Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s get to the news.
→ Two terrorist attacks and a subway derangement: A man drove a truck—with a huge ISIS flag billowing from behind it—into the packed crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans early New Year’s Day. After killing as many as he could with the vehicle, he got out of the car wearing body armor and started shooting (the death toll now is 14). But the important thing the FBI wanted you to know was that this was not terrorism. Not even close.
“This is not a terrorist event,” said FBI assistant special agent in charge Alethea Duncan (see a clip from the press conference here). “What it is right now is there are improvised explosive devices that was found, and we are working on confirming if it’s a viable device or not.”
It’s basically improv. New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick adds (and these are the full quotes, I beg you to watch the video): “I would say that we want our community and our visitors to continue enjoying. There’s so much to enjoy about New Orleans. So we are going to make sure that our routes and the Superdome are safe today for the game. And yeah, we had this tragic event. And we’re sorry again to everyone in our community. But we do want you to go about the day. As we say, just stay away from Bourbon.”
Oh, New Orleans. Murders in New Orleans are so common that a man ramming his truck into a crowd and gunning people down while flying an ISIS flag is given a quick “sorry again to everyone in our community.” Anyhoo, see you at the Superdome!
Very quickly, the terrorist’s name spread online: Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an army vet. The FBI admitted, begrudgingly, that it was terrorism (not as bad as January 6, though, and not as bad as the Covid-era parents who are our #1 domestic terrorists). The mosque that Jabbar belonged to warned members not to speak to law enforcement and instead direct any questions to CAIR and the Islamic Society of Greater Houston.
The front page of The Washington Post put it thusly: “Truck Rams New Orleans Crowd.” Not an ISIS-inspired terrorist, even though that information was known and put lower down. A truck. Like, ew, an F-150? Looks like we lost some more good men to toxic masculinity.
Weirdly, the FBI apparently didn’t rush to Jabbar’s home. They were so slow that the New York Post says they got to the terrorist’s house before the FBI did. Reporters spent the day poking around inside Jabbar’s apartment. What, like it’s so urgent for cops to get there too? He killed 14, which is a New Orleans 3, let’s all calm down. More urgent is for you to check your terrorphobia and anti–ISIS-flag-machine-gun sentiment. Because the first rule of improv is we don’t say no, we say yes, and!
Someone in Las Vegas understood the assignment. There, a terrorist loaded a Tesla Cybertruck with explosives and detonated it outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, killing the driver and injuring seven. It looks like the driver (Matthew Livelsberger, a U.S. Army Green Beret) wanted to do more damage and kill more random civilians but the Cybertruck is a tank and contained the blast. To be clear: as a jaywalker, I do not like cars that are tanks. Anyway, the huge explosion didn’t so much as break the Trump entryway glass. It didn’t even break its own Cybertruck doors, proving again that this is a vehicle designed for war and way too scary when helmed by soccer moms. The FBI requests a moment of silence for the terrorist, since it’s not really fair he didn’t get to kill anyone.
In New York, for good measure, a man with a very long rap sheet randomly shoved a mid-afternoon commuter into an oncoming train. The victim “fell perfectly in the trench,” per law enforcement, and suffered just a broken skull. A little too perfectly, if you ask me. To quote my favorite local congressman Ritchie Torres: “Before 2020, there were 43 killings over the course of 20 years. Since March of 2020, there have been 43 killings in the span of four years.” The subway serves an important purpose: a place for lazy career criminals—small-time assaulters, petty thieves—to show off the world’s laziest murder. Typical millennial crime surge. Like, if you’re elbowing a petite Asian woman into a train, are you really trying at this?