A Tale of Two Manifestoes: Normalizing the Cybertruck Bomber
On New Year’s Day in 2025, a Cybertruck exploded in front of a Donald Trump hotel with the driver, Matthew Livelsberger, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Later newspaper coverage acted as if the driver’s motives were a complete enigma. The driver left two mini-manifestoes on his iPhone, but mainstream newspapers barely bothered to engage with them at all.
Washington Post coverage quoted Livelsberger’s statements to say that the explosion was meant as “wake-up call” aimed at an American public addicted to “spectacles and violence,” but the headline focused on the Livelsberger’s mental health issues and acted as if Livelsberger’s PTSD somehow had drained his act of ideological content. A New York Times article on Livelsberger also used some brief quotes from his two mini-manifestoes, but like the Post, they preferred to focus on Livelsberger’s PTSD than his ideological motives. A follow-up article in the Times delved more deeply into his personal struggles with PTSD, but also ignored the political or ideological implications of his act. A CNN article, “What we know about the driver who exploded a Cybertruck in Las Vegas,” spent two short paragraphs discussing Livelsberger’s mini-manifestoes, including a reference to how Livelsberger “called for action to remove Democrats from both the government and the military,” but quickly glided past that to attribute the explosion to Livelsberger’s depression and “personal grievances.”
I appreciate the compassion for a veteran struggling with his mental health, but Livelsberger’s motives shouldn’t be considered a mystery. The nonprofit news site, the Nevada Current, published an article on January 3 (“Cybertruck driver left behind rant praising Trump and Musk, slamming Democrats”) with a link to Livelsberger’s two letters that came directly from police sources. The letters are not a gigantic tome the size of the Unabomber Manifesto. Together, the two letters have less than 600 words. You could finish reading them while stopped at a traffic light.
Since the mainstream news media isn’t going to engage with this material, I guess I’m going to have to do so.
Here is Livelsberger’s first letter:
Fellow Servicemembers, Veterans, and all Americans,
TIME TO WAKE UP!
We are being led by weak and feckless leadership who only serve to enrich themselves.
Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.
Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.
Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.
Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.
-MSG Matt Livelsberger 18Z, 10th Special Forces Group
First of all, Livelsberger says that all Democrats must be removed the government and military “by any means necessary.” In the Washington Post article about Livelsberger’s mental health struggles, his ex-girlfriend Alicia Arritt described him as “politically moderate,” yet Livelsberger is literally calling for a one-party state based on unchallenged Republican rule. How is that in any sense of the term “moderate”? This is the “both sidesism” of the mainstream media stretched to utter ridiculousness.
In addition, Livelsberger is advocating for the tactic of occupying government buildings in a manner that suggests he was sympathetic to the January 6th insurrection. His statement “Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in” indicates that Livelsberger had also taken inspiration from the Canadian Freedom Convoy protest of 2022, which was effective in getting vaccine mandates lifted for U.S.-Canadian cross-border truck drivers. The protests included the encirclement of the Canadian parliament and a truck blockade of the Ambassador bridge between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, which shut down cross-border trucking for 2 days. Freedom Convoy protesters frequently desecrated Canadian symbols with swastikas and Confederate flags, and resident of the city of Ottawa were harassed by right-wing protesters in an occupation that lasted over 3 weeks.
The most distressing part of Livelsberger’s first letter is the references to the necessity for a “hard reset” and a “purge.” It is highly likely that “purge” is a reference to the Purge horror franchise, a series of dystopian horror movies and TV shows about a future America in which murder is legalized. The reference to a “hard reset” is even more concerning. “Hard Reset” was the name of a publication that circulated online on Terrorgram, a decentralized network within the social media network Telegram, which advocates a political philosophy of right-wing accelerationism that encourages white nationalist activists to commit acts of mass violence.
The specific variety of accelerationism found in Terrorgram’s Hard Reset favors attacking those who “threaten the white race” and advocates “sainthood” for school shooters and other perpetrators of mass violence who kill at least one person. Terrorgram has already been tied to three mass shootings: a 2022 attack on a Slovakian gay bar, a neo-Nazi school shooting in Brazil, and an attack on Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin that happened only three weeks ago.
