When the news media learned that there had been a late-night break-in at Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco mansion and even a physical attack on her husband, they jumped on the story.
An attack on a Democrat leader’s heavily-guarded home and her spouse within? Ten days before the midterms? What a godsend! In this era of terrible news and even worse polls for the Democrats, this might just be the twist to change the messaging and eke out some victories in this election.
So, before much was known, the message went out that Republican rhetoric and Trumpian extremism had struck again, and the poor defenseless elderly Speaker’s spouse, 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, was attacked and beaten by some MAGA-hat-wearing right-winger in his own home at 2:30 am Friday, leaving him with skull fractures needing immediate surgery.
The White House and Congressional leaders immediately joined in, trumpeting the official “January 6 based” line that right-wing political violence is the greatest danger to our country, jeopardizing everything from the coming election to our very way of life.
And then the truth started to come out.
The Truth
Okay, maybe this isn’t a completely honest title, which puts it in good company with the rest of the media’s reporting on the issue.
Truth? The full truth of this event will probably never be known.
What is certain – absolutely positive, is that a 911 call came in from the Pelosi residence, requesting some service, logged as a request for a wellness check, because something unspecified was going on. The caller (referred to in the 911 transcript as an RP, an unnamed Reporting Person, possibly a member of the household staff?) said that someone known to the family – a “friend” named “David” – was in the house and perhaps up to no good. When the police arrived at about 2:27 am, they found Paul Pelosi and David DePape, both in their underwear, struggling over at least one hammer. David DePape allegedly started beating up Paul Pelosi – after the police arrived and could witness it – causing skull fractures requiring immediate surgery. David DePape was also injured.
That really is all we know for certain about what happened.
The Lies
Since we don’t know the truth of this case, we can’t be sure yet what all its lies are. But we should note the fact that the initial message is most assuredly based on a lie.
The official message on Friday morning was that this was a right-wing MAGA-inspired attack on the Speaker, “just like so many others.” But not only was this, not a right-wing attack (DePape is a radical leftist), in fact, there really has been absolutely no rash of right-wing attacks in recent years, despite all these efforts to convince the public that there has been.
The claim is just a complete fabrication by the Democratic Party and the mass media. There have even been proven cases of entrapment and incitement by government agencies, from the Randy Weaver case to the January 6 breakaway group who were talked into entering the capitol. Even the alleged kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Whitmer finally turned out to have essentially been an FBI scheme to talk reticent people into it, not to gain information about people already planning it.
To the extent that violence is up in America – and it certainly is, if you look at our big cities – it’s entirely either non-political violence (regular street crime like carjackings, drug wars, muggings, and murders) or it’s political violence perpetrated by the left (like the Marxist “Antifa” takeovers of numerous urban downtowns in 2020 and 2021 and the riots and takeovers by the 99%, BLM, and similar leftwing groups that preceded them.
There have been direct attacks on politicians in recent years… a number of them… but these have generally been attacks by Democrat perpetrators against Republican politicians, not the opposite. A leftwing activist shot up a Republican congressional baseball practice. A leftwing neighbor tried to kill Sen. Rand Paul. A leftwing activist flew to Washington intending to assassinate Associate Justice Kavanaugh until his sister talked him into turning himself in.
Most crime is not considered political… but the crime that is, it is virtually always committed by leftists.
The Men
Paul Pelosi is not well known to the American public, but he should be. This 82-year-old businessman has long managed to keep his business dealings out of the press, despite the obvious conflict of interest in his running a big investment firm while married to such a high official in the United States government.
It has long been suspected that the Pelosis engage in a great deal of insider trading that would be illegal for anyone outside of Congress, but it’s not prosecutable, at least not directly as such. But Pelosi has had other legal challenges outside his business dealings, such as his habit of irresponsible driving that recently resulted in a late-night DUI collision with injuries in Napa County. Much worse is always suspected of him, as a guy who stays behind in San Francisco while his wife is across the country in Washington, DC, but with nothing provable, such rumors are able to be kept out of the media.
By contrast, David DePape is well-known indeed, not nationally (at least, not until now), but locally. He’s been a Green Party activist, a public nudity activist, a gay rights activist, a drug legalization activist… if an issue is on the left, you name it, and he’s been a public activist on the issue. In San Francisco, they know him for his participation in the Castro neighborhood lifestyle of public nudity, drug abuse, and so forth (a neighborhood that might be most easily described as a snapshot of one of the raunchier floats at a big city Pride Parade).
