Jan. 3: The Las Vegas Bombing Was Not Terrorism

Bernie backs MAGA on H1-Bs; Chinese hack Treasury; Why are young people getting cancer?

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The Big Story

In yesterday’s Big Story, we wrote that the New Year’s Day incident in Las Vegas—in which an active-duty Green Beret, Matthew Livelsberger, blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas—looked like a “protest against the recent election results and the incoming administration.” That was based on a few clues: the means and location of the attack (blowing up an Elon Musk-built vehicle outside a Trump property), for one, and social media evidence that Livelsberger’s wife was a passionate Trump hater, for another. But our initial speculation now looks to have been wrong.

More recent evidence suggests that the Las Vegas bombing was not a terrorist attack an apolitical, albeit dramatic, instance of veteran suicide. The anti-Trump wife identified on social media was in fact Livelsberger’s ex-wife. He had remarried in 2022, but according to reporting from the New York Post and elsewhere, the new wife broke up with him the day after Christmas over his alleged infidelity. After the fight, Livelsberger left his home in Colorado Springs, rented a Cybertruck, and began texting several ex-girlfriends, bragging to one that the car made him feel like “Batman.” He then drove to Las Vegas, rigged his car to explode, and committed suicide via gunshot before the explosives detonated. One ex-girlfriend, who dated Livelsberger from 2018 to 2021, told The Denver Gazette that he had become isolated and depressed after returning from Afghanistan with a traumatic brain injury in 2019.

Politically, Livelsberger “loved Trump” and was a “very, very patriotic soldier” and a “patriotic American,” his uncle Dean Livelsberger told the UK Independent. Dean Livelsberger had been skeptical that his nephew was responsible for the blast, claiming he was a Special Forces “supersoldier” who should have been able to rig up a much more effective IED if he truly intended to kill people. But authorities now suspect that Livelsberger might have purposely chosen a Cybertruck and amateurish explosives, such as fireworks and propane tanks, to limit collateral damage. In the event, the Cybertruck’s chassis directed most of the blast upward through the roof, leading to only minor injuries to seven people.

As for the New Orleans ISIS attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a few small details have surfaced since yesterday. We now know he was divorced three times, and seems to have had a hard time in family court: He was on the hook for $2,200 a month in child support to his first wife and reported a monthly net income of -$1,500 per month in his second divorce. In his third divorce, he lost his house and primary custody of his son and got slapped with an additional $1,353 per month in child support, to be garnished from his monthly paycheck. The New York Post reports that Jabbar had a “bomb-making workbench” in his Texas trailer home and a Quran opened to this verse: “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain.”

The Middle East Media Research Institute, meanwhile, uncovered more evidence of radical sermons at Jabbar’s Houston-area mosque, Masjid Bilal, which, as we noted yesterday, is run by a subsidiary of the Islamic Society of North America, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for fundraising for Hamas. In an Aug. 16, 2024, sermon, Imam Mohammed Elfarooqui expounded on the “Quranic story of the people of Saturday,” in which Allah transforms Jews into monkeys, pigs, and rats for disobeying his commandment not to fish on Saturday. Naturally, Mr. Elfarooqui saw a connection to current events, telling his congregation:

Do we think Allah, the praised and exalted, is not watching us here? That's what the Jews thought. They thought Allah, the praised and exalted, was watching them only in Jerusalem, in Bayt Al-Maqdis [the Temple]. So they went out everywhere on the face of this earth, started creating havoc everywhere.

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Oh Allah, liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the hands of the plunderers. Oh Allah, liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the hands of the plunderers. Oh Allah, liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the hands of the plunderers. Oh Allah, send down on the Zionists, the aggressor and enemies, some of your soldiers. You are the only One who knows Your soldiers.

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The Rest

→Over the holiday break, a MAGA civil war erupted on social media after Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the heads of Trump’s planned “Department of Government Efficiency,” voiced their support for expanding the H-1B program. The H-1B is a work visa for “high-skill” immigrants, which in practice usually means Indians working in IT roles—roughly three-quarters of the H-1Bs issued every year go to Indian nationals. The visas have long been popular among Silicon Valley employers like Musk and Ramaswamy, who argue that the United States depends on it to attract top-tier scientific and engineering talent at a time when the United States is not producing enough qualified or competitive workers.

