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AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with what we know about the two apparent attacks that unfolded in the U.S. on New Year’s Day and the response so far.
The FBI has identified the driver of the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas Wednesday morning as 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger of Colorado Springs. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head moments before his rented car, packed with fireworks and fuel canisters, burst into flames, injuring seven. Livelsberger was an active-duty member of the Army. He was a Green Beret and Special Forces master sergeant. From 2017 to 2019, he served three tours of duty in Afghanistan. Before that, he deployed to the Republic of Congo, Ukraine and Tajikistan. Livelsberger was on leave from his base in Germany. FBI special agent Spencer Evans said Thursday investigators are still searching for a motive.
SPENCER EVANS: We know we have a bombing, absolutely. And it’s a bombing that certainly has factors that raise concern. It’s not lost on us that it’s in front of, you know, of the Trump building, that it’s a Tesla vehicle. But we don’t have information at this point that definitively tells us or suggests it was because of this particular ideology or that — you know, any of the reasoning behind it.
AMY GOODMAN: The FBI says it has not found a link between the Las Vegas man and the suspect in the New Orleans attack earlier, just a few hours earlier, on New Year’s Day. Both men served in the U.S. Army, including overlapping assignments at Fort Bragg in North Carolina — what it used to be called — but there’s no evidence they knew each other.
President Biden Wednesday said the FBI had named 42-year-old Texas-born U.S. citizen, U.S. Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar as the suspect who rammed his pickup truck into throngs of revelers on Bourbon Street early Wednesday, killing 14.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I’ve directed them to keep looking. The individual who rented the truck to explode — that exploded in Las Vegas also served as active-duty U.S. Army. And the FBI is working with the Department of Defense on investigating, including the service member’s possible motives and all those he worked with.
AMY GOODMAN: Jabbar had posted five videos to social media in the last few hours before the attack, pledging allegiance to ISIS and discussing plans to kill his family.
Both Jabbar and Livelsberger were divorced. CNN reports Jabbar’s second wife had a restraining order against him during their divorce case. Meanwhile, in recent months, Livelsberger had reportedly removed pictures of himself from Facebook in which he proposed to his partner and cradled his newborn baby in his arms.
On Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump blamed what he called Biden’s “Open Borders Policy” for, quote, “Radical Islamic Terrorism” in an apparent reference to the New Orleans attack. President Trump said once again that people coming from outside of the country were more dangerous than people at home. Soon after, President Biden said that the Texas man was a U.S.-born Army veteran.
Meanwhile, Trump’s incoming senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, also responded to the New Orleans attack. Gorka advised Trump in his first term but was pushed out after The Forward revealed he once had ties to a Hungarian far-right, Nazi-allied group and that he supported an antisemitic, racist paramilitary militia in Hungary while he served as a Hungarian politician. Gorka spoke on the right-wing news outlet Newsmax.
SEBASTIAN GORKA: You need to understand — every single one of our Newsmax viewers — you are on the frontline of the war against global jihadism. It’s not just our Tier 1 operators. It’s not just the guys at Dam Neck, the SEALs or the guys over the wire at Bragg. You — you, like the people on Bourbon Street — are on the frontline. So be aware. Keep your head on a swivel. And if you hear people doing strange things and acting peculiarly — apparently, this individual converted to Islam last year — you need to also share that information.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Mike Prysner, an Iraq War Army veteran who’s been watching these developments closely. He previously co-founded March Forward, an antiwar group of veterans and active service members, and worked with Veterans for Peace and another group called About Face. He still works as a GI organizer. Michael Prysner joined the U.S. Army in 2001 when he was 17 and left the military in 2005. His company participated in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, where he served for a year. He hosts a podcast for service members called Eyes Left. In June, his report for _The Empire Files was headlined “Dozens Quitting US Military Over Gaza in Protest: Voices of Hidden Unrest Within the Ranks.”