DePape is also a certifiable loon. With many years of many drugs behind him, this character – an illegal Canadian alien who came in over the Mexican border and has overstayed his welcome for years – is now even estranged from his former partner but lives in a broken down vehicle outside her house and reportedly makes “hemp jewelry” (which one would think sounds rather unstable a material for jewelry, but perhaps you need to live in that world to fully appreciate the product).
In any case, these two individuals are as strange as the story itself, but when we consider that they are the participants, we can begin to find some conclusions.
The Speculation
What we don’t know, and we likely will never know, is the rest of the circumstance, the real backstory to this event.
This is, after all, a mansion in a well-policed neighborhood. As one would expect, the house has security cameras all around, as well as having security guards in the area (the press has talked about there being no federal security when the Speaker is not in residence, dodging the point that there’s private security all over the neighborhood). It is frankly inconceivable that someone could break in without being spotted and at least filmed, if not detained. Besides, the presence of the doorway’s broken glass on the outside, rather than the inside, leads one to believe this could not have been a normal break-in. There has been no indication that the family will share their video footage, as it would likely destroy any chance at a favorable narrative.
So. Did DePape break in, as leftist politicians and reporters immediately assumed? Unlikely, to say the least. Besides the lack of evidence of a break-in, the police did not list breaking and entering among the crimes they are charging him with, as the family’s story changes by the day. It certainly seems much more likely that he was invited in as a guest and something went awry.
Could there have been a plan to set up a false flag, intended to generate the kinds of reporting we saw Friday morning? Perhaps a fake break-in was staged, and someone messed up – by hiring the wrong guy (someone violent enough to attack Pelosi rather than running away, or by calling the police too soon, so they arrived before he got away, or by forgetting to clear the household staff so that nothing could go wrong)?
Was even the hammer attack staged? The attack itself looks awfully odd, since it allegedly didn’t occur until there were police to witness it, and since they reported that “Paul Pelosi is expected to make a full recovery,” even before going into surgery. Who on earth can make a statement about an 82-year-old’s prognosis following a violent skull fracture before he’s even been operated on? (update: he was released from the hospital after less than a week; hard to believe for an 82-year-old victim of multiple skull fractures. If it was as serious as originally reported, who heals that fast at that age?)
One of the later-appearing theories is that Mr. DePape was on a “suicide mission” – planning to take out lots of high-visibility political enemies, with his lethal toolkit of… plastic zip ties and a hammer. Right. That’s probably the least likely explanation, and at this writing, it’s the one that law enforcement and the Democrat leadership are hanging their hat on.
Or could it be exactly what it looks like: Paul Pelosi might have called an acquaintance or a male prostitute over for some late-night shenanigans, and either argument or antics got noisy enough that a household staffer got nervous and called 911.
Or perhaps a household staffer who was engaged in an affair with Pelosi was jealous that someone else had been invited for the evening, and called in a wellness check to expose the situation out of jealousy?
Or perhaps it was a setup; surely there must be Democrats who can’t stand Nancy Pelosi’s unshakable grip on her position in leadership, and thought that something exposing her deviant husband might help force her expulsion from senior party leadership? If so, they sure botched it in the execution.
There is even a theory that it had less to do with the midterms and more to do with the U.S. Capitol Police, who is reportedly embarking on a costly plan of questionable motives: setting up field offices all over the country to protect federal officeholders while they are outside of Washington, DC. If the country believed there really was an attempted assassination at the Speaker of the House’s California residence, perhaps an already impoverished public might be convinced to support yet another huge government spending ploy, to fund a national footprint for a police force that ought to be limited to the federal district.
Complicating it all, throughout the weekend, the police reported major changes in the story without explanation, such as going back and forth on whether there even was a third person who opened the door for the police, and whether the 911 call was made by Paul Pelosi or someone else. Throughout the weekend, as soon as people would think of a likely explanation, something would change to knock that theory out of contention.
We will likely never know for sure.
Drug Abuse
What the story does do for us, however, is to provide a window into a certain culture… the drug culture of San Francisco and elsewhere, where the 1960s drug legalization nuts eventually gained permanent control over whole neighborhoods and even over towns. Generations later, we see what living in a drug world, not for weeks but for decades, is really like. The squalor, the crime, the crippled mental state of the users… even the simplest drugs, like pot, are proven to pose far greater dangers than their advocates will ever admit.
