New Year's Day apparent terrorist incidents are but the ugly new face of a burgeoning global trend

And we need to steel ourselves for what's likely coming in 2025

This article was updated at 4:33 pm on Jan. 3.

Just as we were all composing New Year’s resolutions and musing about how 2025 hopefully would bless us with “new beginnings”, what appeared to be terrorists struck in New Orleans and Las Vegas.

More are surely on the way.

Security experts and counterterrorism officials, including the FBI director, have been warning about imminent terrorist attacks since earlier this year.

An attempted assassination of then presidential candidate Donald Trump (now the President-elect) as well as an FBI bust of an Iranian plot to do the same in the runup to last November’s election should have both raised alarm and summoned greater preparedness across civil defense agencies than has been the case.

Now that Trump is scheduled to take the oath of Presidential office in almost two weeks, we should not be at all surprised that the so-called “heightened threat level” about which most Americans have yawned and changed the subject over the last six months is actually on the verge of morphing into the most deadly terrorist violence on the American home front since the months immediately after September 11, 2001.

In less than two days the media has sifted through every detail dripped out by federal and local law enforcement over the suspects in the two incidents.

Although there are a number of weird similarities, including the fact that the two attacks occurred within hours of each other on New Year’s Day, the FBI continues to insist they have found “no definitive link” between the Las Vegas and New Orleans episodes. However, they have not ruled out a connection either.

The vehicles used in both assaults were rented over the carshare app Turo about the same time, and both assailants came from the same military background and at one point had been deployed at the same base.

The backstory to the New Orleans massacre, for which details increasingly emerge, is rather familiar – an angry, disgruntled military veteran who had converted earlier in life to Islam and, after seeing his personal life unravel, succumbed to the siren song of ISIS’ online propaganda. Whether he had any actual dealings with ISIS personnel on the ground is not known.

The case of the Las Vegas bomber – Matthew Rivelsberger, 37, of Colorado Springs - is far more opaque. Currently he has no known association with ISIS or Islamism and was a career military officer with high-level special forces responsibilities and training.

His uncle Dean Livelsberger described him in a press interview as a “100 percent patriot” and a “supersoldier”.

Rivelsberger’s uncle scoffed at the theory that by blowing himself up in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas while driving a Tesla manufactured by the President-elect’s right-hand man Elon Musk his nephew could have been trying to make some kind of ghastly political statement.

The uncle told the British online newspaper The Independent:

Matt was a very skilled warrior, and he would be able to make — if it was him, and if he did this — he would’ve been able to make a more sophisticated explosive than using propane tanks and camping fuel. He was what you might call a ‘supersoldier.’ If you ever read about the things he was awarded, and the experience he had, some of it doesn’t make sense, when he had the skills and ability to make something more, let’s say, ‘efficient.’ His skills were enormous from what he had been taught in the military.

Late breaking news citing interviews with Rivelsberger’s ex-girl friend suggest that the special forces operative may have had as much to do with mental health as with terrorism.

According to police, Rivelsberger left notes on his phone, one of which read: “This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call.”

Yet the vehicles used in both assaults were rented over the carshare app about the same time, and both assailants came from comparable military backgrounds and at one point had been deployed at the same Army base in North Carolina. They both also served in Afghanistan.

Finally, as one FBI agent investigating what happened in Las Vegas stressed, Rivelsberger like Shamsud-din Jabbar, who perpetrated the New Orleans car ramming, was upset with the America he knew and had “family issues or personal grievances in his own life that may have been contributing factors”.

These “coincidences” by themselves underscore why the familiar narrative about how terrorists are cultivated and operate in America is dangerously overdrawn and outdated.

Federal law enforcement is routinely tasked with finding signs of material collaboration between terrorist agents, who are then linked to known “organizations” such as ISIS, not to mention Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iranian intelligence. If the connection cannot be easily made to the degree it can be introduced as evidence in a court of law, the default position is to say the culprit “acted alone”.

What is conveniently left out in such accounts is that for the past few decades most homegrown bad actors have been driven almost exclusively by some vague ideology they have absorbed on their own rather than functioning as components in a well-lubricated covert terrorist apparatus.

The cartoonish image of a terrorist cell with a chain of command reaching across the oceans to some foreign base of operations that meets regularly in the backroom of a vacant warehouse to plot the next public atrocity has been obsolete since the invention of the internet.

Or before.

In fact, it goes even further back to the strategy developed in the early 1980s by white supremacist leader Louis Beam known as “leaderless resistance”.

In his manifesto published ten years at the beginning of a series of spectacular domestic terrorist attacks throughout the 1990s that included the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 innocent people, Beam wrote that “leaderless resistance” signifies that there is a kind of “phantom” organization where “there appears to be no organization”.

The spectral “organization” is fortified by the power of the ideology itself and the unshakable commitment of its “warriors” to carrying its agenda forward.

Beam explained it as follows:

Participants in a program of Leaderless Resistance through phantom cell or individual action must know exactly what they are doing, and how to do it. It becomes the responsibility of the individual to acquire the necessary skills and information as to what is to be done. This is by no means as impractical as it appears, because it is certainly true that in any movement, all persons involved have the same general outlook, are acquainted with the same philosophy, and generally react to given situations in similar ways.