Mike Prysner, welcome to Democracy Now! Thank you for joining us from Portland, Oregon. If you can start off by responding to these two attacks? Now, again, the authorities say they see no connection between the two. They think both men acted alone. They did use the same app to rent their cars. Livelsberger rented in Denver an EV, one of those Tesla Cybertrucks, which looks like a tank. And you have Jabbar, who launched this attack in New Orleans, used his car as a weapon, his EV pickup truck. But both men were in the military. You have Livelsberger, a Green Beret, and you have Jabbar, who was in the military for more than a decade, now a military veteran. Talk about what took place on New Year’s, Mike.
MIKE PRYSNER: Right. Well, both of these incidents and individuals seem quite different, other than the fact that both of them seem to be triggered by relationship issues. But the main thing that links them is the fact that military service is now the number one predictor of becoming what is called a mass casualty offender, surpassing even mental health issues as a profiler.
You know, there are many different consequences of having a massive military empire, the biggest humanity has ever seen, both in its sheer size, its expanse around the world, one that is constantly engaged in endless and morally indefensible wars around the world. And one of those consequences is the violence abroad coming back against people at home. Livelsberger, of course, his career was one of killing. And then, you know, the New Orleans attacker says he was inspired by ISIS, the mass killing ideology of ISIS. ISIS would not exist were it not for the U.S. military’s complete destruction of Iraq and mass killing of innocent people.
You know, America, in general, of course, has a mass violence problem. Mass shootings happen quite regularly, more than once a day on average. And the reasons for that are linked to U.S. militarism, both in the kind of cultural domination of a country that glorifies violence and exports violence, but more so a government that is presiding over a country with deep and extreme social problems, which it refuses to address while having a blank and endless check for militarism abroad and an ever-increasing budget for the military-industrial complex.
And so, this gives rise to an extreme amount of social problems in our society that are rooted in things like alienation and inequality and desperation and despair and hopelessness. And then, so, the U.S. military comes in and, for the purposes of recruitment, must target people who are most impacted by those social problems. They bring them into an institution where they train them to kill. They train them that killing is actually quite honorable and quite cool, and sends many of those people to kill abroad, you know, and has a notoriously — very notorious for ruining people’s mental health, in a mental health system that makes people’s mental health problems even worse, and then spits them back out into a society where people find their lives harder than when they joined. That’s kind of why I think that it’s become a number one predictor of becoming a mass casualty offender, is all of those consequences.
And, you know, if we look at Fort Bragg in particular — you mentioned both these people passed through Fort Bragg — you know, Fort Bragg was, for two decades, the hub of the “global war on terror,” in particular the Special Operations factory, which does some pretty dark stuff around the world. And so, it’s really no surprise that two of these people passed through this base and that they are just joining a larger number of people from the military who end up carrying out acts of violence on others.
A lot of these are turned inward, and there’s, of course, an epidemic of suicide and drug addiction and alcohol addiction and overdoses and things like that. But, of course, when you have a scenario like that in our society, some number of those people, instead of self-destruction, will move to the destruction of others, which is what we’ve seen with these two individuals.
AMY GOODMAN: And again, Fort Bragg is now called Fort Liberty, because Bragg was an enslaving Confederate general, Braxton Bragg, a Confederate officer in the U.S. Civil War, and like a number of bases, it has been renamed. You talk about the violence. Also an epidemic of violence against women on these bases. And it’s always interesting, in these mass casualty events, whether you’re talking about a mass shooter in a school like Sandy Hook, to look at the attackers’ relationship with women in the past. I mean, you had the Sandy Hook shooter killed his mother before. But often when domestic violence doesn’t go — isn’t taken seriously, you see what — the escalation of the violence, Mike.
MIKE PRYSNER: Absolutely. I mean, you know, and this is a problem that’s endemic to the military, as well. I mean, you know, Fort Liberty, it’s high rates of domestic violence, of murders even. You know, Seth Harp, who’s another antiwar Iraq War veteran, has also done really important work on this. And so, yes, I mean, there is, of course, many indicators.
I mean, it comes back to this idea that these — we have this mass violence problem. There are many ways that the government could be stopping this, could be taking measures to get to the root of these things. But instead, it just exacerbates them. And, of course, the U.S. military is — you know, there are so many cocktails in our society that allow these things to bubble over into violence against other people. The military is just, you know, one of the stronger cocktails that exists.
