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Notes -
https://www.startribune.com/vance-boelter-letter-klobuchar-walz-mn-assassination/601376682
Update on the Minnesota assassination spree, the killer has stated in a letter that he was acting under the direction of Governor Tim Walz in order to clear up seats for him to run for the Senate. The article expands on this, notably with very partisan language intending to wash away any kind of culpability from the offending parties. Apparently he was also trained by elements within the US military, which is frightening if true.
Political violence has been simmering in the background for a while now, particularly with the rise of Antifa, BLM in the past Trump admin. These groups recruit susceptible members through radicalization by politicians who race-bait and highlight extraordinary events and treat them as if they represent systemic problems. This is different. Rather than relying on mass mobilization and radicalization, they seem to be moving towards more highly trained and disciplined killers performing targeted assassinations instead of widespread property damage. Maybe they've learned something from the backlash towards their previous tactics?
The main thing I am seeing here is that (after the very real spate of political violence in 2020, which largely ended on Jan 7th 2021), the demand for political violence in the US massively exceeds the supply, in the same way that Steve Sailer used to joke about the demand for racism exceeding the supply. People on both sides desperately want their opponents to be launching the red/brown terror, both to gain political capital by criticising the other side and to feed their own vicarious martyrdom fantasies. And this desire to big up political-looking violence for partisan reasons leads to the kind of media coverage that attracts copycats, so your average unhinged shooter is now more likely to shoot politicians and less likely to shoot up a school.
This isn't new, of course. If you look at the list of attempted Presidential assassinations going back to the founding the words "insanity" and "unfit to plead" appear an awful lot.
Roughly none of the recent cases of "political" violence that blew up in the media involve any of:
Apart from the Islamists, the nearest thing we see to an inteligible political motivation is something like Boelter or Wayne DePape (Paul Pelosi hammer guy) - an unhinged Red Triber who consumes right-wing media and is presumed to vote Republican decides to attack a Democrat for unhinged reasons. And the only reason why this is a mostly-Red thing is that comparably unhinged Blues don't have access to guns.
This is nothing like the Days of Rage, Reconstruction/Redemption, or the early C20 spate of anarchist violence. Nobody keeps the required statistics, but I suspect it is closer to a summer of the shark.
Probably neither of them voted republican, though.
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