1mo ago

Soldier who blew up Tesla at Trump hotel left note saying blast was to be a 'wake up call' for US

apnews.com Soldier who blew up Tesla at Trump hotel left note saying blast was to be a 'wake up call' for US

A highly decorated Army soldier who fatally shot himself just before an explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck at the Trump hotel in Las Vegas left a note saying it was a stunt to serve as “wake up call” for the country’s ills.

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.

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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.
- 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...
- 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...
- Not his words.
  
  These are.

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.
- Twitter doesn't exist anymore. It's Xitter. It's full of xeets.
  
  I prefer to deadname the site.
- Obviously an excellent reason to kill one's self. And he made his reasoning so clear too.
- I have been enlightened!
  Now, there's probably some twisted reasoning that got someone to that conclusion. I wonder how it worked.
- That doesn't even make any sense, but I'm not surprised.

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.

Did not even take a megacorp CEO with him. What a failure.
- Didn't take anyone with him. Best terrorist we have seen yet, only offed himself.
- Yay murder
  
  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.
  
  You applied for the united Healthcare CEO position December 5th, didn't you?
  
  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.
  
  Defense*

Read the note... This guy must have had some TBI from his deployments. I mean he gets to the top of the forest, but then refuses to see the trees.
Yes billionaires and the 1% are a cancer on society... So the solution is to put two of them in charge? Like holy shit, you literally just fucking said they didn't care about us, and that we're cattle to them. Oh except for these two, the illegal immigrant that made a fortune over staying his visa and pays no taxes, and the rape ape who's been convicted of fraud multiple times, who hires illegal immigrants, refuses to pay overtime, and also pays no taxes. Those two are the shining exceptions...
I can't even fathom the cognitive dissonance he must have lived with daily. If this guy were in Jones Town he would have cut in line for his Kool aid even after seeing people start to drop dead.
Thank you for your service, and for showing yourself out.
- I know "false flag" is a meme at this point, but this is just what it looks like when an accelerationist asshole thinks he's clever.
- Where did you find the note? I can only find articles that dissect it without its context.
- His former girlfriend who was an army nurse also said that she thought he had a TBI.
- Nah, he was just a fucking idiot and it’s a good day when any American thug like him wastes away.
  Fuck veterans
  
  'Fuck veterans' is a little harsh. Some enlist because they have no other prospects or can't afford better education to land a job. Or they've been indoctrinated to think it's 'a mans duty to their country'. I've known plenty of veterans that despise the military afterward, despise current gov, and despise Trump.
  
  That is a very narrow view in how the military works. People like to pretend it's voluntary. But if you are poor and you want to improve your life and perhaps go to college, it isn't. Plus, unless you are American you can't realize how hard the indoctrinate children into joining. All high schools have a recruiter there at all hours grooming kids into joining

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?
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

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.”
Source
Given the location and vehicle, I say he is clearly mad at a certain side, can you guess which one? /s
- Surprisingly (or maybe not), he's a Trump supporter:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_International_Hotel_Las_Vegas_Tesla_Cybertruck_explosion#Perpetrator
  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 fool
  
  That factoid means nothing compared to the message he tried to convey.
- 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.

The summary shows his warning.
The following is the terrorist attack ...
Tesla engineers, meanwhile, helped extract data from the Cybertruck for investigators, including Livelsberger’s path between charging stations from Colorado through New Mexico and Arizona and on to Las Vegas, according to Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren.
“We still have a large volume of data to go through,” Koren said Friday. “There’s thousands if not millions of videos and photos and documents and web history and all of those things that need to be analyzed.”
- Goddamn. So it's just constantly filming and listening 24/7 the entire time.
  
  In addition to tracking, speed, acceleration, every sensor inside and outside, and probably hundreds of other data points. Oh and the doors automatically locked when the explosion happened but Elon was able to remotely unlock the car doors and give all that data to authorities.
- This is the lede being buried. Other than that its just the typical Ya'll Qaeda domestic terrorism we've all come to know and expect.

