Not Good

So, today we had massive "No Kings" protests, and Trump's birthday parade was a fizzle. and neither was the story of the day.

Instead the story of the day was right wing political violence. in Minnesota, we had the assassination of a Minnesota State Representative and the attempted assassination of a Minnesota State Senator:

Last night, a gunman impersonating a police officer and wearing body armor, murdered Minnesota State Congresswoman Melissa Hortman and her husband, traveled to State Senator John Hoffman’s house and shot him and his wife. Both politicians are Democrats.

After the first shooting, MN State Police did a proactive check on Hoffman’s house and saw the suspect come out the front door and flee on foot.

Both Hortman and Hoffman are members of an extremely divided Minnesota Congress. By taking out a member of each house, the gunman effectively flipped the state from Blue to Red.

The suspect, Vance Luther Boelter, is the owner of a private security company in Minnesota called “Praetorian Guards” which he runs with his wife.

………

The gunman had nearly 70 targets on a list to murder including a number of abortion providers, and numerous other Democrats including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Challenging the narrative of this event is the fact that in 2019 Tim Walz appointed Vance Luther Boelter to the bipartisan Minnesota Workforce Development Board, which Walz’s predecessor had also done in 2016. This perfunctory nomination by Walz is being spun by right-wing media into some sinister connection between the killer and Walz. Given that Walz was on a list to be murdered, it’s preposterous.

We have the resume of the alleged gunman here.

He definitely had ties to right wing Evangelical Christian groups, and in speeches he gave, he echoes the rhetoric of the Christo-Fascist New Apostolic Reformation cult.

Meanwhile, in Virginia and California, drivers deliberately drove into crowds at the "No King" protests, though in this case there were no deaths.

This sort of political violence is being aggressively fomented by Trump and his allies, though you cannot find any direct links.  

They are exhorting their followers to political violence, knowing that there is a statistical certainty that they will get their violence without direct ties pointingng back to them.

This is deliberate stochastic terrorism.