Rising fascism in the US

hightor wrote:

So why not just wait and see rather than argue about it with insufficient evidence?

But, but ... that would prevent every conspiratorial speculation, and the literary outpourings of many would be stopped.

Federal prosecutors charged the man accused of breaking into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with attempting to kidnap Ms. Pelosi and with assaulting a relative of a federal official, according to charging documents filed on Monday.

The suspect, David DePape, 42, was apprehended by the police at the Pelosi home in the early morning hours on Friday. The police said he forcibly entered through the back door of the house, encountered Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, 82, and, following a struggle over a hammer, struck him with it.

Mr. DePape was looking for Ms. Pelosi, who was in Washington at the time, to interrogate the speaker on an unspecified political matter, according to the federal complaint. If she told the “truth,” he would let her go, but if she “lied,” he intended to break her kneecaps — forcing her to be wheeled into Congress as a lesson to other Democrats, Mr. DePape told police officers in an interview.

He had “a roll of tape, white rope, a second hammer, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves, and zip ties” according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California, which filed the charges.

The swift action by the Justice Department in bringing federal charges — on the same day the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office was expected to file its own charges against Mr. DePape — reflects the department’s urgency in addressing what it sees as a politically motivated crime shortly before the 2022 midterm elections. There has been a surge in threats and attacks against figures of both political parties in recent years, and Ms. Pelosi, in particular, has long been the subject of vilification and threats.

Mr. Pelosi, who alerted the police, underwent surgery on Friday after sustaining a fractured skull and serious injuries to his hands and right arm, according to a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi. In a letter to colleagues on Saturday, Ms. Pelosi said that Mr. Pelosi was continuing to improve. Law enforcement officials said that Mr. DePape sustained “minor injuries” and was treated at a hospital.

The affidavit from an F.B.I. agent that accompanied the charges provided the most complete, and chilling, narrative of the break-in to date. It detailed a groggy early-morning home invasion that culminated with a single, sudden hammer blow, delivered in the presence of shocked police officers.

Mr. DePape broke a glass door and entered the residence, awakening Mr. Pelosi, who confronted him and then ducked into a bathroom to call 911 at 2:23 a.m. Officers with the San Francisco Police Department arrived eight minutes later to find the two men struggling over a hammer.

When they asked what was going on, Mr. DePape “responded that everything was good,” the agent wrote. At that moment, Mr. DePape yanked the hammer from Mr. Pelosi’s grip and struck him once in the head, rendering him unconscious on the floor.

The officers quickly restrained Mr. DePape, who told them he had left his backpack near the smashed door window on the rear porch. When they examined its contents, they found another hammer, tape, rope, two pairs of gloves — rubber and cloth — and a journal.

The police recovered the zip ties in the bedroom. Mr. DePape later told officers he had intended to tie up Mr. Pelosi until the speaker arrived home.

Kidnapping and assault are usually charged under state laws by local authorities, but in extreme circumstances, such as cases involving federal officials or judges, they can become federal crimes.

If convicted, Mr. DePape would face a maximum of 20 years in prison for the attempted kidnapping of a federal official in the performance of official duties, and up to 30 years for assaulting an immediate member of a federal official’s family and inflicting a serious injury with a dangerous weapon.

Ms. Pelosi’s spokesman had no comment on the charges.

It was not immediately clear who was representing Mr. DePape in the case.

Federal law makes such an assault a federal crime when it is done “with the intent to impede, intimidate, or interfere with” the work of an official or “with intent to retaliate against” that person — a charge that stems from Mr. DePape’s attempts to find the speaker.

Mr. Pelosi remains in the intensive care unit of a San Francisco hospital, surrounded by his family, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The attack on the Pelosi home in San Francisco contained echoes of the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the Capitol. When rioters broke into the halls of Congress on that day, some of them carried zip ties and shouted “Nancy, Nancy, where are you, Nancy?” When he was apprehended on Friday, Mr. DePape also was carrying zip ties; a person who had been briefed on the attack said Mr. DePape had been loudly demanding to know where Ms. Pelosi was.

