Over the last four days, the bizarre Cybertruck fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas has run from comical interlude to possible terrorist incident to tragic suicide of another veteran of America’s forever wars. Each of these descriptions still captures an important part of the story. As I noted yesterday, while Matthew Livelsberger appears to have had a series of combustible and likely abusive relationships going back many years he also appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019. (I’m tentative on the spousal abuse front only because for now the direct evidence for that that I’m aware of comes only from the friend of his ex-wife.) But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!

Most headlines I’d seen in the news report only that he warned of national decline and bore “no ill will toward Mr. Trump,” in the words of one of the investigators. That gloss on Donald Trump is, shall we say, a bit of an understatement, as you can see in these excerpts.

Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.
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.

We must end the war in Ukraine with negotiated settlement. It is the only way.
Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.

Stop obsessing over diversity. We are all diverse and DEI is a cancer.
Thankfully we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real President instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.

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 encourage you to read the two minifestos all the way through. They’re not long. I excerpted at least half above. You can find them here.

I should note they capture what we might call the ideologically polyglot — or what appears to many of us as ideologically polyglot — thinking of many of these people. He also rails against the 1%, excessive screen time for kids, wars with no clear strategic purpose, obesity. We should also note explicitly that Livelsberger can both be a violent extremist and a victim of PTSD, and in a broader sense part of the human collateral damage of the wars that occupied the U.S. military through the first two decades of the 21st century. Our minds should be big enough for both those realities. But the through-line is pretty clear: If you’re a Democrat or someone who is Democrat-coded, Livelsberger’s version of national rebirth probably isn’t a fun one for you.

At least when I looked last night the only places I saw these parts of Livelsberger’s writings in any detail were relatively obscure publications. I was worried that maybe they were hoax documents that had somehow found their way into a few publications. So I traced them back to yesterday’s police press conference. They are indeed real.

As a final point, let me return to the question we’ve discussed over the last few days: what was the political message of torching a Cybertruck in front of a Trump hotel? He actually answers that more or less clearly in the second minifesto: “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?”

One might quibble over whether it was a terrorist attack. But I will give Livelsberger his due inasmuch as he does not appear to have intended to injure others, at least not in the vicinity of a Trump venue. He’s pretty clear: making something go boom around big Trump and Musk identifiers would get everyone’s attention. As indeed it did.