[Developing] Nancy Pelosi's husband violently beaten with hammer

Honestly, his walking back towards the intruder is stupid but not that shocking ..... especially for someone that likely has a large ego.... he probably felt that he had the situation under control, and that he would keep the police from escalating it.... what he didn't realize is that someone that is mentally unpredictable can react violently to a threat.

I have seen overly confident people act this way with dogs before.... arrogance.

 

SF police are not overall known for great de-escalation skills with the mentally ill. I've actually wondered if Pelosi would have been best off to call the emergency psych services mobile team that's better trained for this crap. But I completely understand just calling the PoPo if you have an intruder (or, as you may prefer, secret-maybe-gay-half-your-age-booty-call-b/c-you-know-octagenarian-men-have-so-much-testosterone).

 

I understand it all happened very quickly apparently, I'm more wondering about the psyche of the attacker. He had plenty of time to do it if he wanted to attack Pelosi, but he didn't. He only did it once police had arrived. Did he feel "betrayed", "cornered", or what the hell was he actually thinking.

 

I think I saw somewhere that he might have been on a suicide mission.

 

Is Paul Pelosi gay? Did you figure that out yet?

 

Perhaps he was in the middle of opening the door with hammer in hand, and then DePape grabbed the hammer and pulled him away from the door. The police entered and saw them struggling a few feet away.

That seems the most likely explanation. No need for a secret third person or any of the other fanciful stuff that some with a particular political orientation have imagined.

 

This isn't hard.

This man is mentally ill.

People with mental illness can be easily influenced.

He was influenced by extreme leftist causes when he was younger.

The last few years he has been influenced by conspiracy theories from right wing extremists and he lashed out.

Historically, keep in mind that conspiracy theories have been embraced by both sides of the aisle.

For example, the JFK conspiracy theory was something that now is believed by a lot of people, but it was mostly the left that believed it and pushed it at first.

That doesn't mean that the right shouldn't be criticized for tolerating the current conspiracy nuts for election purposes, as it can be dangerous, but it isn't something that is definitely long term only associated with the right. In the 1960's and early 1970's there were a lot of marginal groups that were dangerous and associated with the left.

 

It is mental illness.

He clearly was mentally ill and was in a downward spiral.

He was literally living on the margins of society.

He lost contact with his wife and son.

Not all mental illness is the same obviously, but this is classic.

Trying to figure it out is a fruitless exercise.

My wife had a friend in Northwestern University graduate school that was incredibly smart and literally worked 18-24 hours a day on nano technology and ethics..... he concluded that I was a Scientologist that had programed my wife and was slowly attempting to change ethics in the upper crust of social circles because we had a 3 hour conversation one time about Scientology. He privately emailed me one time wanting to meet with him. I did not go, as I could tell from some of the information in the email that he had been following me. My wife was very pregnant so I decided to not discuss it with her right away.... she went into labor that night, and this same person hung himself at Fermi-Lab minutes after my son was born ............... I spent years trying to figure it out - I never did. He was mentally ill..... and so is this attacker with the hammer.

 

Totally agree - which is why I find it interesting that the majority of posters on this thread is so desperate to paint him as MAGA, instead of focusing on his mental illness.

I'm still just curious to understand what exactly happened, it's a weird but interesting case.

 

He want another round of gay octogenarian hammer sex.

 

Or the police opened the door. No official report I've seen says someone inside opened the door.

Edit: I found a source where Pelosi did open the door.

 

I honestly agree with you to an extent, but here's the deal, as I see it.

We all know a mentally ill person can have many, many triggers. A plethora of nutball narratives are available for anyone who is losing their way in the world. If it wasn't some MAGA, anti-Pelosi, liberals-as-demons BS, it would arguably have been some religious extremist BS or even some cult or another. Maybe the guy would even have become a Warriors fan.

But, by stoking crazy narratives, some people worry that you're setting up political opponents as targets of craziness. Pro Elon people may even now be saying, "hey, quit demonizing this dude -- look at crazy people stalking him now!" And you can definitely paint a clear line, IMHO, from all the anti-Pelosi fringe stuff and influencing a nutjob to attack her household.

It's not that a mentally ill person wouldn't have found a way to break down, it's that we think it's a bad look to provide raw material for a crazy person to attack one's political or cultural adversaries by spreading knowingly false crazy-pants stories.

Cheers.

 

Well, but "the Right" hardly has a monopoly on demonizing "the other side". Do you need examples of how the Left does it? I mean, there are plenty of unhinged people on the Left who choose lawlessness and violence. Something motivated/stoked them as well.

So I agree with you that that is regrettable, but how do you suggest to address it? Curbing free speech isn't the way to do it, in my opinion. I also have no solution.

 

Plenty of people from the left have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole. They usually get there through the pedophile and anti-vaxx conspiracies. Then get into the right-wing stuff. QAnon shaman is an example. Only one party embraces this stuff, so that's why they are getting associated with this guy.

 

I know we don't exactly see eye to eye on what counts as "curbing free speech", but I think the problem is the technology underlying the social networks we have and how it amplifies fringe theories. I really am not in favor of top-down censorship, which is ripe for abuse, but absent movement on fixing how these platforms function some of that might be needed (with the appropriate guardrails -- it's tricky).

 

Hopefully we can all agree that QAnon is complete bullcrap. I can't believe that anyone with an IQ over 60 believes in any of that.

 

Why do you keep wondering about the door? It's been reported for weeks and bodycam footage shows Pelosi opening the door.

 

Yes, I assumed Pelosi opened the door, but some of the reported facts keep changing. It's just weird, the sequence of events. DePape had a lot of time to harm Pelosi but didn't. He lets him use his phone. He lets him walk to the door to open it. Only once the police is already there, he suddenly attacks him. It's weird.