I myself was commissioned by federal law enforcement in the late 1990s to draft a “white paper” on how this concept works in real time and in real situations among domestic terrorists as well as to do training sessions for “first responders” in counter-terrorist protocols and procedures.

The first major challenge came when the destruction of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City by a vehicle bomb stumped investigators for many weeks.

They were (wrongly) focused for many weeks after the event on identifying some terrorist cell under the direction of Iran or Iraq. But it was the arrest of a guy with an illegally stashed 9 millimeter Glock pistol on a random traffic offense by an Oklahoma highway patrol officer that shattered the feds’ long-favored paradigm of who might be behind such a heinous terrorist event and directed them to McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols.

During the trial of McVeigh, who was executed for his role in the bombing in 2001, his ties to a right-wing cult with neo-Nazi sympathizers was officially revealed. The ties were first bared in a series of articles from 1996-97 by Oklahoma investigative journalist J.D. Cash and later by British journalist Ambrose Evans Pritchard in a book about the life and times of President Bill Clinton.

As the British newspaper The Guardian stressed in an article in 2015, twenty years after the bombing, McVeigh appears to have been the fall guy for a classic application of Beam’s tactics of “leaderless resistance”.

Journalist Andrew Gumbel, who authored the piece, is both forceful and transparent in showing how the feds were deliberate and even ruthless in making sure that the full story never came out.

Gumbel writes:

The Justice Department felt pressure to win what was turning into a frustratingly circumstantial case, especially against McVeigh. Prosecutors knew McVeigh was guilty and were pretty sure it was his idea to park the truck bomb directly beneath the daycare centre at the Alfred P Murrah federal building. Their challenge, though, was to prove it without raising significant questions about others they could not catch, or whose involvement they could not demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt.

Unlike the 1990s the idea of “resistance”, whether leaderless or not, has expanded way beyond the white supremacist, anti-semitic paramilitary groups that confronted national law enforcement thirty years ago.

“Leaderless resistance” has now become de rigeur within the radical Islamist underground.

In a follow-up analysis of the recent New Orleans car ramming the Washington Post scrutinized intelligence data involving a failed ISIS-inspired terrorist plot in Vienna last August . The perpetrator, an Austrian Muslim who except for his age and experience closely resembled the New Orleans attacker, had been “self-radicalized” by ingesting ISIS propaganda on social media.

ISIS, according to the Post, has been extremely effective in nurturing terrorist initiatives around the globe simply through its implementation of Beam’s principles using the internet. ‘Unlike al-Qaeda, the Islamic State has built a thriving online presence and encourages followers to carry out terrorist attacks wherever they are, without waiting for instructions or approval”.

Islamist terrorism, which played a subordinate role to domestic, neo-Nazi, cultic movements during that era, took center stage after the toppling of New York’s twin towers on 911 and has not been displaced.

But radical Islamism and neo-Nazism have always been congenial bedfellows from day one, and since the barbarism of Oct. 7, 2023 they have joined forces with the far left as well. Anti-semitism is the adhesive that binds all of them together.

While the two terrorist incident grabbed most of the headlines on New Year’s Day, a large group of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protesters in New York City took over Times Square a few hours later and chanted “our strategy will continue to escalate”, “there is only one solution”, and “intifada, revolution”.

Israeli diplomats connected the demonstration directly to the New Orleans incidents and pointed out: "this is the grim reality of the 'globalization of the Intifada' they called for. It's terror, pure and simple."

We may have witnessed the first authentic harbingers of this “intifada” (the word in Arabic simply means “rebellion”) on New Year’s Day. Besides the conventional elements of neo-Nazism and radical Islamism, the violent rhetoric of “resistance” has now added the previously incongruous ingredient of 1960s style Maoist Marxism.

Until recently Maoism and right-wing racist “Aryanism” were like water and oil in the ideological brew of American political radicalism. But now they have seem to have become quite simpatico.

Consider one of the latest screeds by leaders of the ongoing Columbia University anti-Israel protests, who most likely played some part in the New Year’s Day demonstrations in the Big Apple.

Using such formulaic Communist catchphrases as “mobilize the masses to achieve victory”, the screed demands the need “to unite broadly”. It even explicitly aims to “push back on the idea that the vanguard of today’s Palestinian resistance, namely Hamas and Ansarallah, are ‘not progressive’”, insofar there is a ton of scholarly researching going back half a century that radical Islamism historically has allied with National Socialism.

A book by David Dalin and John Rothman entitled Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radica Islam is but one among countless examples.

But Columbia radicals appropriate the big lie that denies the Nazi roots of radical Islamism. “Hamas and Ansarallah are principally progressive forces in an anti-imperialist struggle because of their military accomplishments and popularity among the vast majority of Palestinians.”

As we start the third day of 2025 we need to realize that America is now a sprawling minefield where countless aggrieved and enraged loners merely through the impact of social media and malign online influencers can pick and swallow a preferred ideological narcotic, whether coherent or not, to motivate them to do something “spectacular” that will not only slake their overdetermined resentment, but give them one last adrenaline rush of “meaning” amid an otherwise desolate landscape of despair and hopelessness.

We have already seen this phenomenon accelerate with school shooters.

The latest trend many be full-blown terrorism.