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A conspiracy theorist with a long history of posting all kinds of weird claims on social media blew up his house and almost the entire street after a tense stand-off with police in a quiet neighbourhood in Virginia, US.

56-year-old James Yoo sounds about as nutty as they come and has been on authorities radars for a while with his many claims of government conspiracies including that the US Capitol riot was an inside job.

Using standard conspiracy language and plenty of capitalisation, Yoo wrote in an October 2023 post “THEY do not want an actual ‘coup’ against THEM so THEY rig, orchestrate and control a FAKE ‘Jan 6th’ ‘event,’ ‘riot’ and then RIG trials to set FAKE precedence in attempts to scare and control the People’s minds.”

The rant was likely not aimed at the gender-neutral crowd, but the post raised THEIR interest in Yoo, who also laid bare paranoid ‘theories’ about Rochester General Hospital in New York, the local sheriff’s office, his sister and his ex-wife, in addition to others.

A 163-page federal lawsuit he filed in 2018 alleged a conspiracy against him and medical malpractice stemming from his mother’s death a decade earlier. Yoo claimed that his sister and now ex-wife conspired to hospitalize him against his will in 2015—and that 9/11 and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election were somehow related to that conspiracy.

Yoo also claimed that New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush disguised himself as an FBI agent by “wearing a wig without facial hair” and came to interview him at his home in 2017. He details his extensive efforts to contact the DOJ and FBI about the “conspiracy.”

The lawsuit was thrown out after a judge declared it “so plainly frivolous, and its allegations are so clearly the product of delusion or fantasy, that it cannot be permitted to proceed.”

Yoo also took his delusions to LinkedIn and YouTube, with his bio stating “I gave THEM/YALL every opportunity to ‘do the right thing. All I see is America’s hypocrisy, corruption, fraud, conspiracy, CHICKENSHAT.”

All of this eventually led to the police being called to Yoo’s house after he fired a flare gun from inside his home more than 30 times. Police deployed “non-flammable, less-lethal munitions” around his house, but Yoo was not ‘cooperating’, rather shooting at officers from inside his house.

The tense stand-off came to an end when the cornered Yoo triggered explosives that sent a huge fireball into the sky, obliterating his house and himself. Remarkably, only three police officers sustained minor injuries in the blast.

🚨#BREAKING: Numerous Reports of People Hearing Large Explosions, Rattling Multiple Buildings and homes ⁰⁰📌#Arlington | #Virginia

Currently Numerous reports are emerging of people hearing and seeing a large explosion in Arlington, Virginia, extending across Washington, D.C.… pic.twitter.com/TypaK15lsQ

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) December 5, 2023

[source:vice]