Is Brian Cole Jr A Patsy?

David Freiheit, who posts as Viva Frei on his YouTube channel, says he thinks Brian Cole Jr is a patsy. He defines "patsy" beginning at 0:18:

Patsies could be absolutely innocent, set up to take the fall for a crime, which I am less inclined to believe right now, or patsies can be the useful tools who either didn't know they were being manipulated for the purpose of commission of a crime, or sort of knew, but sort of got played a little too hard. . . . I believe he's more along the lines of . . . he was used to potentially prepare the bombs, potentially hand them off to somebody for the purposes of placement, and he was always going to be the fall guy if anybody ever got too close to identifying the actual suspect.

He goes on to outline his theory of the FBI: they weren't "incompetent" at leaving the Brian Cole Jr lead on the shelf for nearly five years; this was always going to be the backup plan in case someone got too close to fingering the actual culprit, who in his view continues to be Ms C, the former Capitol Police officer. He talks at length about Cole's on line activity as a "brony", an adult male fan of the My Little Pony animated character. He minimizes the sexual aspect of "bronyism" and stresses that Cole, by his grandmother's account autistic, obsessed with My Litle Pony due only to that, nothing else to see here.

He then goes on to outline a theory that Cole was recruited and groomed by FBI actors via the bronies into building and placing the bombs to create some type of terrorist episode during the congressional cerification of the electoral votes on January 6, which could somehow be blamed on Trump and MAGA, except that on one hand, the bombs didn't detonate, and on the other, there was the Capitol incursion, so they didn't need the bombs anyhow.

He seems to be among those, like Sundance at Conservative Treehouse, who think there are master manipulators within the deep state who control Bondi, Patel, and Bongino, and who've steered them away from the real perp -- apparently Ms C, the former Capitol Police officer -- and gotten them to fixate on Cole, the patsy. No matter there are receipts, cell phone data, and Cole's own apparent confession that tie him to the bombs, Cole is just a patsy, and someone else made him do this for their nefarious get-Trump purposes.

Viva Frei's theory goes so far as to suggest that the FBI recruited him via brony chat sites as early as 2017, and they had him actively building bombs as early as 2019, when nobody could have foreseen the events that led up to January 6, 2021. Apparently the FBI decided to create a patsy just in case they might need a patsy for something one day. It turns out that Megyn Kelly doesn't share Viva Frei's view that My Little Pony is just an innocent autistic thing:

'I'm sorry, this is the thing,' she began. 'So my dear friend took her daughters, when they were young, to a My Little Pony convention - it was coming to town at a hotel… not understanding it's actually for pervy men.

'These conventions are not for little girls,' the former Fox News host then declared.

'They are for pervy men, many of whom are connected to the furry community, who will show up there. It's a very bizarre situation.'

. . . 'There's something very off about those people, I think we can all agree,' Kelly concluded.

'And I think that this guy's interest in the community will come as a surprise to approximately no one.'

I'm inclined to go with Megyn Kelly's view that bronies are a subkink of furries, and we've encountered furries elsewhere in the whole violent "resistance" movement, including the ones who show up at anti-ICE demonstrations, as well as Tyler Robinson's furry partner, Lance Twiggs. As she puts it, there's something very off about these people.

There's another problem with either Brian Cole Jr or Ms C: neither appears to have sufficient motive for building and planting the bombs. Although Viva Frei hints darkly that the FBI secured Coles's confession after a four-hour interrogation, that confession appears to be backed up with cell phone, license plate, and credit card evidence. While other leads from "gait analysis" to Metro cards led to Ms C and her then-next door neighbor, there's no equivalent evidence tying her to building the bombs, and it's hard to imagine that she'd be anything but a patsy herself, so you'd still have to find another big shadowy conspiracy to explain her involvement.

There's another problem: whoever wandered around Capitol Hill for an hour in hoodie and mask before planting the bombs the evening of January 5 was clearly disorganized. He or she would walk a bit, sit on a bench, and walk some more. Whatever the purpose was, it was hard to discern, and it clearly wasn't intended to avoid showing up on surveillance cameras. A serious conspirator, even if a patsy, would dress to blend in, avoid cameras, plant the bombs quickly, and as quickly get out. This is beyond patsy, especially of the sort Viva Frei postulates, someone who was manipulated into building a bomb and placing it as part of a larger, highly professional conspiracy.

We're back to the Lee Harvey Oswald problem, which is a variant of the Groucho Marx problem: "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." No real conspiracy would recruit anybody as flaky and disorganized as either Lee Harvey Oswald, Brian Cole Jr or Ms C, but that leaves out the related problem that Brian Cole Jr is alleged to have spent two years or so building the bombs, but neither one worked. What sort of conspiracy would recruit someone so incompetent? Wouldn't a serious conspirator at least test the timing mechanism, even if it didn't activate the bomb?

Marinus van der Lubbe, the Dutch guy who allegedly set the Reichstag fire, was probably a patsy and may or may not have been mentally troubled, but at least he (or his surrogate) was able actually to start the fire. If either Brian Cole Jr or Ms C built the bombs, they didn't get as far as even Marinus van der Lubbe. Whatever mastermind recruited the pipe bomb patsy had to have been pretty imcompetent himself. What does this say about how effective this whole conspiracy could have been?