Lara Logan/ @laralogan

10/31/2022 00:04:29

Truth Social: 109260902846924840

It’s interesting that journalists who did not take the time to go to Depape’s house & see it for themselves & talk to his neighbors directly, are attacking this reporter - who did exactly that. It’s called first-hand, real reporting & it used to be the minimum standard for every news organization. I know - I was working in those newsrooms for at least three decades. michaelshellenberger.substack.

https://qagg.news/?read=TO54469

Pelosi Attack Suspect Was A Psychotic Homeless Addict Estranged From His Pedophile Lover & Their Children

Berkeley resident David DePape was more in the grip of drug-induced psychosis than ideology-induced fanaticism.

Michael Shellenberger

Oct 29

David DePape, the prime suspect in the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. (Photo Credit,: Associated Press)

Leading politicians yesterday blamed the political Right for the brutal attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul. “This is despicable,” said President Biden. He noted that the alleged attacker, David DePape, 42, shouted the same line, “Where’s Nancy?” as the supporters of Donald Trump, who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. “And what makes us think that one party can talk about stolen elections?” said Biden. “COVID being a hoax? It’s all a bunch of lies.”

California political leaders agreed. “This heinous assault is yet another example of the dangerous consequences of the divisive and hateful rhetoric that is putting lives at risk and undermining our very democracy and Democratic institutions,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom. “This attack,” said San Francisco’s state Senator, Scott Weiner, “is terrifying and the direct result of toxic right-wing rhetoric.”

Journalists, en masse, agreed with their assessment. DePape “appears to have made racist and often rambling posts online,” noted AP, in a report this morning that encapsulated the media narrative, “including some that questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.”

But DePape’s politics have little rhyme or reason. In past years DePape shared a post about Stephen Colbert’s 2006 roast of President George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents dinner; linked to videos of Disney films altered to make it look like the characters were swearing; and claimed, “Jesus is the anti-Christ” — not exactly a litany of right-wing tropes.

The camper van parked in the driveway of the home belonging to David DePape’s ex-wife. The “Natural addiction treatment” that it’s advertising is of the psychedelic ibogaine, which neighbors say the DePape family has been bringing back to the United States from Mexico. The bumper stickers on the back of the camper are left-wing and conspiratorial.

And, as I discovered yesterday, DePape lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree. A closer look reveals the characteristics of a homeless encampment, or what Europeans call “an open drug scene.” In the driveway, there is a broken-down camper van. On the street is a yellow school bus, which neighbors said DePape occasionally stayed in. Both are filled with garbage typical of such structures in homeless encampments. People come and go from the house and the vehicles, neighbors say, in part to partake in the use of a potent psychedelic drug, ibogaine.

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Neighbors described DePape as a homeless addict with a politics that was, until recently, left-wing, but of secondary importance to his psychotic and paranoid behavior. “What I know about the family is that they’re very radical activists,” said one of DePape’s neighbors, a woman who only gave her first name, Trish. “They seem very left. They are all about the Black Lives Matter movement. Gay pride. But they’re very detached from reality. They have called the cops on several of the neighbors, including us, claiming that we are plotting against them. It’s really weird to see that they are willing to be so aggressive toward somebody else who is also a lefty.”

Not all of the news media missed DePape’s history of drug use, psychosis, and homelessness. CNN reported that a woman named Laura Hayes, who said she worked with DePape 10 years ago making hemp bracelets, said he had been living in a storage shed. “He talks to angels,” she said, and told her that “there will be a hard time coming.”

Another woman, Linda Schneider, told CNN and KRON4, that she got to know DePape around 2014 and that he was still homeless, living in a storage unit, and using hard drugs. “He (was) likely a mindless follower of something he saw on social media because I don’t think he had the courage to be part of any political or terrorist group,” said Schneider. “His drug use began again and he went off his rocker.”

But much of the rest of the news media, particularly local journalists who could have interviewed DePape’s neighbors, were swept up in the narrative that DePape was more like John Wilkes Booth, the fanatical but sane assassin of Abraham Lincoln, than John Hinkley, Jr., the mentally ill man who shot Ronald Reagan. DePape is much more like one of the hundreds of psychotic homeless people I’ve interviewed in recent years than the fanatical climate ideologues who I’ve been writing about in recent weeks.

Wrapped up in their own obsession with Trump Republicans, most journalists have missed the real story. David DePape is not a microcosm of the political psychosis gripping America in general. Rather, he’s a microcosm of the drug-induced psychosis gripping the West Coast in particular.

Drugs, Paranoia, and Pedophilia

DePape’s former house at 1526 Woolsey is a combination of a typical left-wing Berkeley home and a homeless encampment. (Author photos)

Yesterday afternoon I visited the Berkeley house where DePape had lived with his former lover, Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, 53, a charismatic Russian immigrant 11 years David’s senior. DePape appears to have fallen under the spell of Taub around 2003, when DePape was a quiet, video game-obsessed 20-year-old in Powell River, a town of 14,000 people that is a four-hour drive up the coast of British Columbia from Vancouver.

A November 27, 2008 article in the Oakland Tribune said Taub and DePape were married with three children. But DePape’s stepfather, Gene, told AP yesterday that Taub was his stepson’s girlfriend, not wife; that David and Taub had two, not three, children together; and that David’s third child was with another woman.

