Updates on the J6 pipe bomber arrest

The New Neo Posted on by

Interesting stuff coming out.

The DOJ says that all the evidence was there, but the Biden administration wasn’t especially interesting in solving the case. Why is that no surprise?:

Attorney General Pam Bondi said during a press conference announcing the arrest of Brian Cole Jr. that existing evidence led to the FBI’s breakthrough in a cold case that had “languished” for nearly five years.

“What I will tell you is that evidence has been sitting there collecting dust,” Bondi said. “This wasn’t a new tip. It wasn’t some new evidence. It was the hard work of President Trump’s administration.”

Bondi said federal investigators were able to identify Cole after spending months “sifting through evidence that had been sitting at the FBI with the Biden administration.” She said bringing charges against Cole was not a result of any new witnesses or leads but rather “good, diligent police work and prosecutorial work.”

In addition:

According to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia reviewed by USA TODAY, Cole lives in a home with his mother and other family members.

Which explains the nice house.

And:

Cole’s credit card and checking account records showed that he purchased multiple items as early as October 2019 through late 2020 consistent with the components used to manufacture two pipe bombs placed at the RNC and DNC offices, according to his 7-page charging document.

Cole bought components including a galvanized pipe, end caps, electrical wire, battery clips and white kitchen timers, court records also said. Investigators tracked Cole’s purchases at Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart and Micro Center.

The suspect bought items including safety glasses, a wire-stripping tool and a machinist’s file, which could be used to make pipe bombs, records also said. Cole then allegedly continued to buy the components after the pipe bombs were found, including a kitchen timer, more nine-volt batteries and galvanized pipes during January 2021. …

Provider records show Cole’s cell phone connected with towers consistent with his being in the area of the RNC and DNC offices on Jan. 5, 2021.

In addition, court documents continued, a Virginia license plate registered to a 2017 Nissan Sentra that he owns was captured on camera the same day at 7:10 p.m., at the South Capitol Street exit from Interstate 395 South. That’s “less than one-half mile from the location where the individual who placed the devices was first observed on foot,” the records said.

Seems like a fair amount of evidence to me.

There’s nothing much coming out about possible ties to groups like Antifa, or about possibly being an anarchist.

ADDENDUM: The suspect has been working for a bail bond company.

And then there’s the poetry book

The New Neo Posted on by

I had originally thought Gerard’s poetry book would be ready for sale by November 1.

Dream on.

Then it seemed highly likely it would be ready by December 1. But then I ran into printer troubles. Trust me – you don’t want to hear the details. So the following is a very quick summary.

I didn’t want to use the print company I’d used for The Name In the Stone, even though I liked the quality of that book, because I wanted a company that would also do the mailings. I found such a company, but the quality of the photos in their proof copy was substandard. So I went back to the original company and ordered a proof from them, thinking I’d figure out a way to deal with the mailings but at least I was pretty sure the print quality would be excellent.

Today I got that proof in the mail, and the quality of the photos was bad. It was completely different from The Name In the Stone, which they had printed for me about a year ago. When I called the company to find out what’s going on, I discovered a little factoid they’d neglected to mention earlier: some time during that year, they had changed their printing machines. Often, when people make a change of that sort, it’s an improvement. They’re not even contending that this was an improvement; it was a downgrade.

Needless to say, I’m unhappy about this. I ended up ordering one more proof from them, though, this time with a different kind of paper they said should help approximate the photo quality of the essay book from last year. I wonder, but I guess I’ll find out.

I still think the poetry book might be ready before the holidays, which was certainly my original plan. But maybe not. I think it’s more important to get it looking right than to rush it for the holidays.

Minnesota judge tosses jury conviction of Somali couple for fraud

The New Neo Posted on by

Who needs a jury? – says a Minnesota judge, who decided to throw out one of those convictions for fraud we’ve heard so much about:

Abdifatah Yusuf and his wife, Lul Ahmed, were charged in June 2024 and were accused of stealing $7.2 million from the state’s Medicaid program while operating a home healthcare business. The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office said the business lacked an office building and operated for “years out of a mailbox.”

The attorney general’s office said Yusuf received Medicaid money by billing for services not provided and services that lacked “any documentation,” and overbilled for services.

Yusuf allegedly used the money to fund a “lavish lifestyle,” including shopping sprees at luxury stores such as Coach, Michael Kors, Nike, Nordstrom and more.

A jury found the couple guilty. But the judge, Sarah West (who looks to be about twelve years old, going by her photo at the link) threw the verdict out because she said the evidence was circumstantial. The jury foreman begged to differ with her ruling:

Ben Walfoort, the jury foreperson in Yusuf’s case, said the decision to convict wasn’t a complicated one.

