In the hours after Vance Boelter was named as the suspect in the fatal shooting of Melissa Hortman, a Democratic Minnesota state representative, and her husband Mark Hortman, far-right conspiracists and Republican influencers claimed he was a violent, leftist Democrat.
“The far left is murderously violent,” Elon Musk wrote on X on Saturday, a post that remains on the site and has been viewed over 50 million times.
When the facts of the story emerged—that the alleged shooter had been registered in other states as a Republican, was said to have voted for President Donald Trump and, as WIRED reported, had participated in an evangelical ministry where he preached against abortion and demonized the LGTBQ community—the conspiracy theories didn’t stop. Instead, they just changed. Posters then claimed the incident was a false flag conducted by the shadowy deep state, while trying to distance the shooter from any connection to the president and the wider MAGA movement.
For years in the wake of mass shootings or politically-motivated violence, the far-right has sought to portray the perpetrators as leftists, members of antifa, part of the LGBTQ community, or connected in some way to the Democratic party, despite all evidence showing that the extremist violence is usually conducted by far-right actors.
On Saturday, as the manhunt for the alleged shooter was underway, conservatives claimed almost immediately that the suspect was linked in some way to Minnesota governor Tim Walz and that the shooting was part of a grand conspiracy to target a Democrat who had recently voted with Republicans in the Minnesota legislature. The alleged shooter was reappointed to a Workforce Development Board by Walz in 2019. But there is no evidence to suggest a closer link between the pair.
This did not stop the term “Walz appointee” from trending on X on Saturday, with right-wing influencers declaring confidently that the alleged shooter was a Democrat.
“Did Walz have her executed?” right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich wrote on X, quoting a post from a well-known conspiracy theory account that highlighted Hortman had voted with Republicans.
YouTuber Benny Johnson, who has almost 5 million followers on the video-sharing site and more than 3 million followers on X, positioned the shooting as part of a growing trend of left-wing violence in a long screed on X that described the alleged shooter as “a left-wing Tim Walz appointee.“
“Everyone talks about Minnesota, but they don’t talk about the guy seems to be a leftist,” Donald Trump Jr. said in an an interview with News Nation. “The guy who committed those atrocities this weekend was a Democrat who worked for Tim Walz.” When pressed by the interviewer, who replied, “he voted for your Dad,” Trump Jr. said, “I’ll believe that when I see it.”
On Sunday, David Carlson, who has known the alleged shooter since fourth grade and described the 57-year-old as his best friend, dismissed the claims that the alleged shooter was a Democrat, telling reporters Sunday he “would be offended if people called him a Democrat.”
“He’s a Trump supporter, he voted for Trump, he liked Trump,” Carlson said, adding: “He listened to InfoWars.” InfoWars is the far-right conspiracy theory channel operated by Alex Jones, the school shooting conspiracist and Pizzagate conspiracy promoter who filed for bankruptcy in 2022. This did not stop Jones from weighing in: “Evidence mounts that the reported Minnesota assassin Vance Luther Boelter is a patsy who is being framed to cover up a larger false flag deep state operation,” Jones wrote on X.
Despite the clear evidence that the alleged shooter was a Trump supporter, those trying to lay the blame on leftists and Democrats fell back on one of the oldest tricks in the conspiracy theorist handbook: Blame the deep state. “The conspiracism about the Minnesota shooting, particularly the allegations that it’s a psy-op or false flag, have become the norm with violent incidents of a political nature,” Mike Rothschild, an author who writes about conspiracy theories and extremists, tells WIRED.
Posters, including elected officials, suggested that the narrative pushed by law enforcement—that the alleged shooter was responsible for the murders of the Hortmans—was actually a ruse and ‘psyop.’
“Is it just me or does the man in the mask who they keep saying is the Minnesota shooter look totally different and about 70 pounds skinnier than the fat slob in a cowboy hat the media keeps saying is the shooter?” conspiracy theorist and close Trump ally Laura Loomer wrote on X.
Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers, who has pushed numerous wild conspiracy theories in the past, added to the confusion by quoting a post on X about the suspected shooter’s arrest and writing: “Something(s) don’t add up. Just sayin.’”
Others pointed to Carlson’s interviews as further proof that this was all a set-up: “This is the most lazy psyop false flag crisis actor I’ve ever seen,” one conspiracy-focused X account wrote above a picture of Carlson.
“When someone on the far-right commits a violent act, [right-wing conspiracy theorists] have to deflect the blame elsewhere, and do it by constructing convoluted conspiracies about the deep state being involved or the left wanting to ‘distract’ from something else—because they’ve convinced themselves and their followers that nobody in their movement could possibly carry out any act of violence,” says Rothschild.
