Paul Pelosi: Violent attack isn’t an SF story. It’s the story of American politics.

Update: Federal charging document offers clues on alleged Pelosi attacker’s plan. SEE END

The vicious, predawn Oct. 28 attack on 82-year-old Paul Pelosi was many things. It was strange. It was terrible. But it was no surprise. 

It was no surprise that the man who allegedly took a hammer to an octogenarian’s head purportedly yelled “Where’s Nancy?” — the same sinister question bellowed by the marauders who overran the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.  

And it was no surprise that 42-year-old David DePape — an apparently unstable and violence-prone man with a trove of online postings dripping with Trumpist talking points, delusional QAnon ramblings, misogyny, racism, and images of hook-nosed Yids straight out of Der Stürmer — purportedly did the sort of thing he fervently advocated should be done. 

On the other hand, DePape’s turn as a nudist activist, one of the regular naked demonstrators tooling around at Castro and 17th streets a decade ago, and the best man at a nude wedding that, for a shining, stupid moment transfixed this city? 

That one we didn’t see coming. 

But even this isn’t all that surprising. DePape’s journey from a nudist making hemp bracelets to an alleged would-be assassin isn’t as radical as it seems. The notion of a left-wing stalwart becoming a right-wing stalwart is hardly new or novel; in essence, that’s what happened to an appreciable portion of the staff of Ramparts magazine. In DePape’s case, it’s even less counterintuitive; he wasn’t an ideologue or a policy guy but, rather, a dippy conspiracist.  

“He followed a common radicalization trajectory,” sums up Abner Hauge, the editor-in-chief of Left Coast Right Watch, a site that monitors right-wing extremism. The nudists DePape palled around with a decade ago were 9-11 truthers; in many ways he simply exchanged and buttressed one dopey, anti-establishment conspiracy theory worldview with others. Along the way, he was abetted by “right-wing grievance culture,” in Hauge’s words. 

Right-wing grievance culture is a powerful thing. Right-wing grievance culture is a growth industry. As such, much of the wild material DePape purportedly wrote on the Internet does not put him all that far afield from an appreciable portion of Republican voters. It does not put him far afield from an appreciable portion of elected Republican federal office-holders; the majority of GOP Congressional representatives, after all, voted to overturn the 2020 election results. 

So that’s the story here. The story is that America’s moral climate — or at least the moral climate pertaining to a goodly portion of our nation and its leaders  — has oozed over to meet the loon who allegedly broke into the home of the Speaker of the House and tried to murder her husband with a hammer. That’s the story. That’s the story. 

But no one wants to talk about that. So, instead, this became a San Francisco story. 

San Francisco, Lord knows, is a place with 99 problems. But violent loons breaking into octogenarians’ homes and attempting to murder them with hammers is not one. 

Except that one time. 

The attack on Paul Pelosi, per FOX News, was either “a crime situation” that “shines a light on what’s happening in San Fran … ” or  was “politically motivated.” And if that’s the case, we all know who’s to blame: “Why is our country so divided? President Biden, you got up to the podium and said you were going to bring us together.” 

FOX also trotted out the clownish, failed California gubernatorial candidate Michael Schellenberger, who said the real lesson of the attack was that “we are in a crime crisis in our country because we demoralize the police” and “have basically said to the police they are the enemy.”  

Astoundingly, the San Francisco Police Officers Association agreed with this, in essence stating that a deranged man purportedly attempted to break into the home of the Speaker of the House and murder her because cops’ feelings were hurt: “We’ve been saying for years that the mental health crisis facing our cities is worsening, putting everyone’s safety at risk. The constant drumbeat against officers is driving people out of and away from the profession.” 

Also: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. The Great Oz has spoken!” 

Considering the apparently exemplary behavior of police in the fraught scene at Chez Pelosi, rapidly responding to a crisis call and subduing a would-be killer, this reactionary bellyaching by the fulminating police union was even more jarring. 

You would expect these sorts of misdirections from FOX, which is to news what pro wrestling is to sports. But it was bewildering to see the New York Times blithely note that “the break-in and assault comes at a time when the city is awash in crises over crime and disorder in the streets, where open-air drug dealing is commonplace and concerns over, especially in wealthy neighborhoods, helped fuel the successful recall of the city’s avowed progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin.”  

No, dude: This wasn’t some dope fiend stealing high-end bicycles from a garage, it was an attempt to assassinate the ranking Democrat in the House. Blathering on about Boudin and open-air drug-dealing here is wholly irrelevant, and reminiscent of an old Yiddish saying: A wise man knows what he says. A fool says what he knows. 

In the end, the strange and terrible saga of David DePape and his purported assault of Paul Pelosi says a lot more about the state of American political discourse than it does about the state of San Francisco. 

The hammer attack on Paul Pelosi allegedly took place in front of several San Francisco police officers and was caught on body-worn cameras. This footage is ostensibly within the public domain and could soon be pulsating around the internet. 

Abner Hauge from Left Coast Right Watch  says this could be a travesty and a disaster. 

Right-wing extremists, he says, “are gonna love it. These are people who get off on violence. They love watching people they deem evil being hurt or killed.” 

He notes the fetisization of the 1960 assassination of Japanese socialist Inejirō Asanuma by a sword-wielding extremist, a scene Hauge says was, in 2019, farcically re-enacted by Proud Boys founder Gavin MacInnes to a raucous reaction by his acolytes, who then went on to do a gang assault. 

To this sort of crowd, the Pelosi footage will be a vast dollop of red meat; footage of the beating of Nancy Pelosi’s husband is “chum in the water.” It is proof positive that “you can do this.” 

And you can. It was done. And this is not a San Francisco problem. It’s an America problem. 

The prognosis for Paul Pelosi is, apparently, positive. You can’t say the same for the country.

Update, Oct. 31: A federal charging document filed today includes excerpts from a purported statement alleged Pelosi attacker David DePape gave to San Francisco police. In it, he said that he hoped to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage, likely with the zip-ties he purportedly had in his possession.

If she told “the truth,” he would release her. If she were to “lie,” however, he planned to break “her kneecaps” with the hammer he later went on to allegedly use on Paul Pelosi’s head.

Nancy Pelosi, in DePape’s view, was the “leader of the pack” of lies told by Democrats. If she was forced to be wheeled into Congress, DePape felt this would be a signal for to her fellow elected officials that there are consequences for their actions.