As Twitchy reported, on Saturday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tweeted his disgust that the attempted assassination of the Speaker of the House was published below the fold on the New York Times front page. Elon Musk buying Twitter was apparently a bigger story. Republicans are just going to get away with this sort of violence just like they did on January 6 because Donald Trump has everyone numbed to the truth.
Michael Shellenberger has a piece on Substack looking into the man who allegedly broke into Pelosi’s San Francisco home and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, and he says it has nothing to do with QAnon and a lot to do with drugs.
The media are portraying the suspect in the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband as a man fundamentally driven by right-wing ideology. But it's obvious to anyone who looks that what drove David DePape to violence was drug-induced paranoid psychosis.https://t.co/qfs5zHokni
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
Neighbors described DePape as a homeless drug addict with a politics that was, until recently, left-wing, but of secondary importance to his psychotic and paranoid behavior. https://t.co/9GK1O0ah5U
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
And, as I discovered yesterday, DePape lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree. pic.twitter.com/qxNvgWXSaG
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
“What I know about the family is that they’re very radical activists. They seem very left. They are all about the Black Lives Matter movement. Gay pride. But they’re very detached from reality. They have called the cops on several of the neighbors, including us."
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
"It’s really weird to see that they are willing to be so aggressive toward somebody else who is also a lefty.”
A closer look reveals the characteristics of a homeless encampment, or what Europeans call “an open drug scene.”
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
In the driveway, there is a broken-down camper van. On the street is a yellow school bus, which neighbors said DePape occasionally stayed in. Both are filled with garbage typical of such structures in homeless encampments. pic.twitter.com/hmvYK8f1F6
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
People come and go from the house and the vehicles, neighbors say, in part to partake in the use of a potent psychedelic drug, ibogaine. “They go to Mexico and they get this drug [ibogaine] that’s legal there and then bring it back here and treat people."
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
Not all of the news media missed DePape’s history of drug use, psychosis, and homelessness. CNN reported that a woman named Laura Hayes, who said she worked with DePape 10 years ago making hemp bracelets, said he had been living in a storage shed.
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
“He talks to angels,” she said, and told her that “there will be a hard time coming.” Another woman, Linda Schneider, told CNN that she got to know DePape around 2014 and that he was still homeless, living in a storage unit, and using hard drugs.
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
But much of the rest of the news media were swept up in the narrative that DePape was more like John Wilkes Booth, the fanatical but sane assassin of Abraham Lincoln, than John Hinkley, Jr., the mentally ill man who shot Ronald Reagan.
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
In truth, DePape is much more like one of the hundreds of psychotic homeless people I’ve interviewed in recent years than the fanatical climate ideologues who I’ve been writing about in recent weeks.
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
Wrapped up in their obsession with MAGA Republicans, journalists have missed the real story. David DePape is not a microcosm of the political psychosis gripping America in general. Rather, he’s a microcosm of the drug-induced psychosis gripping the West Coast in particular.
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 29, 2022
Finally someone willing to tell the truth.
— D.K. Obby (@David30674012) October 29, 2022
https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1586093364767854596
https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1586093997432262656
But they guy was a right-wing QAnon nutjob, wasn’t he? That’s what we’ve gotten from the media.
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Related:
Reports on what happened when police arrived at the Pelosi home have a curious new detail https://t.co/DsOytj5a2Q
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) October 29, 2022