Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

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Nomomo
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Re: Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

Post by Nomomo »

If anyone did not already know that Elon Musk. the richest man in the world. is a gawdamned asshole, they do now.
Paul Pelosi Conspiracy Theory Trends on Twitter After Elon Musk Pushes It

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234621217/

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Re: Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

Post by Vēritās »

As usual, the board racist is engaging in whataboutism and red herrings to avoid the obvious fact that one of his ideological brothers tried to murder a prominent Democratic figure. The moral depravity of today's GOP is personified in nearly every post made by ajax today.
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
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Re: Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

Post by Vēritās »

The right-wing ecosystem that created the Paul Pelosi conspiracy theory
It took roughly 48 hours for the right-wing media ecosystem to turn a story about a man who committed political violence after becoming consumed by right-wing conspiracy theories about the depravity of the left into another right-wing conspiracy theory about the depravity of the left.
(it took Binger only 30 minutes to start propagating this dishonest piece of mierda)
On Friday morning, a man broke into the San Francisco home of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He was reportedly carrying zip ties and duct tape and, according to law enforcement, was looking for the woman who is second in line to the presidency. She was not present, but the man did find and severely beat her 82-year-old husband, Paul, with a hammer, sending him to the hospital for emergency surgery.

The assailant, who was arrested and identified by police as David DePape, had an extensive Internet footprint that suggests a standard case of online right-wing radicalization. DePape’s writings show his adherence to a wide range of conspiracy theories that are often propped up or adopted in their entirety by prominent right-wing media figures and Republican officials. President Joe Biden on Friday night condemned the impact the Republican Party’s “vitriol” has on those who may be mentally unbalanced.

But in the days since the attack, people who get their news from right-wing sources have instead been told an absurd and baseless conspiracy theory. In this telling, there was no home invasion; instead DePape is actually Paul Pelosi’s leftist gay lover, and the police, Democrats, and the press are covering up that the assault was really a lovers’ spat. The tale was quickly adopted by influential right-wing figures – including Twitter owner Elon Musk – and, if past is prologue, will be accepted by a sizable percentage of the GOP base.

The Pelosi conspiracy theory took hold so quickly thanks to the parallel media ecosystem the right constructed over decades. That ecosystem features numerous outlets that generate conspiracy theories for partisan and financial gain; food-chain mechanisms that swiftly distribute them to millions of people; an existing right-wing audience trained to demand such fantasies; minimal internal guardrails within the right-wing press to provide more credible information; and strong external barriers against contrary information from mainstream news sources.
How the right built a Paul Pelosi conspiracy theory
The right’s conspiracy theorists went to work soon after news of Paul Pelosi’s assault broke. They create dubious but politically beneficial narratives by taking existing facts – particularly ones that emerge early in the life of a story, when initial reports are often wrong – mixing in falsehoods, and using wild logical jumps to put the result in a different context.

First, an investigative journalist at a local TV affiliate reported on Friday that the assailant was wearing only his underwear when police arrived. But the journalist retracted that reporting the same day, and no other outlet confirmed it.

Second, the dispatcher who received a 911 call from Paul Pelosi said that he had identified the intruder as a “friend.” But Pelosi, according to law enforcement, was making that call surreptitiously from the bathroom and speaking “in code” to the dispatcher in an attempt to avoid his suspicion.

Third, some alleged that there were no signs of forced entry at the Pelosi home, suggesting that Paul Pelosi had willingly let DePape inside. In fact, police say he forced entry through the rear door, and aerial photos and video show shattered glass around that entryway (in fact, other internet sleuths claim that the glass pattern is suspicious).

Fourth, Politico reported on Friday based on San Francisco Police Chief William Scott’s press conference that the first police officers responding on the scene “were let inside by an unknown person. They discovered DePape and Pelosi struggling for a hammer.” This generated speculation that a third individual had been present. But Scott did not actually say that, and the SFPD subsequently confirmed only two people, DePape and Paul Pelosi, were at the home when police arrived.