AMY GOODMAN: And let’s talk about Livelsberger, what we understand now happened. He’s the Green Beret who drove that Cybertruck that blew up in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas. Apparently, he died of a self-inflicted bullet wound. Can you talk about soldier suicides?
MIKE PRYSNER: Well, I mean, it’s an epidemic, and it has been for a long time. I mean, and it’s something that, you know, especially was exacerbated when the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began. You have people like Livelsberger who deployed many, many, many times. In Special Operations, you know, he, no doubt, was involved in things that — involved in killing all over the world.
But, you know, the way that the military historically and, you know, from my own experience being in touch with so many service members who were struggling against this, you know, the military’s policy when it comes to mental health and suicide and things like that is to maintain the fighting force. And so, the goal of the U.S. military when they’re dealing with this epidemic within the ranks is to keep the fighting force active and keeping people deploying and things like that. And that’s what we saw throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And so, of course, there’s a great deal of this, a great deal of this in society writ large, but in the military in particular. You know, so, Livelsberger, who injured many people and could have killed some people, as well, and so, you know, on face value, it looks like he was just another statistic of someone from Special Operations or the military in general that killed themselves but was doing it in this kind of spectacular way, you know, went out with a bang, which, you know, with our corporate media that sensationalizes so many of these incidents, maybe was inspired to do something that made a scene or something like that. But I think the suicide is, of course, a major problem in the military and in our society, for the reasons that I mentioned earlier, and that, of course, there’s going to be some layer of those people that want to turn that violence on other people, as well as themselves.
AMY GOODMAN: An article in The Washington Post from about, oh, a month ago is headlined “Trump could hobble renewed fight against domestic terrorism, analysts warn.” Now, this is really interesting. I remember when Obama came to office and there was a report on domestic terrorism, especially right-wing terrorism in the military. He was pressured not to have that report released. This is an ongoing issue. Then you have the misinformation that Fox put out on New Year’s Day saying that the truck that was rented came over — this is the truck in New Orleans that Jabbar used — came over the border in the last two days. It was not minutes later that Trump didn’t post on Truth Social that finally people have to accept that people who come from outside this country are more of a threat than people who are born here. And he attributed the minimizing of the foreign threat to Democrats and the fake news media. Of course, he was wrong about this, and Jabbar was a U.S.-born U.S. citizen, served in the military for more than 10 years. Mike?
MIKE PRYSNER: Of course. Well, you know, the Trump administration is going to use the New Orleans attacker to feed into their right-wing agenda. The reality is, is that when we look at extremist attacks or violence from people who have been in the military or are still in the military, a very, very tiny number of those people, you could say, were inspired by Islamic extremism. But right-wing extremism is, in fact, a very prevalent and common thing, and has been throughout the entire history of the U.S. military. I mean, the Ku Klux Klan, America’s premier domestic terrorist organization, was one founded by military veterans. And throughout the entire history of the U.S. military, white supremacist and right-wing organizations have heavily recruited from and been led by people who are in the military and military veterans, as well.
This all came to a head in the ’90s, where the Oklahoma City bombing, but also you had neo-Nazi service members —
AMY GOODMAN: Served — right. Timothy —
MIKE PRYSNER: — in the Marines commit a lynching of a Black couple in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And then, so, there was this brief period of crackdown of the military on right-wing extremism. But when the Iraq War started going very badly and they needed bodies to continue to go to the Iraq War, they completely removed their restrictions on this kind of thing and then — you know, which has been exposed by many journalists — were knowingly bringing in right-wing extremists. Some of them were going into the military specifically to get training to bring back out into their organizations.
And so, today we have many far-right organizations, like Atomwaffen Division, Identity Evropa, Patriot Front, some of those organizations founded by veterans, but also who recruit heavily from the military and veterans, as well. Like, leaked documents from Patriot Front show that more than 20% of their applicants are young veterans or people who are still in the military. You know, this is a real — this is a real danger. You know, the Oath Keepers, after January 6, it was revealed that so many of the participants were military veterans. In fact, many from the Special Operations were really the tactical leadership of that assault, and many of whom had stashed large numbers of assault rifles and ammunition in hotel rooms that were very near the Capitol assault.
