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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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The posts Andrew Torba shared don't seem particularly charged. I have no idea if that's a selection of his posts or all of them, but those aren't the comments of deranged 20 year old leftist shouting online. Without further context those read pretty close to the median internet argument. We can go read far less reasoned comments on reddit all day. For all we know those comments are evidence he liked to pass time as a devil's advocate. This forum has seen a few.

If Torba provided that selection to demonstrate Crooks as frothing leftist I don't buy the framing. Which makes his actions more puzzling. He probably wasn't a committed online ideologue, so why do what he did? More evidence towards CIA LSD mind control device from beyond the Ice Wall.

If Torba provided that selection to demonstrate Crooks as frothing leftist I don't buy the framing.

He did not. He provided it to rebut the FBIs claims that Crooks was a frothing rightist.

Yeah, specifically the pattern of events was that Paul Abbate, the FBI deputy director, testified to the Judiciary Committee that:

Something just very recently uncovered that I want to share is a social media account, which is believed to be associated with the shooter in the 2019-2020 time frame. There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-semitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature. While the investigation team is still working to verify this account, to determine if it did in fact belong to the shooter, we believe it important to share and not it today, particularly given the general absence of other information to date from social media and other sources of information that reflect on the shooter's potential motive and mindset. [emphasis added]

The interesting bit from Torba is not so much that the content of the linked social media account is particularly extremist, but that the EDR less than a week before thought the account was specifically "associated with" the shooter. Allegedly, neither account has been confirmed as the attempted assassins, nor to my knowledge has the FBI said that the Gab account has since been found not to be the shooter's (or proven to be that of an associate of the shooter).

But it makes it quite hard to argue that the federal investigation representative in charge of this wasn't lying before Congress in order to present a more politically useful scenario.

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