Matthew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Green Beret from Colorado Springs, Colorado, also wrote in notes he left on his cellphone that he needed to “cleanse” his mind “of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” Livelsberger served in the Army since 2006 and deployed twice to Afghanistan.
“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,” Livelsberger wrote in one letter found by authorities and released Friday.
Why are they withholding exactly what he meant with his list of grievances? Probably because its’s right wing AF, he’s white, and had lots of guns. When are they going to play the “mental illness angle?
I mean, he’s got regrets about lives he took, so chances are he realised he’s been lied to his whole life and has done terrible things “for his country”.
But maybe I’m being too optimistic here. We really need news agencies to release the full letter instead of selectively quoting. They did the same with Luigi Mangione until Ken Klippenstein released the entire thing. Hopefully he gets his hands on this one as well.
Well I can see why morally they wouldn’t release anything at all, since doing that effectively says “if you kill a bunch of people you will get your voice heard”. But I don’t think that’s what’s stopping them.
sdfhjlaks;fjlk;asfjkl;sfjakl;
Nonetheless, we allegedly have most of the info about Luigi and unsurprisingly the press is painting him as a disaffected rich kid and now a terrorist by the courts. Yet when these right wingers get infamy, like the Las Vegas shooter, the Trump attempted assassination shooter, or even this event, their leanings are buried and obfuscated by the press using terms like mental illness or other problems in their lives as rationalizations for their actions.
That could be their argument, but it’s be a bad one while making so much money by parading this around. If that were truly why they weren’t releasing it then they’d try to keep this as quite as possible, along with school shooters and all the rest.
Yeah, I don’t disagree.
But what lie does he think he was being told? If he expected a quid pro quo for his sacrifices and problems, what was he expecting in return? Good VA benefits, a social safety net, and affordable, accessible mental health care? Somehow I don’t see these benefits being an expectation when being a “patriot” and a “Trump supporter” as they are antithetical to Trump and the republican MO in general. Was he expecting an authoritarian that would shut the libs up, deport everyone, and make harmless tariffs to punish our economic enemies? Who knows, and we probably won’t unless they release everything he’d written about his opinions leading up to this event.
Mental illness? Ah yes because blowing yourself up is a totally normal thing for a totally normal person. Nope. No mental illness here at all.
At this point it’s pretty clear that if you’re a Trump and musk lover you have mental illness.
Point being that it’s “mental illness” when it comes to right wingers doing shitty, bizarre things. It’s terrorism or some kind of “typical” behavior associated with whatever dirt they can dig up on a left-leaning perp. Luigi being a prime example - he gets called a terrorist, Livelsberger probably won’t be despite his attack being plainly politically motivated.
Just based on what was said up top, there’s a pretty good chance this guy had some pretty bad mental health problems. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
They’re trying to portray him as some fallen hero with PTSD because of his military service (plus his whiteness and white name). Yes, it does look like he absolutely had PTSD. But that doesn’t cause people to try to suicide bomb hotels.
“It’s just a tragic case of suicide”. Yeah. So are suicide bombings. Same thing here. He was an extremist and he did this to bring attention to his extremist ideologies.
This isn’t mental illness; this is terrorism.