How Elon Musk, Trump and Tucker Carlson helped far-right conspiracy theorists hijack the Paul Pelosi attack

Bogus reports and right-wing influencers spread false information that rapidly outpaced the truth. Court filings and interviews detail a gruesome attack. There was no ‘friend’ in his underwear. Alex Woodward reports

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According to court filings, David DePape told police that he intended to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage, interrogate her, and break her kneecaps if he believed she lied to him.

But when he arrived at the Pelosi household in San Francisco in the early morning hours on 28 October, he woke up her husband, threatened to tie him up with zip ties, and struck him in the head with a hammer, knocking him unconscious for three minutes in a pool of blood from his fractured skull.

The details of the attack on Paul Pelosi are outlined in several court documents based on 911 calls, police video, surveillance footage and interviews with Mr DePape himself, who reportedly told officers that he was “sick of the insane f****** level of lies coming out of Washington DC” and intended to send a message to members of Congress that there were consequences for their actions.

But within 48 hours of the attack, the case of a man who appeared to be immersed in toxic, online-driven conspiracy theories who nearly killed the Democratic House Speaker’s husband was thrown into chaos by the same far-right ecosystem that fuelled the attack.

Rather than dismiss debunked conspiracy theories that have deflected blame, right-wing media figures and GOP officials have given them a platform and used them against their political rivals. And instead of condemning an act of violence and the potential assassination of an elected official, they have openly mocked it.

In the conspiracy universe, there was no home invasion, Mr DePape is Mr Pelosi’s leftist gay lover, and a far-reaching plot involving Democratic officials and mainstream media is covering up the facts to protect Ms Pelosi.

Those baseless claims – debunked by Mr DePape’s own alleged statements to police, as well as his own apparent online footprint and interviews with his family and neighbours – have been widely shared by influential right-wing figures and media outlets.

Other conservative influencers legitimised the claims by introducing questions that were either already answered in court documents or based on speculation from bogus sources.

As police and investigators collected evidence, rampant speculation among right-wing personalities and social media accounts reached politically convenient conclusions. The speed of false information easily outpaced the truth.

By the time law enforcement agencies filed criminal complaints relying on reams of evidence, several exhausting 24-hour news cycles had already passed, exploiting a flood of mis- and disinformation involving one of the highest-profile Democratic officials routinely at the centre of right-wing scrutiny and GOP campaigns.

Conspiracy theories and attempts to direct attention away from acts of political violence are also thriving among networks and platforms that have epoused similar views to the kinds of content on Mr DePape’s own alleged websites.

They easily caught fire thanks to a media environment that relies on such an audience for partisan and financial support and thrives on presenting “news” contrary to mainstream sources.

The case also points to a growing concern whether news organisations can manage to simultaneously uphold the truth and dismiss bogus narratives while devoting resources to combatting false information, or end up inadvertently amplifying the conspiracy theories and bad-faith arguments that they have tried to debunk.

People who have bought deeply into conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking cannot simply be fact-checked, as they believe the institutions themselves are corrupt, Samuel Woolley, who leads the Propaganda Research Lab at the University of Texas-Austin, explained to The Independent earlier this year.

That “asymmetric polarisation” has enabled a wide audience to digest information in a parallel reality, one in which “they not only don’t get exposed to the same framing of the story, they don’t exposed to the story at all,” according to Mr Woolley.

The kinds of antisemitic, transphobic and violent ideas on websites and social media pages linked to Mr DePape are not limited to obscure internet forums manufacturing conspiracy theories, but are dogwhistled and circulated among mainstream right-wing figures.

Among those whose entire media diet depicts a world in which children are being kidnapped and sexually tortured, Democratic officials are stealing elections, and life-saving vaccines are killing millions, what other choice is there but violent retribution?

As paraphrased by police, Mr DePape allegedly told investigators that he believed that “much like the American founding fathers with the British, he was fighting against tyranny without the option of surrender.”

In an interview, he also “explained that by breaking Nancy’s kneecaps, she would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other members of Congress there were consequences to actions,” according to court filings.

“I came here to have a little chat with his wife,” Mr DePape reportedly told paramedics after his arrest. “I didn’t really want to hurt him, but you know, this was a suicide mission. I’m not going to stand here and do nothing, even if it costs me my life.”

A courtroom sketch depicts David DePape’s first appearance on 31 October. (REUTERS)

On the same day as the attack, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin told a rally crowd that “there’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re going to send [Ms Pelosi] back to be with him in California.”

Arizona’s Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake joked to a crowd at a campaign event on 31 October that Ms Pelosi has “protection when she’s in DC” but “apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection.”

That night, she suggested to Fox News personality Tucker Carlson that she herself was a victim because she “can’t talk about all these issues because the media has told us they’re prohibited.”

“You know, you can’t talk about vaccines. You can’t talk about elections. You can’t talk about Paul Pelosi. Now you can’t talk about Nancy Pelosi,” she claimed. “And you can’t talk about the elections and you can’t talk about Covid and I’m talking about all those things because I still believe we have a little bit of the First Amendment left.”

“That’s right,” Mr Carlson replied.

No, Paul Pelosi did not know the suspect

Several elements from early reporting in the immediate aftermath of the attack have formed the basis for a bulk of bogus conspiracy theories about Mr Pelosi.

A homophobic claim that the attack was a “gay lovers” quarrel gone wrong appeared to have surfaced from a retracted local news report that claimed Mr DePape arrived to the Pelosi household in his underwear.

