We've been watching this story all weekend with growing bewilderment. Last Friday morning, as you know, around 2 a.m., police arrived at the home of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. It's in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Inside the home, they found Pelosi's 82-year-old husband, Paul, and another man, 40 years younger, called David DePape. Nancy Pelosi was out of town at the time.
In full view of the police, DePape hit Paul Pelosi in the head two times with a hammer. Both Pelosi and DePape were then taken immediately to a local hospital— Pelosi for his head injuries and DePape for reasons that are still not clear. DePape was later charged in federal court with assault and attempted kidnapping. At this point, that's what we can say for certain. David DePape assaulted Paul Pelosi with a hammer. Apparently, DePape has admitted that in police custody, but beyond those facts, there was much in the story that remains muddy.
How, for example, did DePape get inside the Pelosi home? That's the first question. Last year, ABC News reported what you already guessed, which is that Pelosi has round the clock protection at her houses. "She has her own security. She has the Capitol Police. They fly all the way out here from Washington, D.C. with her." And yet in this case, San Francisco D.A. Brooke Jenkins says that there was no security present at the Pelosi home on Friday night. And that's pretty strange because according to multiple accounts, even when Pelosi isn't at home, her houses are well-guarded. Again, as you would expect.
Our friend Harmeet Dhillon told us that when her firm recently tried to serve a lawsuit against Paul Pelosi at various properties he owns, all of them were guarded by "multiple law enforcement officers on the perimeter." So how did DePape, get past security that apparently wasn't there? And why wasn't it there if, in fact, it wasn't? We know he got inside and once he was inside, what exactly happened next? Well, accounts of that are changing.
At the first press conference on Friday, San Francisco police suggested there was a third person in the home when police arrived and Politico dutifully reported that, "officers arrived at the house, knocked on the front door and were led inside by an unknown person." In other words, by a person who was not David DePape or Paul Pelosi. Now, Politico never formally corrected this claim. Instead, just two days later, Politico, the same publication, attacked anyone who repeated its own reporting as a crazed conspiracy monger: "Pro-Trump commentators weighed in online to raise questions about the investigation based on unfounded and false claims. Among those baseless claims that a third person answered the door when police arrived at the Pelosi home."
Three separate adjectives, knocking down that idea, but the question remains, was there a third person at the home? We don't know, but it's not crazy to assume there was. Here's how today's charging documents describe the scene inside the house: "When the door was opened, Pelosi and DePape were both holding a hammer with one hand and DePape had his other hand holding on to Pelosi's forearm. Pelosi greeted the officers. The officers asked them what was going on. DePape responded, everything was good."
It's an awful scene in some ways, but here's the critical clause: "when the door was opened." Well, opened by whom? Common sense suggests it probably couldn't have been Pelosi or Pappy who opened it. They were locked in a life-or-death drama, a struggle, over a hammer. The documents filed today assert that Paul Pelosi had never seen David DePape before yet in Pelosi's 911 call he knew DePape's first name and apparently referred to him as a friend. Here's the audio. This is from a dispatcher relaying Paul Pelosi's call.
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DISPATCH AUDIO: RP stated that there was a male in the home and that he is going to wait for his wife. He said that he doesn’t know who the male is, but he advised that his name is David and that he is a friend.
What does that mean exactly? Well, again, we don't know, and we can't know. We do know that anyone who has ever met Paul Pelosi can tell you he is an awfully nice man. He's warm, and he's friendly, and he certainly didn't deserve to be hit in the head with a hammer. It's horrifying that he was. But as long as this is a news story with public policy implications, and unfortunately, that's what it's become, it is fair to ask the obvious questions, as you would, about any other violent crime that occurs in America, and especially this one, since so many facts, basic facts seem to be in dispute.
Local KTVU investigative reporter Evan Sernoffsky, for example, initially reported that DePape was "found in underwear" when police arrived. Today, Sernoffsky made a specific point of retracting that claim. "I'm now told by other sources that DePape was not dressed only in his underwear." Well, okay, fair enough. We'd be satisfied with either explanation. Not really our business. But you can't blame (and this is the point), you can't blame people watching all of this at home for thinking that maybe there's something weird going on here. Parts of the official account don't seem to make any sense.
