The Right's Conspiracy Theory Machine Goes Into Overdrive After Minnesota Shooting
On Saturday morning, Vance Luther Boelter allegedly dressed as a police officer, drove a fake police car to the homes of two Democratic Minnesota lawmakers, and opened fire. State Rep. Melissa Hortman, the former House Speaker, and her husband Mark were killed. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were wounded but survived surgery.
By Saturday afternoon, before Boelter was even captured, the right-wing conspiracy theory machine was already in full swing, desperately trying to pin the blame on the left. This wasn’t some organic confusion that emerged over time. It was an immediate, coordinated effort to rewrite reality in real time, facts be damned.
Mike Cernovich, the conspiracy theorist who helped spread Pizzagate, wasted no time asking on X whether Gov. Tim Walz “had her executed to send a message.” Later, after discovering that Walz had reappointed Boelter to a state workforce board in 2019, Cernovich escalated his claims, suggesting that Walz had “unleashed an assassin” and “ordered the political hit against a rival who voted against Walz’s plan to give free healthcare to illegals.” Cernovich even called for federal action, demanding that “The FBI must take Tim Walz into custody immediately,” according to the Minnesota Reformer.
Alex Jones, naturally, couldn’t resist getting in on the action. According to reporting from The Independent, Jones used his Saturday broadcast to make various unfounded claims, including that Hortman was killed because she was considering switching parties to join Republicans, and that Boelter was a “high-level” Walz appointee and “No Kings” protest organizer. He capped off his misinformation session by reading from what he described as a social media post calling the shooting a “professional hit.”
Even Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of X, joined the pile-on. “The far left is murderously violent,” he wrote on the same day he announced he was working to reprogram his AI program Grok because it was spreading “leftist indoctrination,” according to reports.
But it wasn’t just the usual suspects in the conspiracy theory ecosystem. Sitting U.S. senators got in on the act too. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who had condemned political violence just a day earlier after a shooting in his own state, decided to mock the Minnesota tragedy by calling it the “Nightmare on Waltz Street” — apparently misspelling the governor’s name. He also wrote, “Marxism is a deadly mental illness” and “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.” Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio piled on as well, writing, “The degree to which the extreme left has become radical, violent, and intolerant is both stunning and terrifying.”
Laura Loomer, Trump’s conspiracy theorist traveling companion, claimed that “Walz’s goons are now assassinating lawmakers who support legislation Walz opposes” and called for an investigation into the governor.
So what was the basis for all these wild theories? Essentially two things: Boelter had been reappointed by Walz to a state workforce development board in 2019, and police found “No Kings” protest flyers in his vehicle. That’s it. That’s the “smoking gun” they used to construct an elaborate conspiracy theory.
As the Minnesota Reformer pointed out, the claim that Boelter was a “Walz appointee” was thoroughly misleading. Like many states, Minnesota has hundreds of nonpartisan and bipartisan boards and commissions, composed of thousands of people who typically win appointments by simply volunteering. There are currently 342 open positions on Minnesota boards and commissions. Boelter was first appointed to the Workforce Development Council by Walz’s predecessor, Gov. Mark Dayton, in 2016, and reappointed by Walz in 2019. As the Reformer noted, it was “the equivalent of calling a Sunday school volunteer an ‘appointee of the bishop.’”
According to reporting from the Star Tribune, Walz’s office said the governor had no relationship with Boelter and emphasized that governors routinely appoint thousands of people of all political affiliations to unpaid, external boards and commissions. But that didn’t stop the Murdoch media machine, specifically the New York Post, from running with the headline “Former appointee of Tim Walz sought…”
As for the “No Kings” flyers, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why a man planning to assassinate Democratic lawmakers might have had materials related to anti-Trump protests. He wasn’t organizing them — he was likely planning to attack them. That’s exactly why police tried to cancel the protests after finding the flyers.
Here’s what actually happened, according to law enforcement and media reports: Boelter, described by friends as deeply religious and conservative, was a Trump supporter who registered as a Republican when he lived in Oklahoma, according to the Associated Press. His roommate told NBC affiliate KARE that Boelter voted for Trump and was a “strong supporter” of the president.
Police found a list of about 70 names in Boelter’s vehicle, according to ABC News. The list included prominent Democrats like Gov. Walz, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Sen. Tina Smith, and state Attorney General Keith Ellison, as well as abortion providers and pro-choice activists. Every single politician on the list was a Democrat. As the Minnesota Reformer noted, the suspect’s “hit list” comprised Minnesotans who have been outspoken in favor of abortion rights and included several abortion clinics, “which doesn’t sound like the work of ‘the left.’”
