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Notes -
Since I don't see a thread about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband, what the hell, I guess I'll make one.
I'll probably do a poor job of cataloguing the current state of known facts, but as best I can...
Paul Pelosi's attacker was a guy name David DePape, he appears to have a fairly checkered mental health history, if not homeless, appears to have lived on the edge of homelessness, appears to have social media history that doesn't have zero overlap various right wing issues (apparently concerning Covid), but appears to have a set a life circumstances far outside of the standard Trump supporter. (Is that fair summation of the facts? I hope so, if not, my apologies).
Anyway, more interesting from my viewpoint, Hillary Clinton and Elon Musk exchanged tweets over various theories of the case. With Clinton basically saying this is Trump fault, and Elon linking to an article hypothesizing that DePape might have been a gay escort. Which the NY Times quickly declared misinformation (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/business/musk-tweets-hillary-clinton-pelosi-husband.html), Musk deleted his tweet.
As best I can tell, the gay escort theory at this point is almost entirely based on conjecture.
Here's my question, if the conjecture turns out to be correct, will it come to light? What concatenation of events would keep it from coming to light?
Right now DePape is under arrest for attempted murder, its not apparent to me if he's lawyered up or not yet, I assume at some point he's going to have to go on record establishing a timeline for what he was doing in the 5 or so hours prior to the incident, if he met Paul Pelosi in a gay bar, that seems like something that would be fairly straight forward to corroborate with witnesses, if they arranged a meeting on an app, it would seem that digital corroboration would be pretty straight forward.
Not sure about Paul Pelosi's current ability to speak with police, but I presume they're going to establish a timeline for him as well.
If that is what happened, what would keep if from coming to light? (I anticipate some joke about DePape committing suicide, but, that would obviously drive a fair amount of theorizing were it to happen).
Follow up question, what are the consequences if either story pans out?
I’m back to the usual refrain of every year since about 2015:
“How is this becoming partisan?”
Someone breaks in and makes a probably-political, certifiably-insane attack on a public figure. This is obviously bad. Stochastic terrorism is bad. Defending the actions is (or should be?) basically off the table.
That leaves deflection. First responses in last week’s thread: “gosh those wacky Green Party members” followed by a squabble over whether or not DePape’s emphatic support for QAnon and Trump meant he counted as Republican. Now: one of the most powerful men in America memeing about how the attacker might have been a gay escort, and thus...it’s a Democrat own-goal? What?
I’m reminded of any number of events in summer 2020 in which people tried to rationalize rioting. “Yeah, I get that XYZ was unjust, but I’d like to step back to the part where y’all decided to start burning stuff.” When the bad thing is indefensible, we are more likely to see deflection.
Presumably the motivation is getting out ahead of the Other Team abusing their actual, legitimate criticism. Even if Democrats somehow resisted the lure of equating DePape with mainstream Republicans—which he clearly was not—, there’s still hay to be made of the extremists. It’s the traditional setup for a little “something has to be done.” But is throwing out bullshit theories really the best way to counter it?
I suspect that the answer is no, and that the mainstream GOP response is a more measured rejection. I don’t have evidence for this at the moment; if anyone has examples of GOP officials making public statements on the matter, I’d like to see them. But my theory is that when the official policy is silence, in the era of social media, that’s effectively handing a megaphone to the fringe.
Senate Republicans have made the usual statements, e.g.
https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/1586081299076419586
https://www.sasse.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2022/10/sasse-statement-on-pelosi-attack
https://twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell/status/1586017719912210440
On the other hand, as far as I can tell there have been no comments from Trump or prominent House Republicans like McCarthy or Jordan. And conservative media has been markedly less measured, where aside from the rumormongering there's the position that this is really the fault of Democrats for failing to control crime (see also: MTG in the House).
Thanks. This sort of quiet condemnation is pretty close to what I was expecting: polite solidarity. It’s decidedly not a mea culpa, which would be foolish, and it’s also not full-throated spin.
I’m not sure if the media response supports my theory. On one hand, it’s good sensationalism, especially reporting on meta-drama like Musk tweets. On the other, I expected more lockstep with the party.
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