How the right is taking advantage of the New Year’s terror attacks

This week’s acts of terrorism don’t fit into neat political boxes, but Republicans are using them anyway to score authoritarian points.

The scenes of unrelated terror attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas are still being processed by law enforcement, but the battle over a narrative for who to blame for the attacks — and how to capitalize politically — is well underway.

Both attackers were decorated veterans of the U.S. Army. In New Orleans, Shamsud-Din Jabbar — a U.S. citizen born and raised in Texas — had an ISIS flag flying from his rented truck when he rammed through weak barricades and drove down Bourbon Street early Wednesday morning, killing 14 people. In Las Vegas, Matt Livelsberger, a former Green Beret, rented a Tesla Cybertruck and blew it up in front of the Trump Hotel with a combination of fireworks and flammable liquids. Just before the explosives went off, Livelsberger apparently shot himself in the head.

In the case of Jabbar, a series of personal struggles preceded his outburst of violence, including what sounds like a contentious second divorce and failing finances. The imam at a mosque that Jabbar attended told local media that the 42-year-old had been helping care for his father, who was undergoing physical rehabilitation following a suspected stroke. Prior to carrying out the attack, Jabbar posted videos online saying he had initially planned to harm his own friends and family but changed tactics in order to draw attention to the cause of Islamic extremism, multiple news outlets have reported.

To me, this sounds like an extremely unwell man who used the cause of Islamic extremism as an excuse for his violence — not necessarily a committed ISIS foot soldier or politically-motivated domestic terrorist. Still, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire was quick to note Jabbar’s donations to Democratic candidates, and incorrect reporting from Fox News about Jabbar’s rented truck coming across the southern border combined into something like a perfect storm of right-wing fear mongering that Donald Trump was predictably powerless from getting sucked in by.

Trump directly blamed President Joe Biden and his “Open Border’s Policy” (sic), as well as federal law enforcement — which is currently investigating both attacks — and local prosecutors for not “protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself.”

Obviously, we’re a decade into this madness but let’s take a moment to appreciate the fact that an incoming president is ranting about “SCUM” in the United States government in the wake of two apparent terrorist attacks. Let’s also note that the incoming president tied the New Orleans attack to the southern border based on that already-debunked Fox News report.

A border crossing, a terrorist attack, a non-white-sounding name, an ISIS flag — all too much for Trump to resist. He got sucked in quick and deep, as we’ve come to expect.

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Livelsberger’s political leanings have been a bit more difficult to decipher — something that does not bode well for his attack avoiding the fate of becoming a conspiracy.

Livelsberger has been spotted wearing a pro-Ukrainian shirt in an old social media photo, as well as interacting with a LinkedIn post calling for paid aid workers with military medical experience in the war-torn nation. Both facts have been used by right-wing media and influencers to claim Livelsberger was a Democrat, and carried out his attack as some sort of warning or statement against Trump.

But he’s also interacted with posts on LinkedIn that allude to a more complex political belief system — and one that looks decidedly more conservative than the surface-level posts about his Slava Ukraine shirt. More: family members have explicitly said Livelsberger was a Trump supporter, which should put an end to all the conspiracies that are just beginning to simmer — but surely won’t.

Neither man, as far as we know right now, fits into a neat and easily-digestible political box. One is a 13-year Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and carried out his attack under the purported banner of Islamic extremism. The other is a highly-trained special forces member who went on to what sounds like some pretty sophisticated work in military intelligence, drones and robotics. Livelsberger’s online footprint leaves a complicated paper trail of allusions to his political belief system for investigators and the press to try to unravel, although from all appearances it looks like he skewed more conservative than not.

None of these complexities, however, have stopped the quick and robust flow of speculation-turned-misinformation that have been and will continue to flood Americans’ information ecosystems in the coming days and weeks. And the contentmakers and politicians involved are eager to take advantage of the deeply human desire for simplicity in information. Yet the motivations of these heinous acts of violence, political or not, are anything but simple.

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The American right is clamoring to take advantage of the tragedies for their political gain in a variety of ways — and the causes they see in the events of these attacks are numerous. Oklahoma schools superintendent Ryan Walters — who you might remember because he used taxpayer dollars to buy Trump-branded Bibles for the state’s schoolchildren — skipped right past all the available facts of the suspects and called for the immediate shutdown of the southern border, despite neither attack having anything to do with immigration. Walters went on to tie the attacks back to his personal brand and grift by blaming the American education system for the acts of terrorism.

“You have schools that are teaching kids to hate their country, that this country is evil,” Walters said in a video posted to X. “You have the teachers union (sic) pushing this on our kids — the radical left wants us to hate this country.”

There is no evidence that either Jabbar or Livelsberger can be remotely described as “radical left” actors, but Walters wasn’t done.

He went on to claim that the FBI and federal law enforcement is at least partly at fault for the attacks because the agency is too focused on DEI initiatives, which has become another focal point of the right-wing response to the attacks. As with previous acts of terror, Republicans are using the fear and uncertainty caused by these attacks to say their “tough” policies — in this case those of Trump cabinet picks — are needed. Confirm his cabinet picks now, Rep. Mike Waltz said this week. Then we’ll all be safe.

Right-wing influencer Tami Lahren took the next logical step in the Republican reaction to acts of terrorism — take away people’s rights.

“You know, if you are in our streets, waving Palestinian or ISIS flags and chanting an intifada revolution, you should probably be on a watchlist and/or deported immediately,” Lahren wrote on X. “Just a thought.”

When trying to obtain something as personal and as often unknowable as motive — the thing we all clamor for in the wake of violence and tragedy — biases can make us latch on to scant evidence to explain the sometimes inexplicable.

The unexplained why of these types of events inevitably feeds conspiracy theories. Those conspiracies — like the chaotic unknowns from which they’re birthed — almost always tend to skew their adherents toward right-wing belief systems. That’s because chaos benefits authoritarianism as well the oppression of dissenting voices it ultimately seeks.

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