Fame Seeker III: Breaking Boelter Bad
Ideology does not explain the crimes of Vance Luther Boelter
In “a rambling, conspiratorial letter” addressed to the FBI and left abandoned in his newly-purchased Buick Regal, Vance Luther Boelter claims that Gov. Tim Walz wanted him to murder Senator Amy Klobuchar in order to clear a political path for the governor. According to two sources who spoke to The Minnesota Star Tribune, the purported ‘manifesto’ is “incoherent, one and a half pages long, confusing and hard to read.” So, not exactly the stuff to start a second Civil War.
“Due to the seriousness of the allegations it contains, we will state only that we have seen no evidence that the allegations regarding Governor Walz are based in fact,” Hennepin County Attorney spokesperson Daniel Borgertpoepping told the Star Tribune. Too late: the conspiracy theories wrote themselves in the first hour. Walz, who had appointed Boelter to a nonpartisan volunteer board, threw fuel on that fire when he pronounced Boelter’s crimes were a “politically motivated assassination.” Playing with that fire has left Walz with self-inflicted political burns.
A person who slips the moor and floats out to sea, as Boelter evidently did, cannot be reliably plotted on a left-right political model inherited from revolutionary France. I would argue this scheme of understanding politics is in fact less useful than ever before, in any case. Add a mental spiral, and all bets are off.
John Hinckley Jr. shot a president because he believed a 13-year-old actress was his girlfriend. Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist who thought Fidel Castro wanted him to shoot a Democratic president. This truth is too often obscured beneath the binary American party system, which is an accidental and mathematically-predictable product of the founders’ preference for government by elected representatives in geographic districts. “Left” and “right” become short-circuits that inhibit critical thinking and lubricate the workings of conspiracy theories.
Most often in history, this kind of crazy — the assassin with inscrutable motives — involves some sort of invisible transmission that the afflicted person has ‘received’ from sources beyond any physical evidence of contact: angels, demons, saints, etc. My own first experience of this obviously-abnormal pyschology took place during Ronald Reagan’s first term, when an adult male confided to me that the president had been sending him telepathic messages, and the mafia was trying to stop him from following his instructions.
Being a boy at the time, and recalling that a lunatic had shot Reagan in 1981, I was suitably impressed by his insanity. Boelter too believed that he had unwritten, likely psychic instructions from the governor. He was probably not receiving them through tiny transistors hidden in his dental fillings, but still: Boelter’s delusional ‘relationship’ to Tim Walz is the largest wellspring of conspiracy for MAGA, whereas both sides examined the victims for political identifiers.
Online hyperpartisans were pointing the finger at each other for 48 hours while law enforcement conducted “the largest manhunt in Minnesota history,” according to Minnesota law enforcement. For a hot minute, Boelter was the most exciting person in Democratic Party politics as well as MAGA politics, which is quite a feat. His evident insanity is disappointing to many, who insist that the story as they first received it must have been the true story, after all, while this is the cover-up.
In the real world, the Minnesota Governor’s Workforce Development Board is a nonpartisan advisory board concerned with “the nuts and bolts of how to get the government, educational institutions and the private sector on the same page regarding workforce needs.” In fantasyland, on the other hand, Boelter’s insane belief has been validated as truth: Tim Walz is the Machiavellian manipulator controlling his actions. MinnPost talked to eight people who have served on this board, and “most could not point to a specific accomplishment or outcome that they were most proud of during their time on the board.” No one they talked to remembers anything significant about Boelter.
Furthermore, “Boelter was appointed during both the Mark Dayton administration in 2016 and reappointed during the Tim Walz administration in 2019,” suggesting that Walz likely had no idea who Boelter even was. The appointment was just one of thousands that any governor of Minnesota makes to hundreds of unpaid advisory boards. Such arrangements are extremely common in American state governance, as they can provide knowledgeable advice for free.
The key takeaway here is that Vance Boelter was nobody special to Tim Walz, or the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor (DFL) Party, or anyone of note, and that tells us something about how Boelter felt about himself. His fantasy of being a tool of power speaks to how little power he had in the real world. Boelter, it turns out, had developed an intense fantasy life well in advance of his planning for the murder spree, and power was the object of his fantasy. Partisan political outcomes were secondary to the desire for authority over another person. Boelter was cosplaying the grizzled veteran of foreign bush wars and security professional that he projected in his online presence.
It was Boelter’s claim to “off-books military training” that gave me pause once he had been identified and his social media presence pored over by curious people. Anyone who says they have military experience that the military does not know about should be automatically suspect to everyone, because the military knows absolutely everyone that has ever served in uniform. It is a giant red flag.
Writing of himself in the third person, Boelter claimed online that he “sought out militant Islamists in order to share the gospel and tell them that violence wasn’t the answer” when he preached at LaBorne Matadi in the Congo. While Boelter does in fact seem to have visited the Congo for missionary trips, his confrontation with Islamists seems unlikely. He also claims extensive experience “with security situations in Eastern Europe, Africa, North America and the Middle East, including the West Bank, Southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.”
