So, a couple of days ago, that now seem like weeks, I was browsing around looking for pieces that might help me understand the mentality of Cesar Sayoc aka the MAGABomber, and I found a couple that quoted someone who knew him well and was willing to speak on the record: the family lawyer, Ron Lowy.
Miami Herald:
Mail bomb suspect Cesar Sayoc was a mentally ill man searching for a way to fit into American society, and he found it by acting on President Donald Trump’s vengeful rhetoric, said the Miami lawyer who represented Sayoc in a previous bomb threat case.
[...]
“He wasn’t successful in anything he did,” Lowy said. “He’s been bankrupt, gone into foreclosure. He’s 14 years old living in an adult body.”
Lowy goes on to say that Sayoc’s father left the family when he was a child and this might be the root of his problems.
On Huffington Post, the video isn’t available but Lowy is quoted as telling Anderson Cooper that Sayoc, who wasn’t interested in politics until the 2016 campaign, “found a father in Trump” and happily aligned himself with a movement that would accept him and say it was okay to be angry.
Lowy adds, “I began to realize that he had what I considered a lesser IQ” — no surprise in the light of Sayoc’s writing, which shows him to be barely literate.
But the next part jumped out at me [emphasis added].
Lowy said Sayoc did not appear to be sophisticated enough to carry out the bomb operation alone. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find out there were either others who helped prod or encourage him to do this or that the bombs were so crudely made they never could have worked.”
Now this could be a lawyer trying to help out a family (he is also said to be ‘a family friend’) by providing exculpatory quotes.
Or he’s being perfectly honest. Yesterday, after Columbia University social media expert Jonathan Albright downloaded hundreds of public posts from Sayoc’s Facebook and Twitter accounts before they were deleted and gave them to the Washington Post, the paper published: Mail bomb suspect made numerous references on Facebook to Russian associates and echoed pro-Kremlin views.
The “hardrockintlent” account — which lists the name “Julus Cesar Milan” as the owner — in July 2016 posted about “my brothers in from Russia the great leader Puttins relatives visiting us today” at a Hard Rock Cafe in South Florida. “Puttins” appears to be a misspelled reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
[...]
On at least five occasions in 2015 — three times in April, once in June and once in October — the Facebook account included posts referring to “my Russian Brothers” and picturing a smiling Sayoc wearing a suit and posing alongside what appear to be friends. The posts list specific places, nicknames of people and communities, such as Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, with large Russian populations… Before his arrest Friday, Sayoc lived in an area of suburban Miami with a large Russian community...
I happen to have kept one Facebook account of Sayoc’s open on one of my browsers, and so can confirm what the article says, that this maladjusted loner and chronic failure did indeed have “more than 2,700 friends”.
Sayoc posted obsessively about several interests that had nothing to do with politics up until April of 2016, when, after several months of not posting, he suddenly started frequently posting videos about Syria’s fight against ISIS.
“He just pops up four months later and just relentlessly shares stories about ISIS and terrorists,” said Albright. “The turn is just remarkable… He found ideas that never let go from that point on.”
The posts fit with Kremlin propaganda themes, portraying Russia and Syrian government forces favorably as they battled “terrorists” in what U.S. officials for years have portrayed as a legitimate uprising against the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad.
[...]
Among the Facebook posts are criticisms of then-President Barack Obama, who sent troops to support those fighting against Assad’s force. Several posts show Russian-made jets in what’s portrayed as a battle against mainly the extremist group ISIS, as opposed to the broader uprising typically described in Western accounts of the civil war.
Low-IQ, troubled, yearning to fit in, violent and criminally-inclined, Sayoc seems all too similar to the “President” he sees as a father figure—in being easy for Putin’s agents to make into a “useful idiot”. (Except that Sayoc’s violence is more of the hands-on variety than Trump’s, which makes him useful for hands-on violence.) We don’t know that, as with Trump, his idiocy has been used to make an impact far beyond his own genuine capability, but the posts are suggestive.
The story notes that the FBI is poring through them as well, so they’ll be onto this. We’ll see what comes out.
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