We Canadians are always quick to take credit when an iconic American celebrity has some kind of connection to our country - hence our insistence that Superman is actually Canadian, because co-creator Joe Shuster grew up in Toronto - but I don’t think we’ll be gloating about this one very much:
The B.C.-raised man accused of breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's California home and severely beating her husband with a hammer appears to have made racist and often rambling posts online, including some that questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former U.S. president Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.
David DePape, 42, grew up in Powell River before leaving about 20 years ago to follow an older girlfriend to San Francisco, according to family. The Globe and Mail reported that he also spent some time in Armstrong, a small town in B.C.'s Interior, graduating from Pleasant Valley Secondary School in 1998. A street address listed for DePape in the Bay Area college town of Berkeley led to a post office box at a UPS Store.
This Victoria Times-Colonist story about DePape’s background confirmed what we all suspected: he was a Trump supporter obsessed with QAnon and teh Joos.
Antisemitism is having quite the week in the spotlight, isn’t it?
But far from being your average whitebread suburbanite radicalized practically overnight because of what he read on Facebook and Twitter, DePape was bouncing around conspiracyland for decades and appears to have spent much of that time on its left and/or libertarian flank:
David DePape was known in Berkeley as a pro-nudity activist who had picketed naked at protests against local ordinances requiring people to be clothed in public.
Gene DePape said the girlfriend whom his son followed to California was named Gypsy and they had two children together. DePape also has a child with a different woman, his stepfather said.
Photographs published by The San Francisco Chronicle on Friday identified DePape frolicking nude outside city hall with dozens of others at the 2013 wedding of pro-nudity activist Gypsy Taub, who was marrying another man. Taub did not respond Friday to calls or emails.
A 2013 article in The Chronicle described David DePape as a “hemp jewelry maker” who lived in a Victorian flat in Berkeley with Taub, who hosted a talk show on local public-access TV called “Uncensored 9/11,” in which she appeared naked and pushed conspiracy theories that the 2001 terrorist attacks were “an inside job.”
I guess it’s not impossible that a nudist hemp jewelry maker in Berkeley could be a conservative Republican, in the same way that the lead singer of a thrash metal band can be a practicing Roman Catholic, but it would certainly be unexpected.
By the time he was spurred into violent action, though, there’s no doubt he was camped out on the other end of the horseshoe:
A pair of web blogs posted in recent months online under the name David DePape contained rants about technology, aliens, communists, religious minorities and global elites.
An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q,” displayed a scatological collection of memes that included photos of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and made reference to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that espouses the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals.
[…]
On a different site, someone posting under DePape's name repeated false claims about COVID vaccines and wearing masks, questioned whether climate change is real and displayed an illustration of a zombified Hillary Clinton dining on human flesh.
There appeared to be no direct posts about Pelosi, but there were entries defending former Trump and Ye, the rapper formally known as Kayne West who recently made antisemitic comments.
In other posts, the writer said Jews helped finance Hitler's political rise in Germany and suggested an antisemitic plot was involved in Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine.
In a Sept. 27 post, the writer said any journalists who denied Trump's false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election “should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.”
A pro-Trump vote-fraud conspiracy theorist carrying out political violence? I’m truly shocked by this thoroughly unsurprising development.
Political violence in America is not exclusively a right-wing phenomenon, as illustrated by the Congressional ball-field shooting and the attempt on Justice Kavanaugh’s life which followed weeks of protests outside Supreme Court Justices’ homes. Five minutes of browsing political Twitter should disabuse you of any notion that there aren’t left-wingers gleefully pouring gasoline on a smoldering fire.
Heck, I’ll even agree that when a killer turns out to have political views on the left - or at least explicitly not from the right - the media’s relative lack of cuiriosity is palpable. Had Darrell Brooks shared MAGA conspiracy theories online instead of “Black Hebrew Israelite” babble, I suspect his trial for driving through the Waukesha Christmas parade would have garnered at least as much attention as the Kyle Rittenhouse case, instead of being covered most prominently on subreddits dedicated to sovereign-citizen madness.
But it’s one thing to acknowledge this kind of thing exists on the left, and another to imply that both sides are equally at fault. When a Republican gets threatened or attacked, you tend not to see mainstream Democratic politicians/future Presidential contenders making a funny about it:
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