Paul Pelosi's Attacker Gets a Lot Weirder, and the Picture Gets a Little Clearer

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

On Saturday morning, I penned a piece noting how little sense the attack on Paul Pelosi made. Specifically, the attacker, David DePape, had a profile that seemed to be all over the place. One second, we were finding out he was a nudist protester who lived in a leftwing commune decked out in BLM signs and gay pride flags. The next second the authorities were telling us that he was a January 6th supporter who disparaged Jews.

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So what’s the real story? Well, if a new report from The Washington Post is accurate, we might finally have an answer, and perhaps predictably, it’s probably not going to confirm anyone’s priors.

The San Francisco Bay area man arrested in the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband filled a blog a week before the incident with delusional thoughts, including that an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird, according to online writings under his name.

That one paragraph pretty much tells us all we need to know. Far from being some organized, sinister Republican operative, radicalized by GOP thought, it appears DePape is what he always appeared to be: An insane person with no long-standing, coherent political ideology. His shift from leftwing to rightwing conspiracy theories was likely a result of his already broken mental state.

I know that won’t make Hillary Clinton, Adam Kinzinger, and the other leftists who rushed to blame Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy for the attack happy, but sometimes the truth is more boring than fanciful tales of mainstream partisan influence. More often than not, crazy people are just crazy, latching onto whatever is in front of them, and I now feel confident in saying that’s what happened in this case. In fact, DePape has never mentioned Nancy Pelosi in any of his reported rantings.

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Further explaining the situation is the fact that the attacker was also a drug addict, and the “treatment” he was receiving almost certainly played a major role in his psychotic break.

“The camper van parked in the driveway of the home belonging to David DePape’s ex-wife. The “Natural addiction treatment” that it’s advertising is of the psychedelic ibogaine, which neighbors say the DePape family has been bringing back to the United States from Mexico.”

Ibogaine is a dangerous psychoactive substance that can cause heart problems and death. It’s been used in the past to treat addictions but has been shunned by mainstream medicine because it can’t be used safely. That’s certainly true when it’s being distributed by some new-age nudist commune.

Obviously, other questions remain about the attack itself. Those may or may not be answered in due time, and given how quickly Paul Pelosi’s DUI was covered up, I’d lean towards answers not being forthcoming. Regardless, those trying to use DePape to smear mainline Republican politicians are disgusting. They don’t care about political violence, of which there’s still no evidence that was a factor here. They just care about smearing their opponents. None of us are obligated to play their game. Let them scream at the clouds.

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