of unverified rightwing claims, amplified the narrative to his 200 million followers, quote-tweeting claims that “the left” killed Hortman and saying “the far left is murderously violent”.The lies ignore overwhelming evidence of Boelter’s actual politics: his roommate David Carlson told reporters that Boelter voted for Trump and “was a strong supporter” of the president. Other longtime friends told local media Boelter was right-leaning. While Minnesota voters don’t list party affiliation, he was registered as a Republican in Oklahoma in 2004.Boelter’s own recorded sermons expose his extremist views. Preaching in Congo in 2023, he is recorded as saying: “The churches are so messed up, they don’t know abortion is wrong.” He ranted against LGBTQ+ people as “confused”, claiming “the enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul”. His alleged hit list included abortion providers and pro-choice advocates.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionInfluencers seized on Boelter’s appointment to a state board, branding him a “Walz appointee” to misleadingly suggest a personal relationship. In reality, Boelter was first appointed by Walz’s predecessor, who was a Democrat, in 2016 to a 60-member volunteer advisory board. Walz did, however, renew the appointment in 2019, considered a routine administrative decision for one of hundreds of such positions. Walz did not know Boelter.“It was the equivalent of calling a Sunday school volunteer an ‘appointee of the bishop’,” a local reporter wrote.Rightwing X user Viva Frei, with more than 700,000 followers, posted a thread casting doubt on Boelter being a Trump supporter. The account has continued to post about the shootings, attempting to tie Walz to Boelter and his wife, Jennifer. A different Jennifer Boelter interned in Walz’s congressional office, though Frei has not accepted that fact.“Do you believe @GovTimWalz spokesperson when they claim that the Jennifer Boelter who interned for Tim Walz in 2010 is not the same Jennifer Boelter who is married to suspected assassin/domestic terrorist Vance Boelter?” the account asked in a poll.On Monday, posts showing a man at a protest with a shirt with a gun that says “resist” falsely claimed the man was Boelter. “Yea Libs sorry. He’s one of you. Keep saying he’s not. No one believes you,” said one post that got more than 2m views. The actual man in the picture debunked it, saying he was at a “No Kings” rally in Texas in the photo, making clear it was not Boelter.Local Republican officials have largely not contributed to the rumors, in some cases pushing back on the narratives.Harry Niska, the Republican floor leader in the Minnesota House, said on X that he often has and will continue to criticize Walz’s policies and rhetoric. “But there is no responsible basis to attribute to him any of the evil acts committed by Vance Boelter,” he said. More

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    Suspect in Minnesota shootings visited other legislators’ homes, say authorities

