So far, 2025 has been anything from dull. The incoming president has been sentenced for 34 felony counts, California is facing some of the most severe wildfires in American history, and the Republican side of the aisle is discussing buying Greenland and making Canada the 51st state. Yes, this year is certainly setting itself up—for better or worse—to be one for the books.
One of—if not the most important stories of 2025 thus far—a story that was born only 3 hours and 15 minutes into this year, is the story of the New Orleans terrorist attack. For clarity, the reason this story is so important is because—unlike the other stories percolating in the news cycle lately—this one has left people with more questions than answers. This, in turn, has led to some pretty wild conspiracies that distract from a somewhat more important story.
With that said, as many young people who lean right already know, you should have very little faith in the big E “Establishment,” especially when it comes to official narratives that just don’t make sense, such as the Vegas shooting and the Epstein murder. With that said, though, you don’t have to look too deep into the New Orleans terror attack to realize that this is probably not as complicated as some people are making it out to be, and also, that contained within the most likely explanation for this attack an important lesson exists that our foreign policy leaders should take to heart in the coming months.
To elaborate, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar—the individual who perpetrated this attack—was not only an American citizen, but also a veteran who served in the same areas at the same times as the man who blew up a Cyber Truck outside of Trump Tower in Las Vegas. Furthermore, both individuals used the same app (Turo) to rent the vehicles with which they carried out their attacks. These oddities have led many people on social media to link the two events, with some even claiming that these attacks were some kind of CIA psyop.
Of course, these possibilities cannot be discounted given that we can rarely, if ever, trust the state, but nonetheless, when it comes to the New Orleans attack specifically, it seems like this is a situation that could just as easily be explained by using Occam’s Razor. In lay terms, this philosophical principle states that the simplest answer is most often the correct one. Or, in other words, the explanation that requires the least number of assumptions is generally right.
With this in mind, what answer explains the heinous attack in New Orleans while making the fewest logical leaps?
A story that is all too common among GWOT (Global War On Terror) vets is the tale of a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young patriot signing up to serve his country, getting sent to war, committing and seeing brutality on an epic scale, and then coming back only to realize that it was, in their mind, all for nothing. In fact, I myself have struggled with this and it had such a profound effect on me that I dedicated an entire chapter in my first book to condemning unnecessary wars.
At any rate, as a nation, we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, the United States government called off our troops in November, 2001 when they had Osama bin Laden trapped, trying to nation-build doesn’t work, you can’t force democracy on populations that don’t understand it, and that US foreign policy over the last 25 years has, in the end, actually helped create/empower groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. Put another way, in 20 years of war, the only “real” thing we have to show for it is several generations of disenfranchised veterans battling to accept the fact that they accomplished, well, nothing; or at the very least, not what they set out to do.
Many people will say that last statement is un-American, but it is how many GWOT vet’s honestly feel. And this is why the recent terrorist attack may not actually be that complicated to figure out.
The strange video of a reporter entering the assailants undisturbed home aside, we do know that the gunman was a Muslim. We also know, given his decision to display an ISIS flag on his truck, that he was fairly radicalized. And, in addition to these two pieces of information, it is also public information that he had been through two divorces, with one being as recently as 2022. So it seems fair to say that Shamsud-Din Jabbar was going through a strange time in his life leading up to this attack and had recently lost at least some of his tethers to reality.
Granted, no one citizen journalist can definitively attribute motive to his actions any more than the next “outsider” looking into this attack. However, it is not a mystery that some fairly significant negative impacts can come along with serving your country during a time of war, and that these have historically contributed to certain individuals making the irreversible decision to engage in violence against their fellow Americans.
As a thought experiment, imagine a man who joins the military thinking he is going to make a positive difference in the world. Then, imagine that man getting out almost 15 years later and going through the same realization that many of us have also gone through: that what you did was not what you signed up for. Then picture that man going through two failed marriages, a common occurrence for struggling veterans. Is it safe to say that this man is in a vulnerable position?
Now imagine that the aforementioned man re-dedicates himself to Islam, and after this conversion is bombarded by the establishment media and social media with stories about Palestinian genocide, Israeli political interference, and 9/11 truther conspiracies. What happens to that vulnerable man then?
As stated before, no one should snub their nose at a conspiracy theory if it involves the government being deceitful and/or corrupt, and furthermore, it is probably even likely that a lot of the narratives used to radicalize the New Orleans terrorist have credibility and merit. But be that as it may, given the evidence, it seems that the main causes of Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s radicalization stem from a foundation of rebellion. More specifically, rebellion against the neocon/neolib dreams of empire expansion and influence across the globe.
Does this mean he was a victim of circumstance? No. He was a disturbed man who committed an evil atrocity and we should feel nothing but condemnation and disgust towards him and his memory. Still, there is a lesson to be learned here that our leaders will hopefully take to heart as we move into a new year. To quote from The Sane Citizens Political Handbook,
...in my view this aspect of humanity [war] is, quite possibly, the worst thing about our species. Of course, with that said I am not naïve and I do recognize that sometimes wars are justified and/or necessary (though very rarely), but still, to be frank I have personally witnessed the pointlessness of many of our modern wars, the death and destruction they cause, and the hordes of damaged individuals, both physically and psychologically, that they leave behind when they are finished. Therefore, I do not consider it a radical statement to say that perhaps it would behoove our nation’s leaders to take war a bit more seriously than they currently do; sitting thousands of miles away in relative safety and luxury on the Hill.
In other words, war is the worst thing about our species and, before sending our young men and women to fight them, we better be damn that the cost is worth the result. When it comes to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, the cost was not and as a result an untold number of veterans have been left feeling disenfranchised, lied to, and taken advantage of.
In closing, though 99.9 percent of veterans are honest, hard-working Americans, the more unnecessary wars we have, the more people like Shamsud-Din Jabbar will slip through the cracks. Now this is not a warning to the public that there are leagues of vets out there waiting to commit terror attacks. Rather, it is just something to think about and maybe even a hidden lesson we can take away from this horrible event as a new administration takes the reins during a time of international turmoil, and even worse, a renewed prospect of war in the Middle East.