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The solution, obviously, is to release the police bodycam footage from last Friday. That's often done immediately in cases like this, cases that attract heavy public scrutiny. Transparency restores the public's faith in the system. It is the only thing that does. In fact, that's the whole point of body cams, to reassure people that they can really know what happened. Transparency is the antidote to "misinformation." On the other hand, if you want people to fall headfirst into crazed conspiracy theories, then you would keep lying and hiding things and yet for some reason, the San Francisco Police Department is refusing to release Friday's body cam video.
We learned that today when we filed a records request. No chance, they said. So, until we see that tape, there is a lot that we cannot know, but the main question tonight, (one that's going to affect your life going forward because this story will affect your life), the question is, who exactly is David DePape?
Many in the media seem studiously uninterested. They don't really want to know. At a police press conference last week, a reporter was caught on a hot mic being instructed by someone not to discuss DePape in any great detail. It was left in the end to a journalist who doesn't work for a big media outlet, independent reporter Michael Shellenberger, to fill in some of the blanks. Shellenberger first did the obvious. He went to where DePape was living, across the bay in Berkeley. You're seeing an image of it on your screen right now.
Apparently, DePape was camping full-time in a dilapidated Ken-Kesey-style school bus, complete with a gay pride flag out front and a sign that reads "Berkeley Stands Against Hate." Behind the bus hangs a BLM banner. Politically, this picture could not be clearer. You know where this guy stands.
But Shellenberger and others kept digging. They found that DePape was, in fact, well known in the area, in the entire Bay Area, as a hallucinogenic drug enthusiast and a semiprofessional nudist. He often appeared at nudist theme events. Does David DePape have a prior criminal history? That's an obvious question and perhaps a relevant one. But we can't answer it because, once again, authorities in San Francisco have refused to tell us or anyone else.
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We do know that the people around David DePape believe that he was completely deranged. The ones who knew him best thought that. The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed his ex-girlfriend, who reported that DePape is mentally ill and struggles with drugs. For example, he once thought he was "Jesus for a year. He's never been able to hold a job," said the former girlfriend. "He has been homeless. This person really does suffer from mental illness and that is probably why he was there at 2 a.m.." She described him as a "broken child in an adult body with serious mental problems." DePape's neighbors, who would know, said more or less the same thing.
REPORTER: Anything strange about him or anything that stood out?
TRISH, DAVID DEPAPE’S NEIGHBOR: There's something strange about the whole household. The entire household is very, very strange.
REPORTER: How about him?
TRISH, DAVID DEPAPE’S NEIGHBOR: He is birds of a feather with akin to them. So, they are just, you know, nudist drug abusers and that's who gravitates toward them.
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So, just another homeless, mentally ill drug addict with a fondness for BLM. That's not quite so unusual in San Francisco. Oh, and there's one other highly unsurprising thing about David DePape. He's also an illegal alien. Today, Fox's Bill Melugin learned that DePape, who was originally from Canada, has long overstayed his visa, so he is currently in this country illegally.
So, to restate, the perpetrator in this violent crime against Paul Pelosi is a mentally ill, drug addicted illegal alien nudist who takes hallucinogens and lives in a hippie school bus in Berkeley with a BLM banner and a pride flag out front. Take those uncontested facts and let them rattle around your brain for a moment until a recognizable pattern emerges. What does this sound like to you? If you guessed, this is obviously a textbook case of homegrown right-wing extremism, well, then, obviously, you've been watching a lot of cable news today. Here's a selection:
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN: Is this political violence, in your opinion?
JOHN MILLER: It seems to be clear that the content of his social media and the statements he allegedly made about "Where's Nancy? We're going to wait for Nancy" certainly points in that direction.
TIFFANY CROSS, MSNBC: It seems like there's this effort to normalize this kind of behavior and to make Trumpers feel at home and prioritize their feelings.
JEFF ZELENY, MSNBC: This is about election denialism. What has happened over the last two years has seeped into the minds and the thoughts of some unstable people.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI, MSNBC: Deranged right-wing fanatics, Trump Media allies and some of the most powerful people in the world were feverishly trying to stir up conspiracy theories that distracted from the central political headline of this story that years of Republican propaganda and Trump fueled fascism led 42-year-old David DePape to break into Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco home.
