Straws

Since some prog will bleat “Why aren’t you condemning the attack on Paul Pelosi?” if I don’t say it – violence is bad. Don’t hit people with hammers, or anything else.

Speaking of people trying to exploit the episode…

The Star Tribune:

Rob Reiner, the intellectual thought leader of the modern Democrat party?

And look – here’s Ilhan Omar, on the attack on Paul Pelosi:

A far right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.

Here’s Angie Craig:

Here’s Amy Klobuchar:

On Meet the Press, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar rued how Pelosi “has been villainized for years, and big surprise, it’s gone viral, and it went violent.” She said we have “to make sure we’re not electing more election deniers who are following Donald Trump down this road,” and “we have to do something about this amplification of this election-denying hate speech that we see on the Internet.”

I don’t expect Dems to be familiar with Berg’s 18th Law – but there may be no better case of it in all of history. Indeed, there might be a corollary to the the law – if the Democrats can use the story for political gain, 48 hours is waaaaay too short.

The facts? Much more prosaic:

All of this requires imposing a coherence on David DePape’s mind that simply doesn’t exist, which would be obvious to anyone who paused for a minute to consider and absorb the evidence.

Listen to the person who perhaps knows him best — the mother of his two children, a woman named Oxane Taub (a.k.a. Gypsy), herself a whack-job serving jail time for trying to abduct a 14-year-old boy she was infatuated with.

(As a press release from the local DA’s office put it: “Over the course of 14 months, she sent him numerous obsessive emails, created blogs directed at him, used his friends to send him messages and eventually tried to abduct him a few blocks from his school in Berkeley. While the case was pending, Taub also tried to dissuade the victim from testifying.” And she was the rational half of the couple.)

In an interview from jail, conducted by a local TV station, Taub said, “He is mentally ill. He has been mentally ill for a long time.” She said he was missing for a year and then showed up again “in very bad shape.” According to Taub, “he thought he was Jesus.” She added, “He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him. And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal.”

My theory? Democrats – especially Minnesota DFLers – are looking at next week’s election, and figure painting themselves as victims of MAGA, and the “wave of conservative/white supremacist terror” they’ve been promising for the past 15 years, can’t hurt.

51 thoughts on “Straws

  1. It was always going to be like this. Trumpists are, despite their volubility, not a big group. Trump was able to surf Twitter on the huge (and much more diverse) audience that Twitter had built. But there was never any chance of Truth Social reaching that mass, and without that mass, of attracting other users and advertisers.

    It’s why every attempt so far to build a “conservative” social network has failed (and will fail): there just are not enough potential users. It’s ironic: the US far right wants to build their own Reddit, or Twitter or Facebook — but they can’t. They will forever be doomed to ranting that “libruls are CENsoring our Fre SpeecH!” in subgroups on platforms that more liberal people built.

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