A Tale of Two Bombs And A Thousand MAGA Lies

By David Shuster

By now, all Americans should be used to modern political con artists – men and women who traffic in outrage, conspiracy, and the sacred currency of fear. But even by the most debauched standards of the Trump era, the spectacle surrounding the pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican Committee headquarters on January 5, 2021 has revealed that the state of our political discourse is even more obscene than we could have imagined.

After nearly five years of wild speculation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation recently identified and charged Brian J. Cole Jr., a 30-year old Virginia man, with placing the devices—which fortunately never detonated—near what should have been otherwise secure national political party offices.

In interviews with federal law enforcement agents, Cole said he believed the 2020 election was stolen. It’s the very lie that drove millions of MAGA to fever dream about a rigged result and triggered the January 6^th attempted capitol insurrection.

Cole is no deep state phantom. He is not an “anti-Trump insider” or operative dispatched to sabotage the MAGA movement.

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And yet for years, countless voices across the right wing media ecosystem howled the opposite: the pipe bombs were a “cover up,” an “inside job,” an elaborate ploy by nebulous forces to pin blame on conservative patriots. One of the most vocal purveyors and amplifiers of this crap was Dan Bongino.

For years, he was a right wing podcaster and Fox News contributor who thundered that the federal government knew the pipe bomb truth but withheld it. Bongino repeatedly called it a “massive coverup.”

Now, Bongino is the Deputy Director of the FBI. It’s a fact that would be astonishing had we not, in the last decade, grown so numb to the absurdities and hypocrisies of right-wing politics. When pressed recently on Fox News by Sean Hannity about his past assertions, Bongino conceded, “I was paid in the past for my opinions. That’s clear. And one day I’ll be back in that space. But that’s not what I’m paid for now.”

Think about that for a second. A man paid to fabricate and amplify conspiracies now stands in a position of immense power. He claims that now, because of an FBI title, he “bases investigations on facts.” It is the political equivalent of sending a Fox to guard the chicken coop and trusting the Fox will use Fox (News?) repellent.

Through the years political scientists have repeatedly found that every complex problem in a society invariably gets reduced by quacks to the simple feelings of hate and fear. If the identity of a would-be bomber can be dismissed as “the Democrats’ evil plot,” then Trump Republicans don’t need to examine the river of misinformation that carries MAGA lunatics to that point.

If an entire right-wing audience can be fed the fiction that law enforcement itself masterminded an act of terror – when all evidence showed this was a lone actor motivated by the very conspiratorial rhetoric churned out by right-wing media, then nothing matters anymore but the shallow performance.

Even more revealing has been the media’s reaction to the real story. If the suspect had been anything other than a believer in “Stop the Steal,” every cable news outlet, every Sunday talk show, and every social media feed would have exploded in breathless coverage. Instead, the news has flicked past like an unremarkable blip.

The truth is not worthy of sustained attention because it doesn’t confirm the trope the Trump crowd demanded.

The suspect was not a shadowy deep-state Democratic operative. He was not a saboteur planted inside MAGA. He was a man radicalized by the very Trumpian lies that too many people in the public sphere have trafficked with glee and no accountability.

So let this be yet another cautionary footnote in our ongoing national story: When we allow demagogues to twist reality for profit or power — when we shrug and accept that “everyone does it” — we undermine the very foundation of a sane and just society.

The pipe bombs of January 5th were real. The suspect now charged is real. The conspiracy theories that enveloped the case for years were self-inflicted MAGA fiction and right wing delusions.

The rest of us would be wise to remember that facts, not fantasies, are the bedrock of justice. And people who trade in falsehoods, like Dan Bongino, should not be treated as prophets but as what they are: peddlers of peril.

Dan Bongino should not be in the FBI. He should be under investigation and kept far away from any position that involves public trust.