In his second letter, Livelsberger said of his motives, “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?” This suggests to me that Livelsberger was not a “pure” accelerationist. If Livelsberger had believed that he gets “sainthood” for racking up a high body count, he wouldn’t have limited casualties at the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion in the way that he did. Livelsberger was a former Green Beret, but he chose to blow himself up mostly with fireworks, when he certainly had the knowledge to blow himself up with much more lethal explosives.
On the other hand, I believe that Livelsberger was clearly influenced by right-wing accelerationist ideas, even if he had no notion of where those ideas originated. In this sense, Livelsberger was a “useful idiot” of the accelerationist wing of the white nationalist movement. He was not an accelerationist himself, but he wittingly or unwittingly furthered the goals of much more extremist actors who want to sow murder and chaos for the sake of destroying multiracial pluralist democracy.
I will now turn to Livelsberger’s second letter:
We are the United States of America, the best country people to ever exist! But right now we are terminally ill and headed toward collapse.
We are crumbling because of a lack of self respect, Morales [sic], and respect for others. Greed and gluttony has consumed us. The top 1% decided long ago they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them. You are cattle to them.
We have strayed from family values and corrupted our minds and I am a prime example of having it all but it never being enough.
A lot of us are just sitting around waiting to die. No sunlight, no steps, no fresh air, no hope. Our children are addicted to screens by the age of two. We are filling our bodies with processed foods.
Our population is too fat to join the military yet we are facing a war with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran before 2030.
We must take these actions if we are going to make it past the next few years in one piece:
We must end the war in Ukraine with negotiated settlement. It is the only way.
Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.
Weeded out [sic] those in our government and military who do not idealize #2.
The income inequality in this country and cost-of-living is outrageous. The number of homeless on
our street is embarrassing and disgusting. Have some pride and take care of this.Stop obsessing over diversity. We are all diverse and DEI is a cancer. Thankfully we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real President instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.
We must move on from the culture of weakness and self-enrichment perpetuated by our senior political and military leaders. We are done with the blatant corruption. Our soldiers are done fighting wars without end states or clear objectives.
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?
Why did I personally do it now? I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.
Consider this last sunset of ‘24 and my actions the end of our sickness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.
When it comes to race, he doesn’t necessarily say diversity is a bad thing (“We are all diverse”), but he also says “DEI is a cancer.” Livelsberger is less motivated by race than his obsession with masculinity (“Masculinity is good and men must be leaders”). The use of words like “terminally ill,” “gluttony,” “no sunlight,” and “processed foods” suggest that Livelsberger was heavily influenced by Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, especially RFK Jr’s advocacy of banning processed foods like Cheez-Its and Mountain Dew.
The rest of the second letter is distressing not because of its extremism, but because of how closely it resembles mainstream partisan Republican media. He criticized “the 1%” for treating the American people like “cattle,” but he idolizes Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. According to his girlfriend, Livelsberger loved Teslas. He probably chose a Tesla to blow himself up in for that reason. Livelsberger refers to Kamala Harris as “the DEI candidate” and compares Biden to “Weekend at Bernie’s,” which is so mainstream as right-wing Republican rhetoric, you could probably find it on a relative’s Facebook feed.
I doubt Livelsberger would have called himself a fascist, but this “mainstream” letter that has been normalized by our legacy media is riddled with fascist tropes: the nation is sick and headed for collapse; only a campaign based on masculinity and “strength” will save the nation from destruction; racial diversity is a cancer eating at the nation from within. Based on the evidence in the letters, I can’t prove that Livelsberger has had much exposure to white nationalist content on the Internet, but I think it is clear that he has been exposed to the sexist corners of the Internet known as “the manosphere.” Sexism is so common and banal in our society, but as Livelsberger demonstrates, that sexism has been used to justify terrorism that ultimately serves more extreme actors, especially fascists and white nationalists.