Will Bunch: Las Vegas, New Orleans, and the ugly truths America won't talk about
A deadly U.S. New Year's Day inspires demagogues with little talk about root causes of PTSD, misogyny, and unchecked male rage.
by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published Jan. 5, 2025, 1:01 p.m. ET
The year 2025 A.D. began for much of America less with Auld Lang Syne and more with the anxious paranoia of anticipatory dread. When fierce bolts of lightning in a freak winter storm were caught on video striking the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument at 5:36 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, social media posters joked, in a way, about omens. A New Jersey GOP activist, Tricia Flanagan, tweeted that the new year is “going to be Biblical.”
The nervous jokes stopped just a few hours into New Year’s Day, as the political violence that the 1960s radical H. Rap Brown famously described “as American as cherry pie” arrived long before the first hungover scrambled eggs of 2025.
In New Orleans' French Quarter, still teeming with partygoers and Sugar Bowl football fans just after 3 a.m., a 42-year-old accountant and Army Vet slipped past the city’s unrepaired bollards at Bourbon Street in a rented Ford F-150 pickup with a black ISIS flag on the back. The man, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, then hit the accelerator, mowing down revelers and eventually firing a high-powered weapon at the cops racing to stop him, although he never detonated two bombs he’d placed in coolers along his trail of death and devastation.
It took stunned officials in the Louisiana tourist mecca hours to clear all the bodies from the blood-stained sidewalks, let alone get an accurate count of the dead: 14, or the deadliest attack on U.S. soil in 15 months. Meanwhile, the shocks kept coming when a Tesla Cybertruck — the vehicle that symbolizes richest-man-in-world-history Elon Musk’s quest for world domination that’s allied him with President-elect Donald Trump — exploded car-bomb style at the front door of Trump’s high-rise hotel just off the Las Vegas Strip, its dead driver still inside.
The news of twin New Year’s Day assaults in America’s two most iconic playgrounds seemed to confirm the angst of a nation that most citizens think is on the wrong track and just picked a president who promised not hope but retribution and revenge. It was a weird Wednesday holiday where the promised football gave way to sea-to-sea aftershocks — deadly fireworks in Honolulu! A man pushed onto the Manhattan subway tracks! — that raced to confirm the nightmares of a looming annus horribilis for a nation sitting on the edge of its couch.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
... has transitioned into he man alpha male toxicity. Becoming a citizen's badge of honor, desirable, revered, and normalized thanks to djt.
Buckle up, with Ka$h Patel, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Tulsi Gabbard, plus other Fascist buffoons in djt's cabinet - we are in for a hellacious four year ride.
Soldiers returning from combat in Ukraine having been going on crime sprees in Russia.
In Israel, the suicide rate of IDF soldiers is increasing because of the war.
Sources:
https://www.rferl.org/a/oleg-gorbachyov-trial-sentence-ukraine-war-interior-ministry-crimes-prisukhin/33117343.html
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-says-number-of-troop-suicides-has-risen-during-war-with-hundreds-of-thousands-in-reserves/
Art imitates life:
In this film, Vietnam War veterans apply their experience and training to rob banks.