Paul Pelosi, David DePape, and intentional deception by NBC's Ben Collins
Paul Pelosi, David DePape, and intentional deception by NBC's Ben Collins
While a story with many strange details unfolds, NBC's Ben Collins fills the information gap with lies.
The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit.
- Jacques Ellul
On October 28, 2022, Paul Pelosi, husband of current United States Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was reportedly the victim of an attack by someone who broke into the Pelosi’s house.
Paul Pelosi, 82, was taken to hospital following the incident at their San Francisco residence on Friday.
The attacker was taken into custody by authorities in California while an investigation is carried out.
Mr and Mrs Pelosi have been married since 1963.
Drew Hammill, spokesman for Speaker Pelosi, said that she was not at home at the time of the incident.
“Early this morning, an assailant broke into the Pelosi residence in San Francisco and violently assaulted Mr Pelosi,” he said.
As further details emerged it was reported that the police witnessed, upon arrival, the assailant attacking Mr. Pelosi with a hammer.
Following the initial reports, a strong narrative developed attempting to blame “the right wing” as being responsible for the attack. Taking all the pages out of the playbook laid out in my last article Stochastic Terrorism - A game of rhetorical asymmetry, mainstream news outlets began connecting any and all details to "the right wing” or specific Republican politicians wherever possible.
Ashley Parker isn’t some random “conspiracy theorist” on the internet. Ashley Parker’s resume includes The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC. What she writes is from a position of authority. In other words, the dumbest thing you have ever heard is officially endorsed by The Washington Post as a causal influence to this assault.
Real details are slim
Real information about the attack is slow to come out. It was released that the person arrested for the break-in and attack is named David DePape. How DePape got into the house and the timeline of the attack once arriving at the house are not details that have been fully accounted for.
From the initial police update the details known were
San Francisco Police were dispatched for a “wellness check” at 2:27 am (PST)
When they arrived, they encountered an adult male and Mr. Pelosi fighting over a hammer
The suspect won control of the hammer and then assaulted Mr. Pelosi
Politico reported that there was a third, unnamed person, in the home who let the police inside.
David DePape forced his way into the home through a back entrance, Scott said. Officers arrived at the house, knocked on the front door and were let inside by an unknown person. They discovered DePape and Pelosi struggling for a hammer, and after they instructed them to drop the weapon, Scott said, DePape took the hammer and “violently attacked” Pelosi.
The conversation over the police scanners reported that Mr. Pelosi referred to David DePape as a friend.
These details are changing over time. An hour before writing this very sentence, Tom Winter tweeted clarifications on the above.
Despite all of these details changing, some two days after being reported by major “authoritative” news services, propagandists masquerading as journalists are flooding the zone with lies of both commission and omission.
Flooding the zone with misinformation
On October 29th, 2022, Michael Shellenberger published a Substack article that described DePape as being both a heavy drug user and someone with many mental problems.
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.
Neighbors described DePape as a homeless addict with a politics that was, until recently, left-wing, but of secondary importance to his psychotic and paranoid behavior. “What I know about the family is that they’re very radical activists,” said one of DePape’s neighbors, a woman who only gave her first name, Trish. “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, claiming that we are plotting against them. It’s really weird to see that they are willing to be so aggressive toward somebody else who is also a lefty.”
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. “He talks to angels,” she said, and told her that “there will be a hard time coming.”
Another woman, Linda Schneider, told CNN and KRON4, that she got to know DePape around 2014 and that he was still homeless, living in a storage unit, and using hard drugs. “He (was) likely a mindless follower of something he saw on social media because I don’t think he had the courage to be part of any political or terrorist group,” said Schneider. “His drug use began again and he went off his rocker.”
Ben Collins of NBC News, called what Shellenberger wrote “completely false.”
Ben Collins is flooding the zone - bombarding readers with an image of a list of links, and making a strong claim that he knows that DePape was a “right wing extremist” and he knows this because of these links. It’s indisputable.
Ben Collins is a propagandist - his job is to push a narrative and is not to report the full details of a situation. Ben attempts to train his audience to look no further than the image of links he provides by making a plea to some ethical code
The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit.
Let’s take a look, shall we
Collins’ image of links is not fabricated. It is indeed a list of links from a WordPress blog that has been attributed to DePape and has not as of the time of writing this been shown to be a different David DePape.
Collins says “Here’s every archived page title on the site from this year.” The sleight of hand of hand in this statement is that “this year” is really only of posts made mostly on two days within a five-day period.
These details are easily found when closely inspecting his images of links, the date of the post according to WordPress is included in the link. Consider one of his images of links, which you can verify for yourself by looking at his tweet above.
In between “godisloving.wordpress.com” and the title of the post, is the date of the post. Let’s zoom in
All of the links in his images are between August 24th 2022 and August 28th 2022. This 5 day period is “every archived page title on the site from this year.”
What Collins’ attempts to portray as long and consistent periods of activity is actually a flurry of recent activity in under a week. All of the links in Collins’ images are from 5 separate days, with the vast majority being dated as August 24th and August 26th, 20221.
