Matthew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Green Beret from Colorado Springs, Colorado, also wrote in notes he left on his cellphone that he needed to “cleanse” his mind “of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” Livelsberger served in the Army since 2006 and deployed twice to Afghanistan.
“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,” Livelsberger wrote in one letter found by authorities and released Friday.
“Woke”
Why are they withholding exactly what he meant with his list of grievances? Probably because its’s right wing AF, he’s white, and had lots of guns. When are they going to play the “mental illness angle?
Just based on what was said up top, there’s a pretty good chance this guy had some pretty bad mental health problems. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
I mean, he’s got regrets about lives he took, so chances are he realised he’s been lied to his whole life and has done terrible things “for his country”.
But maybe I’m being too optimistic here. We really need news agencies to release the full letter instead of selectively quoting. They did the same with Luigi Mangione until Ken Klippenstein released the entire thing. Hopefully he gets his hands on this one as well.
We really need news agencies to release the full letter instead of selectively quoting.
Well I can see why morally they wouldn’t release anything at all, since doing that effectively says “if you kill a bunch of people you will get your voice heard”. But I don’t think that’s what’s stopping them.
sdfhjlaks;fjlk;asfjkl;sfjakl;
Nonetheless, we allegedly have most of the info about Luigi and unsurprisingly the press is painting him as a disaffected rich kid and now a terrorist by the courts. Yet when these right wingers get infamy, like the Las Vegas shooter, the Trump attempted assassination shooter, or even this event, their leanings are buried and obfuscated by the press using terms like mental illness or other problems in their lives as rationalizations for their actions.
That could be their argument, but it’s be a bad one while making so much money by parading this around. If that were truly why they weren’t releasing it then they’d try to keep this as quite as possible, along with school shooters and all the rest.
Yeah, I don’t disagree.
But what lie does he think he was being told? If he expected a quid pro quo for his sacrifices and problems, what was he expecting in return? Good VA benefits, a social safety net, and affordable, accessible mental health care? Somehow I don’t see these benefits being an expectation when being a “patriot” and a “Trump supporter” as they are antithetical to Trump and the republican MO in general. Was he expecting an authoritarian that would shut the libs up, deport everyone, and make harmless tariffs to punish our economic enemies? Who knows, and we probably won’t unless they release everything he’d written about his opinions leading up to this event.
They’re trying to portray him as some fallen hero with PTSD because of his military service (plus his whiteness and white name). Yes, it does look like he absolutely had PTSD. But that doesn’t cause people to try to suicide bomb hotels.
“It’s just a tragic case of suicide”. Yeah. So are suicide bombings. Same thing here. He was an extremist and he did this to bring attention to his extremist ideologies.
This isn’t mental illness; this is terrorism.
Mental illness? Ah yes because blowing yourself up is a totally normal thing for a totally normal person. Nope. No mental illness here at all.
At this point it’s pretty clear that if you’re a Trump and musk lover you have mental illness.
Point being that it’s “mental illness” when it comes to right wingers doing shitty, bizarre things. It’s terrorism or some kind of “typical” behavior associated with whatever dirt they can dig up on a left-leaning perp. Luigi being a prime example - he gets called a terrorist, Livelsberger probably won’t be despite his attack being plainly politically motivated.
Since some news sources are afraid to state his stance:
In one letter, he tells “fellow service members, veterans and all Americans” it’s time to “wake up” because the country’s leadership is “weak” and “only serves to enrich themselves.”
Given the location and vehicle, I say he is clearly mad at a certain side, can you guess which one? /s
I’m not here to support the dude’s pro-trump stance. I do, however, believe class consciousness starts when we recognize we share some of this veteran’s grievances, such as Musk’s relationship with Trump. We’re all getting screwed right now.
He said Musk should be supported…
Surprisingly (or maybe not), he’s a Trump supporter:
Livelsberger and his first wife divorced in 2018 in part due to political ideological differences, in particular his support for Donald Trump.
Livelsberger’s family revealed that Matthew intended to vote for Trump in the 2024 election.
EDIT: I just saw your
/s, I’m a foolThat factoid means nothing compared to the message he tried to convey.
Getting more press than the guys lighting themselves on fire outside the supreme court - so the wife beater has a point there.
The egregores, Wyrms no longer content to lurch below, animate wielded flesh to strike with venom and abandon.
Did you just activate a sleeper agent somewhere on Lemmy?