The right’s conspiracy theorists took those four pieces of evidence, mixed in Paul Pelosi’s May DUI charge, and concocted the narrative that hehad been the victim of a drunken gay lovers’ spat that was subsequently covered up.

By Sunday, versions of this speculation were rampant on the right. Commentators who present themselves as credible offered a version in which they were simply asking questions because the press supposedly refused to do so.

Those who lack such airs simply claimed, as Dinesh D’Douza did, that “this guy, the assailant, is either a sexual partner or a male prostitute, and this is a sexual rendezvous that went sideways.”

The website, the Santa Monica Observer, had previously alleged that Clinton died in 2016 and had been replaced by a body double for her presidential debate with Donald Trump.

At the same time, the right-wing media generated nonsensical explanations for why the assailant’s Internet footprint is forged and he’s actually a leftist. They cannot accept that the assailant believed right-wing conspiracy theories without taking on responsibility, so they’ve developed an alternate explanation instead.

Roughly 72 hours after news of the assault on Paul Pelosi had broken, the conspiracy theory had been promoted by a Republican member of Congress and by Donald Trump Jr., and “Pelosigaylover” was trending nationally on Twitter.
The conspiracy-minded ecosystem that fuels the right
The right-wing information ecosystem is built to create and propagate conspiracy theories like the latest drivel about the Pelosi attack.

On message boards and social media platforms, an army of right-wing would-be sleuths looking for political advantage or simple amusement are constantly on the hunt for raw materials that they can spin into these alternate narratives.

Hyperpartisan news sites with no journalistic standards – from local ones like the Santa Monica Observer to national players like Gateway Pundit – trawl those venues looking for stories that they can write up and monetize.

The conspiracy theories move up the right-wing media food chain, with more and more prominent influencers and outlets picking up the story and running with it, until it becomes pervasive on the right.

Sprawling conspiracy theories like 2020 election denial, QAnon, Pizzagate, and Gamergate – all of which DePape had championed – worked their way through these networks.

The right-wing audience is uniquely vulnerable to these narratives.

The right-wing press spent decades spinning out these politically convenient narratives about the diabolical nature of their perceived enemies until the audience came to demand them. Few on the right – and none with any real degree of influence – are interested in debunking the rampant lies once they get going. Instead, powerful figures at Fox News and elsewhere end up pushing the likes of QAnon talking points and scoffing at its extremism. And decades of right-wing attacks on the mainstream press have created a bubble in which the audience is unlikely to receive or credit contradictory information from those outlets.

The result is that we consistently see the conspiracy theories come to infest the ranks of the movement, from Vince Foster’s death to QAnon.

I expect the Paul Pelosi fantasy to follow the same route. Republican politicians and prominent Fox hosts will either stand by as the conspiracy theory builds credence on the right or even give a knowing wink and nod to its supporters. Some will probably promote it entirely, perhaps suggesting that these are simply questions that the media refuses to answer.

Credible news outlets will divert resources from covering the rising tide of right-wing political violence or the GOP’s disturbing policy aims if the party gains ground in the midterm elections to pointing out that the right is peddling nonsense about Pelosi. But thanks to the right-wing media bubble, their facts won’t make it to the people inclined to believe it. And so a sizable chunk of the GOP will come to believe an absurd lie.
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
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Re: Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

The confession:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news ... kidnapping
If Nancy were to tell DEPAPE the 'truth,' he would let her go, and if she 'lied,' he was going to break 'her kneecaps,'" the affidavit stated. "DEPAPE was certain that Nancy would not have told the 'truth.' In the course of the interview, DEPAPE articulated he viewed Nancy as the 'leader of the pack' of lies told by the Democratic Party."

He told police he broke into the house through a glass door using a hammer and woke Paul Pelosi up in his bedroom, according to the affidavit. He said Pelosi "appeared surprised." He said he told Paul Pelosi to wake up …
Will the board’s pieces of craps admit what they were doing?