And so, of course, this is something that should concern everyone. It’s obviously the real clear and present danger when we’re talking about extremism from within the military. But the Trump administration has indicated that the problem in the military is in fact wokeism. And they may be going after woke generals or things like that, which really means they will be going after trans people. But also, I think it’s very concerning when we talk about what we should look forward to with the Trump administration, how they’re going to combat extremism from the military. You know, one of Trump’s main program platforms — on his 20-point program for his presidency, one of them was deporting pro-Hamas terrorists. And so, of course, we know that the Trump administration, when they say “pro-Hamas,” they really just mean pro-Palestine.
And, you know, this, I guess, brings me to the point that, you know, the military, as we’ve been discussing, really transforms people in a lot of ways, that it can tend to transform people in extremely negative ways. But a lot of times people’s military experience puts them in a positive direction and causes them to reject the violence that they were a part of, which is what we’ve been seeing the past year through the Gaza genocide, where large numbers of service members have been quitting the military, both publicly and privately, have been taking part in demonstrations to try to protest the U.S. role in it, and taking other really dramatic and heroic actions in that regard. And those are the kinds of people that Donald Trump and Hegseth and others who are going to be a part of the administration identify as extremists, when the real threat of right-wing extremism is going to go, of course, completely ignored, because that’s really the base of the incoming administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Mike Prysner, a recent Guardian report headlined “Trump pick a threat to US military’s counter-extremism effort, experts warn,” quote, “Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s embattled choice for secretary of defense, will struggle to handle the serious problem of extremism in the US military due to his own far-right political views, experts in the subject have warned.” The piece quotes Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq War veteran, CEO of the nonprofit watchdog Task Force Butler, saying, quote, “I think it’s going to be an absolute disaster. Pete Hegseth is a domestic extremist,” he said. The Guardian goes on to note, quote, “Hegseth, an Iraq and Afghan war veteran, was barred from attending Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration after a fellow national guardsman accused him of being an ‘insider threat’ and an extremist with problematic tattoos.” Mike Prysner, your final comments?
MIKE PRYSNER: Yeah, well, we are in a tumultuous time in America, both a time of heightened political violence and at a time of growing despair and growing inequality in this country. You know, the military, being a cross-section of that U.S. society, experiences those things, as well. And in that moment, there are going to be numbers of people in the military and veterans who are going to gravitate towards right-wing organizations and go the path that Hegseth went. There’s going to be people who do the opposite, and there’s going to be people that just turn inward into self-destruction and despair.
And so, that’s why I think it’s very important for progressive-minded people to realize that there is a role we can play in reaching out to people who are in the military who can go down a different path and can go down the path of the many heroic service members who have taken a stand, who have quit the military and who have used their experiences as a force for good in this world.
And, you know, getting back to this main issue of that, we have these deep-rooted problems in our society that give rise to these incidents of mass violence. You know, service members and veterans, instead of being a number one mass casualty offender, so many of them can actually be a part of changing society and getting to the root of those issues and moving society forward, as they have historically in the past — Vietnam veterans leading the struggle against the Vietnam War, Iraq veterans leading the struggle against the Iraq War, and both those instances being decisive factors in those wars coming to an end. We have much bigger problems to address in society. Service members can be and veterans can very much be a part of solving them. And it’s very much needed that we foster that among progressive people, because there is clearly a faction on the right wing that is very much already doing that and taking advantage of that, and, of course, is entering the highest seats of power, with people like Hegseth.
AMY GOODMAN: Mike Prysner, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Mike was an Iraq War Army veteran, longtime GI organizer, previously co-founded March Forward, an antiwar group of veterans and active service members. He was 17 when he joined the military in 2001. His company participated in the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, three films directed by Palestinians are shortlisted for the Academy Awards. We’ll look at one of them, From Ground Zero. Stay with us.
