In the early hours of New Year’s Day, Bourbon Street revelry turned to carnage. Fifteen New Orleans partiers were murdered, in a truck attack mounted by Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American citizen who pledged allegiance to ISIS the night before the massacre.
That same morning, a Tesla Cyber Truck laden with explosives was blown up outside of a Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, leaving one dead and seven injured. A suspect, Army veteran Matthew Livelsberger, has been identified in the press.
It remains unclear, as of this writing, whether the two incidents are connected. But the FBI says it believes that the New Orleans killer did not work alone, and the Daily Mail has reported that both attackers once served on the same army base—raising questions about possible coordination. Both used the app Turo to rent their vehicles.
The more alarming possibility, though, is that the two events were unconnected—implying that two terror plots were executed within hours of each other on New Year’s Day. If that’s the case, it suggests ominous possibilities for domestic terror in 2025.
After all, the attacks are just the latest in a series of recent shocking, ideologically motivated acts or potential acts of violence. Add to that list the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the perpetrator of which blamed the health insurer’s alleged greed for his act. Consider also the foiled plots, like the one involving the Afghani national who was planning an ISIS-inspired attack on Election Day, or the George Mason University student arrested last month for plotting an attack on the Israeli embassy in New York.
Such acts of domestic terror have grown more frequent of late. Data from the Global Terrorism Database, a project of the University of Maryland’s nonpartisan START consortium, show that terror attacks were once common during the “days of rage” of the 1970s. But between then and the early 2010s, they fell steadily, totaling just one or two incidents a year. Then, the GTD data suggest, domestic terror began to rise again, in recent years reaching levels not seen since the bad old days.
What could be driving this new wave? One answer is technology: the Internet both makes it easier to learn how to carry out a terror attack and, more importantly, creates more opportunities for individuals to become radicalized by peers.
This helps explain the ideological peculiarity of recent incidents. Thompson’s alleged shooter was a Penn-educated engineer incensed about the high cost of health care. The New Orleans attacker appears to be a native-born black American who somehow turned to ISIS radicalism. Neither have “typical” terrorist motives, in other words.
Another important factor is our decaying social norms around violence. As I’ve argued, the wave of violence that struck the country in the 1960s and 1970s was enabled by—indeed facilitated by—ideological permission from liberal elites who saw violence as an expression of legitimate grievances. This “riot ideology,” as the late urbanist Fred Siegel termed it, linked the burning of Detroit in 1967 to the Weather Underground’s bombing campaign. Both were excused, even justified, as the predictable consequences of unfair social conditions. But when the outraged “silent majority” installed Richard Nixon in the White House, the justification went away—and with it much of the violence.
Now the riot ideology is back—has been back, in fact, for more than a decade. Politicians on left and right justify, defend, or excuse rioting and violence with regularity. Is it any surprise that we see more of it?
The New Year’s murders, moreover, are a dangerous sign that this trend will continue. Expect newer, stranger acts of terror to follow—unless our elites stop excusing it and step up to do something about it.
Top Photo by Michael DeMocker/Getty Images