In the early morning hours of January 1, 2025, a Texan named Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove his truck around a police car blocking access to the French Quarter in New Orleans, mowed down dozens of late-night revelers, crashed into a portable crane, emerged from the truck and started shooting passersby. He was immediately confronted by police, two of whom he wounded. He was then shot dead.
About four hours later and more than a thousand miles to the West, a Tesla Cybertruck zipped into the porte cochiere of the Trump Towers hotel on the Las Vegas strip, parked next to the glass entry doors and promptly exploded in flames, killing the occupant and wounding at least seven others in the hotel’s lobby. No, it wasn’t a defect; it was an improvised bomb in the bed of the truck. Police and the FBI are now investigating both as acts of terrorism.
It was originally thought the New Orleans terrorist had at least four accomplices: surveillance video seemed to show three men and one woman dropping boxes around the quarter. Today, that thought seems to have evaporated and with it, any possibility of thorough investigation of this case. The Nevada event is now considered a singular occurrence, undertaken by a decorated former soldier with a fairly long list of grievances. Although not terroristic per se in nature, it serves, along with its New Orleans counterpart, to encourage unhealthy thoughts among other like-minded homicidal knuckleheads around the country.
Happy New Year.
Is this the way we’ve decided to settle our grievances now? By murder, and the more, the better? Those about to gleefully shout “Yeah, and about time!” better consider their words carefully and read both history and anthropology. Privatizing and making justice arbitrary, and the current batch of misguided “Free Luigi”- ites do, ignore the achingly obvious. Once “justice” is privatized, it’s available to everyone, and murderous chaos is the order of the day. This prospers only the worst among us: the unscrupulous, the bully, the sociopath. From the Roman mobs of the collapsing Republic to French revolutionary Jacobins to the police vigilantism of 1980s El Salvador and Honduras, the evidence is right in front of our faces. This is not a road we want to take.
At least as interesting was the FBI’s initial take on both events. No, the New Orleans murder spree, undertaken by a man who had posted online about his allegiance to ISIS; who had used a vehicle in an attack similar to those undertaken in New York, Marseilles, France and just last month, in Magdeburg, Germany; and who had n ISIS flag in his truck was initially discounted as terrorism by an FBI spokesperson. Perhaps she wished the FBI not to be distracted from its principle job of surveilling Trump voters, angry parents at school board meetings and Catholics who prefer a Latin mass. Whatever the reason, reason soon prevailed and the event received the proper label and attention.
The danger in this is obvious, and it doesn’t just pose a random threat to those walking around late at night or waking for an early round of Blackjack, or riding a bicycle down the Hudson River Park bike path in lower Manhattan. Repeated often enough, these attacks become background noise, another unremarkable if bloody note in the drone of modern life. Then those like Mr. Jabbar, deprived of an audience, will have to graduate to even more spectacular forms of violence just to achieve an audience. Modern life will have been coarsened just that little bit more.
What is there to be done about it? In the short run, unfortunately little. We got here slowly, through decades of politicians and their panting panderers in the media telling everyone that those who disagree with their prescriptions for paradise on Earth are “threats to democracy” or some similar heap of compost. They were aided in their work of undermining the Republic by allies in academia who developed and spread a poisonous brew of half-truths and leaps of illogic, pouring hate for country into the malleable minds of young Americans. The result is a general hatred for self and country that infected generations, ultimately causing apparently sane and supposedly well-educated college students to embrace the cause of murderers, kidnappers and those hoping to renew the Holocaust, while assaulting their fellow citizens who dare voice another opinion. So the first step is to call a halt to the deliberate indoctrination and hatemongering in education.
Second, the political and bureaucratic substructure to our national self-poisoning has got to be dismantled. This will require diligence and action by the entire citizenry. Every politician embracing the myths of the “1619 Project” needs calling out and defeating. Every bureaucrat supporting the idea that Washington DC knows better what’s best for Twin Falls, Idaho than the people living there needs demoting to the USDA office in Nome. America’s population must organize itself, because – as our newly-inaugurated president suggests – we have a country to save. We have to demand a different course, one in which the people are respected and seen as those in charge. A return to first things for the country, as it were.
Third, Americans have got to be inculcated with an appreciation of history; not our history alone, but that of a wider world. Only then we will all know just how rare our Republic is, and how fragile. And how dangerous are our present divisions and the way we express them.
