Dear Weekend Jolter,
The aftermath of the attack on Paul Pelosi, and the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Pelosi, went eerily according to script: Shocking news breaks, mere minutes pass, the news starts getting crammed into a political narrative, more information emerges that calls that narrative into question . . . and reality makes a mess of the messaging.
By this point, it is clear that the alleged assailant is a severely mentally ill individual, who drifted toward far-right ideology and conspiracies after dabbling in more progressive environments. This reality is what attenuates the sustained efforts by Democrats — including President Biden, who drew a straight line from January 6 to October 28 in framing this week’s pre-midterm speech asserting “democracy is on the ballot” — to cast the attack as a direct byproduct of 2020 election denial, loathsome as that denial may be.
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. . . . 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. . . . 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.”
Rich continues, “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.”
Ryan Mills’s sketch of DePape’s background and views, if they can be called that, points to recent posts that protest government censorship and blast “communist collusion,” “the woke,” and “feminists.” One headline referred to “Q,” and his Facebook page reportedly included posts promoting 2020 stolen-election claims and downplaying January 6. If those posts were taken in isolation, the MAGA-attack narrative might hold, but there was much more to the story.
Michael Shellenberger reported that the suspect, 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, Taub, told ABC 7: “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.” (This all came out before false conspiracy theories from the right, and elsewhere, started to spread.)
The point, however, is that his scattered and fluid politics are subordinate to the obvious mental illness. The Washington Post reported that DePape wrote that “an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird.” John McCormack notes that the federal criminal complaint makes his delusions painfully clear: “The central fact that explains the assailant’s behavior is that he’s absolutely nuts.”
That fact doesn’t diminish the severity of the attack itself. The suspect is accused of specifically targeting Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He wanted to hold her hostage and compel her to tell him the “truth,” or else he planned to “break her kneecaps,” according to the affidavit. The attack could have been even worse; as it was, Pelosi’s husband was left with a fractured skull after being attacked with a hammer and had to be hospitalized. Even considering DePape’s mental state, the incident should be regarded as a warning that our political environment, fueled by a social-media fever swamp, is overheating, and we’d all be doing right to turn down the burners. Phil Klein cautions that political violence, from both sides, has come for too many victims in recent years. But the San Francisco assault does not neatly fit in the Left’s narrative about stolen-election conspiracies any more than it does in the Right’s narrative about rising crime.
The suspect’s garbled profile drives home that this was not, in crass terms, any sort of October surprise, even if some Democratic figures tried to play it to their advantage as they stare down what by most accounts will be a very difficult election on Tuesday.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The administration’s line on fossil-fuel companies is incoherent: Biden’s Desperate Attack on Oil Companies
Let’s hope the changes at Twitter are a positive step for free speech, and accountability: Elon Musk and the Third Era of Social Media
It’s long past time to walk away: Break Off the Stalled Iran Negotiations
ARTICLES
John McCormack & Brittany Bernstein: Democrats on Defense in Key Senate Races One Week Out from Election
Jim Geraghty: Who Failed Paul Pelosi?
Michael Brendan Dougherty: It’s the Covid Response, Stupid
Dan McLaughlin: How the Campaigns Are Breaking Entering the Final Week
Ramesh Ponnuru: An Old Myth about Justice Thomas and Affirmative Action
Brittany Bernstein: DCCC Chairman Maloney Struggles to Put Away Mike Lawler in Flashing Warning Sign for Dems
Mark Antonio Wright: Against Twitter
Rich Lowry: No, Democracy Is Not on the Ballot
Ari Blaff: Illinois Prosecutors Predict ‘Real Tragedy’ If Unprecedented Bail-Reform Law Takes Effect
Jeffrey Blehar: 2010 Redux or 2014 All Over Again? A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story
Jimmy Quinn: Chinese Diplomat Cornered and Berated Congressional Aide at Other Embassies’ Events
Isaac Schorr: Exclusive: New Report Accuses UNC’s Medical School of Putting Politics Before Patients
Christian Schneider: The Death of the American Political Scandal
CAPITAL MATTERS
Casey Mulligan unpacks the data illustrating the impact of this administration’s oil policies: Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen does his part to revive print journalism (get it?): Marquee Print Fair Returns from Corona-Cancellation
A “eulogy for patriarchy is also its sly defense,” writes Armond White: Raymond & Ray Buries the Idea of Toxic Masculinity
THE ANALYSTS ARE EXPECTING HIGH TURNOUT FOR THESE EXCERPTS
Michael Brendan Dougherty’s got a theory about this election cycle, and it makes a good deal of sense:
We are still climbing out of our pandemic response, and our politics reflect that. The 2020 election was about Donald Trump. The 2022 election is about where you stood on Covid, and the aftermath.
Worldwide, the economic dislocations, the supply-chain problems, and inflation are all downstream of the Covid response. We spent trillions on an experiment in sudden-onset guaranteed income, which was combined with forcibly lowered productivity. So did many other governments. China is still shutting down huge sectors of its society to stop the spread of Covid, thereby slowing the manufacturing of all sorts of goods upon which worldwide industry relies. Of course inflation was going to be one result. . . .
