The Privilege of Depth
White Men Are Never Ideologies or Categories
Vance Boelter, it turns out, had a life. Vance Boelter had secrets, even to himself. Vance Boelter changed, and no one knows quite why.
He was an ordinary guy until the day he wasn’t. He met an evangelist who said something to Vance Boelter, but we aren’t sure what, except that he became intensely Christian afterwards. He was now “all in for Jesus”. He burned most of what he owned up to that point. Though Boelter himself has told the New York Times that it wasn’t the evangelist, it was the government of the United States who approached him with a secret mission.
The evangelist went to Zimbabwe to bring blankets to people. People in Zimbabwe killed the evangelist. Nevertheless, Boelter seem to have gotten the idea that going to Africa—in his case, the Democratic Republic of Congo—was one way to fulfill his faith. He enrolled at the Christ for the Nations Institute, a Pentecostal institution whose student body was significantly international. A religious studies scholar says that the Institute’s curriculum encourages its students to see themselves “as agents of the supernatural, while also blending this sense of God-given power with an entrepreneurial spirit and a distrust of many mainstream Christian denominations”.
Boelter blended a life of dramatic charismatic preaching with a gig-economy pursuit of entrepreneurial success. He was a factory manager and supervisor. He flipped houses. He started nonprofits and a security patrol company. He created a business to support Christian outreach in Congo. He collected bodies for funeral homes. The elders in one U.S. church that he attended regularly believed that he was providing Africans in Congo with “fishing boats”.
The New York Times sums it up as “never quite getting it together”, suggesting it was all a kind of downward spiral into economic desperation and then into mental illness. Boelter’s mood “darkened”. He started to believe that Donald Trump was being persecuted, that a civil war in America was looming. He went back to Congo in February of this year but then came right back. He started planning his campaign of murder. And then he assassinated legislators and their families, including a pet dog.
I offer this summary of a detailed New York Times profile of Vance Boelter to demonstrate one major point: a far-right white man who engages in political violence that could fairly be called “terrorist” always warrants individuation after they have committed their crimes. They are never abstracted, never made to stand in for a category of persons whose ideologies and identities are seen as a general danger. The explanation of their violence is always located in the particular and peculiar, in the specifics of their biographies.
This profile is a perfect case of this approach. The authors go out of their way right at the outset to say that Boelter’s violent acts were not the result of his faith, but instead of a baffling rupture between him and his faith that happened as his circumstances grew more difficult and he became susceptible to disinformation. “[His Christian faith] was a lifelong commitment he would just as suddenly violate 40 years later.”
Boelter himself says otherwise to the NYT authors: his conversion to evangelical Christianity and his recruitment to fight a secret war against social enemies happened at the same time, at the end of his teenage years. Boelter is in many ways the perfect picture of Christian nationalism as it has emerged and strengthened over the last three decades in American life. I read the profile and I think to myself: this is not the story of a sudden break into madness, this is a man who has been devoted to Christian nationalism his whole adult life. He radicalized into active assassination and terrorism because suddenly he found himself in alignment with political leaders who achieved national power for the first time in his life, but 2025 was not the first time he thought that way. This is not an isolated man, this is a revolutionary coming home to his revolution and acting out of long-developing devotion to it.
Let me be clear. I’m not against individuating Vance Boelter, against understanding the distinctive human life he has led. But it is impossible to miss that people like Boelter, like Dylann Roof, like Timothy McVeigh, like Brenton Tarrant, like Anders Breivik, so often seem to warrant being written about in this way. There are frequently heroic efforts by their profilers to make them out to be “lone nuts”, serial killers whose ideology is seen as just being a schtick like sending cryptograms and letters to the police, whose only motives are personal, in their madness and sadness and failure, in the circumstances of their lives. They aren’t taken ever as representing movements or institutions or social categories, and their causality is never attributed to other people except family members who might have hurt them or ignored them or offered them their first gun. It doesn’t even matter if they not only explicitly claim loyalty to an ideology and movement but had strong patterns of prior association with like-minded people.
Brown and Black men, in contrast, are relentlessly typified when they are associated with political violence. Their individual lives rarely matter, it is rare for them to be profiled. Their causality is always collective, communitarian, ideological, categorical.
This is also substantially true for whites who commit political violence that is coded as “left”. In fact, it’s even the case whether someone has actually committed political violence or not: mere association is enough. Using a phrase that the mainstream media has decided always and inevitably connotes violence is seen as a confession of near-future violent action, regardless of whether the person saying it insists it means otherwise. “Left” means your life, your details, your experiences, don’t need attention or explanation or exploration.
A Vance Boelter can be in the company of people calling for murder of their enemies, for a war against the unrighteous, for all of his life, but if those are sermons and he’s in church, it never counts. He can listen to programs that call for enemies to die, he can read books that define liberals and progressives as “unhumans” who must be eliminated, he can harken to a man who says it’s time to incarcerate hundreds of thousands of political enemies, but he will in all the time still be just one man who is having one man’s individual troubles. He’s a normal guy with deep faith until, you know, he’s not making enough money and he’s not a big enough success as a magical prophet and he gets seduced by disinformation designed to prey on the mentally ill.
Either we want to know the stories of every individual who commits a political crime, and understand the interplay between structure and agency in all of them, or we should just typify away about everything that seems to point the way towards assassination and terrorism. Profile all the dangers or understand all the humans.