Pro-Trump provocateur Charlie Kirk on Monday continued to flog baseless and outright false conspiracy theories about the brutal assault on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband, this time calling for an “amazing patriot” to bail out the alleged assailant ahead of the midterm elections.
Over the past few days, prominent Republicans and right-wing media figures have simultaneously downplayed, mocked, and peddled disinformation about the attack perpetrated by 42-year-old David DePape.
While flat-out rejecting that the assault on Paul Pelosi was politically motivated—despite DePape’s extensive online footprint of espousing far-right rhetoric—many conservatives have embraced the unhinged conspiracy that it was actually a drunken gay sex orgy gone bad.
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Kirk, who founded the MAGA student organization Turning Point USA, has been at the forefront of pushing the baseless claim that Pelosi and DePape knew each other and that the alleged attacker did not break into the speaker’s house.
During his podcast on Monday, the far-right pundit continued to go down that conspiratorial rabbit hole.
“Why is the Republican Party, why is the conservative movement to blame for gay schizophrenic nudists that are hemp jewelry makers breaking into somebody's home—or maybe not breaking into somebody's home?” Kirk exclaimed. “Why are we to blame for that exactly?”
Over the weekend, new “Chief Twit” Elon Musk tweeted a link (which he later deleted) to a story from an online right-wing rag claiming Pelosi was actually drunk and got into a dispute with a leftist male prostitute. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk wrote, replying to a Hillary Clinton tweet bashing Republicans for creating a toxic political environment.
“And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out?” Kirk continued on his show. “By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet bail’s like 30 or 40 thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. I wonder what his bail is?”
Outside of calling for DePape to be bailed out so right-wing conspiracists could “ask him some questions,” Kirk is apparently unaware that the suspect is currently in the custody of the San Francisco Police Department and being held without bail.
“They’re going after him with attempted murder, political assassination, all of this stuff. I'm not qualifying it. I think it’s awful. It's not right,” he added. “But why is it that in Chicago you're able to commit murder and be out the next day?”He then went on to claim that DePape’s blogs and social media posts espousing QAnon beliefs and violently nutty vitriol were a false flag.
“And, by the way, why is it that the media hasn't mentioned that they're all these, allegedly, far-right websites that popped up attributed to him and then they were taken down a few days later?” Kirk bellowed. “Who's to blame for that exactly? By the way, as soon as I read those far-right websites that were supposedly attributed to him, I told my team, this is so fake. This is written as if it's a leftist trying to make it seem as if it was somebody on the right. It just seems so artificial.”
The evidence that conservatives have presented as proof that DePape’s conspiracy blog was forged is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine showing it was only recently crawled, falsely insisting that it actually shows that the site was only created after the attack. Additionally, as CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski has noted, URL searches from the blog show that some pages had been archived months ago.
