Over the past four days, the bizarre Cybertruck fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas has evolved from a comical interlude to a possible terrorist incident to the tragic suicide of another veteran of America’s eternal wars. Each of these descriptions still captures an important part of the story. As I noted yesterday, Matthew Livelsberger appears to have had a series of heated and likely abusive relationships for many years, but he appears to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a work trip in 2019. As for spousal abuse, I’m just cautious because the direct evidence of it that I know of currently only comes from his ex-wife’s boyfriend. But at least for now, there is a pretty conspicuous lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents, or what we might probably call minifestos, that investigators found on his iPhone.

They denounce the Democrats and demand that they be “sorted out” of Washington, by force if necessary, and hope that his death will serve as a kind of bell toll for a national rebirth of masculinity led by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr. will serve.

Did you miss that stuff? Yes, me too!

All that was in the headlines recently was that he warned of national decline and harbored “no ill will toward Mr. Trump,” as one of the investigators put it. This whitewashing of Donald Trump is, shall we say, a bit of an understatement, as you can see in these excerpts.

Military and vets are now moving to DC. Militias facilitate and reinforce this activity.
Hundreds of thousands occupy every main street along the Fed buildings and the Fed building campus.
Block off the highways with semi-trucks right after everyone gets on. Wait for the cleanup to complete.
Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight tooth and nail to get the Democrats out of the feds and the military. They all have to go and there has to be a hard reset so that our country doesn’t collapse.

We must end the war in Ukraine through a negotiated solution. It’s the only way.
Focus on strength and victory. Masculinity is good and men need to be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.

Stop pandering to diversity. We are all diverse and DEI is a cancer.
Luckily, we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real president instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.

Consider this final sunset of the year 24 and my actions as the end of our illness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around Trump, Musk and Kennedy and ride this wave to supreme hegemony for all Americans! We are second to none.

I encourage you to read both mini-fests in their entirety. They are not long. I have excerpted at least half of it above. You can find them here.

I should note that they capture what we might call the ideologically polyglot thinking of many of these people – or what strikes many of us as ideologically polyglot. He also rails against the 1%, excessive screen time for children, wars without a clear strategic purpose, and obesity. We should also specifically point out that Livelsberger can both be a violent extremist And a victim of PTSD and, by extension, part of the human collateral damage of the wars that occupied the U.S. military in the first two decades of the 21st century. Our minds should be big enough for both realities. But the idea is pretty clear: If you’re a Democrat or someone who’s democratically coded, you probably won’t enjoy Livilsberger’s version of national rebirth.

At least when I looked last night, the only places I saw these parts of Livelsberger’s writings in detail were in relatively unknown publications. I feared that they might be false documents that had somehow found their way into some publications. So I traced it back to yesterday’s police press conference. They are actually real.

Finally, let me return to the question we have been discussing over the last few days: What was the political message of setting a Cybertruck on fire in front of a Trump hotel? He actually answers this more or less clearly in the second mini-fest: “That wasn’t a terrorist attack, it was a wake-up call.” Americans only pay attention to spectacle and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt involving fireworks and explosives?”

One could argue about whether it was a terrorist attack. But I agree with Livelsberger because he appears to have had no intention of hurting others, at least not near a Trump venue. He makes it pretty clear: getting something going around the big Trump and Musk connoisseurs would get everyone’s attention. And it actually did.