But why let the facts get in the way of a good narrative?
But why let the facts get in the way of a good narrative?
A nutjob viciously attacked the elderly husband of the speaker of the House.
That’s godawful, and every person of good will should wish Paul Pelosi a rapid and full recovery and the very best to his family.
Of course, it’s not enough to leave it at that. The press and Democrats have brushed right by the evidence of the attacker’s mental illness and portrayed the assault as a quasi-MAGA operation. It’s supposedly an extension of the political campaign against Speaker Pelosi, or the inevitable fruit of right-wing election denialism, a kind of follow-on operation to January 6.
In reality, to the extent the attacker represents anything, it’s the milieu of hippie Berkeley more than Steve Bannon’s War Room, but no one is letting that get in the way of a good narrative.
“This is despicable. There’s no place in America. There’s too much violence, political violence, too much hatred, too much vitriol,” President Biden said of the attack. “And what makes us think that one party can talk about stolen elections? Covid being a hoax? It’s all a bunch of lies.”
He added, “You know, it’s reports [sic] that the same chant was used by this guy they have in custody that was used on January 6 in the attacks on the U.S. Capitol. I’m not making this up. This is reported. I can’t guarantee it. We can tell you what’s being reported. The chant was, ‘Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?’”
Reuters led a news report thusly: “The frequent targeting of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by online extremists and political opponents likely contributed to the violent attack on her husband Paul, terrorism and extremism experts said.”
Laurence Tribe tweeted, “The far right has normalized the use of violence even against the families of public officials with whom somebody might disagree.”
On Meet the Press, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar rued how Pelosi “has been villainized for years, and big surprise, it’s gone viral, and it went violent.” She said we have “to make sure we’re not electing more election deniers who are following Donald Trump down this road,” and “we have to do something about this amplification of this election-denying hate speech that we see on the Internet.”
Gavin Newsom declared, “This heinous assault is yet another example of the dangerous consequences of the divisive and hateful rhetoric that is putting lives at risk and undermining our very democracy and democratic institutions.”
All of this requires imposing a coherence on David DePape’s mind that simply doesn’t exist, which would be obvious to anyone who paused for a minute to consider and absorb the evidence.
Listen to the person who perhaps knows him best — the mother of his two children, a woman named Oxane Taub (a.k.a. Gypsy), herself a whack-job serving jail time for trying to abduct a 14-year-old boy she was infatuated with.
(As a press release from the local DA’s office put it: “Over the course of 14 months, she sent him numerous obsessive emails, created blogs directed at him, used his friends to send him messages and eventually tried to abduct him a few blocks from his school in Berkeley. While the case was pending, Taub also tried to dissuade the victim from testifying.” And she was the rational half of the couple.)
In an interview from jail, conducted by a local TV station, Taub said, “He is mentally ill. He has been mentally ill for a long time.” She said he was missing for a year and then showed up again “in very bad shape.” According to Taub, “he thought he was Jesus.” She added, “He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him. And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal.”
In a classic sign of serious mental illness, DePape believes that he was being targeted by invisible forces. In its review of what DePape wrote on his blog the week before the attack, the Washington Post found that he thought “that an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird.”
According to the paper, “he wrote that he was looking to purchase a fairy house on Etsy but was frustrated that the doors were painted and so could not be used by a fairy. ‘They have lots of fairy houses but NONE of them are MADE for fairies,’ he wrote.”
He also believed that he was being targeted by law enforcement manipulating the 4chan message board.
Apparently, before DePape’s posts would load, readers would see an image of someone wearing a giant inflatable unicorn costume.
DePape’s life was about what you’d expect, given these lunatic ravings — a total train wreck. He occasionally slept in a broken-down school bus. His family was afraid of him. A woman identifying herself as his daughter said, “He did genuinely try to be a good person but the monster in him was always too strong for him to be safe around.”
This is not the picture of a man radicalized by election denial or right-wing conspiracy theories. Instead, it shows someone already disturbed and dangerous before he posted anything favorable about Jordan Peterson or Peter Navarro. Years ago he got some attention for sharing Taub’s nudist activism. According to Taub, when they met “he was very much in alignment with my views, and I’ve always been very progressive.”
It’s not clear what election denialism has to do with any of this. It’s just something that progressives hate (for understandable reasons), and so they presume it bears some responsibility for DePape’s crazed violence.
The same goes for political attacks on Nancy Pelosi, which are par for the course for a speaker of the House. If Republicans can’t run negative ads against Pelosi for fear that a lunatic will break into her house at 2 a.m., they can’t run negative ads against anyone — and for a lot of progressive commentators on the Pelosi attack, that’s the ultimate point.