David DePape is now famous, but he’s just a statistic, just one more useless, paranoid loon with a mind utterly baked by decades of ingesting mind-altering drugs. How many people like him are there, in San Francisco or in other such towns around the country, where neighborhoods settled into that culture permanently and never looked back?
No society ever became stronger or happier by addicting its populace to dope. Armies have used it to make their soldiers tougher, kleptocracies have used it to enrich themselves and weaken their neighbors, gangs use it to increase their hold on their neighborhoods.
But if you want your GDP to climb, you will find that a booming drug culture feeds on productivity like a parasite, reducing society’s standard of living every time.
San Francisco
Frankly, one of the key elements of this story is bigger than the Pelosis, bigger than the crime epidemic, and bigger than politics, in a way; it’s about national and regional prejudices. Everyone has long had an opinion about San Francisco, as we all have about many other cities. Just as some are known for their museums, or their architecture, or their history or their cuisine… San Francisco is known for its shocking counterculture. Some assume that such reputations are just rumors, the nasty city rivalries perhaps spread among sports fans, for example.
But the stories about San Francisco are true. Not to say the whole city is like that, of course… but San Francisco’s reputation as a home for people like David DePape – from the hedonistic lifestyle to the political radicalism, from the drug dens to the unavoidable explosions of illness, crime and homelessness that necessarily follow – is well-deserved.
The story – this tale of the late-night wellness check and the hammer fight – has reminded the public of what happens when a city gets taken over by these kinds of people and philosophies.
The Cover-Up Culture
The story first filled the headlines when it looked like it might support the regime’s claim that there’s a terrible risk of right-wing violence. But once it became likely that Paul Pelosi probably just had a boyfriend over, both politicians and media tried their best to stop talking about it.
Some stuck with the original narrative, claiming right-wing violence against all evidence to the contrary, probably thinking they have nothing else to go with in this final desperate week, and maybe they can con some small percentage of independents, perhaps enough to save some seats.
But most are already trying to bury the story, and that’s the real standard pattern. All the subgroups of the modern Left – from academia to mass media, from pop culture to the political class – are united in hiding any truth that reflects poorly on the Democratic Party.
They have hidden Paul Pelosi’s personal issues with extracurricular activities for years, to protect his wife’s speakership. Similarly, when they had to report a story on Rep. Eric Swalwell’s affair with a Chinese spy, or the news that Sen. Diane Feinstein’s driver was a Chinese spy for a decade… or when they happily covered the sensational story of Jeffrey Epstein and his island while keeping his client list – which is full of Democrat politicians and Democrat donors – locked up tight as a drum.
John Fetterman’s desperate issue flip-flops, Joe Biden’s family’s years of corrupt business dealings, Hillary Clinton’s numerous suspicious authorizations of export licenses for deals that would normally be banned to protect national security… Senator Tammy Duckworth’s notorious bureaucratic incompetence in her past jobs, Governors J.B. Pritzker’s and Gretchen Whitmer’s illegal lockdowns in their current jobs… All these are buried like nuclear waste, designed not to be released to the public until a multi-century half-life has passed.
This gives the conservative opposition – already limited in dollars and power – a much harder job to do. The Right doesn’t just have to convince the public of its positions; the Right has to educate the public on all the information that they ought to already have, but which has been kept from them.
It’s a wonder Republicans win any races at all.
Consider how in Illinois, JB Pritzker kept on issuing his illegal state lockdown notices, even after State Senator Darren Bailey defeated him in court, winning a judicial order certifying that Pritzker did not have the power to issue them. Despite clear court decisions and instructions, Pritzker’s office disregarded them entirely, continuing to extend his illegal lockdowns again and again. Much as Josef Stalin famously dismissed the Pope’s opposition with the words, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” – JB Pritzker controls the state bureaucracy and both houses of the legislature; he sees no need to obey a judge whose power depends on a state’s adherence to the rule of law… and Pritzker’s Democrats have purposely rendered the law itself meaningless in Illinois.
We haven’t even seen these stories make it into the news media; they bury such news stories as fast as they can, to protect their allies.
This is one of the reasons that free speech – especially the ability to speak freely on social media, without censorship – is so critical in America, both today and always.
There is always news that will be damaging to one side or the other; we must not allow the side in power to hide all the news that would help their enemy or hurt themselves.
Free elections are dependent on free speech, and that requires both full and open coverage of all the news, and a wise and skeptical audience to be ever on the lookout for false flags and corrupt spin.
Copyright 2022 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, and former president of the Ethnic American Council, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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