Las Vegas, New Orleans, and the ugly truths America won’t talk about

The year 2025 A.D. began for much of America less with “Auld Lang Syne” and more with the anxious paranoia of anticipatory dread. When fierce bolts of lightning in a freak winter storm were caught on video striking the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument at 5:36 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, social media posters joked, in a way, about omens. A New Jersey GOP activist, Tricia Flanagan, tweeted that the new year is “going to be Biblical.”

The nervous jokes stopped just a few hours into New Year’s Day, as the political violence that the 1960s radical H. Rap Brown famously described “as American as cherry pie” arrived long before the first hungover scrambled eggs of 2025.

In New Orleans’ French Quarter, still teeming with partygoers and Sugar Bowl football fans just after 3 a.m., a 42-year-old accountant and Army vet slipped past the city’s unrepaired bollards on Bourbon Street in a rented Ford F-150 pickup with a black ISIS flag on the back. The man, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, then hit the accelerator, mowing down revelers, and eventually firing a high-powered weapon at the cops racing to stop him, although he never detonated two bombs he’d placed in coolers along his trail of death and devastation.

It took stunned officials in the Louisiana tourist mecca hours to clear all the bodies from the bloodstained sidewalks, let alone get an accurate count of the dead: 14, or the deadliest attack on U.S. soil in 15 months. Meanwhile, the shocks kept coming when a Tesla Cybertruck — the vehicle that symbolizes richest-man-in-world-history Elon Musk’s quest for world domination that’s allied him with President-elect Donald Trump — exploded car-bomb style at the front door of Trump’s high-rise hotel just off the Las Vegas Strip, its dead driver still inside.

The news of twin New Year’s Day assaults in America’s two most iconic playgrounds seemed to confirm the angst of a nation that most citizens think is on the wrong track and just picked a president who promised not hope but retribution and revenge. It was a weird Wednesday holiday where the promised football gave way to sea-to-sea aftershocks — Deadly fireworks in Honolulu! A man pushed onto the Manhattan subway tracks! — that raced to confirm the nightmares of a looming annus horribilis for a nation sitting on the edge of its couch.

This first-day eruption of carnage felt so overpowering that people — well, many people — struggled to put it into words. It’s been striking in the days that have followed how few columnists or op-ed writers have even tried to make sense of 2025’s opening blasts, perhaps in an emotionally numb shrug that unspeakable mass killings are now just thoroughly baked into the American experience.

The conversations that did take place were, predictably, less about what actually happened than about the political biases of the posters. Although this was pretty universal — including clucking from the left about Musk’s troubled Cybertruck, at least until the news that a man had died — it was the mainstream of what we used to call the far-right that took the facts, especially in New Orleans, and twisted them into a dangerously politicized alternate reality.

On the disinformation bulletin board that is Fox News, a steady stream of politicians who ought to know better blamed the Bourbon Street assault on America’s “open borders,” despite the early discovery that the military veteran Jabbar was a U.S. citizen who’s always claimed Texas as his home. The worst offender was the man who takes the oath in two weeks as America’s 47th president, who — citing erroneous Fox reporting — falsely called the New Orleans rampage President Joe “Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists.”

It’s also worth noting that the legacy media’s news coverage of the attacks has also felt off the mark, with too little attention paid to right-wing extremist exhortations by the Las Vegas suicide bomber — a 37-year-old active-duty U.S. Army Special Forces officer, Matthew Livelsberger — and way too much read into Jabbar’s pledge of allegiance to ISIS, or the overseas Islamic State. In reality, there’s little to no evidence that Jabbar was working with foreign terror groups and plenty of evidence the ISIS vow was a justification for dark personal demons that had the Texan planning to slaughter his own family before switching to NOLA revelers.

Two important things linger in the haze of pyrotechnics and death over Las Vegas and New Orleans. The first and most immediate is the clear intent for Trump and his allies to shamelessly use both justifiable fear and deliberate falsehoods, in an increasingly ill- or uninformed America, to gain acceptance for their political agenda of starting 2025 with mass deportations of immigrants who had nothing to do with this.

But we should also worry about America’s powerful tendency for avoidance when it comes to the ugly truths about why such a seemingly prosperous nation is also so remarkably violent, the real reasons why mass murder keeps happening, the troubling overlaps with 2020s U.S. (and world) politics, and what we can do about it.

Five days later, it’s clear that the roots of this latest spasm aren’t found in the deserts of Syria, but ingrained in the modern demons of American life, in both our excessively militaristic culture and also in the overlapping crisis of male anger and rage that arguably also put Trump back on top in the November election.

