Why is the right-wing media giving Vance Boelter a megaphone to spout sinister nonsense?
J. Patrick Coolican
Wed, August 13, 2025 at 6:39 PM GMT+1
3 min read
In this handout provided by Hennepin County Sheriff's Office, Vance Luther Boelter poses for a booking photo on June 16, 2025 in Green Isle, Minnesota.
This piece of garbage from
Blaze News, which is part of right-winger Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media, is an illustration of the moral rot of much of the American information landscape.
It promises an “exclusive” interview with Vance Boelter, the alleged shooter of the Sen. John Hoffman and Yvette Hoffman and killer of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.
The publication lends its credibility — yes, a joke to
Reformer readers, but an actual thing to
Blaze’s millions of readers — to Boelter’s preposterous story, almost entirely unchallenged.
Boelter claims he was at the Hoffmans’ to make a “citizen’s arrest” — right-wingers love this kind of cosplay — that was somehow related to an “investigation” Boelter had been conducting on the COVID-19 vaccines, while working at funeral homes. There’s some more argle-bargle details, but the long and short of it is he admits to shooting the Hoffmans.
Blaze treats this like an entirely normal claim, that someone without any experience or expertise would use his job at mortuaries to conduct an “investigation” into a widely used vaccine that saved millions of lives.
The publication doesn’t challenge any of it, except when one of the mortuaries where Boelter worked says, “The assertion in question is wholly unfounded, as no such investigation ever occurred.”
Notably, a postscript says the quote from Wulff Funeral Home came
after publication, probably when the mortuary sent a “WTH?!” email and someone at
Blaze was savvy enough to see the risk of a defamation lawsuit and added the quote.
When asked about the Hortman killings, Boelter suddenly clams up and claims he can’t talk because of the ongoing criminal case. (
Blaze fails to point out that this makes no sense — why can he talk openly about one criminal case but not the other?)
Then they let him play to the foolish mythologies of their readership with fictional claims about the COVID vaccines: “I also think about the hundreds of other Minnesota citizens that have died in the last several years that have not been talked about but should have.”
They just let it hang there, giving legitimacy to the nonsense.
Blaze also fails to mention the lengthy list of targets — Democratic officials and abortion providers — that investigators say was in Boelter’s car. The word abortion never appears in the piece.
Either Boelter is mentally incompetent or perhaps he is propagating propaganda that will justify and even valorize his evil acts in hopes of persuading one right-wing juror to vote for acquittal. (Or persuading a morally bankrupt president for a pardon.)
If it’s the former and he’s suffering a psychotic break from reality, quoting him is unethical: You don’t quote someone who is mentally unfit and detached from reality.
If it’s the latter, you’re participating in his evil charade.
Of course, there’s another possibility: The reporter and editors of
Blaze believe Boelter’s claims, that the vaccine is deadly and he was heroically investigating it.
Which would help us understand the state of right-wing media: So high on their own supply that they’re eagerly willing to give a platform to an accused killer.
You might be thinking, come on, it’s
Blaze. We know what they’re all about. But setting aside their considerable influence — BlazeTV had 450,000 subscribers paying on average $102 a year,
Axios reported in 2020 — there’s a lesson here for mainstream media chasing an interview with Boelter or reporting on his now voluminous public comments.
Even assuming he’s mentally competent, there’s nothing he can say that’s worth printing, unless and until he’s willing to explain who radicalized him — and, thus, who should share in the responsibility for his alleged crimes.
Nope!