David DePape, 42, was arrested in the early hours of Friday morning at the Pelosi’s San Francisco residence. He “violently assaulted” Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband, with a hammer, according to police.
Police said they are still investigating DePape’s motive for attacking Mr. Pelosi. But online screeds published on a personal blog may offer some insight into DePape’s mindset.
DePape’s blog posts are filled with a grab-bag of memes and videos advocating for right-wing causes. The blog—which took its name from a slang term for the word “friends” popular on the anarchic anonymous website 4chan—featured DePape’s thoughts on conspiracy theories about a global cabal.
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DePape posted memes about the “Great Reset,” a belief popular with pro-Trump media figures that holds that world elites plan to destroy the economy and enslave humanity.
In another post, DePape advocated for the ridiculous belief, popular among supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, that Hillary Clinton sexually abuses children in Satanic rituals and murders her political foes. DePape filled his blog with antisemitic and racist references, including a post denying the Holocaust took place.
Elsewhere, the blog reads like a jumble of ideas popular on the broader right-wing internet in 2022. The blog features posts claiming that teachers who discuss LGBT issues in classrooms are sexual-predator “groomers.” DePape posted links to videos made by right-wing internet personality James Lindsay attacking drag queen events and other supposed “groomers.” DePape appears to have believed that progressive “wokism” was ruining the comic-book movies, complaining in a recent review of the movie Black Adam that “wokism destroys movies.”
“David has always had an opinion,” Teresa DePape, David’s step-mother, told The Daily Beast on Friday.
“I’m one of these people who thinks everybody has an opinion, and I was raised when sticks and stones would break your bones, but words will never hurt you,” she said. “But hammers are not words.”
On the blog, which was started in August 2022, DePape weighed in on popular right-wing talking points from the last year. He authored a post claiming George Floyd was a “deadbeat” who died of an overdose, and arguing that police officer Derek Chauvin was “owed damages.”
In several posts, he accused Amber Heard of “fabricating” evidence against Johnny Depp in their highly publicized trial. He shared a video arguing that Ukraine had provoked Russia into going to war, and rejected offers of peace. DePape repeatedly shared COVID disinformation, including links to stories about vaccine injury cover-ups, and mocking people who “bought into covid” as “mask tards.”
DePape’s blog makes no mention of Nancy Pelosi. In one post he describes Tulsi Gabbard as “only democrat candidate who WASN'T running on a platform of being an insane mentally unwell demagogue,” and encouraged Donald Trump to run with Gabbard as his vice-president in 2024.
Elsewhere, his views strayed in extreme misogyny. In one post DePape wrote, “woman [sic] are very problematic and should probably be banned from society,” and in another argued that, “Children should be take [sic] away from mothers given to fathers and the mothers should be forced to pay child support.”
Alongside these political screeds, DePape also shared intimate details of his personal life. He railed against his former partner, Gypsy Taub, who he accused of being “psychotic.” He also linked to YouTube videos he had filmed of birds and squirrels he described on his blog as “spirit” animals.
Taub is a well-known Bay Area nudist activist, who made headlines in 2017 when she stripped naked at a Berkeley City Council meeting. DePape and Taub lived together for some time in a house in Berkeley along with Taub’s three children, according to reports in the Oakland Tribune and SFGate. Taub is currently serving time at California Institution for Women, a jail in Chino, California, according to inmate records.
DePape was charged late Friday with attempted murder, burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, inflicting injury on an elder, and threatening the family member of a public official, among other charges, according to San Francisco jail records.
