The political assassination and attempted killing of Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses have reignited fears about rising political violence in the United States amid intense polarization — and experts are calling on elected officials to lead the charge in changing the tone.
“People ought to be careful about their political rhetoric,” argued Benjamin Ginsberg, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. “What politicians make up to win elections, they have to remember that some people believe.”
Early last Saturday, a man fatally shot Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband. He also wounded another Democratic state lawmaker, John Hoffman, and his wife at their home in what authorities believe was a well-planned, violent rampage.
Police say the suspect, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, was impersonating a member of law enforcement when he carried out the attacks, banging on the legislators' front doors in the middle of the night. He allegedly wore a “hyper realistic” silicone face mask, body armor and a tactical vest, carried a 9 mm handgun and drove a black SUV with flashing emergency lights and a license plate that read “police,” officials said.
Boelter was caught in a field near his property and taken into police custody Sunday evening after a massive two-day manhunt. The state has since charged him with two counts of second-degreee murder and two counts of attempted murder. He also faces six federal charges: two counts each of stalking, first-degree murder and firearm offenses.
Authorities also found a “hit list” of 45 officials, most if not all of whom are Democrats, and “No King’s Day” protest flyers in what they say is Boelter’s vehicle, according to acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson. They believe that he had been researching the lawmakers and planning the attacks for months, and went to the homes of four Minnesota state lawmakers Saturday morning “with the intent to kill them.”
There was no “Unabomber-style manifesto,” Thompson said at a news conference, adding: “Obviously his primary motive was to go out and murder people. They were all elected officials. They were all Democrats."
Democratic Gov. Tim Walz also called the shootings “an act of targeted political violence.”
Ginsberg told Salon in a phone interview that such acts are terrible and alarming, but targeted killings are not the only concerning form of violence.
“Violence by proxy,” in which each political party offers financial or other support to violent social groups, is more dangerous and increasingly indicative of the potential “threat to the nation,” he explained. Alt-right groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, for example, have been building ties to GOP officials across levels of government.
“The most common violence — and that’s what we're seeing a lot of — is individuals who are set off by the political climate,” Ginsberg said. “This is a political climate in which each side really nullifies and condemns the other. There's no moderation and political discussion, and, whereas most people can say, ‘Alright, well, that’s politicians and media,’ there are a certain number of unstable people who take it seriously.”
Political parties sporting their own militias and fighting for control in the streets present the most extreme incidents of political violence and threats to the nation’s health, he added. The U.S. had instances of this before the Civil War and during the Reconstruction era, but hasn’t reached that level of turmoil in the present day.
The shootings in Minnesota are the latest in a series of politically violent acts across the U.S. in recent years and the latest iteration of an alarming trend. Just last month, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot and killed by a man who law enforcement said yelled “Free Palestine” during his arrest. In April, a man was charged with allegedly setting fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, while last December, Luigi Mangione allegedly shot and killed the then-CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson.
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President Donald Trump himself survived an assassination attempt last summer during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, leaving with a bloodied ear while the gunman fatally shot a member of the audience.
Research indicates that such violence and extremist acts are carried out by far-right actors far more often than those on the left. A 2020 Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis of nearly 900 terrorist plots and attacks between January 1994 and May 2020 found that right-wing terrorists perpetrated 57% of all attacks and attempts in the U.S. during that period. Comparatively, attacks from left-wing terrorists amounted to 25% of those incidents, while attacks from religious actors and ethnonationalists amounted to 15% and 3%, respectively.
This reality was acknowledged under the Obama administration, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report in 2009 warning that rising rightwing extremism could spark “lone wolf” attacks and presented “the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat” in the country. But conservative lawmakers and pundits criticized the report as political propaganda upon its release, forcing DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to issue a statement and leading to the findings being buried and the official responsible for producing them being gutted.
The concerns undergirding the report not only remain but "show no signs of abating," according to Sheri Berman, a Barnard College professor of political science who studies authoritarianism and democracy. As a result, the Minnesota attacks should be viewed in the context of previous politically-motivated violence.
“I think the best way to think about these is it’s the latest in a string of escalating violent conflicts that are reflective of some really deep divisions and pathologies in the American political system — and, frankly, in American society more broadly,” Berman told Salon.
The country’s extreme polarization — where both Democrats and Republicans believe the other party to be threats to democracy and their ways of life rather than political opponents with the wrong priorities and policies — makes it hard to stop the cycle of violence, she argued.
“That context, it breeds even further extremism, and it gives to people who are disturbed and conflicted in some way something to latch on to that they can use as an excuse for whatever their violent and disturbed tendencies are,” Berman said in a phone interview.
While it’s important that politicians denounce the violence publicly, their condemnations are the beginning of the solution to the problem, not the end, she said.
“The correct way to ‘fight’ the other side is through the democratic rules of the game, through the peaceful processes of our political system, not by violence, not by shooting, not by calling out troops to deal with protesters. I mean, these are not the correct solutions within a democratic system.”
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Trump is well known for espousing incendiary, divisive rhetoric, arguing that one “violent” day of police brutality would eliminate crime and claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country” among other comments. In the immediate aftermath of the attempt on his life, he pumped his fist, chanted “fight” and created a sort of populist rallying cry to appeal to his base.
In the wake of the violence in Minnesota, the president also declined to call Gov. Walz and instead called the Democrat “a mess.”
Lilliana Mason, also a Johns Hopkins University professor of political science, told Salon that disarming political rhetoric becomes more difficult under a president whose actions indicate greater comfort with political violence than the traditional presidency, even if he releases a statement condemning violence.
The “lawless-feeling” enforcement directed at immigrants, coupled with “pardoning people who do criminal activity but are nice to him, or people that were violent against police in January — that’s sending the opposite message from what the social media message was,” Mason said. “It's just an administration that is characterized by more violent actions.”
The prognosis for the future of the nation is also “not good,” Mason added, given political polarization doesn’t seem to be dying down. Still, she notes, that compared to the volume of threats against lawmakers at both the state and federal level, bad actors rarely follow through with physical attacks.
A 2024 Brennan Center for Justice report found that nearly half of the 1,700 state lawmakers the progressive think tank had surveyed said they had experienced threats or attacks in the past three years. U.S. Capitol Police also recorded last year an uptick in threats against federal lawmakers for the second year in a row.
Mason said that it’s “very easy” for elected leaders to curb such acts. She and her colleagues conducted an experiment reading a quote discouraging violence from former President Joe Biden and Trump, and found that participants who read either quote approved of violence less than those who did not read the quote.
“If we have responsible leadership, then it's less of a problem,” she said. “The problem is when we have leaders who are intentionally inflaming the divisions and mischaracterizing their political opposition in a way that makes them feel or seem more evil and less human and more of an existential threat.”
But one vote of confidence, Mason added, is that most Americans overall reject outright the idea of using violence to achieve political goals, and the nation still has a strong social norm built around that belief.
“It does feel like we're in this age of crass, brutal politics, but social norms do still exist, and those are entirely socially not only constructed, but reinforced,” she said. “We all have a role to play in reminding people how we are supposed to behave as adults in a democracy.
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