A Monster in Minnesota

Another Episode in the All-American Horror Show of White Christian Nationalism

Today, a U.S. Senator from the great state of Utah has pinned under his goofy, second Xitter account, @BasedMikeLee, a tweet blaming “Marxists” for murdering a pro-choice state representative and her husband and shooting two other Democratic politicians.

The Tweet is attached to a horror movie-worthy door cam image of right-wing assassin Vance Boelter. Armed and costumed in cop clothes, his head and face in a white latex mask, he is a cenobite from the series Hellraiser. What could be more terrifying than to encounter that on your doorstep at 3 a.m., on a summer night in leafy suburban Minneapolis?

This fervently anti-abortion, anti-gay, and pro-Trump white Christian nationalist was caught on door cam minutes before he shot pro-choice Democrat and former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, as she shielded her daughter from the bullets, and her husband, killing them both.

It is a measure of how deeply sick the MAGA movement is that before Mr. Boelter was even apprehended – crawling on his hands and knees out of dense shrubs but otherwise unscathed and well-dressed – some 16,000 people had already liked Based Mike Lee’s Tweet. Meanwhile, Media Matters tracked right-wing online influencers like Laura Loomer and Benny Johnson ratcheting up the diversion, Loomer calling for Walz to be “detained by the FBI and interrogated,” and Johnson suggesting the assassination was a “massive false flag.” Yesterday, a Fox & Friends guest host suggested that Hortman was killed because she had “voted against a priority of many Democrats,” apparently referring to a vote on migrant assistance.

The unholy alliance between terminally oblivious Americans, disinformation purveyors, and activated evil continues unabated. Deep in their information silos, hundreds of thousands of people have, for days, lapped up and shared shameful bullshit based on a single bit of this white Christian nationalist maniac’s resume: he was one of 60 people seated on an obscure bipartisan committee in the Minnesota state government that met virtually four times a year. Originally appointed by a Republican governor, he was reappointed by Gov. Tim Walz last year. (Cue the image of some right-wing hack gleefully discovering that document on the internet.)

MAGA propagandists don’t want to hear about the kill list of 70 names, including Democrats and pro-choice women, or that he was ordained as a minister by a church that promotes “violent prayer” and that advocates for literal warfare against progressives. But make no mistake, the cenobite is one of theirs: His own roommate thought he voted for Trump. He is nowhere to be found on Minnesota’s Democratic primary voting rolls.

Vance Boelter is the embodiment of Walz’s “they’re weird” commentary. In grainy photographs, without the latex mask, the door-cam cenobite is a sinister man with a long nose and thick eyebrows, out of central casting for a vampire. He has a super-sketchy resume. An ordained minister, he worked as a general manager of a gas station and a 7-Eleven, lately tried his hand at mortuary science (!), and reportedly was working for an “eye donation” outfit or moving dead bodies from nursing homes. He was some form of a cop wannabe, dabbled in the security industry, and marketed cop vehicles like the black SUV with flashing lights that he parked in the driveways of his victims. And he had some fetishistic interest in the Congo, going in and out of the country for years, preaching anti-gay drool.

The journalist and author

Jeff Sharlet

has devoted his career to investigating white Christian nationalism. He posted on his Substack,

Scenes from a Slow Civil War

, that Boelter is ordained as a minister by the Christ for Nations Institute. Working on his 2024 book “The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War,” Sharlet encountered the sect and its concept of “violent prayer.” Christians killing perceived enemies isn’t personal: “Not you, in particular,” a “pleasant young man” told Sharlet. “Just, you know, the culture.”

According to Sharlet, the sect that ordained Boelter was founded by a 20th-century, all-American, plains-state born and bred lunatic named Gordon Lindsay who preached“British Israelism” - the belief that white Anglo-Saxons, not Jews, are God’s chosen people. This is the same belief system in which the fascist “Captive Dreamer” was raised. Dreamer, aka Geoff Martin, who we covered here, is followed online by the Vice President, tech titan Marc Andreessen, Curtis Yarvin, and many other Trump administration and MAGA luminaries.

Here is Sharlet on the warrior mindset of the peculiar strand of white Christian nationalism that “ordained” Mr. Boelter:

Metaphors don’t just reflect reality, they shape it. Like actual war, spiritual war presupposes an enemy so dangerous and so unreasonable that violence is the only logical response. “The Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, “and violent men take it by force.”

For the close reader of scripture, that’s another metaphor; for Boelter’s Christian nationalist tradition, it’s a religion based on the “deep and holy goodness of masculine aggression,” in the words of fundamentalist author John Eldredge’s 2001 bestselling guide to spiritual war, Wild at Heart, still in print, which advised wives to gift their men actual broad swords as symbols of their warrior nature. Did Boelter, who boasted of bringing the gospel to “Islamic militants” in Gaza, who listed himself as “director of patrols” of the security firm he ran with his wife, Praetorian Guard, read this particular volume? If he’s caught, maybe we can ask him. But we don’t have to wonder whether he read the Word through the theology of prayer as a violent devotion.

I spent many years in the rural Midwest. I know well how weird shit can take root in people’s heads when they’re alone in the empty miles. Minds can get bent around conspiracy theories. In many cases, those conspiracy theories promote violence in service to some greater cause, and often that cause is some perverted form of Christianity.

A disconcerting number of them seem to be all-in with the sociopathic Orange Dictator. It’s almost as if they have been waiting for him.

And not for the first time, the weird reaction from the right to the horror show in Minnesota forces us to consider how it is possible that Bible-drenched people who do a literal reading of Revelations and take an eschatological view of our times don’t look at Trump and see the Prince of Lies.