The war on crazy

Matthew Livelsberger just doesn't make sense.

I had to rework my entire piece this morning, because I realized I was off in the wrong rabble hole, but I am now in a different branch of the same rabbit hole. I feel like I’m lost in Watership Down. So let me set things up. Nixon had his war on drugs. Bush had his war on terror. I’m not sure what war Biden was fighting—a war on war? In the Trump part deux years, I think we will need a war on crazy, but like all the other “war on” efforts, it will fail, and likely backfire.

Photo by Carles Rabada on Unsplash

I want to lead you down the rabbit hole with me, and it will take a few paragraphs to get there. So let me start with the difference between the “war on” effort and actual war, and actual crime.

The whole basis of a “war on” mentality is that there’s some overarching reason why bad things are happening, like murders, or acts of terrorism, or property crime. The liberal ideal is to find the cause at the roots, and cure it, so that the symptoms of the problem will wither away.

In New York City, a proliferation of homeless, mentally ill drug abusers walk the streets and subways. Hauling those people away won’t cure their mental illness and drug abuse. So they are left to push people into the path of oncoming subway trains, or set other homeless people on fire to watch them burn, while those who take physical action to deal with individuals causing a problem are held responsible to the letter of the law for their non-crazy behavior.

The Big Apple, and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, have conflated the problem of homelessness and undocumented immigrants to such a degree that South American gangs operate freely, stealing from stores and selling those stores goods on the street within sight of where they were originally robbed. Store owners who try to stop the robberies are arrested.

I think this is a result of a continuing “war on Trump” that began in 2017 and never stopped. Any action that might subject illegal immigrants to deportation or a “detainer” issued by ICE is rejected and resisted, even if those very actions harm citizens at large. This is one way such “wars on” backfire.

To have a “war on,” there must be an enemy, but Americans have lately failed to name one that can be pointed at, saying “them!” Instead, there’s vague wars on products and ideals, which don’t allow for victory conditions or actual enforcement of anything. (I’m not talking about political enemies, which we know how to name.)

Things were simpler in World War II. There were the Axis powers, our enemies. In Ukraine, there’s Russia, the enemy. In Israel, there’s Hamas, Hezbollah, and their puppet masters, Iran, the enemy. Reagan had the Soviet Union, the evil empire, his Cold War enemy. To win a war, you identify, engage, and defeat the enemy.

But in a “war on drugs,” drugs are not the enemy. In a “war on terror,” terrorists are the enemy, but when you defeat one terrorist organization, a hydra’s head of them pop up. Terror can’t be defeated by making war on it.

This brings me to the rabbit hole I’m in.

America is in a crisis of crazy criminal acts. There’s no useful explanation to satisfy the number of school shootings, radicalized Islamist lone wolf attacks, and other just nuts mass killings we’ve seen in the past decade or so. And as the crazy rises, other bad actors and beliefs join in as a chorus. Anti-semitism, racism against Blacks, Haitians, and other immigrants emerges from the evil swamps.

Our murder rate is beyond recognition of what the most productive, technologically advanced nation in the world should tolerate. We really need to get liberal if we want to find the cure for our societal ills. See, liberals—the bleeding heart variety—always want fix the root cause, but fixing the root cause never seems to work, because frequently we don’t find it, and when we do, the cures are ineffective.

On the other hand, simple enforcement, like reducing crime, is actually not so hard.

Put all your resources into enforcement and punishment, and any country can achieve what El Salvador has done. In just five years, the Central American nation’s murders fell from over 2,000 to 154, a rate of 2.4 per 100,000—the lowest in the Americas except Canada’s. How did they do it? Simple. President Nayib Burkele created a police state, and persuaded legislators to hand him dictatorial powers.

A temporary state of emergency has persisted for over two years. Police, and the military, have the authority to detain citizens, without charges, on mere suspicion of being a gang member: over 80,000 have been locked up since 2022. The policy is “no mercy,” and the infrastructure is a “Terrorist Confinement Center,” called a Cecot, with a 40,000 inmate capacity. But El Salvadorians know who the enemy is: the gangs.

So do the Mexicans, but they are in a less favorable position regarding the cartels, mainly due to the lucrative drug trade across the U.S. border. Of course, the United States locks up plenty of people, but with a less focused approach. The problem that Americans have is that we don’t know who the enemy—the one you can put your hands on and arrest—is.

We have a Green Beret, Matthew Livelsberger, who rented a Cybertruck on Turo, filled the bed with fireworks, mortars, gasoline and camp fuel, and armed with a .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol, drove to Las Vegas, parked in front of the Trump hotel, somehow ignited the combustibles, and shot himself. Does any of that make sense? And you’ve got a bunch of military folks (or people claiming to be military) on Elon Musk’s X platform yelping about “safety phone numbers” and “Signal accounts” that somehow indicate Livelsberger was a patsy.

