No, the Attack on Paul Pelosi Wasn’t a Random Criminal Act
Misinformation Warfare Fuels Attacks on People, Places
There’s a term for the type of crime committed in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home a few days back– stochastic terrorism. I’ll take it to the bank that there was no group or individual behind the attacker’s actions, and no accomplices will be found because there aren’t any.
The act had nothing to do with the property and personal crimes plaguing society, despite what amoralists say as they defend the indefensible. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking it’s a “San Francisco” or a “crime” problem.
The 42 year old attacker decided it was time for a nobody like himself to make history by saving the world from an 82 year old politician from San Francisco. Having found no place in the marketplace economy, he found solace in an alternative universe, one allowing him to believe he was a warrior against the forces of evil.
From San Francisco’s Mission Local:
Right-wing grievance culture is a powerful thing. Right-wing grievance culture is a growth industry. As such, much of the insane material DePape purportedly wrote on the Internet does not put him all that far afield from an appreciable portion of Republican voters. It does not put him far afield from an appreciable portion of elected Republican federal office-holders; the majority of GOP Congressional representatives, after all, voted to overturn the 2020 election results.
So that’s the story here. The story is that America’s moral climate — or at least the moral climate pertaining to a goodly portion of our nation and its leaders — has oozed over to meet the loon who allegedly broke into the home of the Speaker of the House and tried to murder her husband with a hammer. That’s the story. That’s the story.
The tropes of yesteryear’s autocrats joined with the paranoia of today’s Luddites down a rabbit hole impervious to truth and conviviality. Irrationality is a virtue in a place where there is no moral compass. The worst narratives rise to the top to a place inhabited by people who see the cruelty of their actions as the point of their existence.
Although nobody was injured in the January 2022 arson attempt at the home of (then) Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher/Board of Supervisors Chair Nathan Fletcher, you don’t need a degree in criminology to figure out the intent of the attacker(s).
Same shit, different city. Pelosi’s attacker was caught in the act. Our local firebug has almost no chance of getting busted; it’s one of the advantages of solo acts–no co-conspirators to flip.
The strong likelihood of local cops sympathizing with the crazies also could provide a measure of protection for San Diego’s midnight marauders. One only need look at the pity parties staged at local police stations when they were asked to get inoculated against the coronavirus to see the possibility of a connection.
Individuals participating in the threatened or real acts of violence were undoubtedly influenced by vitriol-laced campaigns blaming the intended victims for a host of wrongdoing with the implication that disaster was imminent. The vast majority of the content justifying these beliefs is curated misinformation making its way from the fringes of the internet to the “just asking a question” pundits on Fox News.
From the Los Angeles Times:
Over the last decade, politically motivated extremists, a majority of them right-wing, have killed over 400 people in the U.S., according to the Anti-Defamation League, which has tracked domestic political violence for 15 years. In 2021, political violence resulted in 29 deaths, according to the ADL’s most recent report.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, which also tracks extremist violence, found that 2020 and 2021 had the most attacks since it began tracking incidents in 1994.
There was “a historically high level of both far-right and far-left terrorist attacks in 2021,” the bipartisan think tank’s researchers said, adding that “violent far-right incidents were significantly more likely to be lethal, both in terms of weapon choice and number of resulting fatalities.”
Those of us who’ve been watching the rise of extremism in the world have used the term “stochastic terrorism” repeatedly in our warnings about where the direction of the political zeitgeist. January 6th isn’t over; the mob may have scattered, but their intent remains.
From the New York Times:
But since the attack on the Capitol, members of Congress have reported feeling increasingly vulnerable both in Washington and at home in their districts. The number of recorded threats against members of Congress increased more than tenfold in the five years after Mr. Trump was elected in 2016, according to figures from the Capitol Police, the federal law enforcement department that protects Congress, with more than 9,625 threats reported in 2021.
Now there are thousands upon thousands of lone wolves who worship at the altar of MAGA and go home to plot how they can become heroes for their cause. Most of them limit their acts of allegiance by making threats, often involving violent imagery in imaginary rehearsals.
Yes, the suspect in the attack on Mr. Pelosi is almost certainly mentally ill. The path he chose to express himself was certainly laid by the propagandists of the right.
The government’s Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism report released last week provides a stark warning about what the future could look like:
Via ABC News:
"One of the most significant terrorism threats to the Homeland we face today is posed by lone offenders and small groups of individuals who commit acts of violence motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances," the report says. "Of these actors, domestic violent extremists represent one of the most persistent threats to the United States today. These individuals are often radicalized online and look to conduct attacks with easily accessible weapons.".
While politics has always involved the descriptive words sometimes associated with military campaigns, it was generally understood by the middle of the twentieth century the terms weren’t being used literally.
All that changed with the election of Newt Gingrich to Congress. The firebrand was determined to bring his party to a new place, one less dependent on negotiation and compromise.
From a 2018 profile in the Atlantic:
Gingrich encouraged them to go after their enemies with catchy, alliterative nicknames—“Daffy Dukakis,” “the loony left”—and schooled them in the art of partisan blood sport. Through gopac, he sent out cassette tapes and memos to Republican candidates across the country who wanted to “speak like Newt,” providing them with carefully honed attack lines and creating, quite literally, a new vocabulary for a generation of conservatives. One memo, titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” included a list of recommended words to use in describing Democrats: sick, pathetic, lie, anti-flag, traitors, radical, corrupt…
…Gingrich was not above mining the darkest reaches of the right-wing fever swamps for material. When Vince Foster, a staffer in the Clinton White House, committed suicide, Gingrich publicly flirted with fringe conspiracy theories that suggested he had been assassinated. “He took these things that were confined to the margins of the conservative movement and mainstreamed them,” says David Brock, who worked as a conservative journalist at the time, covering the various Clinton scandals, before later becoming a Democratic operative. “What I think he saw was the potential for using them to throw sand in the gears of Clinton’s ability to govern.”
You can tell a lot about the state of the nation by the way various entities reacted to the attack on Mr. Pelosi.
And The NY Times made it a tiny story below the fold.
The attack on Paul Pelosi was a direct consequence of years of demonization of political opponents by Republicans. The party has spent $36.5 million on advertising attacking the Speaker as part of campaigns since Labor Day.
Via the Washington Post:
For a wide swath of Republicans, Pelosi is Enemy No. 1 — a target of the collective rage, conspiratorial thinking and overt misogyny that have marked the party’s hard-right turn in recent years.
Among far-right extremist groups, the anti-Pelosi memes are often cruder and more violent, but the demonization of the Democratic House leader is no fringe phenomenon. Her face — sometimes adorned with devil’s horns or a swastika — was plastered on signs at all the national rallies that led up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. Pelosi is such a frequent target that it’s common for right-wing pundits and protesters to refer to her only by her first name, as Jan. 6 insurrectionists did when roaming the halls of the Capitol searching for her while yelling: “Where are you, Nancy?”
Political violence trackers say the attack on Pelosi’s husband appears to be a high-profile version of the same threat that has simmered for months at the local level, with the targeting of election workers, librarians and school board members — virtually any public servant perceived as an obstacle to a hard-right agenda.
Here’s a job for the news media: Make the people responsible for this attack own it. Mealy-mouth excuses shouldn’t be accepted. Only when the condemnations of extra-legal, libelous, and paranoid behavior become more widespread will we see a decline in this wave of stochastic terrorism.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com