First of all, I’m furious that Nancy Pelosi’s house was broken into and her 82 year old husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer, fracturing his skull. She and her family did not deserve this. But I’m even more pissed off at the motive. The perpetrator was marinating his brain with lies generated by the right, and it caused him to believe what he was doing something was in some way warranted.
…a blog written by a user who called himself “daviddepape” contains an array of angry and paranoid postings. The blog’s domain was registered to an address in Richmond, Calif., in August, and a resident of that town said that Mr. [David] DePape lived at that address. From August until the day before the attack on Mr. Pelosi, the blog featured a flurry of antisemitic sentiments and concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet.
One of the blog posts suggested that there had been no mass gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, and others were accompanied by malicious and stereotypical images. Another reposted a video lecture defending Adolf Hitler.
In one post, written on Oct. 19, the author urged former President Donald J. Trump to choose Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, as his vice-presidential candidate in 2024.
It may be true, as Fox News host Jesse Watters says, that “People are being hit with hammers every day.” But there’s no denying that Paul Pelosi was hit by a hammer because a bunch of extremely horrible people made up a bunch of lies.
And now it has resulted in a vicious attempted murder of the Speaker of the House, who thankfully was not home, and her elderly husband.
There are any number of ways to fight back against this. What’s certain is that it cannot be allowed to stand.
And I know political figures on the right have been attacked, most famously at a Congressional baseball game in 2017. I know someone traveled to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with the intention of killing him before changing their mind and turning themselves in. These acts are deplorable no matter who is involved.
But look at the things that David DePape was led to believe. It’s a combination of age-old fascist anti-Semitism and white nationalism and brand new manufactured right-wing bullshit. It’s no accident that these two genres of hate meld so seemlessly together in the mind of a man who’s strategizing Donald Trump’s next presidential campaign.
And watch how the right makes excuses, engages in whataboutism, and refuses to even express an ounce of concern of sympathy for the Pelosi family. That’s now how the left reacted to the shooting at the baseball game or the news that Justice Kavanaugh had been at risk.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who just purchased Twitter, is using the social media platform to amplify the very pedophilia conspiracies that motivated the attack. Both he and Tulsi Gabbard, who was Mr. DePape’s preferred replacement for “Hang” Mike Pence on Trump’s 2024 ticket, have been working overtime to help Vladimir Putin divide the West and defeat Ukraine. These are not coincidences.
So, yeah, I’m fucking furious.
One of my pet peeves for over a decade now is the astonishing (to my mind) lack of basic political savvy and will by pro-democracy center-right Republicans. At any time since 2009, 5-10 centrist GOP senators (e.g., Collins, Corker, Flake, Portman, Romney) could have formed a Blue Dog-like caucus with which they could have wielded the balance of power to: 1) strengthen their faction within the party, 2) win legislation, policy, and funding for their states and priorities, and 3) block or slow anti-democratic behavior by the rest of their caucus. Instead, they proceeded in an ad-hoc, every-person-for-themself fashion and repeatedly lost votes, power, and influence.
With this attack on Mr. Pelosi, I’m perfectly willing to stipulate that I have no idea what conversations are taking place behind closed doors. Regardless, prominent pro-democracy conservatives should be doing everything in their power to get McConnell, McCarthy, DeSantis, Abbott, and other party leaders to speak out forcefully and unequivocally to denounce the attack, and to denounce the conspiracies and hatred that propelled it. Failing that, they (e.g., Christie, Romney, Chaney, W. Bush) should jointly issue as public a statement as possible to that effect in their own names.
The same goes for pro-democracy conservative business leaders. There is, I still think, a critical mass of pro-democracy conservative and centrist voters who desperately need some clear and brave political leadership. And the rest of us need pro-democracy conservatives to provide it.
“[P]ro-democracy center-right Republicans” don’t really exist anymore, and to the extent they do, it is as ghosts.
And what COULD they do anyway? When things have gone to far, it’s an admission that something finally broke or was damaged in a way that can’t be fixed.
Thanks for your response. I agree it’s an enormously frustrating situation, and that they are by now a tiny faction of the Republican party. (There were 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021; only two of them have a chance to remain in Congress next year.) And they’re not going to turn the GOP away from fascism any time soon.
What they *could* do is provide leadership for conservative and centrist pro-democracy voters who are looking for someone to vote for. (Cheney endorsing Democrats running against election deniers is one example.)
Ronald Reagan used to tell a story about a (possibly fictional) supporter who’d previously been a Democrat all her life who explained, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party; the party left me.” It was a good political story because it provided what the sociologists call a “permission structure” for a certain set of voters to flip from one party to the other.
Final note: we don’t need a lot of them to flip. Nationally, if 2% of the electorate followed Chaney’s lead, that’d probably be enough to save for democracy.
I kinda doubt those people you mentioned could form a pool party. They need a whole lot of help or they will drown. Trump would not hear of it and explode and all will run away.
Yeah, it’s a small group (and shrinking steadily, look what’s happened to House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021). My point is simply that in the struggle against fascism, every vote matters. Look what happened in Georgia in last year’s Senate run-off elections; just a small percentage of lifelong Republicans either not voting or voting for Ossoff and Warnock flipped control of the Senate.
That’s *not how the left reacted
It’s not one country! When will we come to our senses and get out of this abusive marriage?
Meh. It’s our country. They can leave if they want to.
I’m going to guess that even when this dude was apparently blogging as an anti-war “leftist”, he was probably consuming some pretty unhinged blogs and websites that existed at the time in the darker corners of the anti-war blogosphere (anti-Semites, 9/11 truthers, etc.). That part of the anti-war blogosphere was definitely not leftist, but was very toxic, and conspiracy-theory laden. He found Gamergate, and became openly right-wing from there, and being fed a similar diet of hatred, just with a different emphasis.
I am not surprised that folks who spend their entire adult lives being fed a media diet of eliminationist rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and are incited to commit acts of violence eventually go out and commit acts of violence. I’m honestly not sure that any of these folks can be reached at this point. I’d love to be optimistic. I don’t know if the non-Trump GOP figures still standing have enough legitimacy or political capital to very loudly say that this has all gone way too far and it stops now. I doubt they exist at this point.
We’re at a point I never wanted to see in my lifetime. I honestly expect the level of violence in this country to get far worse before it might show some signs of getting better. I hate being this pessimistic. Yet, here I am.
An essay (On Lying About Violence) worth reading in this context. We don’t have a functional system when one major party is inciting violence and spreading lies. We’re in for a rough time.
https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/on-lying-about-violence
Yet another example of things going way too far:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93a8qp/pennsylvania-richard-ringer-assault