Then, an audio clip from a 911 operator appeared to suggest Mr Pelosi identified the suspect as “friend” on the call. Subsequent law enforcement reports based on call evidence and interviews have referenced that the operator was discussing Mr DePape’s description of himself, confirmed in an apparent transcript of Mr Pelosi’s call in court documents.

Next, allegations that there were no signs of forced entry – suggesting that Mr Pelosi willingly let Mr DePape enter the home – were debunked by police reports and photographs from the scene showing shattered glass at the entryway. Mr DePape also apparently told police that he had to strike the glass several times before he could break it.

Initial police descriptions that the men were “both” holding a hammer when police arrived also fed speculation that they each were holding a hammer. There was only one hammer, and the men were struggling for control when police arrived, according to court documents.

Bogus reports and right-wing influencers fuel conspiracy theories

On 29 October, Hillary Clinton shared a link to a Los Angeles Times story detailing Mr DePape’s digital trail of far-right conspiracy theories. “The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories,” she wrote in a Twitter post.

The following day, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk replied, claiming that “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” He attached a screenshot of a bogus report accusing Mr Pelosi of getting into a drunken fight with a male prostitute.

He quietly deleted the tweet, but thousands of people had already shared it, along with the original article, which has fuelled thousands of similar posts.

He also did not acknowledge the post or apologise for sharing information that was never credible and later debunked by Mr DePape’s own apparent statements to police. Instead, Musk sarcastically attacked The New York Times for reporting, correctly, that he hared a story from a website “known to publish false news.”

“This is fake,” he joked. “I did *not* tweet out a link to The New York Times!”

Far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene defended Musk in a post blaming “mainstream media” and “democrat activists” for spreading misinformation – while also spreading more misinformation herself.

A report from The Gateway Pundit also accelerated the spread of bogus social media posts about the attack with a story that falsely claimed Mr DePape’s websites were recently manufactured, suggesting that his digital footprint was manipulated to pin blame on right-wing reactionaries.

The “exclusive” report based its claims with recent screen captures from the Internet Archive, which is not the same as evidence that the websites were recently published.

“It looks like this is all another far-left conjured-up lie,” the story claims.

Gateway Pundit later removed those claims from the story. It also removed a reference to Mr Pelosi’s “‘friend’ in his underwear.”

The story’s headline (“EXCLUSIVE: Two Far-Right Websites Attributed to David DePape Were FABRICATED – They Were Created Friday and Deleted Today”) was later edited to read “EXCLUSIVE: Two Far-Right Websites Attributed to David DePape to Smear Conservatives Were Scraped Friday and Deleted Saturday.”

But it already had been shared widely, including by far-right conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, whose Twitter post was shared thousands of times. The post includes the original false headline.

The Gateway Pundit story continues to falsely assert that the websites registered to Mr DePape are “likely fakes.”

On Instagram, Donald Trump Jr shared another Twitter user’s post with a photo of a hammer on top of a pair of white underwear, adding, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”

He shared another post with two South Park characters having sex, while one character says into a phone “I’m being attacked!”

Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins tweeted, then deleted, a picture of Ms Pelosi with the caption “that moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy is the reason your husband didn’t make it to your fundraiser.”

New York Congressman Claudia Tenney also posted, then deleted, a photo with several men carrying hammers outside of a home that has been wrongly identified as Mr DePape’s home with a “United Against Hate” sign and LGBT+ Pride flag.

“LOL,” she wrote.

Self-described fascist and prominent anti-trans activist Matt Walsh claimed that it was “absurd” to “paint a hippie nudist from Berkeley as some kind of militant right winger.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz shared the post, adding simply, “truth.”

Social media accounts have spread countless images of the Berkeley property, with signage and nearby bumper stickers that suggest that a politically progressive person lived there.

But law enforcement determined that Mr DePape lived in a garage in Richmond, California, after interviewing the property’s owner, who told investigators that he had lived there for roughly two years.

His neighbours said he was politically right wing and “gravitat[ed] towards the new right talking points”.

Investigators discovered “two hammers, a sword, and a pair of rubber and cloth gloves” in the residence, along with other documents that confirmed his address, including Department of Motor Vehicles paperwork, IRS letters, and PayPal credit cards.

Court filings based on videos and interviews detail attack

Mr Pelosi was sleeping in his bed before the break in. While on the way to the hospital after bleeding from his skull, he told police that Mr DePape entered the bedroom and said he wanted to speak with “Nancy.”

According to court documents, when Mr Pelosi called 911, he told an operator that there was a person in his house waiting for his wife while Mr DePape gestured towards him to get off the phone.

The operator asked whether he knew the man, according to the filing. Mr Pelosi said he did not. The operator then asked for the man’s name and Mr DePape apparently responded, “My name is David.” The operator asked who David is, and Mr Pelosi said, “I don’t know.” Mr DePape then said “I’m a friend of theirs.”

“He wants me to get the hell off the phone,” Mr Pelosi said.

Mr DePape, holding a hammer and zip ties, then led Mr Pelosi downstairs, where Mr Pelosi could see where he entered the house, according to court filings; Mr DePape told him he had to bash a window several times to break through and enter.

Two officers arrived at the house shortly after the call at roughly 2.27am. Mr DePape told the officers “everything’s good,” according to court documents.

An officer shined a flashlight towards him and saw him “holding the bottom handle of the hammer” while Mr Pelosi struggled for control. One of the officers ordered him to drop it. Mr DePape said “nope”, pulled the hammer away from Mr Pelosi to wrench it away from him, then lunged towards him and struck him in the head “at full force,” knocking Mr Pelosi unconscious, according to the filing.

Mr Pelosi “remained unresponsive for about three minutes, waking up in a pool of his own blood.”