Found the reason why.
The writings found on Sergeant Livelsberger’s phone suggest that he had been increasingly concerned about politics. In one note shared by the police, Sergeant Livelsberger said that people should “try peaceful means first but be prepared to fight” to get Democrats out of the federal government.
So this isn't necessarily a problem with Trump, this guy was just another "democrats are the problem with the Real America™" Republican that happened to have mental issues driving him to be a suicide bomber.
He wasn't even anti-Musk, he seems to have worshipped the authoritarian.
In another, he said that “masculinity is good and men must be leaders,” adding that people should rally around Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and a top donor to the Trump campaign.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/us/las-vegas-tesla-explosion-soldier-ptsd-notes.html

Dipshit Donny isn't even in office yet and it's already starting. He's gonna get liquidated by one of his own supporters, 12 months tops. He deserves nothing less
- Too bad Vance is his replacement, horrible outcomes guaranteed.
  
  If I were prone to conspiracy thinking I'd wonder if 25th'ing Trump wasn't the plan the whole time. We have unelected VP Musk and Co-VP Thiel sitting at the helm of our nation.
  
  Yeah, but Vance has nothing going for him. When he becomes president, Republicans will deteriorate into pretty infighting once again and people will be sick of it
- I'm envisioning Trump being attached to electrodes that turn his body to mush and then an orange-tinted puddle.
  It's a nice thought :)
- That's very optimistic of you.

This was also terrorism and occurred only shortly after the terrorist attack in New Orleans, and yet somehow it's the brown Muslim getting all of the attention for being a terrorist.
Yes, the white guy who lit fireworks off in a Tesla said it wasn't terrorism, but he also said that it was to send a message ("a wake up call")--that's terrorism. He was a right wing extremist terrorist but because he was white and not an Islamist, it's just glossed over.
It doesn't matter that he was a decorated soldier. He was a terrorist who literally wanted non-Republicans to be hunted down and forced out of the government.

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.

We all know that a certain orange someone will write this off as just another sucker and loser gone.

Kinda says a lot about the US military that a supposedly well trained soldier - green berets are supposed to be fairly elite right? - couldn't figure out how to build a bomb beyond just stuffing a car with whatever random flammables they could find
- He said in the letter it was not a terrorist attack and he didn’t want to harm people. It wasn’t meant to be a bomb. Green berets train insurgencies. So he know how to build a car bomb.
  
  So he actually designed it perfectly: to look fancy but not do anything.
- Congress makes budget, administration says the VA needs about 12 billion more to cover their costs, the Republican Congress members vote against it.
  I'm not saying a therapist would have helped prevent this, but I'm saying it very well may have helped prevent it.
  
  It wouldn’t have helped this guy. His ex girlfriend talked how he wouldn’t go to a therapist since it would end his career. That needs to change. After what these people see, they need to be able to talk about it workout risk of losing their jobs.
- Says a lot you can't see he didn't want to make a huge explosion.
  
  Mission accomplished then. Still not sure what that ever was. Still not sure how this is supposed to “wake” anyone up.
  This dude was a fucking moron either way.

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
Remotely drove his dead body in a cybertruck (like the fake FSD "taxi" demonstration from musk the other month)
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
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
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
Weird press articles about musk response being a "masterclass" in crisis management PR
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
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.)

whatever that shit didn't wake me up at all
- Ikr, I was late to work because of it. Smdh

US: "5 more minutes, Dad."

Is everybody just ignoring the email he sent to sam shoemate and instead going to trust the corporate owned msm reporting on this?
If he really was a right wing extremist then why would he detonate explosives outside of a trump building and cause property damage to one of the rights most symbolic moron leaders? Something doesnt add up in the mainstream narrative ,

Getting more press than the guys lighting themselves on fire outside the supreme court - so the wife beater has a point there.

Consider us... Woke
https://c.tenor.com/HVkEVSRGMLcAAAAd/tenor.gif

"Woke"

"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.

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.

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.

“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
Well, called that one.
https://lemmy.today/post/21461160/13254268
The glass doors right next to the vehicle look intact in the image, so I can’t imagine that the explosion was very large.
https://lemmy.today/post/21508888/13272957
The only thing that piques my interest there is, if that guy intended a larger explosion – and maybe he didn’t, maybe he just wanted to get the thing in the news than to do a lot of damage – how he couldn’t pull it off, if the guy was a Green Beret.
- You read the news. Made observations. And are now quoting... yourself?
  What is this?
  
  I am smart
  Look how smart I am!
- Do you want a cookie or something?

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