The pond had wanted to feature some insights into the latest political assassin at work in the United States, but this morning got as full as a goog, so the pond had to punt the yarn to a late arvo slot.
The right wing social media circus spent a lot of time insisting that the loon in question was a dangerous Democrat, a leftie and a Marxist.
That last suggestion came from an actual senator, a certain Mike Lee, barking mad and celebrated in HuffPost in Sen. Mike Lee Backtracks After Deranged Tweets About Minnesota Assassination.
Good one Mike.
As often happens, the story was more complicated, and yet it suited all the pond's prejudices, which is why the pond yearned to make a note of it ...
WaPo, where democracy goes to die in a billionaire's purse, provided this coverage:
Minnesota shooting suspect went from youthful evangelizer to far-right zealot, Residents in Vance Boelter’s hometown are struggling to reconcile what they knew of him with the killing of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband. (* archive link)
Even the name at the start of the reporting was evocative, a bit like the way "Snake Gully" works in the land of Oz:
All this reinforced the pond's fervent belief that if you start out deeply passionate and rabid about a cause, you can end up just as deeply passionate and rabid about another cause you found at the bottom of a different rabbit hole ...
And so it came to pass ...
And, the bio claimed, he had made trips overseas to seek out “militant Islamists” to “tell them violence wasn’t the answer.”
Christ for the Nations was founded in 1970 by Gordon Lindsay, a prominent preacher in independent, charismatic Christianity. The focus of the movement initially was on evangelizing, faith healing and experiential worship such as speaking in tongues. In the last quarter-century, however, a segment of it turned to politics and changing policies, especially around abortion.
A Lindsay quote long posted in the school’s lobby reads: “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.”
The exhortation, the school said Monday, described prayer that should be “intense, fervent and passionate.”
In a statement, it confirmed Boelter had graduated in 1990 with a degree in practical theology in leadership and pastoral and said it was “aghast and horrified” at the news that the alum was a suspect.
“This is not who we are,” the statement said. “We have been training Christian servant leaders for 55 years and they have been agents of good, not evil.”
Based on his recent online presence, Boelter’s views now appear to align with the political “far right” of Christianity in the United States, said Matthew Taylor, a senior Christian scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies.
Its core believes in demons and satanic evil in the world and a need “to fight back against it,” Taylor said. He added that the group disseminates “very extreme” rhetoric about abortion, which he said some of its leaders have portrayed as a form of child sacrifice that empowers demons.
Boelter “seems very much to embrace some of the violent rhetoric and ideas that circulate through those spaces,” Taylor said.
Indeed, in another sermon that Wired magazine said it reviewed, Boelter said God was sending people to America for a specific purpose.
“They don’t know abortion is wrong, many churches,” Wired quoted him as saying. “When the body starts moving in the wrong direction … God will raise an apostle or prophet to correct their course.”
God is going to “raise up apostles and prophets in America,” he said. “To correct His church.”
And so on and so forth, and the pond isn't going to use this as an excuse to rabbit on about atheism.
It's enough to note how exhortations to pray at least one violent prayer each day can turn someone from suggesting violence isn't the answer to deciding that violence is the answer.
Wired, which now regularly provides interesting material outside the tech world, was also on the case in Suspect in Minnesota Shooting Linked to Security Company, Evangelical Ministry, The alleged shooter is a 57-year-old white male; according to his ministry's website, he “sought out militant Islamists in order to share the gospel and tell them that violence wasn't the answer.” (*archive link)
Inter alia ...
“They don't know abortion is wrong, many churches,” he said. “They don't have the gifts flowing. God gives the body gifts. To keep balance. Because when the body starts moving in the wrong direction, when they're one, and accepting the gifts, God will raise an apostle or prophet to correct their course.”
”God is going to raise up apostles and prophets in America,” he added, “to correct His church.”
In another sermon in Matadi that year, Boelter railed against the LGBTQ community. “There's people, especially in America, they don't know what sex they are. They don't know their sexual orientation. They're confused,” he said. “The enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.”
A Facebook profile under the suspected shooter’s name was briefly viewed by WIRED before it was taken down. His profile had shown him “liking” several evangelical missionary organizations, as well as pages honoring Reinhard Bonnke, a German pentecostal evangelist known for missions in several African countries, and Smith Wigglesworth, a British evangelist who was influential in the pentecostal movement. He also “liked” the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocacy organization known for its hardline stances against abortion and LGBTQ rights.