It is confusing, because if you wanted to create mayhem, you would not load a truck made to withstand bullets and close it up. A special operations trained Army soldier would not choose to use low-grade fireworks (though they were powerful mortars in that category) and gasoline when he knows how to rig an actual explosive that could have “obliterated half of that hotel if he seriously wanted to hurt others.” That quote is from Livelsberger’s uncle, as told to The Independent and shared on X.

“Cybertruck is the worst possible choice for a car bomb,” Musk noted, “as its stainless steel armor will contain the blast better than any other commercial vehicle.” The explosion didn’t even break the glass doors to the lobby. It’s reasonable to conclude that Livelsberger, who had his military ID and passport with him, wasn’t interested in injuring others. He simply chose a very spectacular way of ending his life.

How does the nation make war on that kind of crazy? Or the kind of crazy in 2017 that Stephen Paddock, the mass shooter, committed in the same city?

Oh it can be tried.. Both liberals and conservatives would take the same path, but with different motivations. Liberals would use the power of the government, and the political will of the people, to eliminate private gun ownership, and restrict all kinds of products that might cause harm. In so doing, they’d have to suspend rights like Habeas Corpus, right to a speedy trial, illegal search and seizure, and that’s just to start. It’s Nayib Burkele’s answer to gangs, applied to guns. Of course, to do it, they’d have to eliminate the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, and somehow subvert the Second Amendment. And then they’d have an actual enemy, because those who rise up against their cause would be enemies, and they’d fill the prisons.

Conservatives wouldn’t focus on the crime prevention aspect, but on enforcement and deterrence. Like Nayib Burkele did, anyone who smelled of a criminal class—the homeless, illegal immigrants, drug abusers, or the mentally ill, would have their rights suspended and they’d be locked up, deported, or killed in the act.

The war on drugs resulted in more arrests and prison terms than in the history of this country. It highlighted the built-in racism that “the system” used, so that over 40 percent of our arrests are non-white, though they make up 20 percent of the population. Apparently, white people must not do drugs—which is completely false. They just aren’t locked up for it like non-whites.

Those details don’t matter when enforcement is the goal. Just do your stop and frisk searches, arrest, a trial, and lock people up. When you use the police in this manner, then crimes rates fall.

But how do you go after crazies like Livelsberger, or Paddock, or Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, who drove a pickup truck into a New Orleans crowd celebrating the New Year? Livelsberger was reportedly a Trump supporter. Maybe his death was a kind of statement—in front of Trump’s hotel. Maybe he wasn’t committing an act against Trump, but in his confused mind he thought he was communicating something. The conspiracists on X and other social media seem to think so.

How does our society deal with random acts of violence from mentally ill people bent on suicide, or sending some kind of social message? I wrote about Luigi Mangione yesterday. He was making a statement by assassinating a CEO. Thomas Matthew Crooks nearly assassinated Donald Trump last summer. We don’t know what kind of statement he was making, other than he was crazy.

The liberal in me—and there’s some bleeding heart—wants to see if there’s some path to a solution, some fix we can apply to America, that will begin to address our mental health. Narcissism, paranoia, depression, these are all out of control, and mental disorders are celebrated online, or hushed up, like the Nashville school shooter’s manifesto. Anti-social behavior is encouraged and protected. Responsible behavior is not rewarded, and in fact it’s punished (see New York City).

Addressing this in a way that doesn’t break our Constitution, and destroy our civil rights, seems to me the biggest problem we’re facing as a nation. We need a “war on crazy” but how can we have one without an enemy? How can we win it at all when the crazies themselves are the ones in charge?

Livelsberger’s death took me way down this rabbit hole, because nothing about it makes sense. The only thing that makes sense is that something in this man’s life drove him to a senseless act, a public act similar to Max Azzarello, who set himself on fire in Central Park last April, during Trump’s New York trial, scattering papers on the ground police described “like a conspiracy-theory type of pamphlet.”

The kind of crazies who only harm themselves are a warning. The ones who plow into crowded streets, or shoot scores of victims, or blow up buildings, or push random strangers onto subway tracks, those are the ones that worry me greatly. And it seems to me—does it do you?—that these acts and people are multiplying.

We need a “war on crazy,” but before we do that, we have to get sane people in charge. Maybe doing that will finally illuminate the real enemy we need to go after. Because if we can’t, we will lose, just like the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror.” But the consequences of such a loss might just be the nation.

RACKET NEWS ON BLUE SKY: If you’re on Blue Sky, the alternative to the app formerly known as Twitter, so are we! Follow us at @newsracket.bsky.social.

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Mastodon: https://federated.press/@RacketNews

Threads: https://www.threads.net/@theracketnews

David: https://www.threads.net/@captainkudzu71

Steve: https://www.threads.net/@stevengberman

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://twitter.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://twitter.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://twitter.com/curmudgeon_NH

Thanks again for subscribing! Don’t forget to share us with your friends!