THE MAINSTREAM PRESS DOESN'T WANT TO ADMIT THAT MUCH OF THE COUNTRY THINKS DEMOCRATS AREN'T AMERICANS (updated)

Josh Marshall makes a very good point about the mainstream media's coverage of Matthew Livelsberger, who blew himself up in a Cybertruck on New Year's morning in Las Vegas:

... Livelsberger ... appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019.... But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents ... that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!

... the only places I saw these parts of Livelsberger’s writings in any detail were relatively obscure publications. I was worried that maybe they were hoax documents that had somehow found their way into a few publications. So I traced them back to yesterday’s police press conference. They are indeed real.

Mediaite published them, and Marshall's characterization of them is correct. One reads in its entirety:

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

Another reads in part:

Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders....

Stop obsessing over diversity. We are all diverse and DEl is a cancer.

... Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.

Why isn't this widely known when it's widely known that the perpetrator of the other major violent event on New Year's, the deadly car attack in New Orleans, was an ISIS sympathizer? The easy answer is that Shamsud-Din Jabbar wasn't a white male and Matthew Livelsberger was. I know that the media likes to say that violent white men have mental or emotional problems while other perpetrators of violence are driven by ideology (or by pure evil) -- but there are exceptions. When Dylann Roof killed nine black women in a Charleston church in 2015, the press quickly told us about his racism. The same was true when Payton Gendron shot up a supermarket in a black neighborhood in Buffalo in 2022. The press openly discussed the anti-Semitism of Robert Bowers, who killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

But the ideologies of these white men are seen as beyond the pale, just as support for ISIS is beyond the pale. Both of our major political parties claim to abhor anti-Semitism and anti-black racism. A violent man with the views of Jabbar, Roof, Gendron, or Bowers is seen as outside of our political system.

But Livelsberger's viewes are well within the system. Millions of Americans agree with him that Democrats aren't legitimate Americans and don't belong in government. The next president of the United States appears to believe this. It appears to be a core belief of the Republican Party and the majority of its voters.

For years, the mainstream press has been in denial about how much the American right despises the Democratic Party. Even after nearly half a century of anti-Democratic rhetoric from Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Fox News, and Donald Trump, even after January 6, the press has a desperate need to believe that America has two reasonable ideologicasl wings that seek to coexist with each other. The Democratic Party clearly seeks to coexist with the Republican Party. (It sometimes seems as if D.C. Democrats want a strong Republican Party more than they want a strong Democratic Party.) But the GOP and the right in general clearly believe that America would be better off if the Democratic Party didn't exist.

So we're not going to talk very much about Matthew Livelsberger's manifestos. Talking about them would get us unnervingly close to truths our politcal establishment can't face.

*****

UPDATE: I realize that I didn't give you a sense of how the press is avoiding this subject. In The Washington Post, Livelsberger's denunciation of the Democrats is buried in the 33rd paragraph of this story. The story says this:

In the writings investigators found on his phone, the soldier expressed concern with America’s standing in the world and Democratic control of government. He called for soldiers and veterans to “move on DC starting now” and to “occupy every major road along fed buildings.”

Livelsberger wasn't just "express[ing] concern with America’s standing in the world and Democratic control of government" -- he was calling for a military siege with the goal of purging Democrats from the federal government and the armed forces.

The New York Times did a bit better, although the information is buried in paragraph 13 of this story:

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.

But he didn't just say they should fight -- he said they should lock down the capital. He said they should, in effect, launch a successful January 6. The coverage is utterly inadequate.