He brings a great security aspect forged by both many on the ground experiences combined with training by both private security firms and by people in the U.S. Military. He has worked for the largest U.S. oil refining company, the world's largest food company based in Switzerland and the world's largest convenience retailer based in Japan.
In fact Boelter had cut back on the number of jobs he worked, for he was getting old, and his work for an eye donation service was hardly millionaire-making. The website for Boelter’s Red Lion Group LLC, which seems to have operated in the Congo for about three years, is defunct, and no archived versions are available. The doctorate he claims is from a campus that has closed. NPR notes that Boelter “appears to have worked most of his career in the food service industry and one long-time friend described parts of Boelter's narrative about his life as ‘fantasy.’”
His ‘security company’, Praetorian Guard Security Services, turns out to be vaporware. “Boelter himself appears to have no history working in law enforcement, the military or private security.”
NPR found no record of the firm having clients or providing any services. A call to the company's phone number connected to what appears to be a private phone line, not a business. The address listed in incorporation papers appeared to be that of a law firm specializing in divorce litigation.
Reportedly a registered Republican in 2022, during the 2020 election Boelter posted a very anodyne reminder to vote, claiming “I have been in several countries where people don't have the ability to vote for who their leaders are. I will just say they were not places that anyone of us would want to live in if we had any choice in the matter” (emphasis added). Boelter concluded with an invitation to pray for the United States “if you believe in prayer.”
Apparently, this ecumenical approach did not come with violent anti-abortion politics, but bog-standard pro-life views. According to his lifelong friend David Carlson, Boelter “was a loving caring guy, he loved his family, he loved his friends. He loved God. I don't know why he did what he did. It's not Vance, no one will believe this, no one that grew up with him, he had lots of friends, trust me. I wish I could have been there to stop him.” Distraught, Carlson read reporters the final text message he had received from Boelter that morning: “I made some choices, and you guys don't know anything about this, but I'm going to be gone for a while.”
Carlson told reporters that Boelter was a “strong supporter” of Donald Trump, but also indicated that he had not discussed politics at all recently, “and that he had not given his friends any indication he had an interest in state-level politics or Minnesota lawmakers. There is no indication he is affiliated with a political party.” He was never a political operator.
Still, the stack of “No Kings” flyers in his abandoned car seemed suggestive. But what did they suggest? What were they meant to suggest, in Boelter’s mind? As he perhaps intended by leaving them in the car and disappearing, a number of anti-Trump rallies were canceled across the state. The list of Democratic lawmakers he supposedly wanted to target, that he left in his car, likewise triggered the intense manhunt. Boelter wanted the law to come after him. This much seems obvious.
Less obvious are the implications of “about $10,000 in cash, two handguns, and ‘passports for Mrs. Boelter and her children, who were in the car’” when officials stopped his wife, Jenny Boelter, to search her vehicle. Mr. Boelter had apparently planned ahead for a potential getaway by leaving this cache, but it was hardly the smartest place for him to leave it.
Instead, “police found a handgun in the backpack that Boelter was carrying” after they found him near his home by using a drone, “completely soaked from crawling through a slough.” Nearby, “between an adjacent home and the Shingle Creek Regional Trail, police found a partially-loaded magazine, the flesh-colored silicone mask that Boelter was allegedly seen wearing in surveillance video, as well as a wig.”
It was a sad conclusion to the fantasy getaway, which Boelter had only planned in general, rather than exacting detail. His attempt to go to ground like Eric Robert Rudolph, the Olympic Park and abortion clinic bomber who spent years hiding in the woods, had been foiled by incomplete preparation.
The exact sequence of events took time to establish for the record. According to Joseph Thompson, the acting U.S. attorney in Minnesota, Boelter first visited the home of Democratic State Sen. John Hoffman, where he identified himself as a police officer. Shining a flashlight in the couple’s faces through the open doorway, Boelter told them he was responding to a shooting. When he dropped the flashlight from their faces, however, the couple saw that he was wearing a mask and refused to cooperate. Then Boelter announced “this is a robbery” and attempted to force his way into the house.
“In the front yard and driveway, police found more than a dozen discharged 9mm cartridge casings,” MPR News reports. “Investigators also recovered several ‘less lethal’ 40mm rounds, which are foam-tipped projectiles that police typically use to incapacitate suspects or for riot control. Inside the home, investigators recovered more spent casings as well as bullets.” Why did Boelter attempt to subdue the couple with ‘less-lethal’ rounds when he was simply going to shoot them repeatedly with bullets? Was there a more complex notion, perhaps of making the family into his hostages, that went awry?
The Hoffmans’ daughter called 911 just after 2 AM. Police went on high alert for further attacks. “At 2:24 a.m., [Boelter] knocked on the door of a state representative in Maple Grove,” namely Rep. Kristin Bahner, “but the representative and her family were on vacation,” according to Thompson. Proceeding to the next nearest victim on his list, Sen. Ann Rest of New Hope, Boelter had an eerie encounter with a genuine police officer who wisely waited for backup before confronting him.