Whole patterns of life were upset by the Covid protocols; in the upheaval, people’s institutional allegiances shifted. Citizens in some states saw their churches closed down for more than a year. Many churches that complied with mandates out of meekness to the state, or conviction, never reopened again. They were outflanked by those shepherds who did tend their sheep in a crisis. Public schools saw enrollment decrease by 2 million students. Parochial schools saw their decade-long trend of decline suddenly shift into reverse. Private-school enrollment soared, as did the number of students being homeschooled. The sum of these facts is that the new populist orientation of individual voters organized itself under the pressure of the pandemic into new social groupings and budding institutions. These churches and schools will provide form and leadership to a prolonged populist insurgency in our politics for a long time to come.
What’s to explain the huge shift of suburban women back into the GOP fold? They haven’t forgotten Trump, who repulsed them. They know about the fall of Roe v. Wade. But many of them also remember that their little kids were masked at school — even at speech therapy — for months or years, only for health authorities to eventually call these masks “little more than useless decorations.” They see the speech delays, the social-development milestones missed, the low reading scores. They see crime rising. And local school boards that became obsessed with eliminating “whiteness” rather than illiteracy. . . .
Covid-19 completely reordered our politics. This is the first election where we’ll see what that looks like.
Brittany Bernstein talks to the Republican aiming to unseat the Democrat in charge of getting other Democrats elected:
Democrats have been caught by surprise in New York’s 17th congressional district, where state assemblyman Michael Lawler is putting up a stronger fight than they expected against Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Sean Patrick Maloney.
Last week, the Cook Political Report shifted the race from “lean Democrat” to “toss up.” That the newly redrawn district is competitive has come as a shock, given that President Joe Biden won the area by ten points in 2020.
If Lawler defeats Maloney, it would be the first time a Republican has defeated the chair of the DCCC in 40 years. Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois faced a similarly narrow challenge in 2020 when she was DCCC chairwoman, but ultimately pulled out a win.
“This would certainly have historical significance, but I think would certainly be a harbinger of what is to come on Election Night, if we’re able to flip a district like this, that is labeled a D+3, by Cook,” Lawler told National Review. “They’ve now put this in the toss-up category and certainly if we can win here, we’re going to have a very, very good night across the country.”
If you’re not following Jimmy Quinn’s China reporting, you’re missing some scoop action and important details about the degree of Beijing’s infiltration in Washington. Here’s his latest on what China’s emissaries are up to:
Chinese diplomats have escalated their bullying of Congress over Taiwan, in one case even sending personnel to harass a congressional aide at gatherings hosted by the embassies of other countries, National Review has learned.
These incidents, reported here for the first time, mark a new escalation of the sort of Wolf Warrior–diplomacy pursued by China’s embassy in the United States. Highly unusual in themselves, the interactions follow other stepped-up efforts in recent months to aggressively push Beijing’s line on U.S. soil, including the embassy’s collaboration with a since-fired congressional aide to arrange meetings for Chinese diplomats with other Hill staffers.
The incident with the congressional aide occurred at a recent event hosted by the embassy of a Southeast Asian country. The aide was standing with a group of people when a Chinese diplomat approached, singling him out, as the aide told NR on condition of anonymity.
The Chinese diplomat, a member of the embassy’s political team, told the congressional aide that his boss’s support of Taiwan would cause a war and that this lawmaker would be responsible for it. The diplomat’s complaints grew so aggressive and loud that others nearby stepped away from the conversation. The interaction lasted about a half hour.
Then, two weeks later, at an event hosted by a different embassy in Washington, the same Chinese diplomat, accompanied by his deputy, approached that aide again with similar complaints. The staffer told NR that he viewed the two incidents as attempts at coercion and intelligence-gathering.
Ari Blaff reports on a far-reaching bail-reform law that could supercharge Illinois’s crime problem:
Illinois prosecutors on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm as the clock ticks down to January 1, 2023, the day the state’s criminal-justice system will be turned upside down by a new law that rewrites the rule book around how suspected criminals are treated as they await trial.
“The first thing about this bill I would say is it’s unprecedented,” Thomas Haine, the Republican state’s attorney (SA) of Madison County, Ill., told National Review.
“As far as I can tell, it is the first complete elimination of cash bail,” he continued. “From my mind, it’s the story of the century. You have a complete revolution in the cash-bail set-up in Illinois that was passed without any understanding of what it contained.”
The Safety, Accountability, Fairness, and Equity-Today Act, otherwise known as SAFE-T, has flown largely under the national radar since passing on January 13, 2021, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the resulting national protests that brought accusations of racism in the criminal-justice system to the fore. It was signed into law the following month and will come into force on the first day of the new year.
Driven by activist demands for ‘equity’ and ‘redistributive justice,’ billionaire Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker and his allies pushed through a bill that has left nearly every legal figure in the state scratching their head. . . .
Some critics have focused on relatively minor facets of the bill that will snarl the justice system, such as the requirement that suspects be given three telephone calls at each location they’re brought to in the custody process, which will cause a “logistical nightmare” according to former NYPD inspector Paul Mauro.
However, according to prosecutors who spoke to National Review, the real threat is the total elimination of the cash-bail system. The move will reshape the criminal landscape of one of the largest states in the union and make Illinois the first state in American history to abolish cash bail without any backstops.
“They’re turning us into guinea pigs for the sake of innovation, without adequate vetting,” Haine said.
Shout-Outs
George Will, at the Washington Post: For the good of the country, Biden and Harris should bow out of the 2024 election
Michael Shellenberger: Pelosi & Kavanaugh Murder Plots Show Media Double Standard
Quin Hillyer, at the Washington Examiner: Advice to college students: Get out of your bubbles and get real
Christopher Bedford, at the Federalist: Union Station Is Symbolic Of America’s Spiraling Crime And Despair
CODA