If anyone deserves to hang by the neck until dead, it’s Vance Boelter. Unfortunately, he won’t. Minnesota, the state where he assassinated a Democratic lawmaker, murdered her spouse and shot two more people, abolished capital punishment in 1911, after a botched hanging.

But state and federal prosecutors are looking at bringing him up on federal charges. Luigi Mangione, who murdered an insurance executive in Manhattan in broad daylight, faces a similar fate. Like Minnesota, New York abolished capital punishment. If Mangione is convicted on federal charges, a jury could sentence him to death.

In Boelter’s case, there is an opportunity that would be obvious to liberals if we were not so squeamish about revenge killing at the hands of the state. This opportunity would be obvious to Democrats, too, if we were not so deferential to the impartiality of the court system.

What opportunity? Make an example of Vance Boelter. Turn his story into a story in the national interest, in which the good guys beat the bad guys, clean up corruption, restore the peace and revive faith.

In that story, Boelter is the evil villain who symbolizes the waves of darkness that have rolled across America over a decade, undermining the common good, shattering values and perverting virtue. And in the telling of that story, liberals and Democrats can tell a story of hope. Donald Trump’s reign will end one day, just as Boelter’s life will end.

Justice won’t prevail on its own, though.

We have to make it happen.

A violent and evil end

What I’m suggesting is what the enemies of liberal democracy do.

Trump, his party and their allies regularly pluck some random person out of obscurity and turn him into a character in a story about the battle between good and evil. Few know who Zohran Mamdani is, but they will soon, as the rightwing media apparatus is turning the New York mayoral candidate, who has a foreign-sounding name and calls himself a democratic socialist, into the greatest perpetrator of a great evil. Today, a Fox talking head said the city is “on the verge of electing an open communist who believes in blowing up buses and cafes.”

The same could be said of child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Over time, he went from mere creep to monster when he became shorthand for a conspiracy theory about “the deep state” – a secret cabal of (Jewish) super-elites that controls the government, businesses and the media. The cabal is so powerful it can commit any crime, including pedophilia and even cannibalism, and get away with it, all while conspiring with allies, foreign and domestic, to bring America down.

Say what you will about QAnon (that’s the name of the conspiracy theory about “the deep state” and, indeed, we have had a lot to say about it here at the Editorial Board), but at the heart of the story is something noble, a longing for justice and the restoration of trust.

Yes, it’s a longing felt by people who believed that Donald Trump would win the election and destroy a phony conspiracy of Jewish monsters like Jeffrey Epstein, who were raping (and eating) children. (Trump has sabotaged that belief by not releasing “the Epstein files.)

But they are not wrong to long for justice, or for the restoration of trust, as there really is a conspiracy against the American people. It can be seen in the president’s bid to hide his own involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-crime syndicate, to crush the middle class, corrupt government and profane the law. And it can be seen in Vance Boelter’s assassination of a former speaker of the Minnesota House.

Trump represents the rightwing reaction against liberal democracy.

Vance Boelter took that reaction to its logical, violent and evil end.

Burn them all

Meanwhile, the forces of darkness continue to roll over America.

• The Air Force announced Thursday it would “deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits,” according to the AP. Such betrayal raises doubts about the trustworthiness of the federal government to future recruits and almost certainly ensures that those who do sign up to serve won’t give the necessary sacrifice.
• NPR reported Thursday that a former Jan. 6 defendant who is now working as a senior adviser for the Department of Justice urged insurrectionists to “kill” Capitol police officers who repelled the attempted paramilitary takeover. In testimony, Jared Wise “acknowledged that he repeatedly yelled ‘kill ’em’ as officers were being attacked … Wise was not convicted of any crimes related to Jan. 6, due to President Trump’s order to end all Capitol riot prosecutions.” Wise was later given a job at the Justice Department. A wanna-be cop-killer is now a cop.
• US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr announced Tuesday that he would end the government’s development of vaccines, including the kind that saved us from the covid. “Everything [Kennedy], the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his ‘maha’ goal,” healthcare policy expert Charles Gaba told me.

These are but three examples of what seem like daily moral offenses, and as they pile up, we must consider what’s necessary in the future.

In this, I think former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is right. He told NPR recently that the Epstein scandal that’s enveloping the Trump White House speaks to a larger pattern of “breakdown in social trust.” I think he’s also right to say the Democrats can’t restore trust by restoring the status quo to where it was before Trump tore it down.

Some of the Democrats seem to get it. They are embracing the idea of creating a new social order, even if it means sacrificing some of their own. Those on the House Oversight Committee forced their GOP counterparts to subpoena records and testimony in association with the government’s investigation of Epstein. Trump is notably absent from the list, but otherwise, the panel wants to talk to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Merrick Garland, Bill Barr, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, James Comey and Robert Mueller.

Burn them all, I say.

Lousy with criminals

I think the most ambitious Democrats are warming up to the idea, because after Trump is no longer in the White House, whenever that day comes, there must be a long period of purging in order to rid a government of, by and for the people of the stink of Trumpism.

The FBI, the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Health and Human Services and especially the US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the regime’s project of disappearing immigrants without due process, are all lousy with criminals whose greatest loyalty is to Trump, not morality, law or the Constitution. (I name four agencies, but virtually the entire government is rotten.)

They must be purged.

If they are not, they will sabotage from the inside whatever new status quo the Democrats try to build up from the rubble Trump left behind.

To do that, however, we need to begin telling the story, right now, in order to justify any future purge, a story that’s just as powerful as the one told by the enemies of democracy, in which the good guys defeat the bad guys, clean up corruption, restore the peace and revive faith.

If sacrificing the old guard of the Democratic Party is necessary to that, so be it. If calling for the death of an assassin is needed, so be it.

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