Republicans Continue to Spread Baseless Claims
About Pelosi Attack
Some of the conspiracy theories have already seeped
into the Republican mainstream.
Steven Lee
MyersStuart A. Thompson
By Steven
Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson
Oct. 31,
2022
Donald
Trump Jr., the former president’s son, continues to post jokes about it.
Dinesh
D’Souza, the creator of a discredited film about the 2020 election called “2000
Mules,” accused the San Francisco Police Department on Monday of covering up
the facts.
Representative
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, wrote that the “same mainstream
media democrat activists” who questioned former President Donald J. Trump’s
ties to Russia were now silencing the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk.
The reason:
Mr. Musk deleted a post linking to a newspaper that once claimed Hillary Rodham
Clinton was dead when she ran for president in 2016.
In the days
since Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was
attacked by an intruder asking, “Where is Nancy?”, a litany of Republicans and
conservatives have spread baseless conspiracy theories about the assault and
its motives.
Although
the police have not yet detailed all the circumstances of the crime, these
theories have already seeped into the Republican mainstream. While many
Republican officials have denounced the violence, others have at the very least
tolerated, and in some cases cheered, a violent assault on the spouse of a
political rival.
The
disinformation “isn’t just political,” said Angelo Carusone, the president and
chief executive of Media Matters for America, a progressive nonprofit. “It’s
much bigger than that; it’s deeper. They’re really rethinking and reshaping a
lot of our norms.”
The attack
on Mr. Pelosi in the couple’s home in San Francisco early on Friday morning has
raised fears about the rise of political violence against elected officials —
increasingly, it seems, inspired by a toxic brew of extremism, hate and
paranoia that is easily found online.
The
assailant, identified by the police as David DePape, 42, posted a series of
notes in the days before the attack suggesting that he had fallen under the
sway of right-wing conspiracy theories and antisemitism online. Some of the
flurry of posts by others questioning the circumstances of the attack appeared
intended to deflect attention from Mr. DePape’s views.
No top
Republican lawmakers joined in peddling unfounded claims about the attack, but
few denounced them, either. Mrs. Clinton, the former first lady and senator who
lost to Mr. Trump in 2016, pointedly blamed the party for spreading “hate and
deranged conspiracy theories.”
“It is
shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result,” she wrote on
Twitter on Saturday. “As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their
words and the actions that follow.”
It was her
post that prompted Mr. Musk, Twitter’s owner since last Thursday night, to
insinuate that an alternate version of the assault was possible. “There is a
tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” he
replied directly to Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Musk
linked to an opinion piece from the Santa Monica Observer, a website known to
publish falsehoods, which offered an alternative account of what led to the
attack on Mr. Pelosi. Relying on an anonymous source and providing no evidence,
the article claimed that the attacker was a male prostitute.
The story
also indicated that the attacker was found by the police wearing only his
underwear, a detail that was originally published by a Fox affiliate before
getting widely circulated in right-wing communities online. The affiliate later
removed the detail and appended a correction, saying the article “misstated
what clothing the suspect was wearing.”
A
spokeswoman for Fox Television Stations said the story was corrected within
about two hours.
That change
prompted a new round of baseless theories, with some right-wing Americans
claiming a cover-up.
“New day,
new narrative,” Tricia Flanagan, a former Republican primary candidate for New
Jersey’s 4th Congressional District, tweeted to her 70,000 followers.
On Monday,
federal prosecutors charged Mr. DePape with attempted kidnapping and assault of
a relative of a public official. He was looking for Ms. Pelosi, who was in
Washington at the time, and carrying “a roll of tape, white rope, a second
hammer, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves and zip ties,” according to the
office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California,
which filed the charges.
Mr.
DePape’s equipment — and his demand to know “Where’s Nancy?” — suggested a
premeditated assault, which would undercut the counterfactual versions being
spread online.
Even so,
the conspiracy theories found receptive audiences, receiving tens of thousands
of engagements on numerous platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and other
platforms that have built smaller, though politically active, audiences.
Charlie
Kirk, the conservative radio and YouTube host, expressed hope on Monday that
some “amazing patriot” would post bail for Mr. DePape and become a “midterm
hero.” “Bail him out and then go ask him some questions,” he said, adding that
liberals were trying to politicize the attack.
Mr.
Carusone noted that Fox’s coverage shifted over the weekend, much as it did
after the 2020 election, when the network initially reported the outcome
accurately only to later give credence to the false claims by Mr. Trump and
others that the vote was somehow fraudulent.
Fox News
did not respond to a request for comment.
The
coverage of the attack on Mr. Pelosi began with fairly straightforward coverage
of the crime, before portraying it as a consequence of Democratic
“soft-on-crime” policies and, finally, as a mystery with darker undercurrents
that could not yet be known.
“Look for
what’s missing and what doesn’t add up,” David Webb, a Fox News contributor,
said during “The Big Sunday Show.”
Mr.
Carusone said the shift reflected a deference by the network, like the
Republican Party, to the most extreme voices in the right-wing information
ecosystem that both cater to.
“This was
everywhere in the right-wing fever swamps immediately,” he said.
At the core
of the flurry of disinformation, he argued, was a refusal to show any sympathy
for an older victim simply because of his ties to a figure regularly vilified
on the opposite end of the political spectrum.
Conservatives
have for years turned opponents like Ms. Pelosi and others into cartoonish
supervillains. Mr. Trump himself regularly called her “Crazy Nancy.”
“They’re
very unlikely to give them any solace or support even in the most clear-cut
circumstances,” Mr. Carusone said, “because in some way it cuts against the
broader narrative that they’re supervillains and therefore deserve it.”
Steven Lee
Myers covers misinformation for The Times. He has worked in Washington, Moscow,
Baghdad and Beijing, where he contributed to the articles that won the Pulitzer
Prize for public service in 2021. He is also the author of “The New Tsar: The
Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.” @stevenleemyers • Facebook
Stuart A.
Thompson is a reporter on the Technology desk covering misinformation and
disinformation. @stuartathompson
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