New Orleans Reels After New Year’s Attack

—Declan Garvey, Executive Editor

• Fourteen people were killed and dozens injured early on Wednesday in a vehicle attack on New Orleans’ popular Bourbon Street. A Texas-born Army veteran drove a pickup truck through crowds at high speed in an attack apparently inspired by the Islamic State. After crashing the vehicle, he was killed in a shootout with police after wounding two officers. Law enforcement also discovered undetonated pipe bombs that the assailant had placed in the area before the attack. The FBI said Thursday that they believe the attacker acted alone, reversing an earlier assessment.  
• South Korean law enforcement on Thursday raided the offices of Jeju Air—the airliner whose Boeing 737-800 flight crashed on Sunday killing 179 people—and the airport operator where the crash took place. The investigation into one of the deadliest aviation crashes in years is only beginning, but the police said in a statement they “plan to swiftly and rigorously determine the cause and responsibility for this accident.” In the meantime, Jeju Air’s CEO has been banned from leaving the country while the investigation is ongoing.  
• South Korean authorities on Friday called off the execution of an arrest warrant that had been issued for South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday on charges of abuse of authority and orchestrating a rebellion. Around 80 police officers and investigators entered the presidential compound on Friday morning to take Yoon into custody for questioning, but police were met at the compound with some 200 soldiers and members of the president’s security detail. The standoff, which reportedly included some skirmishes between the two sides, lasted six hours before police called off the attempt. The warrant is still in effect until January 6 and could be extended. Yoon was impeached last month after his short-lived imposition of martial law, stripping him of his presidential powers while the country’s constitutional court hears his impeachment trial. The warrant was issued after he failed to appear for questioning and blocked the search of his office. 
• Ukraine stopped the flow of a natural gas pipeline on Wednesday that had been used to ferry Russian gas to Europe. The halt came after the expiration of a five-year energy transit agreement that was reached in 2019 before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Russia is losing markets, it will suffer financial losses,” Ukrainian Minister of Energy German Galushchenko noted in a statement. Most European countries have shifted their energy supply away from Russia since the invasion, but the Russian-aligned Moldovan breakaway region of Transnistria shut off heating and hot water on Wednesday. The same day, Russia continued its missile and drone strikes on Kyiv. 
• U.S. forces carried out air strikes against Houthi targets in Sanaa, Yemen, on Monday and Tuesday. The strikes targeted Houthi weapons and command facilities that have been used to attack U.S. Navy vessels and commercial ships, according to a Tuesday statement from U.S. Central Command. 
• A man killed 12 people and injured at least four others in a shooting spree in the Balkan country of Montenegro on Wednesday. The shooter killed four people after a fight at a restaurant in the town of Cetinje before going on to kill eight others at three additional locations, according to local officials. The man died from a self-inflicted gunshot after he was surrounded by law enforcement. 
• Power was restored to most of Puerto Rico on Wednesday after a blackout left nearly the entire island in the dark on New Year’s Eve. Puerto Rico’s new governor, Jenniffer González Colón, was sworn in on Thursday and pledged to fix the island’s energy infrastructure. Colón has said she’ll appoint an energy czar and has floated the idea of revising Puerto Rico’s renewable energy targets and adding more natural gas to the grid.  
• Ten people were injured in a shooting outside of a nightclub in New York City on Wednesday night. Four men opened fire on a group of 15 people who were standing in line waiting to get into the venue, according to the New York Police Department. No one suffered life-threatening injuries, and law enforcement said they were not investigating the shooting as a terrorist attack. 
• The FBI confiscated more than 150 bombs in a raid on a farm in Virginia last month, according to a court filing by federal prosecutors on Monday. Prosecutors said the cache—mainly pipe bombs—represented the largest haul of finished explosive devices the FBI has ever seized. The farm owner was taken into custody on firearm charges for allegedly possessing an unregistered rifle, but prosecutors are considering additional charges related to the explosives. 
• A Tesla Cybertruck filled with explosives and fireworks blew up outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on Wednesday, injuring seven people. An active duty U.S. Army Special Forces soldier rented and drove the truck to the hotel before shooting himself inside the vehicle immediately prior to the explosion, according to local law enforcement. The FBI is still working to determine a motive, but they said they’ve found “no definitive link” between the truck explosion and the vehicle attack in New Orleans. 
• The Department of Labor reported on Thursday that initial jobless claims—a proxy for layoffs—decreased by 9,000 week-over-week to a seasonally adjusted 211,000 claims last week, reaching an eight-month low. The data suggests a tight labor market that could lead the Federal Reserve to continue holding off on additional interest rate cuts.

Just a few hours into the New Year, revelers were still gathered on Bourbon Street in New Orleans’ historic French Quarter. 

