As soon as the news hit that a man had driven through a crowd of people in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, killing 14 and injuring 30, Trump and friends were quick to blame the tragedy on immigrants and the “open borders” policy that we actually do not have here in the US.
“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“New Orleans terrorist attacker is said to have come across the border in Eagle Pass TWO DAYS AGO!!! Shut the border down!!!” Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote in a now-deleted post on Xitter.
“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” Trump wrote in a follow-up post. “That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”
It turned out, of course, that Shamsud Din Jabbar, the perpetrator of the attack, was a Texas native and US Army veteran. He did say that he had recently “joined ISIS” and that he had initially planned to kill his own family, but decided later that driving a truck into people would better highlight the “war between the believers and the disbelievers.” So yes, he was a Muslim, he had radical fundamentalist beliefs, but he was also a US citizen who served in the armed forces — because we are just as capable of producing violent psychopaths as any other country on earth, perhaps even moreso.
A similar pattern followed when, later that day, a man blew up his rented Cybertruck in front of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. Surely it was a leftist angry about Trump being elected!
Right-wing site RedState ran an incredibly smug article with the title “Cringeworthy TDS Speculation on the Vegas Cybertruck Attack Proves Once Again CNN Has Learned Nothing” — about a CNN panel with national security analyst Beth Sanner, who stated, “we don’t know whether this person was, you know, pro-Trump, anti-Trump” instead of definitively saying that the person was anti-Trump, despite not knowing anything about him at that point. You know, like a responsible analyst would do!
Via RedState:
Is this woman implying that if Livelsberger is a Trump supporter, that this is somehow Donald Trump’s fault? Let’s examine this truly impressive demonstration of TDS acrobatics. So, a guy (who happens to be in the military) drives a vehicle right up to a high-rise building that bears the name “Trump.” The vehicle promptly explodes. Wouldn’t the first thought of rational people be that he wants to do damage to the building because it is a Trump building? The operative word here is clearly “rational.”
Except … it was, in fact, a Trump supporter who did it. RedState has not had any follow-ups on this one.
It was 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, an active duty Green Beret who loved Trump and was described by his uncle as “a 100 percent patriot” who was “like a Rambo-type, for lack of a better word.”
For his part, Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma schools chief who has been trying to Jesusify the state’s entire public school system, was pretty sure that these men committed these acts because the US school system taught them to hate America — to hate America so much that, again, they both joined the Army. Like big America-haters often do.
Walters said:
What a terrible day when we see terrorist attacks on American soil. It’s absolutely tragic and we’ve got to look as a country on how these things happen. We absolutely have to shut down the border, we can’t allow terrorists to come across the border. We also have to take a look at how are these terrorists coming from people that live in America?
You have schools that are teaching kids to hate their country, that this country is evil, you have the teachers unions pushing this on our kids, the radical Left wants people to hate this country. They’ve completely destroyed the integrity of the FBI by making them more concerned about DEI than about protecting Americans. It’s a major part of this.
And look, this is a real uncomfortable truth, and I know the Left is going to lose their mind, but listen: We cannot allow our schools to be terrorist training camps. We cannot allow our schools to teach our kids to hate this country. We cannot allow our kids to be taught that this is an evil country.
That’s why we’re getting back to the basics in Oklahoma, to make sure that our kids love this country, understand American values, understand the role that the Constitution, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence played in American history. Because we want patriots, and that’s going to be the focus of our schools.
I suppose it’s possible that these men simply forgot that they hated America for several decades and then went on to commit terrorist attacks against the United States after remembering that they learned that Columbus committed genocide and that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves in school — but it does seem a tad unlikely.
Jabbar, certainly, had a bit more in common with a religious fundamentalist like Ryan Walters than he did with secular liberals looking to advance diversity, equity and inclusion. He, like Walters, believed that the problems of this world were caused by people not sharing his religious beliefs. Perhaps if he’d actually had a little more DEI training, he’d have been able to accept and tolerate people’s differences.
