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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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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?

Whenever something violent happens to a congressperson, or even when there's a newsworthy bomb threat or police shooting, there's always a few thousand people who intuit that it was a false flag or a crazy soap opera event. They read a few dozen paragraphs in news stories, note perceived inconsistencies, and start posting. Some do it on discord, some write for 'fake news' websites. A few are making stuff up for clicks, but afaict most genuinely believe it. Almost always this ends up being completely made up, and when it isn't it's usually coincidental. (this guy was a FBI PLANT! [two weeks later] yeah, I called that he was a generic schizo instead of being politically motivated, the libs overreacted so hard lmao). It's really uninteresting to ask 'what are the consequences if it really was a gay lover' - it's like asking 'what if steve bannon and the russians really did personally fund republican stochastic terrorism'

but appears to have a set a life circumstances far outside of the standard Trump supporter. (Is that fair summation of the facts

This doesn't mean he wasn't a trump supporter, though, there are plenty of violent and insane members of both parties, given each is ~ 1/3 of the us population. Obviously this doesn't mean any republican beliefs or policies are wrong either.