Earlier today, President Donald J. Trump stood before reporters just days after a domestic terror attack that left Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband dead, and State Senator John Hoffman and his wife fighting for their lives. When asked whether he would reach out to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz following the shootings, Trump didn’t hesitate to sneer.
“I don’t really call him. He’s slick — he appointed this guy to a position,” Trump said. “I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him. why would I call him?
“I could call him and say, ‘Hi, how you doing?’” Trump continued. “The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a, he’s a mess. So, you know, I could be nice and call him but why waste time?”
There was no expression of sympathy. No condemnation of political violence. Just a cold, calculated pivot to exploitation. One more chance to swing the axe at his enemies.
That lie—that Governor Tim Walz was somehow responsible for this massacre because the accused gunman, Vance Boelter, once served on a volunteer state board—didn’t start with Trump. He simply gave it its most powerful amplification. The same narrative had already been smeared across right-wing social media like a blood trail:
Mike Lee posted a surveillance image of the suspect and captioned it, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.”
Elon Musk quote-tweeted disinformation that blamed “the far left” for the murder.
Laura Loomer claimed Democrats were carrying out assassinations of their own members.
It was a vile, coordinated inversion of the truth: a Trump supporter—a right-wing, anti-abortion, pro-Trump extremist—was recast as a leftist assassin acting on Walz’s behalf.
The Guardian’s recent exposé, “How the right spread ‘brutal and cruel’ misinformation after Minnesota lawmaker killings,” cataloged this disinformation avalanche in painstaking detail. It traced how figures like Lee, Loomer, and Musk turned lies into viral talking points—pinning the blame on Walz, the left, and the immigrant community. But the piece failed to identify the origin of this fiction. It named the flames, but not the match.
That match was lit by the New York Post, at 1:20 p.m. Eastern Time on June 14, when it published this headline:
“Former appointee of Tim Walz sought in ‘politically motivated assassination’ of Minnesota lawmaker and husband days after she voted with GOP as cops reveal disturbing manifesto”
That is not speculation. That is not interpretation. We have the screenshot. It’s real. The Post ran that exact headline, crafted by editors who knew exactly what they were doing.
Let’s be clear about what that headline implies. It opens by defining Boelter as a “former appointee of Tim Walz”—planting the seed that this killer was aligned with the Democratic governor. It calls the murder a “politically motivated assassination”—asserting motive before authorities had confirmed anything. Then it takes a sharp right turn into fiction, claiming the attack happened “days after she voted with GOP”—pushing the false narrative that Boelter was retaliating from the left over immigration policy. Finally, it seals the lie with invented authority: “as cops reveal disturbing manifesto,” even though no manifesto had been made public at the time.
Every element of that headline was engineered to distort. The framing was dishonest, the timing was reckless, and the consequences were immediate. Within hours, that headline was amplified by a flood of right-wing influencers eager to deflect blame from the violent extremism in their own ranks. And when the facts began to emerge—when it became clear that Boelter was a Trump voter, a pro-life zealot, and a man who once delivered sermons in Congo railing against abortion and LGBTQ people—the New York Post quietly changed the headline.
No correction. No editor’s note. No accountability. Just a silent walk back from the crime scene, hoping no one would notice the blood on their hands.
But we noticed. And we’re not letting it go.
This wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t lazy journalism. It was a deliberate act of narrative laundering by a Murdoch rag that masquerades as a newspaper. The Post took a procedural reappointment to a 60-member advisory board and turned it into a partisan bomb. They built a headline for people like Elon Musk o regurgitate. They handed Mike Lee the language to use. They gave Trump the ammunition he fired back at a grieving state.
The Guardian was right: this was brutal, and it was cruel. But let’s finish the thought.
It was also premeditated.
The New York Post didn’t just spread a lie. They authored it. They detonated it. And when it went off, they backed away and let the chaos consume everyone else. That makes them complicit—not just in misinformation, but in the very political atmosphere that allows acts of violence like this to be twisted into propaganda.
The far right didn’t just manufacture a scapegoat. They were handed one by the New York Post.
And now, thanks to that headline—and the screenshot we will never stop showing—we know exactly who lit the match.
This post has been syndicated from Closer to the Edge, where it was published under this address.