Today marks the fourth anniversary of one of the darkest days in US history, the violent invasion of the US Capitol and attack on Congress fomented by Donald Trump as part of his attempt to hold onto power after losing a free and fair election. If I had told you on that day that the American people would return the architect of that travesty to the Oval Office, would you have believed me?
Within just a few months, the GOP and even Trump himself went from calling it a “heinous attack” and declaring that “the demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy” (Trump’s own words, in an address to the nation the next day) to excusing and even celebrating its perpetrators. That is because Trump soon realized that by inverting the narrative, he could help propel himself back into power. And he was right.
In other words, as many have observed, that auto-coup ultimately succeeded, even if it took four years to do so.
Two weeks from today, when Trump is inaugurated for a second term, he may well make good on his promise to pardon those insurrectionists. Can a parade for them down Pennsylvania Avenue at taxpayer expense be far behind? In the current political climate, as Matthew Yglesias cannily noted, even the suggestion that January 6th was in any way “bad” is cause for excommunication from the cult of personality that is the modern Republican Party. And that does not bode well for what will happen in his second term, to say the least.
But I am not here today to write about that, as many others have done so very eloquently. I am here to contemplate what the immediate future holds, and to do that, I want to focus on one recent incident and what it tells us about the current moment.
ALL IS QUIET ON NEW YEAR’S DAY (NOT)
A few weeks ago in these pages, I wrote about the rising tide of political violence in the United States, spurred by the cold-blooded murder of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in midtown Manhattan, and the disturbing public response that lionized the killer as a folk hero. In the two weeks since then, that tide has only increased. In December, the FBI arrested a man in Norfolk, Virginia who had more than 150 pipe bombs and other field-expedient explosive devices, by some accounts the largest stockpile of homemade explosives ever seized in the US. A deadly vehicular attack in New Orleans by a radicalized veteran inspired by ISIS killed fourteen people on New Year’s Day. On that same day, a Tesla Cybertruck packed with explosives was detonated outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.
Of all these, the Vegas bombing piqued my interest the most.
The man behind that attack was an active duty Special Forces master sergeant named Matthew Livelsberger, assigned to the 1st Battalion 10th SF Group in Stuttgart, Germany. He was a veteran of multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, well-liked and professionally respected by his fellow Green Berets, and a vocal supporter of Donald Trump.
The pattern of veterans bringing the violence of war back home—and of mass murder using the weapons of war like battlefield rifles and car bombs—is largely a post-Vietnam phenomenon, and not unrelated, the writer Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has long argued, to the application of violence by the state on foreign enemies. (And increasingly, domestic ones too.)
Livelsberger reportedly struggled with mental health issues related to his multiple deployments (including headaches, sleeplessness, depression, and other symptoms of PTSD), as well as hearing loss, and possibly neurological damage from years of hard parachute landings and exposure to weapons blasts. That shit is no joke. The press reports that his wife had also left him just days before he killed himself, right after Christmas, taking their infant daughter with her.
I have personal reasons for disliking the cliché of the troubled, homicidal vet, but when the combat boot fits….
I’m here to tell you that once those factors are in play, all bets are off. But Livelsberger’s military history is far from exculpatory when it comes to the political aspect of this tragedy. In fact, it only make the role of politics even stronger, marking him as yet another casualty of a previous Republican administration that sent thousands of American troops into harm’s way for a lie.
MUNICH ON THE POTOMAC
In a 400-word missive found on his cell phone in the wreckage of the detonated Tesla, Livelsberger left some clues to his motives, which speak not only to his mindset, but to the political waters in which he and so many others—the majority of whom are not grizzled professional warriors like him—bathe.
