The New Yorker:

A new political era has arrived, in which the expectation and the fear of political violence are endemic.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Around 2 a.m. on Saturday morning, operators manning emergency lines in the Minneapolis suburb of Champlin, according to a police report, got a call from someone who said that a masked man had come to their home “and then shot their parents.” When police and medics arrived, they discovered that the victims were a Democratic state senator named John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, who were alive but badly injured. A “very intuitive” sergeant from the nearby city of Brooklyn Park, who had helped respond to the call, asked officers from his jurisdiction to check on the home of the Democratic state legislator Melissa Hortman, who was until recently the state House speaker. According to the Brooklyn Park police chief, Mark Bruley, when the officers arrived, at about 3:35 a.m., they saw something unexpected: a “vehicle that looked exactly like an S.U.V. squad car” in the driveway with its emergency lights on. The front door was open, and the officers saw a man dressed like a cop firing into it; he killed Hortman and her husband, Mark. The officers fired at the shooter—since identified as Vance Boelter, a fifty-seven-year-old evangelical Christian (a website of his said that he is an ordained minister) with a scattered work history, who had recently been employed by local funeral-service companies—who ran back into the house and, for a time, escaped. He was arrested on Sunday evening and has been charged with federal murder, which carries the possibility of the death penalty.

The assassination of one elected official, and the attempted assassination of another, confirm the arrival of a new political era, in which the expectation and the fear of political violence are endemic. But who Boelter is, and the exact nature of his objectives and perceived grievances, may ultimately be less salient than whom he pretended to be. (Boelter’s motives aren’t yet clear, though he possessed what police have suggested may have been a target list of about seventy individuals, many of whom are Democratic politicians.) A state legislator summoned to his or her door well after midnight may be wary about opening it, but somewhat less reluctant if the person on the step is uniformed and there’s a cop car parked on the street. As it turns out, Boelter was driving an S.U.V. that he had presumably outfitted for a security business that hadn’t taken off. But he made the deliberate decision to leave the emergency lights on.

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