“It was not a difficult decision whatsoever,” he said, according to KARE. “The deliberation took probably four hours at most. Based off of the state’s evidence that was presented, it was beyond a reasonable doubt,” Walfoort said. “I am shocked. I’m shocked based off of all of the evidence that was presented to us and the obvious guilt that we saw based off of the said evidence.”

Most criminal convictions are based primarily on circumstantial evidence. You know that West has done something really unusual by the fact that Keith Ellison has challenged her ruling:

The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, led by Democrat Keith Ellison, has filed an appeal of West’s decision to overturn Yusuf’s verdict.

Remember the J6 pipe bomber?

The New Neo Posted on by

He or she has long been a mysterious figure, one whom the Biden administration seemed to have less interest in pursuing despite relentlessly hounding everyone else concerned with J6. Now someone has been caught who is purportedly this bomber, but we still know very little about him:

A suspect was arrested Thursday morning and charged with transporting explosives and attempted malicious destruction in connection with the planting of pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican National Committees on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Federal agents swarmed the Woodbridge, Va., home of 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr. following the break in the case that has vexed and embarrassed the FBI for nearly five years. …

Authorities did not publicly indicate any motive for the crime, with one high-placed FBI source rejecting earlier claims that Cole may have had “anarchist” leanings.

Neighbors in the suburban cul-de-sac described a young man who shunned most human interaction and doted on a pet Chihuahua.

So far he seems to be a type of person with whom we’ve become quite familiar: a cipher who may have lived his main life online, except for venturing out into the real world to commit a criminal act. It’s premature to come to any conclusions, although my guess is that a sizable number of people will automatically think he’s the proverbial patsy.

Another aspect of the story is that about a month ago, there was this:

Thursday’s arrest also firmly debunked a prior report from The Blaze. In early November, reporter Steve Barker claimed the suspect had been identified as former Capitol Police officer Shauni Kerkhoff. Barker added that Kerkhoff had quit the force six months after the riot and then “slipped quietly into a three-letter intelligence agency,” fueling the conspiracy theory that the Capitol riot was an inside job.

I skipped that story at the time because it seemed way too shaky.

After all, Orwell did set Nineteen Eighty-Four in Britain

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Ace.]

This is what it’s come to:

An assault victim has been convicted of a homophobic hate crime after she branded her attacker a ‘f****t’ in text messages whilst ranting about being beaten up.

Care home worker Elizabeth Kinney, 34, was said to have sent a ‘barrage’ of messages to a former friend during which she described being attacked by a male mutual acquaintance.

During the messaging the single mother-of-four even sent pictures of her injuries from the assault, which resulted in her being admitted to hospital.

But Kinney, an aspiring nurse, was reported to police over the use of the word ‘f****t’ to describe the unnamed man and later charged with malicious communications offences.

At Sefton magistrates court Kinney, from Tranmere, pleaded guilty to causing to be sent by public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing messages.

She insisted her words were a ‘thoughtless rant’ and that she was not attacking anyone’s sexuality.

But JPs said her remark was ‘homophobic’ and gave her an ‘uplifted’ sentence of a 12 month community order.

The article goes on to add that no one has been charged in the alleged assault.

Let me just say that “former friend” would certainly be the case – accent on the “former.” Because it seems it was this former friend who reported Kinney to the Thought Police. The ex-friend seems to have complained that receiving these texts constituted a terrible trauma for her:

Outlining the facts, Jacqueline Whiting, prosecuting, said: ‘The defendant and the victim in this matter had been friends but had a falling out which resulted in an incident on the October 27, 2024 whereby abusive and homophobic text messages were sent to the victim causing her alarm and distress.

‘The Crown place this offence in the highest category of its type due to the effect related to sexual orientation and the greater harm because it had moderate impact.’

Chilling.

NOTE: The article is adorned with sexy photos of Kinney – seemingly selfies. Don’t know what that’s all about.

NOTE II: Please see this previous post of mine on the subject of free speech – or rather, the lack thereof – in Britain.

Trump Derangement Syndrome, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve certainly tackled giving explanations for the TDS phenomenon before, but the topic came up again today in this thread (see especially the first comment and the many responses to it). So I thought I’d add a bit more.