Far from being a co-conspirator in Hortman’s murder, Walz was actually his close friend and political ally. They had worked together at the Legislature since Walz was elected governor in 2018, according to fact-checkers at the Star Tribune. This was, as Gov. Walz correctly described it, “a politically motivated assassination” — but the politics were right-wing, not left-wing.
If this feels familiar, that’s because it is. We’ve seen this exact playbook deployed repeatedly whenever right-wing violence occurs. The pattern is so predictable that you could probably set your watch by it.
Take Charlottesville. Within 24 hours of Heather Heyer’s death during the Unite the Right rally in August 2017, Alex Jones was declaring the entire event was a “false flag” operation orchestrated by George Soros and that the white supremacists were actually actors, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Mike Cernovich claimed the left initiated violence to instigate civil war. On Reddit’s r/The_Donald forum, users promoted theories that it was “a Soros-funded honeypot psyop” involving “Antifa goons disguised as Nazis,” according to Slate.
After the 2017 Las Vegas shooting that killed 58 people, Jones claimed without evidence that “there was antifa crap everywhere” in the shooter’s hotel room. Other conspiracy theorists falsely claimed the shooter was associated with antifa or ISIS, despite police stating Stephen Paddock “was not on our radar or anyone’s radar prior to the event.”
When the January 6 Capitol insurrection occurred, Fox News hosts like Laura Ingraham immediately suggested that “antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” Rep. Matt Gaetz and others echoed the theory, despite the FBI directly refuting any antifa involvement and no one charged in the attack having any connection to the anti-fascist movement.
After mass shootings at Sandy Hook, Parkland, Buffalo, and Uvalde, the same chorus of voices immediately declared them “false flags” designed to promote gun control legislation, according to Media Matters and other outlets. Alex Jones spent years claiming Sandy Hook didn’t happen at all, leading to harassment of grieving families that ultimately cost him over a billion dollars in defamation lawsuits.
The pattern is always the same: A right-wing extremist commits an act of violence. Within hours, the conspiracy theory machine springs into action, claiming it was actually a “false flag” perpetrated by the left, or that antifa was somehow involved, or that the victims had it coming. The theories are immediately amplified by prominent right-wing figures, from fringe conspiracy theorists to sitting members of Congress to the world’s richest man.
As Amanda Marcotte noted in Salon, these conspiracy theories serve to encourage more political violence by signaling to would-be terrorists that they can expect support from MAGA cheerleaders if they take violent action. They also create counter-narratives that allow potential killers to rationalize that they’re acting in “self-defense.”
The speed and coordination of this misinformation campaign reveals something chilling about our political moment. Within hours of a tragic assassination, prominent figures from conspiracy theorists to sitting senators were working overtime to blame their political opponents for violence committed by someone from their own side. The fact that they didn’t wait for facts, didn’t pause out of respect for the grieving families, didn’t show even basic human decency — that tells us everything we need to know about their priorities.
According to research cited by the Psychiatric Times, about half of the U.S. population believes in at least one conspiracy theory, and nearly one in five Americans believe mass shootings have been faked by groups trying to promote stricter gun control laws. These false flag conspiracy theories typically arise among extreme right-wing groups and align with the theorizer’s political ideology, as noted by UCLA professor Joseph Pierre.
Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans asked the public not to speculate about the shooting during a press conference Sunday. “We often want easy answers for complex problems,” he said, according to reporting. “Those answers will come as we complete the full picture of our investigation.”
But the conspiracy theorists didn’t want to wait for answers. They already had their narrative ready to go, facts be damned. As J. Patrick Coolican, editor of the Minnesota Reformer, wrote, “Right-wing influencers marred Hortman’s death and smeared Walz on a pile of lies. In a different, saner world, they would be humiliated and slink away. But the smart money is that during the next moment of national crisis and mourning, they will again lie for profit.”
He’s absolutely right. Because for these people, every tragedy is just another opportunity to advance their political agenda, even if it means dancing on the graves of the victims to do it. The shooting in Minnesota was a horrible act of political violence that took the life of a dedicated public servant and wounded others. The least we can do is be honest about what actually happened, rather than using it as fodder for the next conspiracy theory.
But apparently, that’s too much to ask from the people who claim to be defending democracy while systematically undermining our ability to agree on basic facts.