What is it with this obsession with teh gaze and teh trans people?
Wired also had something for privacy wonks:
Minnesota Shooting Suspect Allegedly Used Data Broker Sites to Find Targets’ Addresses, The shooter allegedly researched several “people search” sites in an attempt to target his victims, highlighting the potential dangers of widely available personal data. (* archive link)
Inter alia ...
“These are not the first murders that have been abetted by the data broker industry. But most of the previous targets were relatively unknown victims of stalking and abuse," alleges Evan Greer, deputy director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future. “Lawmakers need to act before they have more blood on their hands.”
Benjamin Wallace-Wells put a different spin on it in The New Yorker in The Minnesota Shootings and the Dangerous Trend of Impersonating Law Enforcement, A new political era has arrived, in which the expectation and the fear of political violence are endemic. (* archive link)
The politicization of law enforcement has acquired a new dimension during the ongoing immigration crackdowns, when the Administration has sometimes seemed to allow its agents to disguise their identities or affiliations so that it is often unclear to detainees whose custody they are in, or under what authority. (If the vigilantes have been encouraged to act as cops, the actual cops have also been encouraged to act a bit more like vigilantes.) In Boston, in March, when federal agents arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student who had co-written a pro-Palestine op-ed in a campus newspaper, they were in plain clothes and masked. Sometimes the mission has been fuzzy or concealed: not long after the White House deployed seven hundred marines to Los Angeles, purportedly to help quell the protests against immigration raids, photos spread of them detaining a protester. Catherine Rampell, of the Washington Post, reported last week on an immigration raid targeting a landscaper working outside a boutique home-design business in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in which agents showed up “in masks and tactical gear and refused to show IDs, warrants or even the names of any criminals they were supposedly hunting.” In the piece, Rampell spoke to the business’s co-owner, Linda Shafiroff, who said, “It could have been like a band of the Proud Boys or something.”
In each of these circumstances, the federal government is asking ordinary people to trust that those wearing uniforms are acting on behalf of the public, while also allowing them to shroud their identity and their mission, and pushing the boundaries of what law enforcement can do. It is hard to imagine a scenario more perfectly engineered for exploitation. In February, a man wearing an ICE jacket at the Conservative Political Action Conference, outside Washington, D.C., admitted to a podcaster that he had no affiliation with the agency, but said of his jacket, “It’s $29.99 on Amazon. I would recommend buying a small, if you’re my size.” In Philadelphia, police sought a man who had entered a car-repair shop wearing fake security apparel; yelled “Immigration!,” which caused some employees to scatter; and then proceeded to tie up a worker and rob the business. By the end of March, the fake-ICE situation had grown sufficiently common in Southern California that the Los Angeles Times ran a feature titled “ICE impersonators and other scammers are on the rise: How to protect yourself.”
That's what fascism looks like.
Stephanie McCrummen stayed with fundamentalism in The Atlantic in The Minnesota Suspect’s Radical Spiritual World, Before Vance Boelter was accused of killing a Democratic state lawmaker, he had an active, even grandiose, religious life. (* archive link)
...If Boelter’s beliefs were a factor in the shootings, the question is not exactly what radicalized him, Frederick Clarkson, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates who has been tracking the NAR movement for years, told me: The worldview that Boelter appeared to embrace was radical, he said.
“Everyone brings faith to their life and the things they do—the question is, in what ways does your faith inform your actions and your decision making?” he told me. “Without knowing exactly what motivated the shooter, we can say that being oriented into this kind of NAR thinking, to my mind, it’s just a matter of time before an individual or group of individuals take some kind of action against the enemies of God and the demons in their midst.”
It all speaks to the pond of an insular country which King Donald is determined to make even more isolationist and insular and removed from the world.
Attacking migrants, banning countries, excluding and demeaning ... as evoked by TT ...
How much better off is Europe when you can roam through museums and bump into visual challenges of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus kind ...
Sleeping Hermaphroditus or Sleeping Hermaphrodite (also, "The Borghese Hermaphrodite") is an ancient Roman marble sculpture depicting Hermaphroditus life size; it rests on a marble mattress completed by Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1620. The form is derived from ancient portrayals of Venus and other female nudes, and from feminized Hellenistic portrayals of Dionysus. This subject was widely repeated during the Hellenistic period and in ancient Rome, given the number of versions that have survived...
Well yes, there's no need to go off the deep end ...it's better to live and let live and enjoy the curves, however they turn up ...
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