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Well, to be fair, the fact that Mika Brzezinski has a high paying job does give rise to conspiracy theories. I mean, in a fair society, how could that happen? But it has.
The bottom line is, ladies and gentlemen, the mentally ill, homeless, illegal alien, drug addict who lives in a painted school bus in Berkeley with the BLM flag is actually, despite all appearances, another member of Donald Trump's QAnon army. As CNN commentator David Axelrod put it, "far-right conspiracy theories" are to blame here. And of course, Jen Rubin at The Washington Post accused right wing Republicans of "inciting violence" against the Pelosi family using this illegal alien, homeless guy on drugs. "The far-right demonized Pelosi and that led to the attack," read a banner on MSNBC.
On what grounds, other than political desperation, are they saying things like this? Well, according to some reports, the homeless, mentally ill, drug addicted illegal alien David DePape somehow maintained websites with right wing content on them. One of these sites was apparently called "friendy-frens-dot-com" and the strange thing about that website is that the web address for it was registered back in September, but there's content on the site that is backdated to August and internet archiving services didn't register any content from that blog, apparently David DePape's blog, until October 28. That was the day of DePape's attack on Paul Pelosi.
On October 28, "friendy-frens-dot-com" suddenly included a bunch of incoherent posts about UFOs and Peter Navarro. I'm not making that up. Those are the facts. What do they mean? Well, it's a right-wing conspiracy, obviously. Better indict Marjorie Taylor Greene for the crime.
Keep in mind, as you shake your head in bewilderment at all of this, that the midterm elections are next Tuesday and Democrats are in trouble, and they believe the attack on Paul Pelosi might help them. As Margaret Brennan explained over on CBS, because a mentally ill illegal alien attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband is now immoral to criticize the leader of the Democrats a week before an election. Savor this.
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MARGARET BRENNAN, CBS NEWS: Republican candidates assume more than 116 million on ads that mentioned Speaker Pelosi by name in this cycle. If this is about the issues, why shouldn't make it about the issues? We are 8 days out. Don't you think this needs to change? Why not pull some of these ads.
"Why do you make it about the issues?" said the lady who spent four years screaming about Donald Trump, the man. It's hilarious and brazen and shameless and the second the midterms are over, they'll stop, but the point is, as always, all the journalists got the same memo and they're all running with the same memo, of course using exactly the same words. Ashley Parker at The Washington Post wrote this, "In 2022, the GOP spent $40 million vilifying Pelosi in ads and on Friday, her husband was attacked by a hammer." Do you see the direct correlation?
If you criticize Nancy Pelosi, obviously you're endangering her family. Of course, she does run the political party that's facing re-election right now, that controls the United States Congress. She's third in line for the presidency. But you can't criticize her because if you do, you're just like your acolyte...DePape.
So the Republican Party clearly needs to stop running advertisements that hurt Democrats ahead of the midterms. Please.
That's the problem here, not the mentally ill, BLM nudist in Berkeley. That they're really arguing is in the wake of this attack, which is awful against someone who did not deserve it and we want to be clear about that. Paul Pelosi really is a nice guy. Hard to believe, but he is. But in the wake of that, they're telling you unfortunately, you can no longer have free speech. We can't. They're telling you this is an example of "stochastic terrorism," which is a completely meaningless phrase that emerged like a virus out of the university to infect our public discourse or more precisely, to suppress our public discourse.
Reuters has reported that "terrorism and extremism experts believe it could be an example of the growing threat of so-called stochastic terrorism in which sometimes unstable individuals are inspired to violence by hate speech."
What is hate speech, by the way? All of a sudden, everyone in the media has sort of, without explaining why, agreed that there's this thing called hate speech that's real and probably actionable. They can find a billion-dollar judgment against you if you commit hate speech, but just to remind everyone watching, there's no such thing as hate speech. Hate speech is speech people hate, usually the people in power. The truth is all speech, except speech that encourages people to imminent illegal action, like "go shoot that guy", short of that, there's no hate speech. All of it is allowed under the United States' Constitution, which is our final hope.
But what they're telling you is that dissenting in any way from the editorial positions of, say, The Washington Post or The Daily Beast or The Atlantic Magazine, disagreeing with those publications and the consensus they represent isn't simply immoral. No, it's worse than that. It's violence. It gets people killed. That's the stochastic terrorism. When you question, say, COVID protocols or drag queen story hour or the war against Russia, you are effectively smashing an 82-year-old man in the head with a hammer. They're making that argument.
