If Reality Doesn't Support Republican Politics, Then Republicans Will Change Reality.

The New Orleans terrorist attack is the latest chapter in the GOP's alternate universe.

2025 began in the worst way imaginable. Just a few hours into the new year, a terrorist killed fifteen people on New Orleans’ iconic Bourbon Street. As has become standard GOP procedure, before the bodies could turn cold, right-wing political figures were promoting outlandish claims about the killer that advanced their reactionary worldview.

It all started when Fox News reported the suspect crossed the U.S.-Mexico border “two days ago.” They specifically claimed he immigrated through Eagle Pass, a notable crossing the xenophobic right associates with the false fear of violent immigrants.

Donald Trump quickly “Truthed” the same claim, calling the attack a result of “OPEN BORDERS” (his emphasis).

With the marching orders sent, the Republican Party and its media universe fell in line. Donald Trump Jr., Purge mask-turned-Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and popular conservative influencers all painted the attack as a product of mass criminal immigration. Through this view, the horrific attack vindicated their extreme rightwing politics of building a wall, deporting ten million people, and enlarging America’s fascist police state.

A few statements from the usual suspects.

Some even went a step further, drawing a connection between the New Orleans attack and the cyber truck explosion outside the Las Vegas Trump Hotel.

A prominent conservative account with 400k followers promoting a baseless conspiracy theory.

Now, I’m asking you to please sit down because you’re about to receive some world-altering information: Despite their long-standing commitment to truth-seeking and good-faith politics, Fox News and Donald Trump lied. Gasp! I know. I can hardly believe it myself.

Within hours, the FBI released details that debunked the right’s claim. The deceased suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was neither an immigrant nor undocumented. He was an American-born citizen who served in the Army from 2006 to 2015, including deploying to Afghanistan in 2009.¹

The FBI also stated that Jabbar had recorded videos during his drive from Houston to New Orleans, in which he admitted he’d planned to murder-suicide his family but then decided on a public target. He claimed to have “joined ISIS last summer,” which explains the black flag on the truck used in the attack.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar at a Louisiana Army base in 2013.

This episode is yet another case study into the daily delusion of the Republican Party. The conservative movement, stretching from its online supporters to the incoming President, has no desire to solve the problems facing Americans. Any political project that sought the best interests of its constituents would respond to such a horrific attack by seeking to identify and eliminate the sources of terrorism and mass murder. That would involve taking a sober look at the political picture and asking questions such as, “Why did an American soldier consider murdering his family? What turned a seasoned service member into a terrorist? How can we get professional help to those suffering from mental illness? Is it too easy to access firearms in this country?”

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Conservatism is not asking the questions because it doesn’t care about their answers. Serious inspection of American imperialism and the effect it has on its soldiers and subjects is the least of their concerns, behind de-woking Sesame Street. Ever since William F. Buckley Jr. united Southern segregationists and Northern capitalists into the modern Republican Party, it has operated for the explicit purpose of advancing the goals of the conservative intelligentsia. Such policies include, but are not limited to:

• Unrestrained capitalism,

• The elimination of the welfare state,

• Imperialism, and

• The advancement of White-Christian supremacist values, which include everything from codified xenophobia to complaining about Asian women in Star Wars.

As these goals are immoral and unable to help the majority of Americans, conservatives must jam The Heritage Foundation’s square beliefs into the round hole of daily life. While there’s the never ending faucet of reactionary podcasters telling listeners we need to deregulate the aerospace industry to “fight wokeness,” rightist propaganda is most effective when the public is frightened, mourning, and looking for answers. Terrorist attacks are deeply unsettling, making it the perfect time to shove whatever social grievance right-wingers have into the news cycle. For example, Shai Davidai, a Zionist Columbia professor barred from campus for harassing pro-Palestine students, took the opportunity to say Students for Justice in Palestine was to blame for the attack.

I don’t think you have to be smart to be a professor.