Convenient ethical codes
By flooding the zone and deliberately misportraying the activity on this WordPress blog as being over a period of a year, readers are expected to believe that Collins has definitively established that Shellenberger has lied and that DePape is not suffering from mental instability and pernicious drug use but is instead only motivated by far right politics.
Collins then justifies not further elaborating in the name of harm prevention. Were he to show images of these posts, he claims, it would do immense harm. I will take that risk then, and post screenshots of these posts. I apologize in advance for any immense harm caused in the pursuit of the truth.
Let’s take a look at a post titled “Pedophile normalization” from August 26th 2022.
If there was ever content here, all that is left is the title now. You may see this nonexistent content yourself both at this archive and this other archive.
Let’s now look at another post “The Big Lie.”
This post is also without content, again leaving the title all there is. In Collins’ original reply to Shellenberger claiming his article is “completely false", he states that all the links were from archives of the site, you and I are both looking at screenshots from archives of the site - the same Collins claims would cause immense harm.
Here again you may see this lack of content and title-only page that Collins won’t screenshot out of a proclaimed ethical responsibility to minimize harm (*cough* to the narrative). One archive version and a second archive.
Not all pages were empty
I grabbed screenshots of every archived page I could retrieve, and by the errors I received in my program code to automate such a project it seems like I may have missed only two or three pages. You may get a copy of all the screenshots I took here. Please don’t cause immense harm, and unleash Collins’ worst fears.
Here is a page that has content. It is titled “Horton hears a”
I did not censor the content for your protection. That is the content. That’s what David DePape supposedly posted according to the archive. One archive failed to grab the image (you can see a tiny square where it would have been) but another archive captured it.
Other posts with content were, for lack of a better word, bizarre.
I don’t know how to calculate the harm done by posting this screenshot.
There are indeed entries that may be reasonably categorized as containing content Collins originally claimed, such as a post “Pedo Schools 1”
Although in the context of accusing Shellenberger of writing an article that is “completely false” and “filling the information gap with lies” where Shellenberger wrote about those who knew David DePape and that
he was still homeless, living in a storage unit, and using hard drugs. “He (was) likely a mindless follower of something he saw on social media because I don’t think he had the courage to be part of any political or terrorist group,” said Schneider. “His drug use began again and he went off his rocker.”
it’s a little uncertain how such a screenshot reduces the idea of mental instability.
A screenshot of another post, titled “Pizza Gate,” likewise can fall into a category like Collins described, since it is titled Pizza Gate, but let’s see if the screenshot does immense harm to anything other than Collins’ narrative that Shellenberger is lying about DePape’s mental stability.
Moving goal posts
Collins will want to move goal posts if he tries to respond to this. He accused Shellenberger of telling a story that was completely false, filling an information gap with lies.
Consider the exclusive report today (October 30th) by Tara Campbell, “Former partner of accused Paul Pelosi attacker DePape reveals new details about suspect” [emphasis mine]
The former partner of the man accused of violently attacking Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband at their San Francisco home on Friday is revealing new details about the suspect.
"Hello this is Gypsy Taub. I am the ex-life partner of David DePape and the mother of his children," said Oxane Taub, calling from the Californian Institution For Women in Corona, California.
Taub -- better known as "Gypsy" -- is a well-known nudist activist who spoke with ABC7 in 2013 at a protest in San Francisco.
"We just wanted to test the waters to see how much the police department respected our first amendment rights," said Taub in 2013. Now she's revealing a longtime relationship with David DePape.
"He is mentally ill. He has been mentally ill for a long time," said Taub, who last year was found guilty on 20 counts, including the attempted abduction of a 14-year-old boy near his Berkeley high school.
Taub told ABC7 News that she and DePape met more than 20 years ago. Together they raised their two sons and her daughter until about seven years ago.
She described a time DePape returned home after disappearing for a year.
"He came back in very bad shape. He thought he was Jesus. He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him," Taub said. "And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal."
Collins will want to move the goal posts if he responds, that he will be vindicated because some of the bizarre posts fits the categories he asserted. But he asserted that Shellenberger’s article was completely false and filled with lies. He asserted that there was a blog with a year of activity demonstrating a mentally stable person with no serious drug problems (since Shellenberger’s article again was completely false) and that it was demonstrable that only because of “far right” ideology was the person motivated to attack Paul Pelosi.
The only person purely motivated by political ideology here is Ben Collins.
The chart was made in excel, and the date formatting at the bottom is unfortunately obscure. Excel decided to do a “range” display, which is read with nuance. The first date reads [8/24/2022, 8/24/2022] and the next (8/24/2022, 8/25/2022]. The notation is mathematical interval notation. The round bracket ( indicates “up to but not including” and square means “up to and including.” So the second column means all of 8/25 “up to” the earliest moment just before 8/24.
I couldn’t figure out how to change it and I got annoyed so I gave up and decided to put this footnote instead. You may download the data yourself here.