And of course, they have no choice but to make that argument. Democrats are very worried about the coming elections, but they're absolutely terrified that Elon Musk may allow people to criticize them on Twitter and they know Republicans don't seem to know, which is without censorship, the Democratic Party cannot continue to hold power.
Democrats understand that. They have nothing to offer. They have to stop you from asking questions, so they have to crush Elon Musk, not because he's a right-winger, but because he will allow their opponents to speak. And of course, they are using the attack on poor Paul Pelosi to do just that.
The New York Times has just come out with a piece that says "Elon Musk in a Tweet, shares a link from a site known to publish fake news." Really? What did Elon Musk do? Well, he linked to an article about how Paul Pelosi called the guy in his home a friend. Well, that's what the name on one tape says. You can draw your own conclusions or not, or maybe you don't care, which is also fine. How is that fake? Seems to be real. NBC News is Ben Collins explaining that Musk's tweets are "how you lose a democracy in the age of the internet."
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Oh, by asking questions. Jimmy Kimmel attacked Musk personally, used to be a comic, sad to watch that decline. "It's been interesting," Kimmel wrote to Musk, "to watch you blossom from the electric car guy into a fully formed piece of …" human excrement. Then CNN told its viewers today that in the wake of the attack on Paul Pelosi, Elon Musk no longer let people speak freely on Twitter. That was his plan, but no more. In the wake of the attack on Pelosi, Musk must retain "what the far-right calls censorship" The far-right?
We don't need to be far-right to identify the censorship, because censorship is exactly what it is and to restate, Democrats could no longer exist or hold power without it. They need censorship, and they're going to try to use this horrifying crime to hold on to it.
But something else is going on here too, something beneath even all of that. Obviously, by immediately politicizing the attacks, Democrats get a lot potentially, but the main thing they do is effectively obscure the deepest truth of all, which is that what happened to Paul Pelosi is not so unusual anymore. Crime in this country is out of control by every measure. Attacks by the mentally ill, homeless, even non nudist who don't live in buses, but the mentally ill homeless are now their own category. They're a feature of life in our cities, in fact, of every part of this country controlled by the Democratic Party. If you live in one of those places, no matter who you vote for, you know that that's true. You're pushed in front of a subway train by one of them. That's entirely real. Here's one recent and especially awful example from California.
A 54-year-old man and his 22-year-old daughter were just stabbed to death in the parking lot of a Kohl’s in Palmdale by a mentally ill homeless man. Not an unusual story, but a particularly awful one. Here's a local news account:
REPORTER: Residents say there are multiple homeless encampments in the area and that people are known to live out of their cars in the back of this particular parking lot. Everyone said they're shocked by the violence.
CASEY COLLIER, PALMDALE RESIDENT: For me, I was like dumbfounded. This thing like, wait, somebody just got stabbed in broad daylight? I mean, like again, it doesn't matter if it's daylight or nighttime, but the fact that people have the audacity, which means, hey, people don't care, you know, especially when you're dealing with the type of mentality that these homeless people have, they don't care. So, to find out, like, wait a minute, somewhere where I go shopping, to get gas, my bank is right here, but then some dead person is right there. That's infuriating and sad.
To restate with heartfelt sincerity, we couldn't feel worse about what happened to Paul Pelosi. He didn't deserve it. On the other hand, if you're going to be injured in a violent crime in 2022, not so surprising that that crime was committed by a mentally ill homeless man because so many crimes are committed by mentally ill homeless people. A fact that everyone who lives in the city understands perfectly well and the people who are making it possible, the leaders of the Democratic Party, assiduously ignore.
This summer, a nonprofit director in San Francisco, for example, a man called James Spingola asked two homeless men to move away from the steps of a community center. In response, the homeless man violently beat him with a wooden plank and sent him to the hospital. This happened at 11 a.m. in broad daylight. This happens all the time and here's the point. The psycho drug addled zombies who do it are usually released the same day to do it again. Everyone knows that. It's not an accident. It's the result of policy, policies that Nancy Pelosi supports in her own city.