At about 3:15 a.m. Wednesday morning, a man drove a white Ford pickup truck at high speeds into the pedestrian area, swerving around the police vehicle that was stationed at the top of the street to block cars. The driver careened down nearly three blocks of Bourbon Street, intentionally plowing through the crowd before hitting another vehicle. The man emerged from the car, firing at police—striking and wounding two officers—who ultimately shot and killed him. 

“There were people everywhere,” a witness, Kimberly Strickland of Mobile, Alabama, told Reuters. “You just heard this squeal and the rev of the engine and this huge loud impact and then the people screaming and debris—just metal—the sound of crunching metal and bodies.” 

A little before 4 a.m., police reportedly discovered a pipe bomb along Bourbon Street that had not been detonated, and a second bomb was discovered later that morning. Both were apparently concealed inside ice chests, and the FBI said Thursday it has surveillance video of the driver himself placing the IEDs.

Investigators are still probing for details about the attack and the assailant, who killed 14 people and wounded dozens of others. Officials now believe the driver—an Army veteran apparently inspired by the Islamic State—was a lone wolf, adding that there is “no definitive link” between the New Orleans attack and another in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day, though the investigation is ongoing.   

Among those killed in the Bourbon Street attack were a former college football player, a student at the University of Alabama, an 18-year-old aspiring nursing student, and a mother to a four-year-old son. Mexican and Israeli nationals were among those injured. “It was very intentional behavior. This man was trying to run over as many people as he possibly could,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said Wednesday morning. “He was hell-bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.”

FBI officials said Wednesday that it was investigating the attack as an act of terrorism. Earlier on Wednesday, a local FBI official had contradicted the New Orleans mayor, saying the incident was not terrorism. 

Law enforcement has identified the truck’s driver as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a Texas-born Army veteran who was on active duty from 2007 to 2015, during which time he did a tour of duty in Afghanistan. When he carried out the attack, the 42-year-old was an employee of Deloitte, a consulting company. He had also been involved in selling real estate. 

An ISIS flag was apparently found inside the rented pickup truck that he used in the attack, and law enforcement officials said he had posted videos to his Facebook page on Tuesday night detailing threats to kill his own family and pledging allegiance to ISIS. According to Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, Jabbar said in those videos that he abandoned the plans to murder his family because the subsequent news headlines would not have focused on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers.”

Jabbar had converted to Islam only recently and, according to family, was acting erratically in the months before the attack. As a result of his strange behavior, his ex-wife limited his contact with his two daughters. “He was 100 percent inspired by ISIS,” Raia said, adding the bureau is looking closely at his “path to radicalization.” Three phones were apparently found inside his truck. 

Louisiana’s attorney general, Liz Murrill, said on Wednesday that a house fire at an Airbnb in New Orleans on Wednesday morning was “connected to this event,” adding that law enforcement believed IEDs were being made at the rented home. Raia seemed to indicate Thursday that the house was being actively searched by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and that two laptops had been discovered there. An ATF official said the fire started after Jabbar was already dead. 

In the early hours of the investigation, officials at first suggested Jabbar was not working alone. FBI officials originally said they didn’t believe Jabbar was “solely responsible” for the attack.  CBS News reported that video footage originally thought to show accomplices actually just showed bystanders. 

The FBI has since reversed its original concern about a cell. “We’re confident that, at this point, there’s no accomplices,” Raia said during a Thursday morning press conference, adding that early reports of people besides Jabbar placing the coolers with IEDs were in fact revelers checking for drinks. 

ISIS-inspired attacks have been rare in the United States since the fall of the terrorist group’s caliphate in 2019. But a lone-wolf attack, while not suggesting the presence of a cell, is not reassuring. “It may be counterintuitive, but I’d argue that a lone wolf is far more worrisome and dangerous for US counterterrorism officials, as it is so much harder for both law enforcement and the intelligence community to penetrate the operation itself,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. “This is exacerbated further if the attacker self-radicalized, receiving inspiration and guidance virtually from ISIS propaganda, for example.”

President Joe Biden delivered brief remarks from Camp David on Wednesday, confirming some details of the investigation and offering his condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims. “For all the people of New Orleans who are grieving today, I want you to know I grieve with you, our nation grieves with you,” he said. “We’re going to stand with you as you mourn and as you heal in the weeks to come.” 

Biden also addressed another New Year’s Day incident. At around 8:40 a.m. local time, a Tesla Cybertruck—apparently loaded with fireworks and gasoline—exploded in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. Only the driver of the vehicle, inside the truck at the time of the explosion, was killed. Like the truck used in the New Orleans attack, the vehicle in Las Vegas was rented using the Turo app. “Law enforcement and the intelligence community are investigating this as well, including whether there’s any possible connection with the attack in New Orleans,” Biden said. “Thus far, there’s nothing to report on that score, at this point.” 

