Source: MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images / Getty
The rush to blame conservatives for a drug-addled insane person attacking Paul Pelosi is disgusting and a stain on the American media and Democrats engaging in it. Rich Lowry at National Review writes:
Of course, it’s not enough to leave it at that. The press and Democrats have brushed right by the evidence of the attacker’s mental illness and portrayed the assault as a quasi-MAGA operation. It’s supposedly an extension of the political campaign against Speaker Pelosi, or the inevitable fruit of right-wing election denialism, a kind of follow-on operation to January 6.
In reality, to the extent the attacker represents anything, it’s the milieu of hippie Berkeley more than Steve Bannon’s War Room, but no one is letting that get in the way of a good narrative.
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In a classic sign of serious mental illness, DePape believes that he was being targeted by invisible forces. In its review of what DePape wrote on his blog the week before the attack, the Washington Post found that he thought “that an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird.”
According to the paper, “he wrote that he was looking to purchase a fairy house on Etsy but was frustrated that the doors were painted and so could not be used by a fairy. ‘They have lots of fairy houses but NONE of them are MADE for fairies,’ he wrote.”
He also believed that he was being targeted by law enforcement manipulating the 4chan message board.
Apparently, before DePape’s posts would load, readers would see an image of someone wearing a giant inflatable unicorn costume.
DePape’s life was about what you’d expect, given these lunatic ravings — a total train wreck. He occasionally slept in a broken-down school bus. His family was afraid of him. A woman identifying herself as his daughter said, “He did genuinely try to be a good person but the monster in him was always too strong for him to be safe around.”
This is not the picture of a man radicalized by election denial or right-wing conspiracy theories. Instead, it shows someone already disturbed and dangerous before he posted anything favorable about Jordan Peterson or Peter Navarro. Years ago he got some attention for sharing Taub’s nudist activism. According to Taub, when they met “he was very much in alignment with my views, and I’ve always been very progressive.”
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