On New Year’s Day, a Tesla Cybertruck pulled up to the entrance of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, where the driver triggered a device consisting of fuel canisters and fireworks, detonating the vehicle. He claimed no lives but his own, whether or not he intended to.
In the aftermath of the attack – the second of that day, coming on the heels of a mass casualty attack in New Orleans earlier in the morning – media and law enforcement worked through the standard paces, identifying the bomber and attempting to discern his motivations. His name was Matthew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Green Beret, a five-time recipient of the Bronze Star, and a resident of Colorado Springs. And he made sure no one would need to puzzle over why he did what he did, leaving three separate pieces of correspondence explaining his motivations in detail. Manifestos, as we tend to call them in this kind of scenario.
And then the coverage shifted. Upon seeing the bomber’s motivations in his own words, media outlets apparently decided en masse to sidestep and sugar-coat the contents of the manifestos, with week-two coverage all but abandoning the documents in favor of focusing on Livelsberger’s service record – and I think I know why.
Suppressing an attacker’s manifesto is not new, and is often the responsible thing to do. Outlets have done it in the past, with documents produced by the Christchurch shooter, or Anders Behring Breivik, opting to summarize the contents rather than proliferate the kinds of vile racism and extremism contained within. But this can’t be why the media has shied away from Livelsberger’s manifestos: they contain no such content.
Rather, I suspect that much of the media has opted to ignore the manifestos for the opposite reason: because the ideas expressed in those documents – the things a Green Beret listed among his reasons for perpetrating a bombing against a civilian target – are shockingly mainstream right-wing talking points.
I often object to the idea that someone must be mentally unwell to perpetrate violence: the fevered attempts to dismiss every mass shooter as a psychiatric patient, the self-soothing idea that mental health screenings could be a stand-in for stricter gun laws. It’s baseless – history is overrun with violence committed by those of sound mind and body – but it comforts us, so we cling to it.
As more information has emerged about Matthew Livelsberger, however, it has become clear that something was indeed amiss with the Green Beret. His former girlfriend, an Army nurse, believes he sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) during a deployment in 2019, and the FBI has concluded that Livelsberger likely suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as well. His mood and behavior changed after the 2019 injury, and there is ample reason to believe that he was not a rational actor by the time he left his home in Colorado Springs the day after Christmas to rent a Tesla Cybertruck in Denver, pack it with explosives, and drive it to Las Vegas – not because of the actions he took, but because of the very real conditions he appears to have suffered from.
Livelsberger was not the only one carrying the weight of life-altering, unseen combat wounds. Traumatic brain injuries can impact motor function, speech, reasoning, and emotion. PTSD can have both physical and psychological effects, and is strongly correlated with mental health issues. Both of these conditions are prevalent among Global War on Terrorism veterans like Livelsberger, with PTSD in particular having been dubbed the “signature wound” of the conflict.
The less political parts of Liversberger’s manifestos made it clear that he was suffering from trauma incurred during his service. In one of the documents Livelsberger left behind – a letter sent to a friend shortly before the attack, which police believe to be genuine – he talks about his role in conducting targeting for airstrikes in the Nimruz Province of Afghanistan in 2019, which he believes claimed civilian lives. In another document, Livelsberger said his death was a way to “cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”
It’s clear that Livelsberger’s combat service damaged him, and that the bombing he perpetrated in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day was yet another tragic servicemember suicide – but his manifestos also make it clear that he had a lot of political ideas swirling around in his troubled mind, and that he chose to commit suicide via spectacle for the explicit purpose of drawing attention to those ideas.
“Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,” Livelsberger wrote. “What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?”
Yet the political ideas Livelsberger details in his manifestos – the political ideas that contributed to him building a bomb, driving it across state lines, and blowing himself up with it – were not the avant-garde ravings of a new kind of extremist. They were the kinds of sentiments that would be right at home on Donald Trump’s Truth Social, Elon Musk’s X, or your uncle’s Facebook page. And that’s more troubling than the alternative.
DEI is a cancer,” Livelsberger wrote in one of his manifestos. Altogether, the manifestos consist of three documents: one addressed to “Fellow Servicemembers, Veterans, and All Americans,” and two which he sent as emails to friends.
“Thankfully we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real President instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.”
DEI – or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – is just one of a handful of mundane, everyday bits of right-wing grievance politics occupying Livelsberger’s manifestos. His reference to Vice President Kamala Harris as “the DEI candidate” is so commonplace in right-wing circles that Republican members of Congress were tweeting the same insult seven months ago. “Stop obsessing over diversity, we are all diverse,” Livelsberger wrote.
And his disdain for diversity was not the only position Livelsberger shared with Republican members of Congress or online right-wing activists. He also despaired about the abandonment of family values and traditional morality.
“We are crumbling because of a lack of self-respect, morales [sic], and respect for others,” he wrote. “We have strayed from family values and corrupted our minds.”
This is such a boilerplate conservative sentiment that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance just ran a sizable portion of their campaign on the idea of a “pro-family” agenda and traditional American values.
In his letters, Livelsberger also rails against screen time, obesity, the lack of masculinity in America, and a “culture of weakness.” He warned of Chinese drones – another sentiment shared by a Republican congressman in the last month – and said his attack was a “wake-up call.” He encouraged everyone to “rally around” Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to bring a “new chapter of health for our people.”
Then he set a timer on his device and ended his own life.
It would be disingenuous to portray Livelsberger as a rational political actor, or to depict his crime as the logical end-point of the political views he expressed in his manifestos. His political views are striking, not because those views are destined to result in violence, but because so many Americans – including many of our leaders – share them.
And I suspect that’s why most of the mainstream media abandoned the manifestos after seeing their contents: how are they supposed to talk about the views expressed in a bomber’s manifesto when those views are routinely expressed by Republican leaders? How muddy do the lines get when the contents of a manifesto are indistinguishable from comments made every day by the president-elect, the wealthiest man on earth, and their millions of supporters?
What does it say about the state of political life in the United States that news outlets are dancing around a would-be terrorist’s motives because those motives are, seemingly, too mainstream? And what does it say about the conservative movement, that its ideas resonated so thoroughly with a traumatized, brain-damaged, suicide bomber?
Nothing good.