Most of it was straight-up, tiresome-by-now Fox News talking points attacking feminism, DEI, and the decline of “family values”; chauvinistic ranting about how America is greatest country on Earth; and a bemoaning of our imminent societal collapse due to liberalism, etc. He took a swipe at Kamala for being the beneficiary of affirmative action, instead of “a real President” like Trump (who totally got no help from anyone, as the white male son of a multimillionaire) and lamented the general lack of “respect for others” in our contemporary culture, even as he supported a politician who is the poster boy for that kind of vulgar disrespect.
That is all part of the anti-government mentality that the American right has been relentlessly propagating since the New Deal. Really, one can take it back to Reconstruction, or even to the dynamics that led to the Civil War itself. As Heather Cox Richardson writes:
Livelsberger’s notes reflect not reality but rather the political rhetoric in which many Americans have marinated since the 1950s: the idea that a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends.
There was the predictable machismo and sexism. “Focus on strength and winning,” he wrote. “Masculinity is good and men must be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product,” He noted that “(o)ur population is too fat to join the military yet we are facing a war with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran before 2030.” (Link mine. See also here.)
Two of the most surprising lines, for me were: “The income inequality in this country and cost-of-living is outrageous,” and “Greed and gluttony has consumed us. The top 1% decided long ago they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them. You are cattle to them.” Dangerously close to Marxist class warfare, no? Of course, he went on to suggest that the best solution would be to turn the government over to two billionaires.
But needless to say, that sort of ass-backwards thinking is commonplace on the right, a measure of how successfully the Barnumesque long con of trickle down economics and faux populism has been perpetrated on so much of the country. (Livelsberger also lamented “self enrichment perpetuated by our senior political and military leaders. We are done with the blatant corruption.” Who’s going to tell him?)
In a more poignant moment, he indicted himself for succumbing to that materialist mindset, writing: “I am a prime example of having it all but it never being enough.” He also cited some more traditional PTSD-driven motives, declaring, “Our soldiers are done fighting wars without end states or clear objectives,” and writing of the bombing he was about to commit: “Why did I personally do it now? I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”
But amid the self-reflection, there was a much uglier side as well. CNN reports that investigators also released a second, shorter letter also found on his phone, in which Livelsberger proposed a scheme of maneuver for the violent obliteration of Trump’s opponents by way of “saving” America:
Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands. Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete. Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.
While he was enthusiastic about using of violence at home, Sergeant Livelsberger was far less keen on using it abroad, which is weird since that was his job. The very first point he made in his list of prescriptions for how to fix America was: “We must end the war in Ukraine with negotiated settlement. It is the only way.”
What the fuck, over?
This is not a sort of coolheaded, sophisticated realpolitik that recognizes the limits of military force as a tool of policy. It is craven, Kremlin-abetting surrender to brutal aggression: the kind of thing that American conservatives once abhorred and derided. (I’m speaking of the right’s longtime hawkish majority, not its isolationist minority.) Once upon a time, Republicans and other conservatives sneered at that mentality. Appeasement, they called it! For decades, in virtually any international crisis, the specter of Chamberlain and Munich was recklessly invoked whenever a politician, journalist, or other figure dared suggest that maybe going to war was not the best idea. But no more.
And coming from a professional soldier, a veteran NCO from 10th Group no less, whose geographic area of concentration is Europe, it’s especially distasteful. The SF motto is De oppresso liber: to free the oppressed. But I guess I missed the fine print that reads, “Except when Putin and Trump aren’t cool with it.”
It’s true that a negotiated solution may be the ultimate outcome in Ukraine, but not because it’s the just and honorable thing to do. The strong take what they will and the poor into endure they must, not to get too Peloponnesian about it. With Trump headed back to the White House and Putin doing cartwheels in hall of the Kremlin as a result, Volodymyr Zelinskyy is considering the best possible deal he can get as his country when facing the obliteration of his country full stop at the hands of Moscow, with Washington’s groveling assistance. For an American warrior to applaud that is appalling. But that is now the Kremlin-driven party line of the erstwhile GOP, as propagated by Putin’s allies at Fox News and the rest of the right wing mediasphere.