Law enforcement officials have not specified the exact motivation for the attack, and much remains unknown about Mr. DePape. But the authorities have been examining what appeared to be Mr. DePape’s copious online presence, which included angry rants and extremist views.

The domain of a blog written by a user who called himself “daviddepape” was registered to an address in Richmond, Calif., in August, and a resident close to that location said that Mr. DePape lived at that address. From August until the day before the attack on Mr. Pelosi, the blog featured many antisemitic sentiments as well as concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet.

One of the blog posts suggested that there had been no mass gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, and others were accompanied by malicious and stereotypical images. Another reposted a video lecture defending Adolf Hitler.

I don't believe anything, Lash. There's always more to the story than the media puts out there. There's more to the story than any group or individual puts out there. I always wonder what the total truth is.

Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, continues to post jokes about it.

Dinesh D’Souza, the creator of a discredited film about the 2020 election called “2000 Mules,” accused the San Francisco Police Department on Monday of covering up the facts.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, wrote that the “same mainstream media democrat activists” who questioned former President Donald J. Trump’s ties to Russia were now silencing the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk.

The reason: Mr. Musk deleted a post linking to a newspaper that once claimed Hillary Rodham Clinton was dead when she ran for president in 2016.

In the days since Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by an intruder asking, “Where is Nancy?”, a litany of Republicans and conservatives have spread baseless conspiracy theories about the assault and its motives.

Although the police have not yet detailed all the circumstances of the crime, these theories have already seeped into the Republican mainstream. While many Republican officials have denounced the violence, others have at the very least tolerated, and in some cases cheered, a violent assault on the spouse of a political rival.

The disinformation “isn’t just political,” said Angelo Carusone, the president and chief executive of Media Matters for America, a progressive nonprofit. “It’s much bigger than that; it’s deeper. They’re really rethinking and reshaping a lot of our norms.”

The attack on Mr. Pelosi in the couple’s home in San Francisco early on Friday morning has raised fears about the rise of political violence against elected officials — increasingly, it seems, inspired by a toxic brew of extremism, hate and paranoia that is easily found online.

The assailant, identified by the police as David DePape, 42, posted a series of notes in the days before the attack suggesting that he had fallen under the sway of right-wing conspiracy theories and antisemitism online. Some of the flurry of posts by others questioning the circumstances of the attack appeared intended to deflect attention from Mr. DePape’s views.

No top Republican lawmakers joined in peddling unfounded claims about the attack, but few denounced them, either. Mrs. Clinton, the former first lady and senator who lost to Mr. Trump in 2016, pointedly blamed the party for spreading “hate and deranged conspiracy theories.”

“It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result,” she wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.”

It was her post that prompted Mr. Musk, Twitter’s owner since last Thursday night, to insinuate that an alternate version of the assault was possible. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” he replied directly to Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Musk linked to an opinion piece from the Santa Monica Observer, a website known to publish falsehoods, which offered an alternative account of what led to the attack on Mr. Pelosi. Relying on an anonymous source and providing no evidence, the article claimed that the attacker was a male prostitute.

The story also indicated that the attacker was found by the police wearing only his underwear, a detail that was originally published by a Fox affiliate before getting widely circulated in right-wing communities online. The affiliate later removed the detail and appended a correction, saying the article “misstated what clothing the suspect was wearing.”

A spokeswoman for Fox Television Stations said the story was corrected within about two hours.

That change prompted a new round of baseless theories, with some right-wing Americans claiming a cover-up.

“New day, new narrative,” Tricia Flanagan, a former Republican primary candidate for New Jersey’s 4th Congressional District, tweeted to her 70,000 followers.

On Monday, federal prosecutors charged Mr. DePape with attempted kidnapping and assault of a relative of a public official. He was looking for Ms. Pelosi, who was in Washington at the time, and carrying “a roll of tape, white rope, a second hammer, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves and zip ties,” according to the office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, which filed the charges.

