Matthew Livelsberger warned people about World War III: Alleged manifesto

Matthew Livelsberger, who was inside the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside President-elect Donald Trump‘s Las Vegas hotel on Wednesday, allegedly warned of a coming “world war” in an emailed manifesto one day earlier.

Why It Matters

Authorities identified Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Army Special Forces soldier, as the person suspected of detonating an improvised bomb in a rented Cybertruck just outside the entrance to Vegas’ Trump International Hotel on New Year’s Day. Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said that Livelsberger suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head just before the explosion.

The Cybertruck bomb exploded in Las Vegas only hours after a truck plowed into a crowd in New Orleans’ busy French Quarter, killing at least 15 people in a suspected act of terrorism. The attacker was shot dead by police.

What To Know

Retired Army intelligence officer Sam Shoemate said during an episode of the Shawn Ryan Show podcast released on Friday that he received an email from Livelsberger on December 31. It urged him to warn the public that “gravitic” technology used by the U.S. and China was a “mutually assured destruction situation” that could bring about World War III.

Ryan, a former Navy Seal, has over 3.5 million subscribers to his podcast on YouTube and more than 1 million followers on Instagram, including fellow podcaster Joe Rogan and the president-elect’s daughter Ivanka Trump. Ryan said during the show that he could not give Livelsberger’s alleged manifesto “100 percent credibility.”

Livelsberger’s email claims that the recent sightings of mysterious drones in the U.S. were actually “the operational use of gravitic propulsion systems powered aircraft” by China. He said that “only” the U.S. and China have the purported technology, which he called “the most dangerous threat to national security that has ever existed.”

“They basically have an unlimited payload capacity and can park it over the [White House] if they wanted,” the alleged email from Livelsberger reads, according to a Ryan post on X (formerly Twitter). “It’s checkmate…. China is poised to attack anywhere in the east coast.”

The email goes on to claim that Livelsberger had “been followed for over a week now” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or the FBI, who supposedly knew that Livelsberger was “armed” and carrying a “massive VBIED [vehicle borne improvised explosive device].”

Livelsberger also allegedly claimed that he helped the first Trump administration “cover up” what he said were “war crimes” that killed “hundreds of civilians in a single day” in Afghanistan in 2019.

“You need to elevate this to the media so we avoid a world war because this is a mutually assured destruction situation,” Livelsberger allegedly wrote toward the end of the email to Shoemate.

Newsweek reached out for comment to the DHS and FBI via email on Friday.

What People Are Saying

Sam Shoemate explained on X his decision to share the alleged Livelsberger email: “I knew taking this public would insert me into the ‘glowy boi’ conspiracy cycle, especially since I’m an intelligence officer. I had no choice. Dude dumped it in my inbox. When I saw his name in the news, I had little choice but to hand it over to the feds. I knew the FBI wouldn’t release it, or at least without an agenda attached, so I took it to @ShawnRyan762 because he has the platform to handle the magnitude of this information and will do so as objectively as possible.”

Sheriff Kevin McMahill said during a press conference Friday: “We’re very well aware of a podcast that is going around today and the contents of the letter in that podcast…. We’ve been aware of that document for a while now, and we still have not completely gone all the way through that and verified that entirely.”

What Happens Next

Police are still investigating the explosion in Las Vegas, which injured seven bystanders in addition to the death of Livelsberger.

Police said on Friday that a note found on Livelsberger’s phone explained that he blew up the Cybertruck as a “stunt” and a “wake up call,” adding that he wanted to “cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”