Democrats would have a better claim to moral authority if, when they condemn efforts to revise January 6 history, they didn’t engage in revisionism themselves.
Democrats would have a better claim to moral authority if, when they condemn efforts to revise the history of January 6, they didn’t engage in revisionism themselves.
A fter observing that the January 6 riots were “personal” for Nancy Pelosi and making note of the fact that the interlopers in the Capitol chanted her name and sought to “shoot her in the friggin’ brain,” Nancy Pelosi could only answer in the negative when CBS News host Margaret Brennan asked whether she thought the event’s “nonviolent attackers” deserved a pardon.
“The nonviolent?” Pelosi replied. “I think that’s a violent attacker.” Moreover, the former House speaker added, the instigation in which Donald Trump engaged ahead of that day’s violence didn’t end with the assault on the Capitol. “He called out to these people to continue their violence,” Pelosi continued. “My husband being a victim of all of that. And it’s still, he still has injuries from that attack. So it just goes on and on.”
Democrats would have a better claim to moral authority if, when they condemn the pro-Trump Right’s efforts to revise the history of the January 6 riots, they didn’t engage in revisionism themselves.
The people who knew Paul Pelosi’s attacker, David DePape, described watching his mental state “deteriorate” over the year that preceded the assault on Mr. Pelosi. DePape “spent a great deal of time alone, absorbing extremist views online and shifting his political views from supporting former President Obama years ago to believing in the false ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Others said he “had a history of mental illness, drug abuse and, possibly, childhood trauma.”
DePape described the extremely online “Gamergate” phenomenon as a “consumer-led revolt against communism,” and he had two children with a woman who promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories on public-access television. He “lived under a tree in a park in Berkeley” and “told people he was Jesus,” according to the New York Times. He was prone to Manichaean paranoia and, according to one acquaintance, “was just not rational.”
DePape’s own defense attorneys argued that their client suffered “from a schizoid personality disorder that left him unable to control his actions and emotions and left him prone to fantastical, delusional thinking.” Even if they made that case in pursuit of a motion to declare DePape unfit to stand trial (which failed), their diagnosis doesn’t seem especially far-fetched.
Paul Pelosi’s assailant was prone to disordered thinking. If he was susceptible to suggestions, it seems he observed little discretion when subscribing to the various conspiracy theories that come in and out of fashion in online forums. There is, however, no evidence that this attack was a by-product of Donald Trump’s rhetoric. Attributing DePape’s violence to Trump and the Republican Party requires a lot of intellectual dexterity.
DePape’s refusal to neatly fit the role of lucid political assassin in which Democrats had cast him compelled Pelosi’s party to invent the scourge of “stochastic terrorism.” According to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s definition of the phenomenon, that’s when “you use a very large platform to turn up the temperature and target an individual until something happens.”
For partisan Democrats, it’s easy to see the appeal of an idea that assigns acts of violence not to their perpetrators but to the political commentators with whom they disagree. Ocasio-Cortez determined that the culprits behind “political violence” — specifically threats against her — were Fox News Channel and Tucker Carlson. In other words, even if people in power don’t specifically call their followers to violence, they might be held accountable for it nonetheless.
In a Scientific American essay, science writer Bryn Nelson threw the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo into the mix — as if DePape had been radicalized by reading Rufo’s white papers on K–12 curriculum reform. “The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories,” Hillary Clinton wrote in the wake of DePape’s attack. “It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result.”
“Though incidents of direct, specific violence are rare, the risk feels heightened,” Vox’s Ellen Ioanes wrote in an interview with American University professor Kurt Braddock. Sure, “it’s impossible to know who’s going to perpetrate that violent act, where and how they’ll strike, or even who or what the target could be,” she conceded. But “stochastic terror — the idea that even if people in power don’t specifically call their followers to violence, by entertaining it as a legitimate tactic or by demonizing a political enemy on a platform capable of reaching millions of people, one of those millions will be inspired to violent action — provides a framework for understanding the current moment.”
With this handy tool, virtually any criminal act can be retroactively attributed to personalities who may have no connection at all to the criminal. Indeed, those who subscribe to this “framework” all but absolve the criminally violent of their misdeeds. The poor, unwitting fools — they’ve been led astray by the real villains: our political opponents.
The “stochastic terrorism” craze didn’t last. The connections it attempted to draw were simply too tenuous; its claims too tendentious to withstand scrutiny after DePape’s mental illness became common knowledge. But Nancy Pelosi is especially shameless in her attempt to revive the bankrupt assertion that Republicans used their mesmeric hold over America’s kooks to mete out violence against their political adversaries.
If Pelosi set out to indict Trump’s reckless and irresponsible rhetoric, she muddied the message with some reckless rhetoric of her own. If Democrats are wondering what happened to the moral authority they thought they enjoyed in the wake of the January 6 riots, Pelosi’s cynical advantage-seeking provides at least a partial explanation.