The article, which carried the headline, “Need is great on Thanksgiving Day in the East Bay,” described Taub, Pape, and their three children eating Thanksgiving dinner with the homeless. Taub told the reporter that they were there for the community, not because they couldn’t afford to eat at home.

Taub was in the news again five years later when she, then 44, married a 20-year-old man, Jamyz Smith, naked, at City Hall in San Francisco. A photo in the December 16, 2013 edition of The San Francisco Chronicle shows DePape, Taub, Smith, and the three children huddled under a blanket watching television together. The caption describes DePape as “a family friend.” As in The Oakland Tribune article, the focus was on Taub, with no quotes from DePape.

Ryan La Coste, who lives in an apartment directly behind the Taub-DePape house, said that the day after Taub’s wedding to Smith, “There was a huge fight. The guy [Smith] that she married got locked up. And so Taub married somebody else. My understanding was that David [DePape] was the best man to her husband at the wedding.”

The episode was typical of the chaos that swirled around DePape during the years leading up to his alleged attack on Paul Pelosi.

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/pelosi-attack-suspect-was-a-psychotic

Here Come the Investigations

Congressional oversight spells big trouble for Biden.

Let’s say the GOP wins control of Congress on November 8. What will 2023 look like?

History offers clues. The Republican Congress will fight with the president over spending, immigration, the IRS, aid to Ukraine, and the debt ceiling. And it will open investigations into Biden’s personal and professional life. Divided government in a polarized America doesn’t simply halt a president’s legislative agenda. It saps energy out of the executive branch by forcing the White House into a defensive crouch.

Every president since Ronald Reagan has experienced a period of divided government. Every president since Reagan has faced withering scrutiny from an opposition Congress, from a special or independent counsel, or from all the above. Every president since Bill Clinton has fought Congress over spending. Those battles resulted in at least one government shutdown during three of the past four presidencies. (The Democratic Congress during George W. Bush’s final two years didn’t want to close the government, it wanted to cut off funds for the war in Iraq.)

Reagan was almost impeached for the Iran-contra scandal. George H.W. Bush had to contend with independent counsel Lawrence Walsh and with fallout from the collapse of the Savings and Loan industry. Clinton’s troubles began with Whitewater, moved on to the White House travel office, progressed to sleazy campaign finance, and climaxed in his impeachment for lying about and covering up his affair with a White House intern half his age. George W. Bush had to deal with another special counsel investigation, as well as a firestorm over his firing of U.S. attorneys.

Barack Obama’s administration was investigated for the Fast & Furious program, IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, and the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. Donald Trump had special counsel Robert Mueller hounding him during his first two years, then Congress impeached him for his unsuccessful attempt to strong-arm the Ukrainians into giving him dirt on Biden. Then Congress impeached him again for the events of January 6, 2021. Trump has been out of office for almost two years, and Congress is still investigating him.

That’s six presidents and three impeachments. Three and a half, if you count the Iran-contra mess. Fair odds, then, that another impeachment lies ahead.

As soon as Congress changes hands, Republicans will be all over Homeland Security’s response to the border crisis. They will deluge the White House with document requests. They will examine whether the administration colluded with social media companies to censor politically incorrect views. They will put Attorney General Merrick Garland in the hot seat for his department’s handling of school board protests and criminalization of political differences. And, of course, the GOP Congress will pore over the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Investigations are easy to start and hard to finish. They take on lives of their own. Republicans may have some idea of where they want to focus, but things never go according to plan.

New scandals emerge. On my screen as I write is an October 25 article in the New York Times with the headline, “U.S. Officials Had a Secret Oil Deal with the Saudis. Or So They Thought.” Reporters Mark Mazzetti, Edward Wong, and Adam Entous write that when President Biden met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman in July, he believed that the Saudis would increase oil production ahead of the midterm elections.

The Times notes that, on the very day in June that the White House announced its Middle East trip, Saudi Arabia said it would accelerate a production increase. When Biden met with Prince Salman in Riyadh, they fist-bumped. Then Biden left and the deal — if there ever was a deal — fell apart.

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Take a step back for a moment. The president of the United States entered what he thought was a secret agreement with a foreign government to take actions intended to benefit his political party. The White House is convinced that the president’s fortunes rise and fall on the “price at the pump.” A price that Biden has tried desperately to drop — not by approving domestic oil and gas leases, pipelines, and refineries, but by depleting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and pleading with autocratic governments to drill overseas. And when Saudi Arabia didn’t behave as expected, when the desired political benefit didn’t appear, Biden threatened retaliation.

Anyone else remember that “perfect” phone call between President Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky?

I’m not saying the situations are perfectly analogous. A fist bump is not quite the same as a phone transcript. Lower gas prices would help everybody, not just Biden and the Democrats. Plus, after scandal erupted over Trump’s call with Zelensky, U.S. military aid to Ukraine went ahead. Biden may follow through on his threats to punish Saudi Arabia — despite not having imposed any real penalty on Iran, which is supplying Russia with the kamikaze drones brutalizing Ukraine.

The Times story is a reminder that the future in politics is never a straight-line projection from the present. It is also a taste of all the subjects a Republican Congress will investigate in the coming years. None of us knows what grist for the oversight mill will be in tomorrow’s paper. Nor can we imagine what details intrepid congressional researchers will unearth in the months ahead.

The job of president has been hard for Joe Biden. It’s about to get a lot worse.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/92435-here-come-the-investigations-2022-10-29