Mr. DePape’s equipment — and his demand to know “Where’s Nancy?” — suggested a premeditated assault, which would undercut the counterfactual versions being spread online.

Even so, the conspiracy theories found receptive audiences, receiving tens of thousands of engagements on numerous platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and other platforms that have built smaller, though politically active audiences.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative radio and YouTube host, expressed hope on Monday that some “amazing patriot” would post bail for Mr. DePape and become a “midterm hero.” “Bail him out and then go ask him some questions,” he said, adding that liberals were trying to politicize the attack.

Mr. Carusone noted that Fox’s coverage shifted over the weekend, much as it did after the 2020 election, when the network initially reported the outcome accurately only to later give credence to the false claims by Mr. Trump and others that the vote was somehow fraudulent.

Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.

The coverage of the attack on Mr. Pelosi began with fairly straightforward coverage of the crime, before portraying it as a consequence of Democratic “soft-on-crime” policies and, finally, as a mystery with darker undercurrents that could not yet be known.

“Look for what’s missing and what doesn’t add up,” David Webb, a Fox News contributor, said during “The Big Sunday Show.”

Mr. Carusone said the shift reflected a deference by the network, like the Republican Party, to the most extreme voices in the right-wing information ecosystem that both cater to.

“This was everywhere in the right-wing fever swamps immediately,” he said.

At the core of the flurry of disinformation, he argued, was a refusal to show any sympathy for an older victim simply because of his ties to a figure regularly vilified on the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Conservatives have for years turned opponents like Ms. Pelosi and others into cartoonish supervillains. Mr. Trump himself regularly called her “Crazy Nancy.”

“They’re very unlikely to give them any solace or support even in the most clear-cut circumstances,” Mr. Carusone said, “because in some way it cuts against the broader narrative that they’re supervillains and therefore deserve it.”

The political scientist Pippa Norris explains how a ‘silent revolution in values’ is fueling the global rise of the right.

Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

As we approach the 2022 midterms, the outlook for American democracy doesn’t appear promising. An increasingly Trumpist, anti-democratic Republican Party is poised to take over at least one chamber of Congress. And the Democratic Party, facing an inflationary economy and with an unpopular president in office, looks helpless to stop them.

But the United States isn’t alone in this regard. Over the course of 2022, Italy elected a far-right prime minister from a party with Fascist roots, a party founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads won the second-highest number of seats in Sweden’s Parliament, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary won its fourth consecutive election by a landslide, Marine Le Pen won 41 percent of the vote in the final round of France’s presidential elections and — just this past weekend — Jair Bolsonaro came dangerously close to winning re-election in Brazil.

Why are these populist uprisings happening simultaneously, in countries with such diverse cultures, economies and political systems?

Pippa Norris is a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she has taught for three decades. In that time, she’s written dozens of books on topics ranging from comparative political institutions to right-wing parties and the decline of religion. And in 2019 she and Ronald Inglehart published “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism,” which gives the best explanation of the far right’s rise that I’ve read.

We discuss what Norris calls the “silent revolution in cultural values” that has occurred across advanced democracies in recent decades, why the best predictor of support for populist parties is the generation people were born into, why the “transgressive aesthetic” of leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro is so central to their appeal, how demographic and cultural “tipping points” have produced conservative backlashes across the globe, the difference between “demand-side” and “supply-side” theories of populist uprising, the role that economic anxiety and insecurity play in fueling right-wing backlashes, why delivering economic benefits might not be enough for mainstream leaders to stave off populist challenges and more.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

The Covid narrative changed more than a couple of times.

For a while it was considered disinformation to say the virus originated in Wuhan.

I've noticed that the imprecise use of language is one of the main routes for misinformation to be widely spread.

The virus originated in Wuhan.
I shouldn’t have anybody criticizing me for saying that.
It’s a fact.
People were bounced off of social media and censured in other ways for stating facts.