An FBI official in Las Vegas said Wednesday that there was no further danger to the public after the explosion. The intelligence agency has since repeatedly referred to the Vegas attack as an “isolated incident.” CNN reported on Thursday that the driver was a sergeant in the U.S. Army, on leave from a posting in Germany with the 10^th Special Forces Group, and local law enforcement indicated Thursday the explosion was a suicide. Law enforcement ramped up their presence in front of Trump Trump in New York City on Thursday. 

President-elect Donald Trump responded to the New Orleans attack with a post on his social media site, Truth Social. In it, he seemed to refer to an erroneous report from Fox News, since retracted, suggesting the assailant had driven the truck across the southern border just days before the attack. “This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership,” he wrote in the early hours of Thursday. “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. Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen to our Country.” 

In a subsequent post on Thursday, Trump doubled down on the claim that the suspect, who’s confirmed to be a U.S. citizen, came from across the southern border. “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” he said. 

New Orleans was set to host the Sugar Bowl—a College Football Playoff Quarterfinal game between Notre Dame and the University of Georgia—on New Year’s Day. Officials postponed the game until Thursday in the interest of “public safety.” The city will also play host to the NFL Super Bowl in February, though the organizers said in a statement Wednesday that they were “confident” the event would be safe. 

But there are also brewing questions about New Orleans’ security failures. The bollards, barriers that typically block the entrances to the pedestrian areas of Bourbon Street, had been removed for replacement ahead of next month’s Super Bowl, and law enforcement in place to try to block cars ultimately failed to do so with the attacker’s truck. The Department of Homeland Security also recently issued two warnings to local law enforcement about the potential for lone-wolf vehicle attacks.

But local officials expressed confidence ahead of last night’s game, and opened Bourbon Street to the public again on Thursday. “What we plan to do is ensure that as we remember those folks that we put New Orleans back in a position where people can come and have a good time,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said Thursday morning. “We believe that the city, I’m convinced the city, is safe.” 

“At the end of the day, we need not let fear paralyze us,” he said of the rescheduled college football game. “When we do that, terrorists win.”

• Writing for n+1, Will Tavlin deconstructed the “casual viewing” that Netflix has built its streaming business around. “For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward,” he wrote. “The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix, however, audiences don’t pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root. Netflix’s movies don’t have to abide by any of the norms established over the history of cinema: they don’t have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theater seats. Netflix’s audiences watch from their homes, on couches, in beds, on public transportation, and on toilets. Often they aren’t even watching.” 
• Graeme Wood has covered ISIS for more than a decade, and his latest essay for The Atlantic argued that the best way to prevent attacks like the one in New Orleans is to fully destroy the terror group. “The most effective antidote to attacks like this is probably just to do what the United States did late in Barack Obama’s second term and throughout Trump’s first: to dismantle the Islamic State and relegate it to obscurity, where it has less power to inspire random people to act in its name,” he wrote. “That strategy has the added effect of countering more sophisticated attacks, by leaving attackers with fewer lairs and havens from which to stage them. There is no law of nature that says terrorists must always be bad at terrorism. Many terrorists and mass murderers have plotted very effectively, and racked up the body counts to prove it. … The correct response, in the long term, is to prepare for the day when competence and fervor intersect.”

Washington Post: Thunder, Lightning and Wind Ring in D.C.’s New Year

Photographs posted on social media showed lightning striking at two of the most symbolic spots in Washington and the entire country. It appeared that both the top of the Washington Monument and the dome of the U.S. Capitol received direct hits.

CBS News: Trump To Hold D.C. Rally on Jan. 19, the Day Before His Inauguration

It turns out Ralph Fiennes is just as impressive performing Shakespeare or Homer as he is one of 2024’s most viral moments (that is simply too complicated to explain here). 

• On the podcasts: Jonah Goldberg was joined by Chris Stirewalt on The Remnant to unpack the biggest political mistakes of 2024 and the strategic value of populism, and Virginia Postrel also joined Jonah for a conversation on dynamism, right-wing utopias, and the myths of American nostalgia. 
• On the site over the break: Jonah Goldberg outlined the differences between the swamp and the “Deep State,” Greg Lukianoff made the case for campus free speech optimism, and John P. Caves III argued that Democrats should take lessons from the Whig Party’s electoral success in the mid-nineteenth century. 
• On the site today: Kevin D. Williamson argues no one should actually believe Pete Hegseth could run the Pentagon, and Andrew Zucker suggests Trump could revive the weekly presidential address. 

What are your New Year’s resolutions?