We’ve seen this before. Charlottesville. Pittsburgh. El Paso. Buffalo. Kenosha. Allen. Jacksonville. Lakewood. Austin. Over and over again, the pattern plays out with numbing regularity: white men radicalized by conspiracy, drenched in grievance, and armed with fantasies of civil war. Trump tells them to take their country back. The right calls them patriots. Then the bullets start flying. The targets are always the same: immigrants, Jews, Black Americans, Democrats, women, journalists, LGBTQ people. Anyone who gets in the way of their violent, hallucinatory vision of America.
Don’t let them sell you the lone wolf story again. Don’t let Elon Musk or Mike Lee or some Fox News teleprompter tell you this was “the left” or some deep-state psyop. Vance Boelter’s roommate said it plainly: he was a Trump guy. He voted MAGA. He bought into the lie that Democrats were evil. And then he did what the most poisoned minds in the movement always eventually do. He loaded his weapon and opened the door.
He wasn’t the first. Not even close. James Alex Fields Jr. rammed his Dodge Challenger into Heather Heyer in Charlottesville after marching alongside torch-wielding white nationalists. Trump said there were very fine people “on both sides.” Robert Bowers walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and murdered eleven Jews after hearing that immigrants were invading—and that Jews were helping them. Patrick Crusius massacred 23 people at an El Paso Walmart after posting about the “Hispanic invasion.” Kyle Rittenhouse killed two in Kenosha and was rewarded with a photo op at Mar-a-Lago. Payton Gendron gunned down ten Black people in a Buffalo supermarket after being radicalized by Great Replacement theory. Over and over and over again, the same pipeline. The same violence. The same silence from the top.
This is not an accident. This is not a coincidence. This is a movement. It walks like MAGA, talks like MAGA, votes like MAGA—and when it snaps, it kills like MAGA.
Boelter wasn’t inspired by Antifa. He wasn’t a rogue actor from a forgotten fringe. He was the product of a steady drip of propaganda and rage, nurtured in the algorithmic petri dish of right-wing media and turbocharged by a president who told his followers that Democrats were the enemy of the people. He didn’t act alone—but alone he pulled the trigger. Alone, he murdered. Alone, he fled.
But he’s not alone in what he believed.
Vance Boelter is MAGA.
And if you’re still pretending otherwise, you’re complicit in what comes next.
He wasn’t the first.
He won’t be the last.
This post has been syndicated from Closer to the Edge, where it was published under this address.