Home-Grown Terror on Bourbon Street and Vegas

MAGA Needs A Scapegoat

Terrorism in Vegas and down South in the first hours of 2025 - could there be a more MAGA start to the new year? The President-elect is not a man to let news of bloody violence go to waste when it can be used to pander to xenophobes and gin up white fear. It’s like paying taxes or leaving government money on the table instead of taking it. What kind of chump does that?

So, after a man drove a truck into French Quarter revelers, killing 15 and injuring dozens, Trump was blaming the attack on “criminals coming in,” because of course, no American has ever been known to commit mass murder. “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump posted on Truth Social hours after the New Year's Eve attack. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. … The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!”

Even after law enforcement revealed that the driver of the truck was an American citizen who was born in Texas, and reporters started to turn up his long military record, MAGA Daddy clung to nativism. The fact that the unhinged former Army staff sergeant was carrying an ISIS flag and had converted to Islam at some point was all he and his fans needed to blame open borders, and paint federal law enforcement as weak and, of course, devoted to the single ludicrous goal of destroying Trump himself.

“Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World! This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership,” Trump wrote. “The DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors have not done their job. They are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself.”

On the other hand, perhaps because the Vegas incident involved a Tesla truck outside a Trump hotel - entities associated with the President and his benefactor - neither he nor MAGA influencers spent much time talking about it. But it turns out the suicide bomber was also an American and a longtime member of the U.S. military.

During the campaign, convicted felon and son and grandson of immigrants Donald Trump bet that phantom fear of non-white newcomers to America would be more motivational for a majority of American voters than any boring policy prescriptions addressing what’s actually wrong (for-profit health care, wealth inequality and billionaire hogs, money in politics, etc.) with our country.

He and his surrogates routinely picked numbers out of thin air, the bigger the better. Were there 10 million undocumented immigrants in the United States or 30 million? Who cared what the statistics showed - everyone knows the Deep State makes it up.

Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller (grandson of immigrants) routinely tossed out the 20 million number. Immigrant Seb Gorka, fascist-adjacent Trump advisor, was last seen by this correspondent warning Pennsylvanians of 40 million undocumented immigrants, at a gun fest organized by a “pastor” who preaches wearing a crown of bullets. Gorka himself is a documented immigrant but his path to citizenship has been challenged: in 2017, Democratic Senators asked the Secretary of Homeland Security to investigate whether Gorka falsified his U.S. naturalization application by failing to disclose his membership in the WW2 Nazi-friendly, notoriously anti-Semitic Hungarian “order of heroes,” Vitézi Rend.

Trump liked to toss around big scary made-up numbers to support his rally-rousing deportation scheme. He often claimed that undocumented immigrants killed 4,000 Americans annually. Reuters easily debunked that number, finding no evidence to back it up. But influencers and bots on social media posts got more traction sharing the whopper than anyone correcting it.

The fact is that American citizens kill, mass murder, rob and drug us at far higher rates than immigrants, documented or not. We lead the world in gun deaths. Armed and dangerous Americans are constantly - hourly - blasting away at each other (and the unarmed) in incidents so common that they barely blip into the local news. Even in hyper-nativist Texas, undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born American citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.

Warnings of caravans of murderers pouring into our country to kill us share broadcast and social media space with real gun massacres almost exclusively perpetrated by home-grown American men and boys. No corner of the United States remains untouched by mass shootings.

According to The Trace and the Gun Violence Archive, which has been charting the numbers of dead and injured in mass shootings and daily gun shootings for a dozen years now, there were 4,283 mass shootings in the ten years preceding fall 2023, killing 4,298 victims and wounding at least 17,632. None were perpetrated by undocumented immigrants.

The premise that hordes of immigrants are coming to kill and rape us is a total lie and foundational to Trump’s political career and the MAGA movement. The lie is so critical to the political enterprise that it is provoking the first of hopefully many cracks in the shaky coalition that got Trump elected.

Silicon Valley bros need Trump to deregulate their crypto and un-tax their profits. But they also love smart foreigners and the H1B visa program that lets them into the USA. MAGA doesn’t like foreign folks who think they’re smarter than white Christian American men.

Shadow President Elon Musk is a South African who got into America on an H1B visa. Tesla is one of the many U.S. tech companies heavily reliant on foreign-born brainiacs. But it was still surprising to see him endorse a tweet calling out “retarded” right-wingers and then issuing a psychotic threat of his own: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

The circular firing squad that will be Trump 2.0 has formed even before the inauguration. Jailbird and political werewolf Steve Bannon responded to what he called “recent converts” like Musk vowing that MAGA would never back down on its promise to whiten America: “We’re going to rip your face off,” he announced on his War Room podcast last week.

While we watch this delicious spectacle, here’s something else to think about: Millions of words have been spilled on why MAGAs don’t give a crap about facts. What’s the matter with them? Defunded American education and the end of critical thinking? Legal weed exacerbating and expanding the population of don’t-give-a-shit couch potatoes? The legacy of the JFK assassination? Russian bots and disinformation ops? Too much sugar and processed foods?

Since the election, though, there’s been a little more attention paid to a weird but plausible little theory involving a form of entertainment called kayfabe, the bizarre alchemy that happens in the brains of pro-wrestling fans who consume the fake-but-real-but-really-fake violence as a spectator “sport.”

Pro-wrestling fans - who share Venn Diagram circles with MAGA - navigate a mental realm where what’s real and what’s fake are constantly shifting. Do two giant ape men in tiny shorts and oiled bare chests actually fight? Or are they choreographed partners? Do they bear real grudges against each other or are they acting?

In an essay published in the Times a year ago, Abraham Josephine Reisman, the author of a biography of WWE owner, nepo-baby, and Trump pal Vince McMahon, explained the evolution of kayfabe - possibly Pig Latin for “be fake” - and proposed that a version of it explains how Trump’s outrageous lies work. McMahon - whose father owned the old pro wrestling franchise, World Wrestling Federation (WWF) - started calling his sport “entertainment” to save money by avoiding health and safety regulations the government applied to other sports. But in the process, he and his actor-fighters injected a dose of reality into the act. Reisman writes:

In the mid-1990s, wrestlers and promoters started juicing the audience by tossing them little teases of once-taboo reality. A grappler trying to “get over” (industry lingo for winning the audience’s attention) as a villain might reference a fellow wrestler’s real-life personal problems in a cruel in-ring monologue, just to make the audience hate him more. An owner might direct a wrestler to pretend he’s going rogue against the company in an outrageous monologue, then tell gullible journalists that he’s in big trouble with his employer, all to juice interest in what might happen next on the show. You knew wrestling was usually fake, but maybe this thing you were seeing, right now, was, in some way, real. Suddenly, the fun of the match had everything to do with decoding it.

Old kayfabe was built on the solid, flat foundation of one big lie: that wrestling was real. Neokayfabe, on the other hand, rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment. After a while, the producers and the consumers of neokayfabe tend to lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t. Wrestlers can become their characters; fans can become deluded obsessives who get off on arguing or total cynics who gobble it all up for the thrills, truth be damned.

Trump has been pals with McMahon - a similarly oafish septuagenarian who has been defending himself against accusations of sexual battery and trafficking - for decades. He is the only U.S. President to have a berth in the WWE Hall of Fame and he was an apt pupil of the form. The garishness, vulgarity, the real and fake menace, and implied or real violence are essential elements of his Great Oz, circus barker political shtick. In his essay, Reisman concluded: “The human mind is easily exploited when it’s trying to swim the choppy waters between fact and fiction.”

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