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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Thanks! I watched enough of the stream to hear Kelly mention Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli. This guy was indeed held without bail and then sentenced to 48 months in prison after a jury trial. I was very curious about why he was denied bail and why his sentence was so high. His motion for release was litigated around Mar 2021 and the government brief adds some potentially relevant details.

I think the only valid concern the government had was that Hale would try to destroy evidence or intimidate witnesses. He apparently was frantically trying to delete all his accounts and also dispose of clothing from that day and a flag pole used a javelin. Hale worked at a naval weapons center and had a security clearance, but his coworkers said they feared retaliation from reporting his antics because he was "crazy", probably because he would regularly show up to work in a Hitler mustache and make jokes about the holocaust.

Beyond that though, the government brief spends several pages describing how awful his politics are. I think that's protected speech that should have no bearing on whether he is released, but unsympathetic defendants make bad laws, and this guy sounded especially unstable and unhinged. The government successfully argued that his enthusiastic talk about "civil war" (see starting pg 19) should be considered in context of his clear Nazi political ideology.

But the reasons he was denied bail are largely orthogonal to the original issue I raised. Even a charitable reading of the statement of facts filed against him by the government doesn't really accuse him of engaging in violence on J6, but apparently "coordinating" other rioters to advance and also cussing at police officers. I think @anti_dan can plausibly argue that Hale was someone "held without bail for wandering in" but not "without them even proving that you knew it was illegal to be there".