Paul Pelosi – A Politically Motivated Attack on a California Senator and a Republican Candidate, and the Importance of Truth

American politics is festering in violence, intimidation and inhumanity as another election looms amid escalating risks to political figures, all of which poses a grave threat to democracy.

In one extraordinary moment on Monday, investigators from San Francisco moved to debunk a false conspiracy theory pushed by some conservatives that Paul Pelosi knew his attacker and was in a relationship with him.

His comments don’t reflect the charge sheet now facing DePape and the comments of investigators in San Francisco. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said the assault was “politically motivated” based on DePape’s statements. The alleged attacker is accused of trying to kidnapping a US official and attacking a family member of a US official. He is also facing charges from state officials with “attempted murder, residential burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, false imprisonment of an elder, as well as threats to a public official and their family.”

This version of events will be tested in court and it’s premature to link any specific piece of political rhetoric to what transpired. But the incident leaves extremist politicians who fling vitriol – yet refuse to take responsibility for their words – on ever more tenuous ground.

Perhaps the most extraordinary by-product of an assault apparently intended for the speaker is that it produced its own churn of conspiracy theories and rhetorical cruelty. The dissemination of false information and misinformation on the internet and on the ideological right is creating an alternative reality meant to blur truth, prevent accountability, and to further pollute political discourse.

It wasn’t just the internet that caused the elevation of the conspiracies, it also came from one of Donald Trump Jr.’s sons and a Republican candidate for governor in Arizona. Lake appeared to mock Paul Pelosi over his assault and the security at his home. That anyone could find humor in a physical attack is troubling, especially given America’s recent history of political violence.

It was the latest outburst of a climate of violence and harassment swamping modern politics. It took place less than two years after an unprecedented violent insurrection at the US Capitol rooted in Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. It followed a few months after a man was arrested and charged with attempting to murder conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. This came five years after GOP House Minority Whip Steve Scalise was shot at a congressional baseball practice. And it’s less than 12 years since Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords was left with a brain injury after she was shot in the head in Tucson, Arizona.

There is a backdrop of tension as well as reports of groups watching voter drop boxes in Arizona as the Paul Pelosi attack took place. Earlier this summer, former Georgia poll worker Ruby Freeman searingly told the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, that there was now nowhere she felt safe after getting drawn in to Trump’s voter fraud conspiracies and asked, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”

Analyzing Paul Pelosi’s Facebook Attack on the House January 6 Committee: Trump, the Oath Keepers, and the Capitol

A Washington Post poll found 34% of Americans and 40% of Republicans thought violence against the government was justified.

Last year we saw threats against Congress people and their families double what we have seen before, and it’s the first time that’s happened since we became a nation.

Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a conspiracy theory social media post featuring a hammer, as though the ordeal suffered by Paul Pelosi, who is still in the hospital, was funny. The new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, retweeted and deleted a similar post, raising the possibility that one of the world’s newest social media gatekeepers might end up exacerbating an already toxic political culture.

“This attack goes to the core of our democracy and it can’t be just written off to some crazy person. What our leaders say matters,” Ed Davis, a former Boston police commissioner, said on “CNN Newsroom” on Monday.

In the interview, Trump claimed that what happened was a terrible thing but was indicative of rising crime in American cities.

The House January 6 committee has shown how Trump’s words swayed those who attacked the Capitol into doing what he wanted. That impression was further underlined on Monday when a former member of the Oath Keepers extremist group told a jury that after the election, he felt a “sense of desperation and hopelessness” because he believed Trump’s claims that fraud was committed in the 2020 election.

“I guess I was acting like a traitor against my own government,” said Graydon Young, the first Oath Keeper to plead guilty to conspiracy in connection to January 6.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/01/politics/democracy-paul-pelosi-attack-analysis/index.html

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His comments underscored the power of the inflammatory rhetoric coming from leaders like Trump, who have appeared to offer tacit encouragement for political violence.

She said, “It is sad to see that at a time in history where people believe it is okay to express their political sentiment through violence.”

One of the keys to understanding our era is seeing the ways conservative and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The left and right have different attitudes towards American institutions, the left with a new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. and the populist right with skepticism and paranoia. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. There is a resemblance to Foucault and postmodernism among Trumpian conservatism’s rivals.

These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you have been told that a disturbed-seeming man with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the jewelry trade was planning to assault an important national politician, then you would be in for a real shock.

By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.