I want to start by saying that the depth and breadth of the phenomenon defies a complete explanation. That’s not to say there aren’t many rational examples of reasons to dislike Trump; see the list in this comment, plus the added:

None of these, singly, explains it. Even all of these together don’t explain it. They do not explain the absolute visceral bile, the intensity, the insanity, the tendency to foam at the mouth and act irrationally, stupidly, murderously.

Some people merely dislike Trump and won’t vote for him – but we’re not talking about them. We’re talking about those who believe he is the personification of evil, and that it is therefore virtuous and right to hate him with every fiber of their beings. Often, they’ve been macerated in propaganda to that effect, and it takes root and then builds and builds with every new “fact” about him. He’s a rapist. He’s corrupt in the financial sense. He’s a liar. He a bigot and white supremacist. He murders innocent people and rounds up old abuelas to send them back to their doom. The fact that he really often is rude and a bully adds to the reasons to hate him, but that’s not the root of it.

I also submit that people who suffer from TDS ordinarily know others who share the sentiments, and they reinforce each others’ belief system. Especially for women, there’s often an extra layer of Trump reminding them of an abusive or otherwise upsetting man in their lives, perhaps a sibling or father or uncle or boss or date or boyfriend or ex or co-worker or fellow student. Someone by whom they felt victimized. But although it may be the case that more women exhibit TDS – after all, more women than men are Democrats – it is by no means confined to women.

Before TDS, there was Reagan DS and Bush DS, and let’s not forget Palin DS. But TDS is more intense and more widespread, in part because Trump really does have an abrasive personality and seems to take delight in stirring up antagonism.

What to do if you’re confronted with a loved one or friend with TDS, and it’s become a big problem between you? I would suggest a therapist except for the fact that finding an unbiased one would be quite a task these days. So I think you should go to the Braver Angels site and start reading. You can even join, although you don’t have to do so in order to get the benefit of what they have to offer. If you find anything helpful there, use it and perhaps even show it to the TDS sufferer in your life. Pay special attention to this, as well as this.

And good luck. You’ll need it.

Explaining the Tennessee special election

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve read a wide variety of analyses of the results, from “it’s really a plus-ten-point GOP district, so this is exactly as expected” to “the Republican should have done a lot better and this is a wake-up call.”

Roger L. Simon – who’s been living near Nashville for quite a few years now – has this to say:

What does this mean? Not a lot. I would define it as “Much Ado About Nothing… Much.”

That, of course, will not stop the thumb suckers who already have their thumbs out and are ready to point blame. I predict two explanations:

One, typical Republican voter passivity, especially without Trump running.

Two, changed demographics. All those domestic p/p[ gtvyf migrants who have been moving from blue states to red states to escape state income tax have brought their blue state values with them.

While there might be some elements of truth here, I reject both of these overall.’

Regarding the passivity, it’s not the voters who are passive so much as the Republican leadership, starting at the top. This is true of several red states, but definitely of Tennessee. (Neighboring Georgia is worse.) The local GOP, with a few exceptions, never got in gear to seriously win this election against the target-rich Behn until the last couple of weeks. The Democrats had been going full tilt for a long while. Don’t blame the GOP voters.

Simon goes on to add that the newcomers are mostly conservatives.

His explanation – passive and complacent leadership – dovetails with what I wrote in yesterday’s post: “Behn got a head start in early votes that probably occurred before the GOP was alerted to the danger of an upset.”

I’ve also read that Nashville is now populated by quite a few of those young “we wuz robbed” type voters who voted in NYC for Mamdani’s promises of “affordability”:

Not unlike NYC, Nashville is now filled with both 20somethings who really cannot afford to live there and are susceptible to all this affordability nonsense and blue state migrants who are gonna import their politics. Both are more highly motivated to vote in these special elections. As for the former: elite overproduction is a thing. Lots of these 25 yo folks who hit all the marks and got their NYU degree are pissed when they look around and see some dude who went to Alabama or Tennessee and studied accounting or see trades people earning more than they are tending bar. Then I think their impulse is to go into politics and figure out how to expropriate it.

Well, Roger Simon rejects the “blue state migrants” explanation. But I think that the “angry, entitled 20-somethings who know nothing about socialism” explanation may well be correct. Watch out for that demographic.

The Republican wins in the Tennessee special election

The New Neo Posted on by

Good news: the Republican Matt Van Epps has defeated Democratic Socialist Aftyn Behn in Tennessee’s special election to replace retiring House member Mark Green. With 95% of the vote in, he won by five points.

This was in a district that Trump won by +22 in 2024, so the margin of victory should have been far greater. Then again, this was a special election, which generally favors the party not in power – and Behn got a head start in early votes that probably occurred before the GOP was alerted to the danger of an upset.

