New Year, Same Old Fear

Ex-military extremists ring in 2025 with a bang. Will the madness continue?

I was happy to leave 2024 behind, but 2025 has started out rocky to say the least. It has the familiar stench of death and despair—and we haven’t even gotten to NFL Wildcard Weekend yet.

I’m sure you’re aware by now that we had another senseless mass-casualty event in New Orleans, a fascinating city I visited three times post-Katrina, and the intentional explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. In the latter case, no one except the man responsible died. Both acts were committed by military men (no surprise that they were men) who may have crossed paths while stationed at the base in North Carolina formerly known as Fort Bragg.

The man who torched the Cybertruck is of more interest to me than the pansy-ass piece of shit who rammed his pickup truck into a peaceful crowd, and it’s not just because I have a documented hatred of Tesla, Cybertrucks in particular, and Peon Musk. The late Matthew Livelsberger was a fellow madman named Matt of a similar age, so I’d be wrong not to give him a proper send-off to whatever hell (outside of earth) is waiting for him.

Despite how it first appeared, the Vegas Cybertruck incident was no act of terrorism or attempted assassination: It was a theatrical suicide. Livelsberger clearly had seen/done too much in his long, decorated career as a Green Beret to handle the pressures of civilian life and decided to check out in style.

In a final letter he reportedly wrote, “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,” and the spectacle he created by blowing up Musk’s vehicular monstrosity was the best way to get his point across. I don’t disagree that Americans love violence and spectacle (I already referenced the NFL in this piece), but what exactly was his point? Either he didn’t make it clear in his letter, or the authorities are withholding key bits of information.

Maybe suicide was the point, and he was too distraught to think up a better planned self-execution despite his extensive knowledge of weapons and explosives. This is possible: I have enough experience with madness to know that executive functioning is the first thing to go out the window. A desperate person at the end of his rope would have trouble merely ordering lunch—let alone figuring out how to send a well-crafted political message that involves crude pyrotechnics and light symbolism. It’s laughable (in a morbid way) that the media would expect coherence from a man suffering from PTSD and living in the twisted reality of America in 2025—Trump supporter or not.

Of course, if his point was that the Trump-Musk relationship would go up in flames—this is already in the works. I’m not sure that’s a point worth making in a such a complicated way, but I’m not as mad as Mr. Livelsberger was—not yet at least.

I’ll end with a tribute to another dead man: Freddie Mercury. He sung what I think should be the 2025 anthem: Keep Yourself Alive. (I won’t try to sing it, obviously. Listen to it for yourself—and then get on with your day.)

It doesn’t sound like much, but sometimes, when shit is really bad, keeping ourselves alive is the best we can do for ourselves. Till next time.