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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Do you realize what that would mean?

If the pipe bomb was an OP assuming CIA. Besides the huge abuse of power etc. What were they covering up? You start going down a path that gets very crazy.

The mildest version would be Biden legitimately won the election but the CIA wanted to permanently ruin Trumps political future.

Technically, the mildest version would be some variant of the Curtis Culwell Center attack. If the malefactors in that case hadn't gotten shot red-handed on-site in a way that shut down the center of a small city, they'd have been incredibly embarrassing for the feds to pursue in court: encouraged toward attacks and their specific target by a federal undercover agent, armed with a Fast and Furious gun, and literally tailed by FBI agents who were apparently dressed up like Team America extras but did not provide aid to those under attack.

We don't, tautologically, know of any situations where this sort of embarrassing attack happened and the feds just shrugged their shoulders about it (... probably), and I'd like to think that 'found the pipe bomber' would outweigh the 'took an embarrassing and hard-to-solve case' bit, but it's at least plausible that they exist.

That said, I think the null hypothesis is still more plausible than most people think. DC police and surveillance just aren't that good, and while opsec is harder than a lot of people think, sometimes even mediocre opsec won't necessarily drop a case into your lap. There are some details that leave me suspicious enough that the more dire options aren't implausible, but follow enough crime investigations and you do occasionally see people caught on HD video with no masks, who drove past a couple LPRs in a bright painted weird car, and who left ammo cases at the scene, and months later no one can find or ID the fuckers.

For the 16th Street Baptist Church scenario that would seem to strongly point towards an antifa or otherwise identifiable leftist group as the perpetrator. That would be a reason the FBI would bury evidence on who did it.

Since after 1/6 Trump was a very bad man and the primary target you would not want it to come out that on 1/6 day there was also a leftist trying to do a frame job on Maga as very bad people by planting some pipe bombs. That would lead to a mixed narrative that gets Trump off. If it was a Maga guy who did it then they would use it to hang Trump.