“Brown” and borrowed racial victimhood

The New Neo Posted on by

This sort of use of the word “brown” annoys me greatly:

Mark Kelly seems to be intent on running for president in 2028, by the way (and this may be the moment for me to remark that he looks like Lex Luthor).

But anyway, back to “brown.” I’m as “brown” as the Afghani guy who shot the members of the National Guard, or as “brown” as any Middle Easterner. The common modern-day use of the term “brown,” which Kelly employs here, is an attempt to appropriate a racial designation for cultural purposes, a sort of “stolen valor” from the civil rights movement that involved black people (called “Negroes” in my youth).

NOTE: Jews are an all-purpose exception. To those Jew-hating neo-Nazis on the supposed right, Jews are “brown.” To the Jew-hating leftists, Jews are the whitest of white oppressors. But Jews actually come in all skin colors, of course.

Roundup!

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The New York Times isn’t go along entirely with the WaPo’s hit piece on Hegseth about the second strike. The Times is saying it can’t find any sources that implicate Hegseth. What’s going on at the Times? First the expose of Walz and the Minnesota fraud, and now this.

(2) Around 16K people in Canada killed themselves through medically assisted suicide last year. Of these, 95.6% were people whose death was “medically foreseeable” and the rest were not. Each year the program has been operating since 2019, the numbers using the program have grown.

The entire thing is highly depressing, IMHO. There are plenty of statistics at that link, but nothing really tells us: who are these people, and why did they make this choice?

(3) Whistleblowers say that Minnesota’s Governor Walz looked the other way and allowed the fraud committed by Somalis in Minnesota to run rampant. The reason he would have done that isn’t too hard to guess:

Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said Monday that Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz allowed the state’s massive COVID-era fraud scandal to fester because he sought political favor from the state’s large Somali community.

Walz defended his administration Sunday by claiming Minnesota “attracts criminals” and telling the public not to “demonize” the Somali community, even as he faced questions over more than $1 billion in welfare fraud tied to Somali-linked schemes. Appearing on “The Evening Edit,” Jarrett said the question many Minnesotans want answered is simple: Why would Walz allow a massive fraud scheme to flourish?

“So if all of this is true, and I suspect it is, the question is, why would he do it? Well, the answer is he was currying favor with the large Somali community where the fraud was largely happening. He was turning a blind eye for political gain,” Jarrett told host Elizabeth MacDonald.

What percentage of Minnesota’s voters are Somali? It’s a large group compared to other states, but it’s really not all that large: 1.12%. Then again, although that’s a small group, turning on them probably would have earned Walz the “racist” label. Now he gets to call others racists.

(4) Jack Smith had several reasons for spying on GOP members of Congress:

House and Senate Republicans targeted by former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s subpoenas were gearing up for significant oversight of both the Justice Department and the FBI when their phone records were seized.

This raises questions about whether the subpoenas served a dual purpose—to investigate Jan. 6, as Smith was appointed to do, and to keep tabs on the oversight probes into agency conduct, one former representative whose phone records were seized by Smith suggested.

“They were trying to spy on us to see what we were doing,” former Rep. Louie Gohmert told the John Solomon Reports podcast. “And also, I think they were looking for anything that they could use to come after us, or hold over our heads, because, you know, you can intimidate the people that are coming after you.”

(5) The same media that covered up for Biden’s completely obvious decline is engaged in trying to get us to believe that Trump is ill and senile:

President Trump has been working up to 12-hour days this month, according to Oval Office logs the White House provided to The Post after the New York Times claimed there were “signs of fatigue” in his less detailed public schedule.

The previously unpublished “private narrative” documents span 10 weekdays between Nov. 12 and Nov 25 — the day the Times story was published — and show the president worked roughly 50-hour weeks, not counting any official duties that may have been performed on weekends.

The White House made the rare decision to share the logs to counter the narrative that Trump, 79, is slowing with age — with the files instead showing him working longer hours than the average American as he overhauls trade and immigration policies, attempts to end the Russia-Ukraine war and spearheads the most significant construction at the White House in decades.

He also released a normal MRI report.

Of all the criticisms that can be mounted against Trump, this seems the oddest to me. Not only is he obviously vigorous, not just for a man of his age but compared to most people over forty, but the left’s covering up of Biden’s obvious lack of vigor was blatant. But this contradiction doesn’t seem to faze Trump’s critics. After all, sooner or later his health will decline, and then they’ll say, “See, I told you so!” In the meantime, there are plenty of gullible Trump-haters who will believe what the MSM says.