Letters from an American - January 5, 2025

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

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January 5, 2025. Investigators found two letters on a phone inside the remains of the rented Tesla cyber truck that active duty Green Beret Master Sergeant Matthew Allen Liefelsberger exploded outside the Las Vegas-Nevada Trump Hotel on New Year's Day. It appeared that Lievlsberger wrote them to explain why he was performing what he called a stunt with fireworks and explosives. Aside from his personal need to forget about the violence of his military career, he wrote, he wanted to wake up service members,

veterans, and all Americans. He wrote that the U.S. is headed toward collapse, and he listed as reasons Americans' moral failings and boredom, diversity programs, an economy that has permitted the top 1% to leave everyone else behind, and a weak and corrupt government. His solution was to focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good, and men must be leaders, he wrote.

Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product. He called for weeding out those in our government and military who do not idealize that masculinity and strength, and urged military personnel, veterans, and militias to move on DC starting now. Occupy every major road along federal buildings and the campus of federal 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 Democrats out of the federal government and military by any means necessary. They all must go, and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse. The vision of the U.S. as a hellscape that can only be fixed by purging the government of Democrats does not reflect reality.

As Peter Baker recorded in the New York Times today, the country that President Joe Biden and his Democratic administration will leave behind when they leave office is the best shape it's been in since at least 2000. No U.S. troops are fighting in foreign wars. Murders have plummeted. Deaths from drug overdoses have dropped sharply. Undocumented immigration is below where it was when Trump left office. Stocks have just had their best two years since the last century. The economy is growing. Real wages are rising. Inflation has fallen to close to its normal range. Unemployment is at near-historic lows and energy production is at historic highs.

The economy has added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020. Baker quoted chief economist of Moody's Analytics, Mark Zandi, who said, President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it gets. Lieboldsberger's notes reflect not reality, but rather the political rhetoric in which many Americans have marinated since the 1950s.

The idea that a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights, crushes the individualism on which America depends. Ronald Reagan made that argument central to American political debate in the 1980s. Joining those who claimed that the modern American state was creeping toward communism, he warned that the federal government was the current problem in the nation. He

championed a mythological American cowboy who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone. That cowboy myth arose after the Civil War, when former Confederates complained that federal protection of black rights cost white tax dollars. They contrasted the socialism in Washington, D.C. with the Western cowboys in the cattle industry, portraying the cowboys as hard-working white men who dominated the land and the peoples of the West and enforced the law themselves with principles and guns. The cowboy image of the post-World War II years served a similar function, to undermine a government that, in the process of regulating business and providing a basic social safety net,

defended the rights of minorities and women. After 1980, Republicans increasingly insisted that regulations, taxation, and a social safety net were socialism, and they attracted white male voters by warning that the real beneficiaries of the government were racial, ethnic, religious and gender minorities and women. In 1972 the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of cheap handguns but in 1975 as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Reagan took a stand against gun control.

In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the National Rifle Association endorsed a presidential candidate, Reagan, for the first time. As cuts to regulation, taxation, and the social safety net began to hollow out the middle class, Republicans pushed the idea that the country's problems came from grasping minorities and women who wanted to work outside the home. More and more they insisted that the federal government was stealing tax dollars and destroying society and they encouraged individual men to take charge of the country. What in the 1980s was a rhetorical image of individuals destroying the federal government was turning into action by the 1990s. Taxes are a joke a

former Army gunner Timothy McVe, wrote to a newspaper in 1992, Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that, but it might. On April 19th, 1995, McVeigh set off a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children younger than six and wounded more than 800. When the police captured McVeigh, he was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words,

six semper tyrannis, the same words John Wilkes Booth shouted after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. They mean, thus always to tyrants, and are the words attributed to Brutus after he and his supporters murdered Julius Caesar. As wealth continued to move upward, the idea that individuals and paramilitary groups must reclaim America from undeserving Americans who were taking tax dollars

became embedded in the Republican Party. By 2014 Senator Dean Heller, a Republican of Nevada, called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters patriots when they showed up armed to meet officials from the Bureau of Land Management who tried to impound Bundy's cattle because he owed more than a million dollars in grazing fees for running cattle on public land. Democrat Harry Reid, also of Nevada, the Senate Majority Leader at the time, warned, �We can't have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it.� But the idea of reclaiming the country for white men by destroying the federal government grew stronger.

In 2016, Trump insisted that his Democratic opponent belonged in jail, and that he alone could save the country from the Washington, D.C. swamp. Winning the election through the Electoral College, he first attacked the government over the FBI's investigation of the ties between his campaign and Russian operatives, and then, after his first impeachment, went after any official who tried to hold him accountable to the law. Although many of his critics were Republicans, including his own appointees, he called anyone who crossed him a Democrat. Republican lawmakers began to pose their families for Christmas cards with everyone

holding a semi-automatic weapon. As Joshua Kaplan reported in ProPublica yesterday in a deep dive into the world of a mole who embedded himself in the world of today's right-wing paramilitaries, leaders in that system now include doctors, career cops, and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, Kaplan wrote,

but always heavily armed. It was a world where a man could propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics. But voters kept protesting cuts to the social safety net, and in November 2020 they elected a Democratic president, Joe Biden, by a popular majority of more than 7 million votes and an Electoral College win of 306 votes to 232. Trump supporters believe that Democrats could not possibly have won fairly, and that if they had won, it simply meant the vote was illegitimate. Trump told his supporters that emboldened, radical left Democrats had stolen the election and that democratic policies chipped away our jobs, weakened our military, threw open our borders, and put America last. Biden would be an illegitimate president, voted on by a bunch of stupid people. You'll never take back our country with weakness, Trump told them. You have to show

strength and you have to be strong. We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore. Radicalized individuals fantasized that they were imitating the American founders about to start a new nation. Newly elected representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican of Colorado, wrote on January 5th, 2021, remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history. On January 6th she wrote, today is 1776. In fact it was not 1776 but 1861 when

insurrectionists tried to overthrow the government in order to establish minority rule. They wanted to take away the right at the center of American democracy, our right to determine our own destiny, in order to make sure the power of elite white men could not be challenged. It was no accident that the rioters carried a Confederate battle flag. And now voters have re-elected Trump, who last night held a party at Mar-a-Lago to celebrate those who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He has called the January 6 rioters patriots and promised to pardon those who have been convicted of crimes in relation to the event, as soon as he takes office. But this would be a deeply unpopular move. More than 60% of Americans oppose such pardons. In the late 19th century, former Confederates regained control of their states

as Americans across the country accepted the argument that a government that protected civil rights would usher in socialism. Today's Americans have heard the same argument since at least the 1980s. But rather than a redistribution of wealth downward, between 1981 and 2021, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Now, the incoming president has openly tied himself to billionaires. Trump continues to vow that he will dismantle the federal government, but the four years

from 2021 to 2025 challenged Reagan's claim that the government is the problem. Those years demonstrated that the government could work for all Americans, although results did not come quickly enough to undo the damage of the previous 40 years and satisfy those left behind, many of whom voted for Trump, and some of whom have resorted to violence. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.