Many Call Out Connection Between Pelosi Attack And Republicans 'Looking Like War Lords'
Messaging on the political right stirs political violence
The vicious attack on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the culmination of a growing pattern of promoting and idealizing political violence among those among the right wing, according to a number of politicians and political commentators.
The San Francisco, Calif., district attorney on Monday announced an attempted murder charge for the man accused of violently attacking Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), in the couple’s California home last week.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced that David Wayne DePape, 42, will be charged with residential burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, false imprisonment of an elder and threats to a public official and their family, in addition to attempted murder.
Paul Pelosi reportedly was beaten with a hammer so severely that he required surgery, after his attacker entered the Pelosi home in San Francisco and demanded, “Where's Nancy?”
The attack, however, was no aberration, according to many who have watched the embrace of authoritarianism and fascism by the Republican Party since the election of Donald Trump.
“That’s the dangerous cocktail we have, right? So, we have two major problems that are, like, melding together into one very big problem,” NBC News reporter Ben Collins said Tuesday in an on-camera appearance. “The Republican Party has decided that intimidation is a big part of what they’re doing, even at the local level. You know, for example, school board meetings, you know, these drag queen story hours that are always, you know, taken over by Proud Boys, things they don’t like, things that — they want to talk about books in schools, and they want to talk about drag queens. Those are taken over by Proud Boys. And if there’s a vote at that school board, at that library, board of commissioners, maybe, the Proud Boys are there to intimidate the people.
“I saw this firsthand. I was in Stockton, Calif., last year, and somebody who stormed the Capitol on January 6 was outside of a school board meeting. She didn’t have a kid in that school, but she was able to overturn a mask mandate right before Omicron hit,” Collins added. “So, that’s one side of this, the idea that, as Charlie Kirk from Turning Point USA, the big conservative [political action committee] for young people, said yesterday, that, you know, our country is not a democracy, it’s a republic.
“That, in conjunction with the fueling and monetization of these culture wars by people like Elon Musk, where they’re incentivized to keep these things going, incentivized to keep this intimidation tactic over actual discourse, over humanity, when you put those two things together, that is how you get fascism,” Collins continued, referring to the billionaire who recently purchased Twitter. “Unfortunately, there’s no other word for this. I know we’re tiptoeing around this thing, but historically, this is how you get to fascism. You get intimidation because people feel helpless because their vote is lesser, because they are becoming a minority in this country. That combined with violence, combined with immediate ecosystem that incentivizes that sort of ‘othering,’ that sort of idea that you’re losing power, historically, throughout time, it hasn’t happened here yet in this way, but there’s no reason it can’t. And that’s how it’s going to happen if we don’t really start right now to inject some humanity into our politics.”
Paul Pelosi's alleged attacker simply was taking cues from prominent figures on the right, according to Democratic Rep Eric Swalwell, of California.
“Yeah, he went there to kill. And speaking of the revolutionary talk, we heard that from Ted Cruz, we heard that from Marjorie Taylor Greene, leading up to January 6,” Swalwell said in a separate interview, referring to the Republican senator from Texas and congresswoman from Georgia, respectively. “Most Americans, if you go to their Facebook page, they got pictures of their families, their dogs, their favorite sports teams, maybe hunting with their kids.
“This guy had conspiracy theories about January 6, COVID, and other nonsense that looks just like the Facebook pages of Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert,” Swalwell added, referring in addition to the Republican congresswoman from Colorado. “And the problem is, when they conduct themselves by espousing violent rhetoric, people like this guy take it as the gospel and they carry out the violence.”
MSNBC host Joy Reid also called out the behavior of Republican political leaders.
“What we’re seeing on the right is they’ll say violence is not appropriate, but none of them are willing to do anything to tamp down what is clearly a tendency toward increasingly violent political rhetoric,” Reid said. “I have been watching politics a long time. There are more ads now with Republicans shooting guns, shooting weapons, trying to show themselves looking like war lords than I have ever seen in politics. That’s now normal in Republican politics. Is there any way that kind of activity does not contribute to the kind of violence we just saw happen to the speaker’s husband?”
Russia, Iran and China
The international adversaries of the United States are taking advantage of the disinformation and extreme dissention in the country today, said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“Well, I think dangerous rhetoric is something that divides our country, regrettably, and that division itself can be a threat that our adversaries, nation states exploit, Russia, Iran, China, and the spread of disinformation,” Mayorkas said. “They try to fill that divide with disinformation and misinformation.
“I thought that [Senate Republican] Leader [Mitch] McConnell spoke very powerfully in condemning the attack against Mr. Pelosi. Those were very important words from one of our nation’s leaders,” he added.
Correction: Rep Eric Swalwell was misidentified in an earlier version of this story. It has been corrected.
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