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Re: Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

Post by Hawkeye »

Nomomo wrote:
Tue Nov 01, 2022 8:12 am
If anyone did not already know that Elon Musk. the richest man in the world. is a gawdamned asshole, they do now.
Paul Pelosi Conspiracy Theory Trends on Twitter After Elon Musk Pushes It

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234621217/

Image
Maybe you can kick him off Twitter. Twitter is the place for mainstream political discourse from people like Chris Hayes and the Ayotollah Khomeni. DIsagreement with any of these political leaders should never be tolerated.
The best part about this is waiting four years to see how all the crazy apocalyptic predictions made by the fear mongering idiots in Right Wing media turned out to be painfully wrong...Gasoline would hit $10/gallon. Hyperinflation would ensue.
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Re: Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

What’s the opposite of Hanlon’s razor when Xanax posts?

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Re: Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

Post by Res Ipsa »

the Post is running an interesting article today on the nature of political radicalization, built around Pelosi's attacker. it's behind a paywall, but here are some highlights:
Washington Post wrote:The path that led an attacker to the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was long and meandering, with evidence suggesting that he dabbled in fringe movements of all sorts before embracing the right-wing vilification of Democrats.

The complex history of accused attacker David DePape’s radicalization unfolded over more than eight years and several different ideologies, moving from Green Party support and nudist activism, to a hateful mix of racist, anti-Jewish and misogynistic rhetoric, according to terrorism analysts who’ve studied his writings and social media posts.

They say DePape’s evolving beliefs show how today’s extremist threat complicates easy left-right categorization, a shift that’s confusing to the public and a bonanza for trolls who exploit the messiness to push disinformation and justify violence.

“You get stuff that just feels contradictory, but when you understand how online exposure to propaganda works, it makes perfect sense,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who heads the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University. “It’s a choose-your-own-adventure type of radicalization.”

By the time DePape, 42, allegedly broke into the Pelosis’ residence Friday and attacked 82-year-old Paul with a hammer, his writings were laden with far-right messaging that indicated a dark, conspiratorial spiral. His blog posts in October were a mix of bloody images and hateful screeds aimed at a variety of targeted groups including Jewish, Black and trans people, as well as Democrats. He also shared delusional thoughts about an invisible fairy that sometimes appeared as a bird; a purported former romantic partner, Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, has told reporters that DePape is “mentally ill.”
Arguing over whether DePape was "liberal" or "conservative" misses the point. People who are drawn into extremism don't fit neatly into those categories. What we should focus on is what motivated the attack.
Washington Post wrote:Analysts say such reactions are dangerous, bad faith attempts to score political points while playing down the seriousness of a violent attack targeting the most powerful woman in Congress. Federal prosecutors on Monday filed attempted kidnapping and assault charges against DePape, noting that, in addition to the hammer allegedly used to strike Paul Pelosi, authorities recovered “a roll of tape, white rope, a second hammer, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves, and zip ties.” After being taken into custody, DePape told authorities that his plan was to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage and potentially break “her kneecaps” to make an example of her as “leader of the pack” of what he considers lying Democrats, according to court papers.

“Calling this guy a left-wing fanatic today is disingenuous when his chosen path for the last eight years was clearly Alt Right,” extremism researcher J.J. MacNab wrote in a Twitter thread that laid out her research into DePape’s far-right descent.
Extremists are not necessarily stable in their political positions.
Washington Post wrote:DePape’s turning point appears to have come in 2014 with Gamergate, the vicious campaign of online abuse against female video game developers and critics, a precursor to the rise of coordinated right-wing or bias-fueled troll attacks.

“How did I get into this. Gamer gate it was gamer gate,” DePape wrote, according to research compiled by Erin Gallagher, a research assistant with the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School.

Analysts say such shifts often occur not by a singular seismic event but through a gradual process, typically online, where people can click through a smorgasbord of fringe ideologies, picking and choosing what resonates. Sometimes that leads to a melding of extremism — such as white supremacists borrowing Islamist militant phrases — and other times it can lead to a full flip of the political spectrum, such as moving from the far right to the far left, sometimes called “side switching.”
Side switching is not uncommon among extremists.
Washngton Post wrote:“Side switching across mutually exclusive or hostile ideologies is really not that uncommon,” said Daniel Koehler, a terrorism analyst in Germany who has written extensively about the transnational phenomenon.