Longing. Rusted. Seventeen. Daybreak. Furnace. Nine. Benign. Homecoming. One. Freight car.
My Elon-brainwashed relative alerted me to the fact that on twitter, the main rumor is that he killed himself to bring attention to the drone sightings being a secret Chinese gravitic propulsion technology.
God I hate that site.
That doesn’t even make any sense, but I’m not surprised.
I have been enlightened!
Now, there’s probably some twisted reasoning that got someone to that conclusion. I wonder how it worked.
Obviously an excellent reason to kill one’s self. And he made his reasoning so clear too.
Twitter doesn’t exist anymore. It’s Xitter. It’s full of xeets.
I prefer to deadname the site.
Honestly, the only deadnaming I can get onboard with. Although I do like referring to tweets as Xcrements now though.
Livelsberger’s letters covered a range of topics including political grievances, societal problems and both domestic and international issues, including the war in Ukraine. He said in one letter that the U.S. was “terminally ill and headed toward collapse.”
Do you notice how the side he takes on those grievances is not mentioned? I wonder what that means.
Edit: Oh wait, he was a “Trump-loving supersoldier patriot,” I know exactly what that means.
Not his words.
Page doesn’t (fully) load. Can you link to the raw document?
The neutral contents are valid and I feel empathy for him. Then I read your comment and now I ask myself how often they had to redact the N-Word from his text,…and now I’m angry and sad.
So much energy towards a common goal wasted for stupid fascist shit. Propaganda works my dudes…
Yeah it’s been hard to parse what his actual goal was. Like, you want to wake people up. To what, exactly? I can make assumptions, but haven’t seen facts outlining this yet. It sure sounds like he was in a really bad place mentally though.
They always want us to wake up, but they never want us to be woke…
Madness inflicting the nation as the mad king takes his throne. Trump isn’t even remotely equipped to handle this. I wonder what happens when the right turns on him.
Musk/Vance 2024? Or do they even wait that long? They could put Trump out to pasture in his golf courses and run the country. Maybe let one of his criminal cases play out. A state one they technically can’t control.
You might know this and I’m missing the sarcasm, but Musk can’t be president (or VP). He’s not a native born citizen. President is one of the few places where being a naturalized citizen isn’t enough.
Trump isn’t eligible either under the 14th amendment. So what? There are no laws anymore.
What a stupid take 😂
Laws are words written on a piece of paper (or digital documents). They cannot enforce themselves. They are not magical. They will not protect you.
That would be up to the Supreme Court. What’s your level of confidence in them to enforce the law against billionaires these days?
It really astounds me that people still think Republicans give two shits about the law.
sdfhjlaks;fjlk;asfjkl;sfjakl;
Famous last words.
sdfhjlaks;fjlk;asfjkl;sfjakl;
Sure, I’ll give you some of the negative dollars I have.
Of course I’m not going to fucking bet with a stranger over Lemmy, I’m not a gambling addict.
sdfhjlaks;fjlk;asfjkl;sfjakl;
I mean, we live inside of bullshit town, so it’s less unbelievable each day that something like the following is actually true:
-
They killed a guy or the guy decided to “die for the cause” as a cult member
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Remotely drove his dead body in a cybertruck (like the fake FSD “taxi” demonstration from musk the other month)
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Parked at decrepit old trump hotel with arrival and lobby area in desperate need of repair, but in a place that would assure press coverage for brand and to stoke bases’s victimhood complex
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Remotely detonated explosive when it was clear of most people and in a way that was loud and showy, but without extreme loss of life
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Cops at first won’t name cybertruck directly as involved vehicle as they “investigate” and then immediately cop starts talking in specific detail (uncharacteristic of cops) mentioning truck by name and how that specific brand model truck contained blast probably
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Weird press articles about musk response being a “masterclass” in crisis management PR
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trump will fundraise a lot off of the “attack” and also make a huge fraudulent insurance claim ridiculously inflating costs of ruined assets and remodeling "there was van Gogh in the lobby, you couldn’t see it, but it was there
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dead person’s writings will serve to radicalize more nutjobs ready for the slaughter as soon as their divorce finalizes.
(Keep in mind that while you were reading all that, musk is on Twitter now admitting, after being publicly caught and humiliated, that he has had fake Twitter accounts for years where he personally goes to his own posts and comments on how great he is, to himself, as the world’s richest person, on paper.)