It could be possible that Livelsberger was very upset about the recent H-1B VISA scuffle between Trump and Elon and their supporters, it’s possible he was upset about the price of eggs, even — but the guy also had kind of a lot going on in his personal life. Like how his second wife kicked him out around Christmastime after he got caught cheating, and how he immediately started reaching out to ex-girlfriends, texting one of them all about how driving the Cybertruck made him feel like “Batman or halo.”
Livelsberger, reportedly, had some fraught relationships in his past. A friend of his first wife said the two were polar opposites (she liked Bernie Sanders and he was a Trumper) and that some of his behavior was a little off.
“Nothing ever felt stable or steady between the two of them. She was trying to get healthy, and he would mock her. He preyed on her,” the friend told The Daily Mail.
Now, again — we may never know what Livelsberger’s exact motive was in killing himself by setting fire to his Cybertruck in front of a Trump hotel, but if I had to guess, I would say it likely had more to do with what was going on in his own life and his own mind than with some grand political statement for which he did not even bother to write a manifesto (that we know of).
To be fair, this tactic does work for them.
A few months ago, 14-year-old Colt Gray went on a shooting spree at at Apalachee High School, in Winder, Georgia, killing two teachers and two students and injuring nine others. Almost immediately afterwards, frothing transphobes took to social media to claim that Gray was transgender, trying to make the whole incident into a discourse on the incredible danger of trans people. Gray, however, like the vast, vast majority of mass shooters before and after him, was a cisgender male. In fact, it would also turn out that Gray, himself, was very upset about the existence of trans people.
Once that was clear, they didn’t walk it back, they just stopped talking about it altogether.
In actuality, only 10 out of the 4,400 mass shooters in the last decade — 0.22 percent — identified as transgender, and I do believe this figure includes the Club Q shooter, an openly homophobic 4chan troll who was almost definitely lying about being non-binary and had never identified as such prior to the shooting. However, conservative users on Xitter and elsewhere have created an entire narrative in which every mass shooter is now transgender, and now they all believe it, to the point where they immediately begin “transvestigating” the perpetrators of these crimes the moment the news hits.
It’s almost as if they don’t care what is true and what isn’t, so long as it makes them feel good. Or, more specifically: Their “facts” care very deeply about their feelings.
Speaking of facts and statistics, there are traits that many of these criminals share — they’re just not the ones conservatives want to hear about. Sixty-eight percent of mass shooters, rather than being fervent supporters of equality, usually have a history of domestic violence or violence against women. There have been multiple mass shootings committed by men who felt rejected by women or by a woman in particular, who were angry about our increasingly multicultural society, who were angry about immigrants being here, LGBTQ+ people existing, Black people existing or Jewish people existing. Also, studies have shown that the strongest predictor of acts of violent extremist acts is US military service, not “being an immigrant or just looking like one (to people who think all brown people are from somewhere else).”
I’m also going to note, for posterity’s sake, that just last week, a 22-year-old Michigan man plead guilty to planning a mass shooting of gay people at both “a political party’s headquarters” and a nearby gay bar. While his journals were filled with endless anti-LGBTQ+ tirades and praise for other mass murderers, there was very little about having learned to hate America from his teachers. He is also not an immigrant.
I am not a mind reader, but I strongly suspect that these people desperately want to be able to blame acts of terrorism, mass shootings and other tragedies on immigration, accurate United States history classes, and transgender people because they want very badly to have their big “I told you so!” moments. I think there were a lot of years there where they got very huffy about us supposedly “politicizing” tragedies by saying we wanted better gun control laws so that they didn’t happen again or by pointing out the way the hateful ideologies of those who committed them had been promoted by right-wing media — and that they now think that they are “giving us a taste of our own medicine.” I think they think this is about PR and “winning.”
Luckily for them, they can frequently count on people only paying attention in the beginning of the news coverage for things like this and tuning out afterwards, never actually finding out the whole story or learning they are wrong.
The whole purpose of terrorism is to scare people into doing what the terrorist wants or to punish them for not doing that. Purposely lying about a tragedy or act of terrorism in order to achieve a political aim, or claiming that the perpetrator is a member of a group you don’t like without any evidence (or desperately wanting that person to be, in order to help you further demonize that group), isn’t exactly terrorism itself, but it’s sure as hell done in the same spirit and with the same intent.
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