Koehler, founding director of the German Institute for Radicalization and de-Radicalization Studies, has identified key “bridging areas” that span disparate ideologies — chief among them are antisemitism, misogyny and anti-government or anti-establishment beliefs. Those bridges, he said, work “as a kind of ideological highway between these environments that are usually very exclusive and consider each other to be mortal enemies.”

In Germany, Koehler said, he sees the blurriness these days in anti-vaccination and covid-19 denial movements, where far-left protesters have openly mixed with white supremacists.

“There have been times where they produce memes and propaganda that calls upon antifascists or anarchists even to form an alliance against the democratic Western society,” Koehler said. “They think they could unite forces on the shared premise of, ‘We reject dualism, we reject democracy, we reject a free-market society.' ”
The pandemic appears to have created a number of these bridging areas.
Washington Post wrote:Recent years have provided several examples of such bridges leading to plots and violence, such as white nationalists overlapping with the misogynistic “incel” movement or borrowing leftist climate talking points to whip up right-wing fears over racial competition for resources. White supremacist mass shooters in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso both dropped environmentalist themes into the notes they wrote before their deadly attacks.
One of the highest profile cases involving blurred influences was in 2020, when 22-year-old Army Pvt. Ethan Melzer was charged with planning an ambush against his own unit. He had browsed ISIS and other jihadist propaganda and even slipped information to someone he believed to be an al-Qaeda operative, according to prosecutors. But they allege that his main motivation was violent white supremacy. A federal indictment accused Melzer of passing sensitive military information to fellow members of a Satanic neo-Nazi network, the Order of the Nine Angles. The Justice Department described Melzer’s beliefs as “a diabolical cocktail of ideologies.”

Judith Faessler, an extremism analyst at Bavarian State Office for Protection of the Constitution, a domestic intelligence agency for the German state of Bavaria, said the overlap can be used strategically to broaden movements, finding mutual interests among “incoherent and sometimes contradictory ideologies.”

The extremism might mutate, but the threat of mobilization to violence remains constant.

“A demonized concept of the enemy is being constructed, the worldview becomes dualistic — ‘we’ and ‘they,’ “ Faessler said. “‘They’ want to destroy us. Self-defense is the only way out.”
That last bit is the extreme polarization the media keeps warning about and fueling at the same time.
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Re: Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

Post by Dr Exiled »

I'll wait for the facts to come out on this politically charged one that is coming right before the election. Right now we have to rely on leaks/statements from the police and those are usually one sided for the prosecutor. Let's see what the defense says, if the story isn't buried right after the election. Looks like this guy is mentally ill though, but we have to wait. Obviously, violence isn't the answer.
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Re: Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

Post by Gunnar »

I long ago came to the conclusion that there are some people who have an incurable predisposition to be fanatical extremists who preferentially accept without skepticism the wildest and least probable conspiracies. It is almost certainly easier to convert these fanatics from one fanatical extreme to another completely contrary and equally irrational fanatical extreme than it is to cure them of being irrational fanatics. They are much like the Electric Monk from Douglas Adams' hilarious detective novel, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.
I think that is perfect description of much of Trump's sycophantic MAGA crowd of conspiracy fanatics.
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Re: Pelosi's Husband Attacked in Home

Post by MeDotOrg »

I recommend Eric Hofer's The True Believer. Written in the aftermath of World War II, it discusses the commonalities between extremist movements. The more authoritarian a movement, the closer it is to its counterpart on the other side of the political spectrum. Is North Korea a Communist Nation or a Fascist Nation? It depends on how you look at it. Conversely, extreme libertarians on the left and right have more in common with each other than with the authoritarian branches of their respective ideologies.

As far as Dirk Gently goes, my favorite part of his Universe was that he invented time travel to go back and watch TV shows he had missed because he couldn't figure out how to program is VCR.
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