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“Not a terrorist attack” – um detonating a bomb in a public place to get attention for a political purpose is basically the definition of a terror attack. Using fear to stop your opponents from opposing your favored political despots. Not to mention that even if there weren’t many injuries, the people who breathed the fumes from those batteries burning likely will develop cancer including the firefighters. And the cost of cleaning that up falls on the people who live there. Not exactly a beneficial act.
The media treating this as a patriotic act is just going to encourage copycats. And this guy was a bomb expert, but failed to realize that the temperatures he was creating would vaporize the fireworks, not shoot them off. If an expert could make that kind of mistake, just imagine the mistakes that will be made by the copycats. Look forward to many casualties from “patriotic” terrorists.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest that he was a bomb expert. Familiar with IEDs, but that doesn’t mean expert.
OK, expert maybe was the wrong word, but it was part of his job. And that the mistake he made was obvious to anyone with basic understanding of heat and how things like gasoline burns. It’s a simple concept that could have easily have been solved by simply opening the top and using the fireworks to trigger things or lots of other ways to do what he said was going to happen.
Not to be a big asshole or anything, but we’ll forget about this by Monday.
No, they’ll keep overanalyzing and rehashing every detail, because it keeps Luigi Mangione out of the news.
That makes me wonder if that’s why he did it.
“If I blast myself for GOP causes writ large, I will be the new Famous Martyr!”
I mean, nobody remembers that guy that blew himself up in Nashville either. That was in the news for 2 days and everyone moved on.
Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation_of_Aaron_Bushnell
It’s unfortunate for those who self-immolate as an anti-war or anti-genocide protest, but it just doesn’t seem like it works because the public just doesn’t care enough to remember them for long, so it is not effective as a form of protest.
I remember. That shit shook me for weeks. Sometimes I still think of his burning body.
Burning yourself won’t stop Israel, sure. But it gets people involved. It got me involved.
sdfhjlaks;fjlk;asfjkl;sfjakl;
I cared before too. There is a difference between passively engaging in BDS and pouring your heart and soul into a movement.
Edit: I felt the need to elaborate.
For a very long time I followed the boycott and donated what I could. Genocide is atrocious, but what else could I do? I lived in the middle of bumfuck nowhere; There weren’t exactly any movements nearby I could get involved in.
I then saw a man from bumfuck nowhere drive all the way to the Israeli Embassy and burn himself alive. I realised there was a whole lot of things I could do.
I also moved to Ireland, so I got a lot more opportunities to act on my sentiments.
We’ve had like five major events in 3 days. I can’t blame anyone for missing one or two of them.
Saturday is only the 4th day of 2025.
Consider us… Woke
Did not even take a megacorp CEO with him. What a failure.
Yay murder
It’s murder when it’s a human. The mega-rich aren’t human and belong in the ground where they can’t hurt anyone else.
Dehumanizing the other has succesfully been used to to make normal people commit horrible acts in the past as well.
The horrible thing about self defense is that its necessary.
While I agree with you in theory (because you’re completely correct with your point), these people also do horrible acts on a global scale daily. We’re at the point where either they go, or we all do.
We’re at the point where either they go, or we all do.
I’m sure this argument has been used before as well.
Again, I agree in theory, but it has only been used in bad faith before. These guys are going to utterly destroy the very planet that sustains us.
There’s a difference.
Hey buddy the boot licking conference is down the hall.
P.s. they’re never gonna pat you on the head.
But sometimes it’s a lie and sometimes it’s true.
It has and I am with you that we should not dehumanize our enemies. However, I also wonder the difference between dehumanizing your enemies because they are weaker than you and make a good target versus dehumanizing your enemies because they have exorbitant power over you. What if that’s what it takes to get people to actually stand up to the oligarchy? I don’t know.
Defense*
You applied for the united Healthcare CEO position December 5th, didn’t you?
That’s a great impression of a healthcare insurance CEO!
Are you Dora the Explorer on an acid trip?
Cause you just can’t stop licking Boots.
Didn’t take anyone with him. Best terrorist we have seen yet, only offed himself.
I feel like they’re trying to ‘handle’ it differently so that they don’t get a repeat of Luigi or more ‘woke’? ‘Anti-woke?’ People don’t copycat.
Thank you Matt for your service. Now we know China has gravitic propulsion capabilities.
Yes, that’s how they built their secret base on Jupiter’s third moon. It’s so obvious now.