But in this case, the guy did not walk because it happened in Nancy Pelosi's House. So, the guy is still in jail. He's not benefiting from cashless bail. The police got there in 2 minutes in San Francisco. That's four times faster than the average response time in San Francisco. Four times!
The lesson here couldn't be more obvious and they're screaming is designed to keep you from reaching this conclusion, but here it is, Nancy Pelosi and her party, the Democratic Party – it's not an overstatement to say this – have deliberately created a breakdown in law and order and safety and quality of life in your neighborhood. Yet, they are given special treatment themselves when it happens to them.
So, you can grieve the attack on Paul Pelosi and see it as horrifying because it is and still understand that the response to it would not be extended to you. It's a double standard. It's a two-tiered system of justice. That's completely unacceptable and it's not justice. In fact, it's the opposite.
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The media ought to be saying something about this. This is happening. This crime specifically happened, but so many others have happened because of policies designed to allow them to happen and someone in the press should point that out. "Hey, Paul Pelosi is not the only guy who got attacked by a nut case homeless guy this month," but they're not saying that and because they're not saying that Democratic politicians get to skate and not just skate, but to grandstand on Republican violence in ways that any person with a sense of shame would be totally incapable of doing because you'd hate yourself for doing it. But they don't hate themselves. They'll say whatever it takes.
On the very same day that Barack Obama blamed Republicans for assaulting Paul Pelosi, Obama was campaigning in Wisconsin for Tony Evers. Does that name sound familiar? That's the governor who let homicidal mobs take over the city of Kenosha two years ago for political reasons. Watch this.
BARACK OBAMA: We've got politicians who work to stir up division, to try to make us angry and afraid of one another for their own advantage and all of it gets amped up, hyped up 24/7 by social media, because a lot of times those are their for-profit platforms and they find it more profitable to feed you controversy and conflict instead of facts and truth and sometimes it can turn dangerous.
Oh, your speech turns dangerous. Other people are stirring up resentment. Really? No president in American history ever caused, intentionally caused, more racial division, more race hate than Barack Obama did. Of course, it was the key to a second term, obviously. But the solution to something that he did is prohibiting you from saying what you think. Shutting down your constitutionally protected right, your God-given right to say what you think is true is always the solution because they conflate words with violence when it suits them.
In Georgia last week, Barack Obama said Democrats, the party that defunded the police, the Democratic Party, somehow, he said, bears no responsibility for the rise in violent crime all over the country. In fact, Obama pretended Democrats had not voted to defund the police at all. "Who actually voted against more resources for the police departments?" he asked.
It's like if you say anything maybe it works. Who oversees Baltimore; Gary, Indiana; Minneapolis; New York; Seattle and Portland, Oregon? How are those cities doing? Speaking of shamelessness, Kathy Hochul just went to on Al Sharpton's show to claim that the crime wave, the one that you're watching, the one that may have hurt you or killed one of your neighbors, it's all fake, in the statement that is crazier than anything Alex Jones has ever thought.
GOV. HOCHUL: They have a conspiracy going all across America to try and convince people that in Democratic states, they are not is safe. Well, guess what? They're also not only election deniers, they're data deniers. The data shows that shootings and murders are down in our state by 15%, even in New York City, down 20% on Long Island, where Lee Zeldin comes from.
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That's just a lie, actually. New York is so dangerous that people are leaving. Rents haven't gone down because foreign investors are buying up a lot of the buildings, but people are leaving New York in droves. Of course, but according to Kathy Hochul in a claim that is truly crazier than anything Alex Jones has ever even thought in the shower to himself, Kathy Hochul is telling you that the data are fake. So here you have a city in which, New York City, subway ridership has dropped by 40% over the last two years.
Now, according to Kathy Hochul it's not because subway riders are being pushed in front of trains. People are being attacked by mentally a whole homeless. No, it's because apparently millions of New Yorkers are watching Fox News. They've been fooled by right-wing propaganda into thinking the subway is dangerous. That's what she's suggesting.
This is too stupid. This is a lie. Voters know it's a lie and when Democrats get crushed in next week's midterms, it'll be in part because people who live in cities and states run by liberals understand that what happened to Paul Pelosi could very well happen to them, and no one would care. "Morning Joe" would pretend it never happened.