Boelter then traveled to the home of a state senator in New Hope, Thompson said. A police officer, who had been sent to conduct a wellness check after learning the Hoffmans had been shot, saw Boelter’s car parked and tried to talk to him through the window because she thought Boelter was a police officer. He didn’t respond and stared straight ahead. By the time more officers came, Boelter was gone.
Arriving at the home of State Rep. Melissa Hortman around 3:30 AM, Boelter “parked in the driveway and left his fake emergency lights on.” At around 3:35, “city police officers arrived to check on Hortman and saw Boelter standing near the front door. Boelter then fired into the door and rushed into the house, where he fatally shot the Hortmans and escaped out the back.” Police opened fire on Boelter, who ran away on foot, abandoning his “retired squad” vehicle. It is unclear whether he fired back at the police.
Thompson told reporters that “it was hard to know what was motivating Boelter in terms of ideology.” While the 45 elected officials on his list include abortion rights supporters, and they are “mostly or all Democrats,” that still does not describe all of them. Investigators are still poring through “hundreds of pages of documents” to figure out what Boelter’s psychodrama may have been about.
Once Boelter had been forced to flee on foot, his attacks came to an end, according to the charging documents. “Dad went to war last night,” Boelter texted his wife at 6:18 AM. He apologized, warning her that “there’s gonna be some people coming to the house armed and trigger-happy and I don’t want you guys around.” Emphasis added:
Hours after the shootings, Boelter bought an e-bike and a Buick sedan from a man he met at a bus stop in Minneapolis, according to court records. Boelter emptied a bank account to complete the purchase, an FBI agent said in court documents. Cameras at the bank captured Boelter wearing a cowboy hat.
When law enforcement searched the abandoned Buick, they found Boelter’s letter addressed to the FBI confessing to the shootings, signed “Dr. Vance Luther Boelter.” They also discovered “at least three AK-47 assault rifles and a handgun” along with the list of 45 elected officials. “Police found a ballistic vest, a disassembled 9mm gun, a mask and a gold police-style badge in the area” as well. At least four of the recovered guns belong to Boelter. The Star Tribune reports that “four dozen firearms, including rifles, pistols and shotguns” were recovered from Boelter’s residences. He had apparently begun spending an increasing amount of time separate from his wife.
Boelter was eventually found near his new e-bike. Having left his survival gear in the SUV abandoned at the Hortmans’ house, he was hardly equipped for an extended outdoor stay. One wonders why he did not try to flee the state altogether while he had the Buick. His actions do not seem well-planned or thought-through, but rather extemporaneous and disorganized and impulsive.
Vance Luther Boelter did not attend a radical church, in fact his faith community has repudiated his actions. According to Carlson, Boelter was having financial problems from travelling to Africa and starting up a security firm that had failed to win any contracts for “random armed patrols” of private property. Boelter had been forced to work for a funeral home.
“Problem is, he quit all his jobs to go down there,” Carlson explained. “And then he comes back and tries to find new jobs. Wasn’t working out that good.” Boelter was 57, the age when careers should be winding down instead of starting over. “He was looking around, but maybe things didn’t work out and he just gave up and decided to go out in the blaze of glory,” Carlson suggested. “I have no idea what he was thinking.”
David Carlson, who has known Boelter since the fourth grade, presents us with a picture of the accused in the twilight of his manhood, struggling to survive, increasingly isolated and disappointed. This would be consistent with the overall decline of status and well-being among American men. Boelter simply broke bad; politics played no role in breaking him.
Still, partisans want to “call it” for their own team, which is stupid. Here are two reactions to the same news report, one that stops thinking at Donald Trump and another that stops thinking at Tim Walz. Both of these opinions are terrible in equal measure, even if the latter is the more conspiratorial. Richard Hanania is the last man in America who should try to speak for the American male.
Boelter had no influence. He had no business success. His doctorate in leadership from a now-shuttered Catholic university justified addressing the FBI as “Dr.,” but it was worthless to him in material terms. His foray into volunteer political appointments had not produced any networking results, nor had his business interest in the DRC panned out. Vance Luther Boelter had failed at life, so he began to dream of death. He wanted to make himself great again, before the end, even if he had to be a great villain. Weirdly, he thought that making Tim Walz a Senator would make him greater, too. I will keep an eye on this story as new details emerge.
Donald Trump Is Not Ideological
There is no ideology to Donald Trump, just id. He feels his politics in his gut. Reason and evidence are not interesting to Trump. To quote John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser, fascism is a “comprehensive ideology” while “Trump isn’t capable of philosophical thought.” Rumors of an ideological admiration for Adolf Hitler are therefore utterly ridiculous and tendentious.
I only get the Home Shopping Network on my dental implants. 😞