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Reports: Paul Pelosi Assailant Has History of Serious Mental Illness, is in US Illegally

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  November 01, 2022 1:15 PM

The news media simply decided over the weekend that the attack against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband was politically-motivated, and they knew just who and what were to blame: Republicans and their rhetoric, as always.  To be crystal clear, the assault was very disturbing, for reasons chillingly laid out in yesterday's federal charging documents.  The perpetrator should be harshly punished, and everyone should hope for a speedy and complete recovery for the victim.  We now know that the house was targeted because the alleged assailant wanted to kidnap and harm Nancy Pelosi, whom he called a partisan liar to police.  He also claimed he wanted to use her detention to "lure" someone else, whatever that means.  Whether that combination of factors, added to the information below, qualifies the crime as explicitly political in nature is up for debate.  But even if an undeniable fact pattern traces the suspect's motives to some twisted and deluded agenda associated with the fringe political Right, that does not make anyone else responsible his actions.  I've been very consistent on this point, and it cuts both ways.  

To put an even finer point on it, Republicans campaigning against Pelosi and her party with standard-issue slogans ("fire Pelosi," etc) and critiques are not culpable for the deranged actions of some psycho with a hammer.  The rush to fully embrace that narrative -- with which the news media also embarrassed and discredited itself after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting -- is further evidence of the media's activism and corruption.  For days, amid a dearth of solid information, headline after headline presupposed a right-wing or Republican-aligned political motive or connection, with news anchors browbeating Republicans over their supposed complicity, and cable news programming leaning into "political violence" hand-wringing.  All of this has unfolded before any hard evidence emerged that the incident was remotely related to politics. But that didn't stop members of the press from doing what they do.  It's surreal and maddening:

Certain episodes of political violence — even when some wind up not actually being political violence — are treated as an emergency to many journalists, generally when an incident is useful in stifling and demonizing politicians and others those journalists dislike.  Too often, it’s literally that simple; lazy, knee-jerk tribalism over journalism.  Other (less narrative-friendly and therefore politically inconvenient) political violence just doesn’t matter as much to them.  That's blunt but accurate.  It's true that the Pelosi suspect's virtual footprint appears to include some ranting about January 6th and COVID vaccines.  He was also locally known as a nudist protester who lives in a hippie commune festooned with every left-wing slogan imaginable, and who has railed against Christianity (while alternatively believing himself to be Jesus Christ).  Acquaintances say his shifting and incoherent politics had been mostly left-wing in the past, but it generally sounds like he's just deeply mentally ill, in a non-ideologically-conforming sort of way.  This reads like a grab-bag of crazy:

I am obviously not arguing that this guy was actually a leftist, and so leftists should be blamed. That would be irresponsible and unfair.  But 'irresponsible and unfair' characterized the reflexive, blanket, zealous coverage undertaken by our news media after the initial news broke.  Gathering the particulars was secondary.  The partisan blame-fest, especially so close to a national election, was paramount.  Some of the utterly bizarre initial reported details about the crime (an assailant in his underwear, a mysterious third party answering the door when police arrived) have been clarified or debunked.  Other elements of the timeline are still a bit strange.  Of course, crimes involving raving lunatics are likely to be strange.  Ethically, it's usually a good rule of thumb to wait for facts to come in before leaping to political conclusions.  And in terms of fairness, even if the facts look bad for one 'side,' it's also a good rule of thumb not to tar half the country, or one of the major political parties, as complicit.  Yet the news media selectively rejects these best practices, for political and ideological reasons, over and over again.  

Indeed, as I mentioned yesterday, just last week, members of the journo class were excoriating Marco Rubio for denouncing a vicious assault against a Republican canvasser in Florida.  The victim told authorities that his attackers bea him savagely because of his politics (he was wearing GOP gear).  We've seen conservative volunteers and campaign workers assaulted and shot in multiple incidents across the country, which has strangely not sparked a 'national conversation' about the Left's incendiary rhetoric.  Such things never do.  Wrong perpetrators, wrong victims.  Sure, there will be some perfunctory coverage, virtually none of it accusatory or point-scoring, then it's very quickly on to the next thing.  Relatedly, I'll leave you with this:

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Remember, within days of that murder plot getting broken up, it was no longer national news.  Hell, it was barely treated as such the day after the would-be assassin was arrested.  Also, I'll just leave this here.  Pelosi's assailant was, reportedly, a man familiar to at least one local politician, with a significant rap sheet, who was in the country illegally, living in and around an infamous sanctuary city: