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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Ever since a police standoff with a homeless man ended in the prosecution of two policemen, I’ve Noticed that my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico seems to be functioning as a testbed for leftist movements in coastal cities and inner cities across America. We seem to be a perverse Peoria.

Here’s the next one coming your way: Solomon Peña.

A thief and felon, who somehow managed to convince the right people to let him on the ballots, ran as a Republican to be state legislator in a heavily blue district. Predictably, he lost. He hired a literal conspiracy of people to shoot at Democrat office holders’ homes.

The national news media is calling him a MAGA candidate / MAGA Republican in every news article. I’ve heard from a local who know him and apparently he was always a little off his rocker, not a steady America-First patriot.

Police arrested him ONE DAY after the Bernalillo County Republican Party convention, which I attended along with hundreds of other GOP locals, mostly my parents’ peers. The MAGA wing was out in large numbers, and together we elected a new Treasurer and Vice-Chair. The Chairman retained his seat, the Chairman under whom Peña was allowed to become a candidate. The next day, Peña, who had been the prime suspect for a little while, was arrested.

I cannot overstate how much this one lone nut tarnished the local party in our semi-megalopolis, and I cannot overstate how non-representative he is of the people I met and caucused with. Peña is, in my estimation, one of a tiny minority of politically active Albuquerque Republicans who would even know how to contract with other criminals to shoot up politicians’ homes. I literally only had to Google “Albuquerque Republican” to find the NPR story I linked above.

This stinks of “sources and methods” in my opinion. That story will forever be linked with Albuquerque Republicans. It has been a rousing success for the left in New Mexico’s biggest city. So, I expect similar stories to start popping up in other big blue cities, probably with higher body counts. And it only takes one dead legislator to call MAGA an insurrection movement and make it legally stick. No Republican will be allowed to denounce Peña (or any future similar incidents) and still laud Trump without being called a liar on the denunciation by the media.

What do you mean by "sources and methods"? That phrase is doing a lot of work in your post but it is unclear weather it is working hard or hardly working.

It seems reasonable to assume that y'all nominated and voted for this candidate with full knowledge of his positions and agreed with them as he did not hide them. His past was readily discoverable. This seems more like a failure (?) on the local party's part rather than some covert opperation by the provenly inept deepstate.

I don’t have an actual conspiracy theory of who spurred who to doing what, if anything. It was just an amazingly bad coincidence for Albuquerque Republicans that we didn't have the info on Peña’s criminal actions in time to vote out the chairman under whom he was nominated.

It feels like a successful intelligence operation, similar to school shootings by suspects who were on the FBI’s radar. “Sources & methods” is a shorthand reference to the intel community claims that their vital national security work was endangered by attempts to disprove the Trump Russia hoax operation, [Crossfire Hurricane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_Hurricane_(FBI_investigation)).

It feels like a successful intelligence operation, similar to school shootings by suspects who were on the FBI’s radar

Are you saying school shootings are intelligence operations? Are you saying this guy was FBI or instigated by FBI? Very offhand underspecified remark for such a wild implication