Critics, however, including many tech employees and Trump’s incoming White House deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, have argued that the H-1B program is mostly a way for employers to undercut American wages, as H-1B recipients will typically work for less than American workers and cannot leave their jobs since their visas are sponsored by their employers. The critics have also pointed to the program’s abuse by so-called body shops such as the IT firm Cognizant, the largest corporate recipient of H-1Bs over the past decade, which was found to have intentionally discriminated against American workers in a federal class-action lawsuit earlier this year. Cognizant’s former director of U.S. corporate talent acquisition told Bloomberg in December that the company’s “entire business model is built on the back of cheap Indian labor.”

On Thursday, Miller and the MAGA restrictionists received support from an unlikely ally: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. “Elon Musk is wrong,” Sanders wrote in a statement posted to X. “The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”

→Quote of the Day:

And our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker … We are complying with the law fully, but ah, our objective is to get this person a green card … So certainly we are not going to try to find a place [at which to advertise the job] where the applicants are the most numerous. We're going to try to find a place where we can comply with the law, and hoping, and likely, not to find qualified and interested worker applicants … Very qualified U.S. applicants are brought in for an interview for the sole purpose of finding a legal basis to disqualify them. In most cases, this doesn’t seem to be a problem.

That’s from a 2007 presentation to Silicon Valley corporate clients by the immigration law firm Cohen and Grigsby, explaining how employers can hire cheap foreign employees while outwardly complying with legal requirements to search for qualified American workers. It’s quoted in a Friday piece in Compact by University of California-Davis computer science professor Norman Matloff on the problems with the H-1B program, which you can read in full here. A 2020 study on the H-1B program from the Economic Policy Institute found that “sixty percent of H-1B positions certified by the U.S. Department of Labor are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation.”

→State-sponsored Chinese hackers breached the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), the office responsible for enforcing U.S. sanctions, in early December, The Washington Post reports. The Treasury notified Congress of the hack on Monday, but the details come from anonymous Treasury officials speaking to the Post, which revealed Tuesday that the hackers had breached OFAC as well as the Office of the Treasury Secretary and the Office of Financial Research. The hackers, who gained access to the Treasury systems through a compromised third-party vendor, did not obtain any classified documents, according to the Post, but the breach marks the latest in a string of high-profile Chinese hacks over the past year. In September, a group of Chinese hackers known as Salt Typhoon breached nine U.S. telecommunications companies, including AT&T and Verizon, “allowing them to listen in on audio calls in real time,” in what Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has called “the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history—by far,” per a previous report in the Post. In October, Chinese hackers were revealed to have targeted the cell phones of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and aides to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.

→China is also providing Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthi terrorist group with arms in exchange for safe passage for Chinese vessels through the Red Sea, according to U.S. intelligence officials speaking to Israel’s i24News. The report is light on details, but here’s the big takeaway:

U.S. intelligence services have identified a complex supply chain set up by the Houthis in China since the beginning of the attacks in the Red Sea. This network allows them to acquire advanced components and guidance equipment for their ballistic and cruise missiles.

In exchange, the Houthis have granted immunity from attacks to “ships flying the Chinese flag.” According to the anonymously sourced report, Houthi officials visited Beijing “several times” in the summer and fall of 2024. The United States, in turn, has “repeatedly” passed information on the supply chain to the Chinese government and is now threatening to “act jointly with Israel to cut off these Chinese trade networks from the global financial system.” In October 2024, the United States sanctioned two Chinese companies for providing “dual-use components” to the Houthis for use in their drone and ballistic missile programs.

→Chart of the Day:

That’s from a Tuesday story in The Wall Street Journal on the alarming rise in cancers, and especially colorectal cancers, in Americans under the age of 40 since 1975. Researchers have connected the rising incidence of these cancers to gut health, obesity, excessive sugar and alcohol consumption, antibiotics, circadian rhythms, and sedentary lifestyle, but “everything you can think of that has been introduced in our society since really the 1960s, the post-World War II era, is a potential culprit,” according to Dr. Marios Giannakis of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. The article notes that many cancer researchers share the suspicions of Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that ultra-processed foods, microplastics, and “forever chemicals” in the environment have contributed to rising rates of cancer and other chronic diseases.

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