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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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They did this to several J6ers.

You're saying that the FBI framed several J6ers by "sprinkle some child pornography on him" ? source? would love to read up on this.

Do people who were framed for CP usually submit a guilty plea? The only thing he’s contesting is that the search was illegal.

The other guy linked was Andrew Jackson, who apparently skipped the image step and got life in prison for actually molesting a kid.

FYI, you got your presidents mixed up. The offender was Andrew Johnson, not Andrew Jackson.

Damn it! Now I’ve libeled a President, too.

Do people who were framed for CP usually submit a guilty plea? The only thing he’s contesting is that the search was illegal.

Probably, because they aren't allowed to argue framing as a defense and the United States federal court system is well known for beating people, figuratively, into guilty pleas through intimidation via threatening cruelly long sentences if they don't plea and are found guilty. So, imagine, you are told by the judge you can't allege the government framed you in your trial. You can stage a half-defense at your trial, but if the jury doesn't buy it, since it is not the true defense, you will go to jail for 5 to 10 extra years. They plea out at this point.

The other guy linked was Andrew Jackson, who apparently skipped the image step and got life in prison for actually molesting a kid.

And that is a federal matter how? Because the kid will at some point cross state lines in interstate commerce? How is that relevant to J6? It seems suspicious. People lie and slander each other all the time, what if the allegations were produced by the J6 investigation and are not true?

I’m talking about this guy. Not a federal charge.

they aren't allowed to argue framing as a defense [...] So, imagine, you are told by the judge you can't allege the government framed you in your trial

Do you have a citation on this being a real thing that happens? I know there are arguments that a judge can say that the defense can't make to the jury, but my understanding is that those are more things like "you should nullify" or "the judge has ruled this search legal, but actually it was illegal" (though you can still argue about what the evidence from that search means).

Daniel Tocci plead guilty to possession of child pornography. Doesn't seem like the police sprinkled it on his computer.

In the United States federal system, guilty pleas are procedurally manufactured through defendant intimidation. Read my other comment on this https://www.themotte.org/post/3758/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/445398?context=8#context

You know, I’m quite open to the possibility that the FBI is planting such material in order to get at politically disfavored people whom they cannot otherwise touch. It’s definitely doable, it would only require a few bad actors, and it would be almost impossible for the victim to defend against. But the case you linked doesn’t seem at all relevant. The defendant’s complaint is that the evidence was accidentally found during an unrelated search, not that the evidence was planted. He also doesn’t seem to be a particular ringleader, so it seems unlikely that the FBI would single him out (there haven’t been a slew of similar cases to my knowledge). Plus, there were some 1,500 January 6 defendants who were pardoned by Trump. It doesn’t seem statistically unlikely that one of those 1,500 would be into CP, especially given that some sources estimate that 1–5% of the male population are pedophiles.

So Americans will send a man to jail for 10 years because their government wrongly searched him and alleges to have found obscene photos on a private hard drive. Sounds like some uncivilized Russian monkey business to me. This is despite the initial cause for search being illegitimate enough that they could not hold him on the actual charges they were investigating. This boils down to blindly trusting a government that has already demonstrated openly, through the initial search, that they are just engaging in mere political persecution, and not the „justice” they they so hubristically don themselves in through their self-namings such as Department of „Justice,” „justice” system, supreme court „justice.” What does the United States know of justice? Is it the state that Plato envisioned when he thought of justice, or is it a democratic tyranny? Anyway, as for your statistics, maybe the special agent in charge of this specific persecution was a corrupt Democrat pedophile who was well positioned and motivated to frame this specific person for this specific crime. In the whole FBI you would expect at least one such person when it comes to a persecution as big as the J6 round-up, even if the FBI generally was not very corrupt. But we don't know because it is illegal in the United States to investigate federal agents or to question their trustworthiness at trial. I have read that judges gag the defense from presenting arguments that „place the government on trial” by alleging that evidence is forged, agents are corrupt, the prosecution is motivated, etc. Which does not seem like it is keeping up a real right to defense to me.