Journalists subordinated DePape’s mental illness and drug abuse to political ideology. Steve Scalise’s attacker was given different treatment.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we compare the media’s reaction to violence against Republicans to its reaction to violence against Democrats, and hit more media misses.
Journalists Rush to Judgment
The media have been quick to assign blame after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was violently attacked in the couple’s San Francisco home last week. According to the attacker’s now-imprisoned former girlfriend, he is a mentally ill drug addict who believed for a time that he was Jesus Christ. But for much of the media, the obvious role that addiction and mental illness played in the tragic attack is secondary to the real cause: Republicans and their extreme rhetoric.
A man broke into the couple’s home early Friday morning and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer. Pelosi underwent “successful surgery” for a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hand. Authorities have identified the suspect as David Wayne DePape, a 42-year-old man who appears to have a history of affiliations with nudists and conspiracy theorists.
As NR’s Ryan Mills has reported, DePape’s political leanings are not easily discernible. He has ranted against Covid lockdowns and government censorship on his blog but, according to journalist Michael Schellenberger, he also at one point “lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree.”
The nudist, DePape’s former girlfriend and the mother of his children, said they were aligned in their commitment to progressivism when they were together. (It’s unclear when the pair broke up, but the woman has been in jail since last year.)
“Well when I met him, he was only 20 years old, and he didn’t have any experience in politics, and he was very much in alignment with my views and I’ve always been very progressive. I absolutely admire Nancy Pelosi.”
While it seems unlikely that a nudist who lived in a house festooned with the markers of modern progressivism would identify with the MAGA movement, Democrats and members of the media have worked to connect the attack to the January 6 Capitol riot.
“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. “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 suggested that “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.”
Yet when James T. Hodgkinson, a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders, opened fire on Representative Steve Scalise and other Republicans as they practiced for the annual Congressional Baseball Game in 2017, media outlets did not fault political rhetoric from Democrats as the cause of the violence.
Reuters seemed to be trying to blame Scalise for his own shooting back in 2017, saying of the House Republican whip: “An ardent supporter of Trump inside the Republican Party, he has an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association, a powerful lobbying group that fights for gun-ownership rights.”
“In 2014, Scalise’s office confirmed he had addressed a white supremacist group connected to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in 2002 when he was a state representative,” the article adds.
The Los Angeles Times published a slew of news headlines and columns on the Pelosi attack: “Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband stems from toxic politics,” “Extremist political violence is increasing, experts warn,” “Paul Pelosi attack: Get ready for more political violence,” “Attack on Pelosi’s husband seen as rising political violence.”
In 2017, the paper said Hodgkinson “hated Republicans, and ‘was always in his own little world’”
“There seemed to be little about America that James T. Hodgkinson agreed with. He had a hero, Bernie Sanders. But his enemies seemed to be endless,” the story began. It took pains to note that Sanders, whom the shooter had once campaigned for, denounced his supporter on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
The article called the attack “the work of a left-wing activist and small-town Democrat who had, for years, waged his own political war of words against Republicans on social media with no success.” Despite the direct connection with political violence, at no point does the paper suggest Democrats are responsible for the shooting, which left six people injured.
This week, the Washington Post wrote that the “Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband follows years of GOP demonizing her.”
In 2017, the paper cited a source who said Hodgkinson wasn’t active among local Democrats and that he was a “lone wolf.” The story discussed the type of weapon Hodgkinson used at length.
HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte suggested last week that “people bringing up the left-wing nut who tried to kill Steve Scalise and other Rs are missing the point.”
“The former Republican president and current GOP leader has been stoking political violence since 2015, energetically so since Dec. 19, 2020,” he said. “There is no analog among Dems.”
CBS’s Face the Nation anchor Margaret Brennan had a tense exchange with Representative Tom Emmer (R., Minn.) on Sunday, when she took him to task for tweeting “Let’s #FirePelosi” with a video showing him shooting a gun days before the attack on Paul Pelosi.
“I never saw anyone after Steve Scalise was shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter equate Democrat rhetoric with those actions. Please don’t do that,” Emmer said.
Brennan went on to say Republican candidates have spent more than $116 million on ads that mention speaker Pelosi by name in this cycle. She suggested Republicans pull the ads and that Emmer use a pink slip in his “fire Pelosi” video instead of a weapon.
Former CBS anchor Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner suggested Americans “should not be shocked” about the attack on Paul Pelosi.
“We have seen the storm clouds of political violence assemble,” the pair wrote. “There is a direct line from January 6 to today. And it stretches even farther backward. We should be very careful about using the term ‘fascism,’ but a political system plunging toward normalized violence and instability is one that is taking on very dark undertones.”
Yet the media has placed no blame on Democrats for a string of attacks against Republicans in recent years, including a GOP canvasser for Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) who says he was viciously attacked in South Florida over his political affiliation. In July, a man attempted to attack Representative Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) at a campaign event in upstate New York, jumping on stage and raising his arm toward the congressman while holding a keychain with two sharp points. It’s been just four months since law enforcement foiled an assasination attempt against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, arresting a California man outside of the Kavanaugh home in Maryland.
Headline Fail of the Week:
PBS Newshour decided to die on a strange hill this week, defending drag as an “art form.”
“Analysis: Political rhetoric, false claims obscure the history of drag performance,” it headlined a piece it published on the topic.
“Lately, drag has been dragged through the mud,” the “analysis” piece begins. “The art form has been cast in a false light in recent months by right-wing activists and politicians who complain about the ‘sexualization’ or ‘grooming’ of children. Opponents often coordinate protests at drag events that feature or cater to children, sometimes showing up with guns. Some politicians have proposed banning children from drag events and even criminally charging parents who take their kids to one.”
Media Misses
• Jacob Kornbluh of The Forward accused Ron DeSantis of antisemitism against progressive billionaire George Soros while the Florida governor was campaigning on behalf of New York GOP gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin — who is Jewish.
The entire reason DeSantis was there was to persuade New Yorkers to elect a Jewish governor. https://t.co/TjJcx1Ghma
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) October 31, 2022
• The Washington Post’s chief troublemaker, Taylor Lorenz, is at it again. This time she lauded the Chinese Communist Party’s “zero Covid” policy:
Tbh he’s right, millions of ppl in the western world are becoming permanently disabled/chronically ill w/ an incurable condition that destroys ur ability to live a normal life and our leaders and majority of the media are simply ignoring it and misleading ppl abt the risk https://t.co/ws8bLbG3VR
— SUBSCRIBE TO MY SUBSTACK (@TaylorLorenz) October 31, 2022
• MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough lied about Republican Mehmet Oz after last week’s Pennsylvania Senate debate, implying that Oz wanted “local officials” in random small-town departments to decide abortion policy, when Oz had actually urged women, doctors, and local officials to lobby their state legislators.
Here’s how Scarborough characterized Oz’s position: “[Oz is] talking about people in the Water Management District making decisions about life or death, life-or-death decisions on rape, incest, life of the mother.”
Here’s what Oz said: “There should not be involvement from the federal government in how states decide their abortion decisions. As a physician, I’ve been in the room when there’s some difficult conversations happening. I don’t want the federal government involved with that at all. I want women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves.”
The Pennsylvania Republican reiterated his position that state legislators should be in charge of abortion policy several more times over the course of the debate, and the moderators even granted that Oz believes there should be a right to abortion if a pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, or if it endangers the life of a mother.