When President Donald Trump took the oath of office for the second time in January, one of his first acts was pardoning 23 anti-abortion activists, some of whom were serving five-year sentences for violently attacking staff and patients at abortion clinics. At the time, Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northrup said the pardons invited “anti-abortion extremists to step up their attacks.”
On Saturday, Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota Democrat and the former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband, Mark, were shot and killed by a man impersonating a police officer, in what Governor Tim Walz called a “politically motivated assassination.” The suspect, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, was arrested on Sunday night after a nearly 48-hour manhunt. Before his arrest, police found a hit list of over 70 targets in his car, including abortion providers, abortion clinics, and Planned Parenthood locations.
“There clearly was some through line with abortion because of the groups that were on the list,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said on Meet the Press on Sunday. The list has not been publicly released, but a spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety told Mother Jones that anyone included has been contacted by the police.
Boelter also shot and wounded Democratic State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette; both are expected to recover. Other Democratic Minnesota members of Congress—including Sen. Tina Smith, Reps. Ilhan Omar, Kelly Morrison, and Angie Craig, as well as Walz, and Attorney General Keith Ellison—appeared on Boelter’s suspected list of targets.
Apart from killing two Democrats, attempting to kill two others, and having a kill list of Democrats and abortion rights organizations, Boelter’s specific motives aren’t yet clear. His friends told the Associated Press that Boelter was definitely conservative and religious, but that they didn’t think he was fanatical. He worked as a security contractor, but also served as an evangelical pastor in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2023, according to the AP. “The churches are so messed up, they don’t know abortion is wrong in many churches,” he said during a sermon in February 2023. Another friend told CNN that Boelter was a “staunch opponent” of abortion rights.
However, outside of the sermon, and apart from the fact that he frequently attended Trump campaign rallies, both AP and CNN report that Boelter didn’t appear to make any public comments or declarations about abortion. Wired reported that Boelter had “liked” the Alliance Defending Freedom, the far-right Christian nationalist law organization responsible for getting Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court, on Facebook. (His public profile has since been taken down.) Jezebel has reached out to ADF as well as the anti-abortion organization Students for Life of America for comment. In an emailed statement, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America told Jezebel it “condemns political violence.”
“He never talked to me about abortion,” one friend told the AP of Boelter. “It seemed to be just that he was a conservative Republican who naturally followed Trump.” It’s almost as if the two go hand in hand…
Speaking of Trump, who celebrated his 79th birthday on Saturday with a humiliating “military” parade that looked like it was ordered from Shein, when asked for comment about the killings, he called Walz “grossly incompetent.”
Later on Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social to praise ICE and warn people in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City (what he called “the core of the Democrat Power Center”) that ICE will be ramping up its attacks.
In a press conference that same day, Walz said, “This cannot be the norm. It cannot be the way that we deal with our political differences.”
But when we have a president who directs a government agency to commit violence against the opposing political party’s population centers; pardons violent anti-abortion criminals and January 6 rioters; says a political rival should have “guns trained on her face”; and refers to Democrats as the “enemy from within,” deadly violence does not feel particularly far from “the norm.”
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