Despite early speculation, Jabbar and Livelsberger didn’t know each other, but their common bonds are striking. Both men served in Afghanistan, the botched longest war in U.S. history that left the Taliban intact and in charge even as it scarred the Americans who fought there. Both men were trained to kill overseas, yet unskilled at coping at home, leaving a trail of broken marriages and (for Jabbar) money woes. And both, in their so-called minifestos of murder, sublimated their rage and feelings of misogyny to adopt a veneer of political rationalization.

As a leading chronicler of American war abuses, the journalist Nick Turse, reported, U.S. military service is now the No. 1 predictor for mass-casualty violence here at home, a factor that has increased dramatically since around 2011, when America marked its 10th anniversary in Afghanistan. Turse cites new University of Maryland research that one-quarter of all known plotted U.S. mass-casualty events from 1990 through 2023 were tied to veterans or active troops, far greater than their share of the population. In that context, the story of Livelsberger leaps off the page.

His ex-girlfriend Alicia Arlitt told the Denver Gazette that the 19-year-soldier was a changed man after suffering a traumatic brain injury during a Middle Eastern tour of duty in 2019, yet refused to get treatment for apparent depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, citing the macho nature of his work with special forces.

» READ MORE: Forget Greenland. Trump and Musk’s real WWIII is an all-out war on the truth. | Will Bunch

Livelsberger’s final letters, discovered after the bombing, attacked America’s leaders as “weak” and “only [serving] to enrich themselves” in the aftermath of 2021’s chaotic end to the U.S. role in Afghanistan, but also spoke to his own anguish and even guilt. “I need to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost,” he wrote before apparently shooting himself in the head and igniting the explosive-laden Cybertruck, “and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”

Indeed, the soldier wrote near the end that he had evidence of “war crimes that were covered up” in an American bombing of a supposed meth lab in Afghanistan’s Nimruz Province in 2019 that, according to a subsequent United Nations report, killed as many as 30 civilian women and children.

Needless to say, you didn’t hear about that on Fox News amid the tape loop of “open border” lies. You can argue about how the 2021 pullout from Kabul was handled, or screwed up, but there’s no appetite for a serious debate on how 20 years of often pointless war affected the men and women dispatched there.

The same could be said of the other bond two attackers 1,000 miles apart seemed to share, which is a history of tortured relationships with the women in their lives. News accounts say Livelsberger’s first marriage and relationship with Arlitt both collapsed and that his second wife, who’d just given birth to their child, also left him right before his apparent suicide. In his final notes, Livelsberger wrote, “Masculinity is good and men must be leaders.”

Jabbar, who also served in Afghanistan but apparently in a desk job, didn’t share Livelsberger’s combat experiences, but did face similar struggles at home and also in the workplace after his discharge from the Army, the experience which his half-brother later said “gave him some discipline.”

As a civilian, Jabbar managed to get divorced three times, in 2012, 2016, and 2020, and despite a six-figure salary, at least for a time, as a corporate accountant, he struggled both with paying child support for his three kids and with his outside business ventures. A lifelong Muslim, Jabbar, according to reports, seemed to embrace the more radical and fundamentalist worldview of ISIS as his private life unraveled in Houston.

Indeed, it feels like if people are truly determined to find the political links to mass murder, it is hiding in plain sight — misogyny, and the role that a long overdue assault on the contradictions and unfairness of modern patriarchy is now playing in the current backlash of right-wing, populist, and testosterone-laced political movements, and not just in America.

Male rage over the possible implosion of their ancient hierarchy has become a dangerous double-edged sword. The dull edge is the dude-bro podcast politics that pulled Trump and his 49.8% over the 2024 finish line, but also empowers many other autocrats, from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to South Korea’s embattled Yoon Suk Yeol.

The sharp edge is what lashed out on Bourbon Street and in the Nevada desert, in a time when assaults on women and violent misogyny are seen as a trigger for bigger and bolder attacks. Our lack of honest conversation about the combustible interplay between America’s militaristic culture and personal machismo and their inherent contradictions means it won’t be long before we wake up to the next New Orleans.

Meanwhile, we are moving rapidly in the wrong direction. One of the many ironies of a soldier with PTSD attacking America with a Cybertruck is that an easy target for Musk, his Trump-backed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and his plan for deep spending cuts would be the $119 billion we currently spend on veterans' health care.

More broadly, we are miles away from a debate on why America spends more than the next nine nations combined on our military while steadily underfunding an educational system where boys, in particular, are struggling — falling further behind women in college attendance in a not-so-delicate dance with a thriving grievance culture.

This comes ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration of a president who threatens to turn this cycle into a hyperloop, in a world where the next generation of uniformed Jabbars or Livelsbergers might be attacking Greenland or Latino neighborhoods like Hunting Park or the last die-hards who take to the streets in protest. You can almost smell the next batch of cherry pie and American blood warming in the oven.

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