MANIFEST DESTINY
So when does a suicide note cross the line into “manifesto”? Livelsberger’s writings are really the former, Luigi Mangione’s self-consciously the latter. But these days any sort of epistle connected to an act of political violence feels like it’s in that category. (Ted Kaczynski’s 75 page screed remains the GOAT, and the model.)
And some of Livelsberger’s musings do sound positively Unabomber-ish. (“A lot of us are just sitting around waiting to die. No sunlight, no steps, no fresh air, no hope. Our children are addicted to screens by the age of two. We are filling our bodies with processed foods.”) There’s also a whiff of Colonel Kurtz-like dictation, harkening back to a fictional Green Beret.
In closing, Livelsberger wrote: “This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?” Well, that’s the Fanonist argument that all terrorists make, isn’t it? In Resisting the Right, I make the case that we need to start viewing the American epidemic of mass murders—particularly with firearms, but extending to weapons like cars as well—not as the random acts of disconnected lone wolves, but as part of an ongoing white nationalist insurgency. His car bombing puts a fine point on it.
But even as political theater—which terrorism is a subset of—the act itself made no more sense than the manifesto. If you’re pro-Trump and pro-Musk, why use the latter’s car as the bomb you set off in front of the former’s hotel? Why not a Prius detonated in front of headquarters of the National Organization for Women? (Bizarrely, Livelsberger himself referred to what he was about to do as “a stunt with fireworks and explosives.”)
His closing lines are less Fanon than just standard right wing nutjob:
Consider this last sunset of ’24 and my actions the end of our sickness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.
I say all these things not to dunk on Master Sergeant Livelsberger—nil nisi bonum and all that. He committed a terrible act, and took his own life in the process; fortunately no one else was killed, though that was very much a matter of luck. It might easily have gone the other way. (As it was, seven innocent people were injured.)
Even though I have deep contempt for the man’s political views, I have deep respect for his service to the country and the sacrifices that service entailed. Is it unfair and hypocritical that he gets that consideration from me when I do not extend it to so many other perpetrators of psychopathic acts of violence? I suppose it is. But he’s from my tribe, and I take those extenuating factors into account for a man who was obviously unwell, in part because of what our country asked of him, and what he did for it.
But that is not to excuse a political belief system that has already caused untold suffering, and promises to do much worse in the next few years. On the contrary: he was a terrible case study in it.
FRANKLY, SCARLET
Unlike the late MSG Livelsberger, most Republicans do not have the excuse of a brain injury to account for their nonsensical, neo-fascist beliefs, or for perpetrating violence to further them. But the Orwellian indoctrination that consumed Matt Livelsberger is the same process that Trump and his allies perpetrated on half the country in turning January 6th inside out.
Three days after the Insurrection, I wrote in this blog that if no reckoning was forthcoming for what happened that day and for Trump’s pressure campaign that led up to it, those events “won’t be a low watermark. They will only be a prelude.”
That piece was called “Will There Be a Reckoning….or a Repeat?” Now we know.
Let’s also recall what a slightly higher profile thinker, Paul Krugman, wrote at the time:
If you imagine that the people who stormed the Capitol will just go away once Biden is installed in the White House, you’re delusional.
It’s time to stop appeasing the fascists among us…..there needs to be an accounting for whatever crimes took place during the past four years—and does anyone doubt that Trump allies and associates engaged in criminal acts? Don’t say that we should look forward, not back; accountability for past actions will be crucial if we want the future to be better. Appeasement is what got us to where we are. It has to stop, now.
There’s that scarlet letter “A” word yet again. Trump supporters continue to plump for Chamberlain-like deference toward Moscow, even as we collectively offer the same to them for their sins. And now their man is about to be back in power, with more violence sure to come.
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Photo: Not a publicity still from a dystopian science fiction movie. A Tesla Cybertruck packed with explosives, on fire outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, after being detonated by a suicidal Trump supporter, New Year’s Day, 2025.
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