Morally bankrupt MAGA is cool with killing Democrats because that's how fascists roll

The Minnesota assassin is a pro-Trump right-wing extremist. What a shock.

On June 30, 1934, some Nazi thugs invaded the home of former German chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and shot him dead on the spot. Mrs. Schleicher was summarily whacked as well. Their names were on a Nazi hit list, political violence was a national disease, so they had to go. Also assassinated that night was newspaperman Willi Schmid, a music critic. He died by accident. The intended target was political operative Wilhelm Schmid, but the Nazi killers had mixed up the two names and invaded the wrong home. Oh well! Nobody in power apologized for the screwup; and, needless to say, nobody condemned the violence.

Political assassinations in an ostensibly civilized western nation…who could ever imagine such a thing?

It was in that fascist spirit that accused Minnesota murderer Vance Boelter decided last weekend to assassinate ex-Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman (along with her husband) at their suburban home; to seriously wound a Democratic state senator (along with his wife); to stalk two other Democratic lawmakers at their homes; to compile an exhaustive hit list of other Democrats in Minnesota and Wisconsin; to compile Planned Parenthood targets; and to text his wife that he was going “to war.”

And it turns out that Boelter is a Trump-voting MAGA “army of God” Christian extremist who hates abortion rights and gay people. Well, shock me outta my shoes. Who could’ve ever predicted that?

Anyone with a brain, actually.

Umpteen studies have long concluded that most of the politically motivated (and increasing) violence during the last three decades has been the work of right-wing extremists. The convicted felon currently in the White House didn’t light those fires, but he has brutally fanned the flames - witness, for instance, the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the mass shootings of 11 Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the mass shootings of 23 Hispanic shoppers at an El Paso Wall Mart, the mass shootings of 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket, the firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official residence…none of which comes as a surprise, given the fact that the federal Homeland Security Department presciently warned in a report, way back in 2009, that “right-wing extremism” (what it also called “non-Islamic domestic terrorism”) is “fueling resurgence in radicalization” and is therefore a clear and present danger to our political climate.

Oh, I almost forgot: When that report was first released, Republicans and conservatives savaged it, laughed at it, and dove into deep denial. Sound familiar?

Sixteen years later, they’re still lodging their heads where the sun don’t shine. Their tribal refusal to face the truth has metastasized to the point where detestable cruelty has become their standard ‘tude. Not even the deaths and woundings of freely-elected lawmakers - shot with their spouses, in their homes - has roused them from their amoral stupor. Even though two children are now orphaned, their first impulse - even after all we’ve learned about Boelter - is to deny, deflect, and lie without a smidgen of shame.

Earlier this week, Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno echoed the MAGA mantra that Boelter hails from “the extreme left,” without a shred of empirical evidence. Elon Musk said on X that “the left,” which is “murderously violent,” did the deeds. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post concocted the headline Gov. Walz appointee suspected in assassination, thus implying that Boelter, like Walz, is a Democrat. The truth (which hardly matters these days) is that he served on a nonpartisan workforce development advisory board along with 60 other people, that he was appointed by a previous governor, and that Walz, in a routine gubernatorial move, re-upped Boelter (whom he doesn’t know) along with other advisory members.

But those MAGA lies were too mild for Mike Lee, the Utah senator who was once known as a principled conservative, “a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution” (his words), a stickler for the rule of law and a foe of authoritarianism. His lies this week were so glibly horrific (“This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way”- huh? Boelter is a “Marxist”?) that two Democratic senators on Boelter’s hit list, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, goaded Lee into deleting some of his most execrable effluvia. But he hasn’t apologized, of course, because grace and compassion and humility are human traits that the MAGA movement has sucked out of his soul.

Lee, who opposed Trump in 2016 all the way to the GOP convention, is a metaphor for our national debasement. By shrugging off the import of the Minnesota assassinations and refusing to condemn political violence, much less warn of its potential escalation, he’s just playing Follow Der Leader. Because it’s Der Leader who celebrates violence (pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists) and demonizes his political opponents as evil, as “scum,” as “communists,” as “Marxists,” as “terrorists,” as “vermin,” and thus gives permission to losers like Boelter to lock and load.

How nice it would be if politicians on both sides of the tribal divide came together to condemn political violence, to say loudly and repeatedly that the assassination of public servants and their families is anti-American and the lowest form of animal life. But I suppose we’ll see that happen around the same time that unicorns gambol on the National Mall. For now, these lyrics from Brian Wilson seem most apt:

I was sittin' in a crummy movie
With my hands on my chin
All the violence that occurs
Seems like we never win

Love and mercy is indeed what we need. Brian may have checked out just in time.