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This is good so I’m just going to post link to the Pelosi video. There’s no hard evidence he was a right wing intruder. I notice two things he had a drink in his hand and was partially undressed. Now if someone broke into my house late I’d probably be in my boxers. But I wouldn’t be wearing a button down shirt too; I’d be topless or in a t-shirt
I think the video will be interpreted both sides. It doesn’t prove he was paying a crazy gay prostitute to blow him but bodycam would lean in that direction instead of a red tribe terrorist.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/watch-paul-pelosi-hammer-attack-bodycam-video-released.
I guess bigger culture war issue is if he was just trying to get his dick sucked and the media said that was false and it was a right wing terrorist then basically confirms a lot of peoples view that they are lying to us. (Nothing wrong with trying to get your dick sucked).
Edit: there’s video of him breaking in which adds more to the intruder narrative I didn’t see previously still weird video of cops entering. Without breaking in video it looked more like a domestic.
If "The SFPD is so totally owned by the Pelosi's that they either fabricated DePape's confession or coerced him into a false confession" seems more plausible to you then "an 82 year old had a shitty security system, wore a button up shirt to bed, and had a funny expression on his face in a highly stressful situation" then you have some wild priors.
How does a random weirdo get into the house of the third most powerful person in the US?
In addition to their power, the Pelosis have over $100 million! Doesn't that buy you enough home security to keep out random weirdos in San Francisco, a city notoriously full of random weirdos who break into houses and cars?
I guess the same way a random weirdo gets into the house of the number one most powerful person in the US.
Sure, that's a good point. I suppose staggering incompetence and complacency is a decent answer.
Mid ranking judges in my much more peaceful country get offered extra home security. I would've thought very high-ranking officials in a violent country get proportionately more protection, especially given the hysteria about terrorism for the last 15 years.
As mentioned below, Nancy Pelosi has more protection, but she wasn't there, and since historically, with very few exceptions, violence against politicians in America is 'crazed weirdo with barely coherent thoughts who does it in public', nobody thinks somebody is going to try to break-in to a prominent politician's home and commit violence.
Hell, even at the height of political violence in the 70's, while Italian Prime Ministers were getting kidnapped, our violence left-wingers...bombed some post offices and office buildings, but made sure the bombs went off when nobody would be there.
I still can't believe a very rich and powerful family in the richest country in the world don't have shatter-proof windows. It's one thing if you have some men blasting down the bulletproof windows with sustained machine-gun fire, or if they use some kind of advanced tactic. Even an intermediate tactic or a basic tactic is something. I've seen tiktoks from South Africans showing more serious and elaborate security systems than whatever was going on here.
Nobody in the whole bloated US security/intelligence sector thought 'Al Qaeda has a bunch of skilled and capable operators working hard on doing us harm, so we should ensure our highest ranking politicans have decent protection at home, that their close relatives aren't kidnapped or anything'? Nobody thought that maybe the US Capitol should have doors that can lock and block unarmed masses of angry people, let alone well-armed terrorists prepared to die for their beliefs? What were they spending all that anti-terror money on? Doesn't this seem absurd?
But the US isn't South Africa. Hell, it isn't even Europe, where there are soldiers with assault rifles on what seems like every street and subway station in Western Europe and 3x the number of police per capita (humorously, this is what the average European internet commentator appears to think the US is like). Though considering the amount of political violence that occurs in Europe, and how packed together everyone is in the nations there, the fact that the social systems are basically expecting a revolution every 50 years or so (France is on its Fifth Republic in 200 years- in fact, apart from the UK, most European polities are less than 30 years old- and this isn't even ahistorical for them) they absolutely have a reason for the increased security.
To my knowledge, "they don't actually have any skilled and capable operators" was their assessment, and that assessment was ultimately correct (alternately, their SIGINT is so good they managed to stop everything; I'm half willing to believe this but ultimately have no real basis for that).
Why would it need that? You can normally just waltz right in to the Capitol; it's not like those other countries where "government is this closed-off, special thing". Unlike 24 Sussex Drive or Buckingham Palace, you can just go in to the White House to the point that they have organized tours most every day. You'd kind of expect that from a country with such anime-esque slogans and beliefs about government... especially since most people still believe in it 250 years after the fact.
(Also, the symmetry in the US massively favors the attacker- the tools for that are not only readily available to basically anyone, but ownership of them for such a purpose is celebrated by half the nation and its founding document. It's probably not worth trying to stop even with added security across all politicians and their families, with the exception of the President and his Vice.)
Well, the US is an absurd country where most citizens are defended from others simply by being really spread out, defended from its enemies by two oceans, and rich enough that the people who are screwed up enough to attack politicians are relatively inept.
I should defend Britain here by saying that you can in fact just go and watch the proceedings of the House of Commons or Lords whenever you like. Unless you want to watch PMQs or a very important debate you don't have to book, you just walk in and queue. In quieter times you can often go straight in iirc, even though the gallery is quite small.
Also, you can actually just walk into the lobby of Parliament and ask to see your MP, and I am told that some MPs do sometimes (though probably relatively rarely) just go and see random constituents who turn up there and ask for them.
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