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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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As someone interested in true crime, this is fascinating:

FBI arrests man in Jan. 6 DC pipe bomber investigation, sources say

Jan 6th pipe bomber arrested

This concludes a five year investigation.

My biggest question, and the question on others' mind is, how was he caught when there is apparently so little evidence? A grainy video, a sneaker brand, and that was it pretty much it. The FBI has even outdone the 4chan geolocators, which describes a community of online sleuths who “dox” targets by analyzing geographic details such as weather patterns, cloud formations, and other environmental cues in photos, who were unable to identify him (of course, the FBI has much more resources, evidence and extralegal powers).

A few possibilities in no particular order:

  • This guy is a patsy, thrown against the wall by Kash Patel in a desperate attempt to keep his job.

  • The FBI has had this guy as a suspect for a long time, but they didn’t have the evidence they thought they needed for an obvious conviction in a politically-charged case.

  • Nome of their other January 6 leads ever tied-in to the attempted pipe-bombing. Because of this, they assumed that the incident was unrelated to the other more-important conspiracies that played out that day.

  • The FBI know early-on that the suspect was a leftist or otherwise clearly non-MAGA. It was politically unacceptable to give the impression that any part of January 6 was not the fault of Trump or Republicans, so the case was dropped.

  • The team originally assigned to the case was legitimately incompetent, and nobody ever checked their work.

  • The suspect is himself a fed (unlikely IMO, but the situation is strange enough that we have to keep the possibility open).

EDIT - One more idea after reading Gillirut’s breakdown of the evidence:

  • The FBI only recently got the go-ahead to use Palantir technology on the giant NSA databank of all internet activity to find the suspect.