Yesterday was New Year’s Day, and as such it should have been an optimistic, joyous day looking forward to what could be a great 2025.

Instead, with 15 people dead from a terrorist attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, it turned out to be anything but a joyous day.

We don’t know enough about Shamsud Din Jabbar, the Houston real estate broker and freshly-minted jihadi warrior who drove a rented Ford Lightning EV pickup truck past a police blockade on the corner of Bourbon and Canal and rammed his way for several blocks until finally smacking into a movable crane in the early hours of Jan. 1. We’re beginning to learn about the 45 people Jabbar turned into casualties – 15 of whom have so far died.

All of those were and are better people than Jabbar was.

What we do know about him is that he served in the Army, but not in a combat role. He was an HR specialist, apparently, and was twice reported to Army COC for holding jihadist views. But we also know he’d recently been radicalized at a mosque in Houston a short distance from the trailer park where he lived.

If that information is correct Jabbar might have been a jihadist and gone into remission, only to recover his anti-American mindset. We know that he suffered a financial collapse which either resulted from or resulted in a divorce, and we know that Jabbar made and posted several manifesto-style videos from the road as he drove to New Orleans from Texas.

He clearly wasn’t alone. He had a .308 rifle that was reported stolen in New Jersey and a Glock 9 millimeter pistol also reported stolen.

And the communications from the mosque, Masjid Bilal in Houston, following Jabbar’s massacre indicate there is much more going on than just a lone wolf.

This is from the mosque the NOLA terrorist came from.

It's a known 'bad" mosque.

And they apparently decided they want CAIR speaking for them and not to cooperate with law enforcement.

The current paradigm is insufficient. pic.twitter.com/Fq9KswwX2l

— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) January 2, 2025

It turns out that the New York Post beat the FBI to both Jabbar’s house and his mosque. That’s a really bad look.

What else is a really bad look is Alethea Duncan, the Assistant Special Agent In Charge of the FBI’s New Orleans office who is now running point for the Bureau following the massacre on Bourbon Street. Duncan listened to New Orleans mayor LaToya Cantrell as she said the obvious, which was that the attack was classic terrorism, and then took to a press-conference microphone to deny that it was a terrorist act.

The FBI had Jabbar’s ISIS flag and Duncan, sporting a nose ring which magically disappeared at her next public appearance a few hours later, nonetheless spouted classic bilge without having the slightest bit of understanding what it would mean.

Sure, it’s the FBI’s doctrine to downplay events like this until the facts are in. But this was not such a situation. The ISIS flag definitively marked this as a jihadist act and we were clearly beyond the standard-issue reticence to call a spade a spade.

But you don’t get confident, competent people projecting expertise and effectiveness when you don’t select for them, and the New Orleans FBI office is run as something akin to a kakistocracy.

Alethea Duncan’s main experience is in health care criminal investigations.

Her boss, Lyonel Myrthil, most recent experience was leading investigations into non-violent January 6th cases. https://t.co/MSaxWP7cJ2 pic.twitter.com/3N9ziODmfs

— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) January 1, 2025

LaToya Cantrell is anything but competent and yet she had the intellectual wherewithal to identify that massacre as a terrorist attack, but Alethea Duncan did not. And Duncan is more responsible for rolling up the conspiracy that produced Jabbar’s murders than Cantrell.

It’s impossible to have confidence in the FBI. Particularly after the last four years of chasing down January 6 protesters and harassing Catholics to prefer the Latin Mass while allowing plots like Jabbar’s at known jihadist mosques like Masjid Bilal to fester.

The hope is that the Louisiana State Police will roll up Jabbar’s confederates. If they do, here’s further hoping that those individuals will be held by Louisiana authorities and charged under Louisiana’s terrorism and murder statutes and not turned over to the feds.

Because until Kash Patel takes over as head of the FBI and conducts a complete purge of the leftist ideologues, DEI wokesters and other incompetents who have rendered the FBI utterly useless, giving them a chance to play J. Edgar Hoover with this conspiracy is a fool’s errand.

There’s a reason John Kennedy yesterday made multiple statements about demanding that the FBI competently roll up the Jabbar plot and tell the American people the truth or else he’d unleash “fresh hell” on them. Kennedy saw a whole lot that he didn’t like. He wasn’t just grandstanding. He was pissed off, and not just about what Jabbar had done.

I wish none of this was true. But it is. And it’s a real problem. Louisiana needs to act on the impression that its law enforcement personnel are essentially on their own in this test.