New Year, New Upheavals

A terrorist attack in New Orleans, a Tesla car bomb in Vegas, MAGA versus Silicon Valley, populist problems, fury over rape gangs in the UK. Welcome to 2025.

Credit: Twitter.

By the time Shamsud-Din Jabbar exchanged gunfire with police officers, he had already rammed a pick-up truck into crowds of revelers on Bourbon Street in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter. It was just after 3:15 a.m. on New Year’s Day.

Later that morning, nearly two thousand miles away, a Tesla Cybertruck rolled to a stop in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. Smoke curled out from under the vehicle before it exploded, sending out a battery of secondary explosions in all directions.

So began 2025, which I think means we’re in for a wild ride.

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What we know about the two men behind these incidents only raises more questions. Shamsud-Din Jabbar and the driver of the Tesla, Matthew Livelsberger, were both Army veterans and had spent time at Fort Bragg. Jabber enlisted in 2007 and worked in human resources and information technology. He had done a deployment to Afghanistan in 2009 and served for more than a decade. Livelsberger was an active-duty Green Beret who was on leave from Germany, where he was reportedly serving with the 10th Special Forces Group. Both men rented the vehicles they used in these attacks with Turo.

Some people speculated that these could be related terrorist events. It helped that Jabber was flying an ISIS flag. But as of now, there’s no definitive connection between these two attacks, nor is there any record of Jabber and Livelsberger having overlapping assignments.

In the lead-up to the New Orleans attack, Jabber had just finalized his third divorce and was apparently under extreme financial duress due to punishing attorney fees and a string of failed businesses. Jabber claimed he was $27,000 behind on his house payments in a court filing from 2022. He lived in a squalid home in a Houston trailer park with goats and sheep roaming in his yard. People who knew him said he had started acting erratically over the last few months.

As authorities searched for more clues, a local Houston mosque sent out an email that urged people to avoid contact with law enforcement and cautioned them to remain “vigilant and aware of your surroundings,” which would have been good advice for the (at least) 14 people Jabber killed. There is a Norm Macdonald meme for this sort of thing.

Jabber’s case at least offers something like a coherent narrative line. He posted videos to Facebook hours before the killings in which he said that he did what he did because he wanted to bring attention to the “war between believers and disbelievers.”

Then there’s Livelsberger, a 37-year-old man with a wife and a baby who neighbors remember as basically a normal person. He was also a highly decorated Green Beret, with five Bronze Stars, including one with a valor device for courage under fire, a combat infantry badge, and an Army Commendation Medal with valor.

Livelsberger’s first marriage ended in divorce in 2018, and this is just about the only clue we have so far as to something like a motive or catalyzing event. According to The New York Post, his second wife, the mother of his baby, confronted him about apparent infidelity around Christmas. Livelsberger left his Colorado home the day after Christmas and rented the Tesla through Turo, then packed it full of explosives (including fireworks) and headed for Trump International in Vegas. Oddly enough, Livelsberger’s family said he had been a Trump supporter during his first term, calling Donald “a soldier’s best friend.”

The bomb itself is one of the things that makes the least sense. As a Green Beret, he was undoubtedly familiar with improvised explosive devices and how to make them. Instead, he put together an idiot’s version of a car bomb. “The level of sophistication is not what we would expect from an individual with this type of military experience,” Kenny Cooper, a special agent in charge for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told the Associated Press.

The exploding Tesla caused minor injuries to a handful of people and left the hotel virtually unscathed.

There’s a manifesto rumored to be Livelsberger’s floating around somewhere, but I doubt anything can make sense of this in a satisfying way. It’s not surprising the internet is alive with theories about how all this is just a pretense for enlarging the security state.

Rational explanations seem increasingly exhausted. It feels like trying to use logic to explain a great metaphysical evil that has infected a village and is causing the townsfolk to go insane and kill each other. The watchmen are either under the same spell or evil in their own petty way. The military, our watchmen, spent years going to war with “right-wing extremism” within its ranks, purging thousands who refused vaccination, jamming ideological brainwashing down the throats of troops. It turns out that none of these things made us any safer.

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A friend in Australia recently launched a new publication, Observer & Review, that focuses on politics, literature, and culture.

The latest issue is available now through their website, Sidestream Press. It’s got an eclectic mix of essays and reviews, including pieces on Mike Ma’s Harassment Architecture and T.S. Eliot.

The print editions are very elegantly done, from the binding to the paper. I really recommend it.

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I plan to write about the recent spat between Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and the MAGA base over not-so-high-skilled-but-legal immigration here and for Chronicles soon so that I won’t get too into it now. However, there is one thing I want to highlight, and that is how some Democrats might see this as an opportunity for them to wedge populist voters away from a Republican Party that already seems to be taking them for granted.

To provide some very brief background: Musk and Vivek defended importing workers to do the jobs that they say Americans can’t do or aren’t enough of them to do. I disagree with that position, and so did Trump’s MAGA base. Unfortunately, Trump sided with Musk and Vivek. That opened the door for some Democrats to capitalize on the situation.