Early Saturday morning in New Hope, Minnesota, a local law enforcement officer passed a parked black SUV with police lights. She did not know the nondescript white man seated behind the wheel was in the midst of an alleged assassination spree, stalking public officials at their homes, posing as a police officer at their doors, and, when they answered, opening fire. Neither did she have any idea that the suspected assassin was known as “Dr. Vance” to congregants at an evangelical church, where he was soft-spoken and swayed back and forth as he told them how he was saved when he was 17 years old. One day, he said, he realized he wasn’t living for God, but for himself. He wept at the revelation. He made a pamphlet of his “testimony,” he said, then went around town and “knocked on every door,” handing the pamphlet to anyone who answered.

In the predawn dark, the parked SUV looked like a squad car to the officer. She assumed the man was there for the same reason she was: to protect a public official who could be a target. She approached and tried to speak with him, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court the next day. But the man just continued staring and said nothing. She drove on to do her welfare check on the official and saw no signs of distress. By the time additional officers arrived to join her, the SUV was gone. Within an hour, other officers found it parked in the driveway of the former speaker of the Minnesota state House, a Democrat. All told, the suspected assassin would drive to the homes of four public officials over the course of his hunt, shooting and severely wounding Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, and killing Representative Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark, and their dog. A few hours after the shootings, according to the same criminal complaint, a 57-year-old struggling businessman and pastor named Vance Boelter texted a family group chat to say, “Dad went to war last night.”

Boelter, allegedly the nondescript white man who posed as a police officer, is now charged with multiple federal and state crimes connected to his plot to assassinate public officials, mostly Democrats, along with abortion providers. His online footprint is fairly minimal, and his beliefs and politics appeared mostly unremarkable to those around him. A friend told Wired, of the whole family, “They’re all nice people.” Another friend told the AP that Boelter was “right-leaning politically but never fanatical.” (Boelter was also a Trump voter, one longtime friend said.)

Boelter may have passed for “nice” and not “fanatical” because beliefs that were once considered the province of the far edge of the American right are now more commonplace: the demonization of political opponents, sometimes spoken of as literal demonic spirits; claims that opponents are threatening children and the American way of life; and an openness toward violence (and a willingness to look away from it) in order to secure political victories. This shift from the margin to the middle has also been successfully camouflaged; the political violence primarily waged by the right is often covered up with the notion that we as a country suffer from “polarization.” But these beliefs and politics come from somewhere, and we are overdue in exploring their origins, if only so we can better understand why they have managed to spread—and go relatively unnoticed—for so long.

“Who was he going to war against? Because they did not think of themselves as combatants,” said Matthew D. Taylor, the religious studies scholar and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, when we spoke two days after Boelter’s arrest. “Where did he get the idea that they were legitimate targets of violence? I think it’s coming out of a subculture that is both MAGA and spiritual.”

Taylor is working with the same set of limited data as the rest of us,........

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