    A man accused of dressing up as a police officer and shooting two Minnesota state lawmakers in their homes – killing one and her husband – also showed up at the houses of two other legislators the same night intending to assassinate them too, authorities revealed on Monday.Vance Luther Boelter, 57, was captured on Sunday night after a major two-day manhunt and charged by state prosecutors with the second-degree murder of the Democratic representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, at their residence in Brooklyn Park early on Saturday.He was also charged with the attempted murder of state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their home in Champlin.Appearing in federal court in St Paul, Minnesota, on Monday, Boelter said he could not afford an attorney. A federal public defender was appointed to represent him. A hearing about whether Boelter should be detained in federal custody pending the outcome of his case was tentatively scheduled for 27 June.The court appearance came after officials announced a separate 20-page federal indictment, which could include the death penalty for Hortman’s murder, at a late-morning press conference.The acting US attorney for the district of Minnesota, Joe Thompson, told reporters that as well as the early-hours attacks on the Hortman and Hoffman residences, Boelter was spotted at the homes of two other unnamed lawmakers, one a state representative, the other a state senator, in a “planned campaign of stalking and violence”.At one of the properties, nobody was home, he said. At the other, he was confronted by a police officer who was called to make a wellness check, and fled the scene.“It is no exaggeration to say that his crimes are the stuff of nightmares,” Thompson said.“Boelter stalked his victims like prey. He went to their homes, held himself out as a police officer, and shot them in cold blood.”Hortman’s killing, at the final house he visited, “was a political assassination”, he added.“It’s a chilling attack on our democracy, on our way of life. The trend [of political violence] has been increasing over recent years and I hope it’s a wake-up call to everyone that people can disagree with you without being evil, without [anybody] needing to be killed for it.”Thompson gave a timeline of Boelter’s alleged spree, which began at the Hoffmans’ home. Arriving in a black SUV disguised to look like a police vehicle, and wearing a “hyper-realistic latex mask”, Boelter knocked on their door claiming to be a police officer, and shot them both repeatedly after they opened the door and realized he was not who he claimed to be.Both remain in hospital in serious condition but are expected to survive.Next, Thompson said, Boelter drove to the home of a Minnesota state representative in Maple Grove, where a doorbell camera captured him at 2.24am. She was on vacation, and he left.From there, he traveled to the home of a state senator, arriving at about 2.36am. An officer from the New Hope police department arrived to find Boelter’s vehicle parked a short distance away with lights on.Thompson said she assumed he was a fellow officer already there in response to the Hoffman shooting – but when she wound down her window to speak to him, Boelter did not respond, and “just sat there and stared straight ahead”, Thompson said.She retreated to the senator’s home to await the arrival of colleagues, who arrived to find him gone.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFinally, Thompson said, he drove to the Hortmans’ home in Brooklyn Park. Officers arrived at about 3.30am to find him standing on the porch – and when they got out of their vehicles, he began firing at them, forced his way into the house and shot and killed Hortman and her husband, then fled on foot.“Boelter planned his attack carefully. He researched his victims and their families,” Thompson said.“He used the internet and other tools to find their addresses and names, the names of the family members. He conducted surveillance of their homes and took notes about the location of their homes.”He said he could not speculate on a motive, but said investigators found “dozens and dozens of names on hundreds of pages of documents” in the vehicle retrieved at the Hortman residence. All the elected officials targeted were Democrats, Thompson said.The writings and list of names are believed to include prominent state and federal lawmakers and community leaders, along with abortion rights advocates and information about healthcare facilities.An FBI affidavit states that after the shootings Boelter used cash to purchase a vehicle from a stranger, and then drove to Green Isle, about an hour west of Minneapolis, where a police officer reported seeing him run into woodland.The Brooklyn Park police chief, Mark Bruley, said about 20 different tactical teams searched inside a perimeter for him and he was located after an hours-long operation that included a helicopter.When Boelter was found, Bruley said, he crawled out of the woods after “a short period of negotiation” and was taken into custody in a field.In the vehicle there, police allegedly found a handwritten confession, while a search of his wife’s car yielded two handguns, passports and $10,000 in cash, the affidavit said.It states that Boelter texted his wife: “Words are not gonna explain how sorry I am for this situation. There’s gonna be some people coming to the house armed and trigger-happy and I don’t want you guys around.”The superintendent of Minnesota’s bureau of criminal apprehension, Drew Evans, told a Sunday news conference that authorities interviewed Boelter’s wife and other family members in connection with Saturday’s shootings and that they were cooperative and not in custody. More

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    Suspect in shootings of Minnesota lawmakers charged with two counts of murder

    The man suspected of opening fire on two Minnesota legislators and their spouses on 14 June, killing one legislator and her husband, was apprehended late on Sunday night and charged with two counts of murder and two of attempted murder, the state’s governor, Tim Walz, said at a news conference.Vance Boelter, 57, is suspected of fatally shooting the Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, at their residence early on Saturday. Boelter is also suspected of shooting the state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their home, seriously injuring them.“One man’s unthinkable actions have altered the state of Minnesota,” the state’s governor, Tim Walz, said at a news conference.Boelter was arrested in a rural area in Sibley County, southwest of Minneapolis, according to police, who added that he was armed when he was taken into custody. A criminal complaint unsealed Sunday night said Boelter faces two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted second-degree murder in the deaths of the Hortmans and the wounding of Hoffman and his wife.Authorities alleged Boelter fled on foot after police responded to a shooting at Hortman’s house. Authorities alleged Boelter was wearing a police uniform that so closely resembled an actual law enforcement uniform that most civilians wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.Earlier Sunday, Drew Evans, superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said at a news conference a nationwide warrant had been issued for the suspect’s arrest.Evans said authorities found a car very early Sunday they believed Boelter was using, a few miles from his home in Green Isle, in the farm country about an hour west of Minneapolis. He also said they found evidence in the car that was relevant to the investigation, but did not provide details.The superintendent also said authorities interviewed Boelter’s wife and other family members in connection with Saturday’s shootings. He said they were cooperative and were not in custody.The FBI had issued a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to his arrest and conviction. They circulated a photo taken Saturday of Boelter wearing a tan cowboy hat and asked the public to report sightings.On Sunday evening, US Senator Amy Klobuchar shared a statement from Yvette Hoffman expressing appreciation for the outpouring of public support.“John is enduring many surgeries right now and is closer every hour to being out of the woods,” Yvette Hoffman said in a text that Klobuchar posted on social media. “He took 9 bullet hits. I took 8 and we are both incredibly lucky to be alive. We are gutted and devastated by the loss of Melissa and Mark.” More