The absurd notion that a Columbia student group founded ISIS is vague and insane, but that is by design. This is not a new tactic, as we have seen it employed many times before. Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign and its sycophants wielded platitudes about “them” and “they” trying to kill Trump. Remaining cryptic about the perpetrator empowered the right wing message in two ways:=

1. It lets the audience fill in the blank with whoever they are mad at, whether that’s the deep state, Antifa, Iran, or the guy flying drones over New Jersey.

2. It conveniently omitted the shooter was a registered Republican, information that would have stalled the grievance machine.²

“They” = A Republican Voter.

At its heart, this perfectly constructed smoke-and-mirrors tactic is a way to obscure the truth that all conservatism can offer the American people is vibes. The American right has no solutions to the problems Americans face, because their desired politics of capitalism and nationalism created the problems before us. If they did have an answer, they wouldn’t need to fabricate a lie about the terrorists crossing the border, Students for Justice in Palestine founding ISIS, or Nancy Pelosi trying to assassinate Donald Trump via a 20-year-old Republican shooter. In every sense of the word, this Republican worldview is a delusion purposely promoted by right-wing interests to convince Americans that down is up, immigrants are a threat to their families, and a billionaire slum lord is the “working man’s candidate.”

If you read my work, then you know my solution to this problem is the tune of a broken record. I earnestly believe the only way to combat the conservative fever dreams (and the rest of their fascist project) is through class-based politics: By educating workers about their class interests, such as higher wages, increased workplace protections, and clean environments, they will see that what is good for them and their families is at odds with the Republican agenda. Once that is clear, they will be far less likely to fall into the Fox News rabbit hole.

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Of course, the conservative alternate reality cannot be understood without discussing the culpability of the mainstream media. As the Republican Party has moved right over the last two decades, its public relations strategy has been to bully the press into accepting its Overton Window shift. Perpetually afraid of being criticized as “liberal,” mainstream publications routinely give air to conservative lies to create a sense of balance. This is best illustrated by the below The Guardian headline, which describes Trump’s lies about the attack as a “contrasting” account.

This deceptive copywriting implies that Donald Trump has “a different opinion” about the attack, one that is worth considering. This is bullshit.

Donald Trump did not give “a different view” about the New Orleans terrorist attack. He lied and said the attacker was an immigrant to build support for his coming mass deportation program. Then, his supporters repeated the lie to the point it’s now a fact in the mind of your MAGA cousin.

Just when I thought the media couldn’t debase itself further, we got this is this gem of modern journalism from The New York Times, which fuels the flames of the imagined link between ISIS terrorists and the Palestine liberation movement.³

This is one way the media speaks right-wing conspiracy theories into existence. The police, a prominent right-wing force in the contemporary United States, certainly wants there to be an ISIS-Palestine link, as that would justify last summer’s brutal cop riot against campus protestors. So, they leak to the NYT they are “trying to determine” if there’s a connection, the Times runs the story, and now the idea that this was a Gazan terrorist is in the mind of every NYT reader. What was once a hallucination is now a story being run by the world’s leading news outlet.

(The deep irony here is that it is Israel, not Palestine, that has questionable links to the Islamic State. You can learn more about the Israel-ISIS-Al Qaeda connection here.)

With Allies Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

It is a societal failing that legacy media cannot meet the needs of the American moment. It is too compromised and so scared of its own shadow that it will willingly carry water for the dominant political force and elevate its bat-shit ideas in the name of “respectability.”

Fortunately, I have no qualms about calling out political absurdity. If you’d enjoy media that is willing to call a spade a spade and a Congressperson a dipshit (when appropriate, of course), then I suggest you subscribe to receive JoeWrote straight in your inbox.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/law-enforcement-officials-identify-suspect-new-orleans-attack-rcna185929

2. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3gw58wv4e9o

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/01/us/politics/new-orleans-attack-terrorism.html