Hey. Listen.

"This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wakeup 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 a letter found by authorities who released only excerpts of it.

[...]

A law enforcement official said investigators learned through interviews that he may have gotten into a fight with his wife about relationship issues shortly before he rented the Tesla on Saturday and bought the guns. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.
The soldier who died in Cybertruck explosion wrote it was intended as a 'wakeup call'

If anyone at the Associated Press, or NPR, noted the irony, it didn't make it into the article. But news sources know where their clicks come from... offering random, and sometimes completely irrelevant, details about events to the public. And so they're willing to print information from someone that they directly say shouldn't be giving that information to them in the first place. Just to pad out a story a bit more before the broader public loses interest.

I could go back and rehash what I was saying a week and a half ago about there being more interest in the murder of a child beauty-pageant contestant from nearly three decades ago than there is in say, fiscal policy, but even dead horses deserve a break now and again.

So instead, I'll see if I can make a coherent point about all of this using former President Jimmy Carter. President Carter was, in my estimation, the last, and perhaps the only, scrupulously honest man to have lived in the White House. What this meant in practice was that he didn't sugar-coat things. And while he may have had other shortcomings as the Chief Executive of the United States, I think that one of the lessons that politicians learned from his example was never to follow it.

While I'm pretty sure that the United States, as a nation, is not unique in this, it's fairly obvious what messages the population, as a whole, want to hear. Donald Trump rode his willingness to convey those messages back to the White House, even when it's pretty clear that he couldn't have been sincere about all of them, and some of them practically require rewriting the laws of economics as we currently understand them. But they lined up with what enough people understood to be true, and want the future to look like, that it lead to electoral success. President Biden did the same thing before him, and we can go on and on. And it's the same with Congress. The body as a whole has a poor approval rating, but people tend to think their own Representative and Senators are doing a pretty good job (as long as they're of the correct party, anyway).

Master Sergeant Livelsberger was attempting to foment a Republican revolution within the United States, calling on "Fellow Servicemembers, Veterans, and all Americans" to "be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary." It's a stereotypically simplistic answer for things, but the underlying sentiment, that there are serious problems with the United States that are being ignored and that the public is somewhere between complacent and complicit, is perhaps more common than it's being given credit for.

President Carter made the point that the United States had serious problems, and look where it got him. Not because of the message itself; there's no shortage of people who are willing to say there are problems. But because of the implication that the solutions wouldn't be easy or inexpensive. The letters that the Las Vegas police have released seem to point to the solution being as simple as chasing Democrats out of national government and going back to the 1950s. Nothing more than several days of inconvenience and ignoring several decades of social change. But no real mention of the blood, sweat and tears that would be required. The things that people seem to shy away from when there's anything else on offer.

Because, I suspect, they feel they've earned their leisure. And they'll turn a deaf ear to anyone who says otherwise. And I'm not going to exempt myself from this. I'm not exactly a fan of the higher tax rates (and accompanying lower standards of living) that would be required to sort out the nation's finances. I'm simply resigned to the fact that it's something that must be done, and soon. But I'm not dumb enough to think that it's an attractive way of looking at the world.