Main politicians blamed the political proper for the brutal assault on Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul.
“That is despicable,” stated President Biden. He famous that the alleged attacker, David DePape, 42, shouted the identical line, “The place’s Nancy?” because the supporters of Donald Trump, who stormed the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “And what makes us assume that one occasion can discuss stolen elections?” stated Biden. “COVID being a hoax? It’s all a bunch of lies.”
California political leaders agreed. “This heinous assault is one more instance of the harmful penalties of the divisive and hateful rhetoric that’s placing lives in danger and undermining our very democracy and democratic establishments,” stated California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “This assault,” stated San Francisco’s state Sen. Scott Weiner, “is terrifying and the direct results of poisonous right-wing rhetoric.”
Journalists, en masse, agreed with their evaluation. DePape “seems to have made racist and sometimes rambling posts on-line,” famous AP, in a report that encapsulated the media narrative, “together with some that questioned the outcomes of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.”
However DePape’s politics have little rhyme or purpose. In previous years DePape shared a publish about Stephen Colbert’s 2006 roast of President George W. Bush on the White Home Correspondents dinner; linked to movies of Disney movies altered to make it appear like the characters have been swearing; and claimed, “Jesus is the anti-Christ” — not precisely a litany of right-wing tropes.
And, as I quickly found, DePape lived with a infamous native nudist in a Berkeley house, full with a Black Lives Matter signal within the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana image, hanging from a tree. A more in-depth look reveals the traits of a homeless encampment, or what Europeans name “an open drug scene.” Within the driveway, there’s a broken-down camper van. On the road is a yellow college bus, which neighbors stated DePape sometimes stayed in. Each are full of rubbish typical of such constructions in homeless encampments. Individuals come and go from the home and the automobiles, neighbors say, partly to partake in the usage of a potent psychedelic drug, ibogaine.
Neighbors described DePape as a homeless addict with politics that was, till lately, left-wing, however of secondary significance to his psychotic and paranoid conduct.
“What I do know in regards to the household is that they’re very radical activists,” stated one in every of DePape’s neighbors, a lady who solely gave her first identify, Trish. “They appear very left. They’re all in regards to the Black Lives Matter motion. Homosexual pleasure. However they’re very indifferent from actuality. They’ve known as the cops on a number of of the neighbors, together with us, claiming that we’re plotting in opposition to them. It’s actually bizarre to see that they’re keen to be so aggressive towards someone else who can also be a lefty.”
Not all the information media missed DePape’s historical past of drug use, psychosis, and homelessness. CNN reported {that a} girl named Laura Hayes, who stated she labored with DePape 10 years in the past making hemp bracelets, stated he had been dwelling in a storage shed. “He talks to angels,” she stated, and informed her that “there will probably be a tough time coming.”
One other girl, Linda Schneider, informed CNN and Bay Space NBC TV affiliate, KRON4, that she acquired to know DePape round 2014 and that he was nonetheless homeless, dwelling in a storage unit, and utilizing laborious medication. “He [was] seemingly a senseless follower of one thing he noticed on social media as a result of I don’t assume he had the braveness to be a part of any political or terrorist group,” stated Schneider. “His drug use started once more and he went off his rocker.”
However a lot of the remainder of the information media, significantly native journalists who may have interviewed DePape’s neighbors, have been swept up within the narrative that DePape was extra like John Wilkes Sales space, the fanatical however sane murderer of Abraham Lincoln, than John Hinkley, Jr., the mentally ailing man who shot Ronald Reagan. DePape is way more like one of many a whole bunch of psychotic homeless folks I’ve interviewed lately than the fanatical local weather ideologues who I’ve been writing about in current weeks.
Wrapped up in their very own obsession with Trump Republicans, most journalists have missed the true story. David DePape isn’t a microcosm of the political psychosis gripping America usually. Fairly, he’s a microcosm of the drug-induced psychosis gripping the West Coast specifically.
Medication, Paranoia, and Pedophilia
I visited the Berkeley home the place DePape had lived along with his former lover, Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, 53, a charismatic Russian immigrant 11 years David’s senior. DePape seems to have fallen underneath the spell of Taub round 2003, when DePape was a quiet, video game-obsessed 21-year-old in Powell River, a city of 14,000 folks that could be a four-hour drive up the coast of British Columbia from Vancouver.
A Nov. 27, 2008, article within the Oakland Tribune stated Taub and DePape have been married with three kids. However DePape’s stepfather, Gene, informed AP yesterday that Taub was his stepson’s girlfriend, not spouse; that David and Taub had two, not three, kids collectively; and that David’s third youngster was with one other girl.
The article, which carried the headline, “Want is nice on Thanksgiving Day within the East Bay,” described Taub, Pape, and their three kids consuming Thanksgiving dinner with the homeless. Taub informed the reporter that they have been there for the group, not as a result of they couldn’t afford to eat at house.
Taub was within the information once more 5 years later when she, then 44, married a 20-year-old man, Jamyz Smith, bare, at Metropolis Corridor in San Francisco. A photograph within the December 16, 2013, version of The San Francisco Chronicle exhibits DePape, Taub, Smith, and the three kids huddled underneath a blanket watching tv collectively. The caption describes DePape as “a household buddy.” As in The Oakland Tribune article, the main focus was on Taub, with no quotes from DePape.
Ryan La Coste, who lives in an residence immediately behind the Taub-DePape home, stated that the day after Taub’s wedding ceremony to Smith, “There was an enormous struggle. The man [Smith] that she married acquired locked up. And so Taub married someone else. My understanding was that David [DePape] was the very best man to her husband on the wedding ceremony.”
The episode was typical of the chaos that swirled round DePape in the course of the years main as much as his alleged assault on Paul Pelosi.
Michael Shellenberger is the best-selling creator of “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Smash Cities.” His unique reporting may be learn at MichaelShellenberger.Substack.com.
