Eric Risberg/AP Photo
Police stand at the top of the closed street outside the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul Pelosi in San Francisco, October 28, 2022.
As Paul Pelosi, the husband of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was violently attacked in his home, recovered from a skull fracture and awaited brain surgery, Kari Lake, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and many other Republican leaders found the entire story of the attack hysterically funny. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin referenced it to attack the Speaker. Lunatic homophobic conspiracy theories abounded among Republicans, unsurprisingly promoted by noted convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza, convicted felon Steve Bannon, convicted felon Roger Stone, Twitter’s new owner (and one day …) Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. (also perhaps one day soon), all demonstrating that none have learned from the example set by the cautionary tale of their fellow hallucinogenicist Alex Jones. Charlie Kirk sought to raise a defense fund for the antisemitic, QAnon follower, anti-vaxxer, election denier David DePape, who carried out the attack. DePape told the cops that had the Speaker been there he would have busted her kneecaps, “which would show other members of Congress there were consequences to actions.”
It’s hard to imagine anything that could draw a clearer distinction between America’s two major political parties. It’s true that among the countless murderous attacks and threats made to politicians since the Trump era began, an extremely small percentage have come from the left against politicians of the right. But when a deranged leftist shot Republican representative Steve Scalise at a congressional softball game in 2017, he was denounced and deplored by literally every well-known liberal or Democratic politician who offered an opinion. With the Republicans, however, the embrace of violence, both rhetorical and real, together with various forms of conspiratorial insanity, is business as usual. (Fox’s Laura Ingraham can be seen demonstrating her characteristic respect for truth and accuracy on the issue in this brilliant video.) Denouncing not only the act, but its source, has been left to Never Trumpers such as David Frum, “Only the GOP Celebrates Political Violence”; Max Boot, “Don’t Blame ‘Both Sides.’ The Right Is Driving Political Violence”; and Tom Nichols, “The Dark Heart of the Republican Party.”
And yet many in the mainstream media have become so inured to this development—when they are even willing to recognize it at all—that nothing about it strikes most of its members as all that significant. The New York Times, the MSM’s standard-bearer, barely could find room on its next-day front page for a report on the attack, running the story on the bottom corner. The lead story in its top right-hand corner was one of hundreds of stories it has run about inflation, which just happens to be one of the Republican Party’s two most important election arguments for this coming November 8. Rather incredibly, the Times story contained this sentence, as if it were at all relevant to this bizarre attack (rather than the Republican Party’s other main election talking point): “For San Francisco, the break-in and assault comes at a time when the city is awash in crises over crime and disorder in the streets, where open-air drug dealing is commonplace and concerns over burglaries, especially in wealthy neighborhoods, helped fuel the successful recall of the city’s avowed progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, this year.”
(Before moving on, take a moment to compare that with the treatment received when Republican congressman Steve Scalise was shot in an attempted assassination. Now compare it to just a few days of “HER EMAILS.”)
By contrast, the Los Angeles Times distinguished itself by reporting, immediately on October 28, that that this was another case of right-wing violence inspired by Trumpist/alt-right conspiracy-mongering. It noted that in his “personal blog that DePape maintained, posts include such topics as ‘Manipulation of History,’ ‘Holohoax’ and ‘It’s OK to be white.’ He mentioned 4chan, a favorite message board of the far right. He posted videos about conspiracies involving COVID-19 vaccines and the war in Ukraine being a ploy for Jewish people to buy land.”
“DePape’s screeds,” the L.A. paper continued, “included posts about QAnon, an unfounded theory that former President Trump is at war with a cabal of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring and control the world. In an Aug. 23 entry titled Q, DePape wrote: ‘Either Q is Trump himself or Q is the deepstate moles within Trumps inner circle.’” DePape even went in for that notion that liberal politicians are participating in “pedo rape parties and … kiddie rape orgies,” and the absolutely insane “Pizzagate” story that so many members of the Republican base have embraced and which almost led to a mass murder in a Washington, D.C., pizzeria in 2016. Trump BFF, and fellow coup plotter, MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell was also a mainstay of DePape’s posting.
The New York Times, however, led with its apparently unbreakable “both sides” frame. In its story headlined “Pelosi Attack Highlights Rising Fears of Political Violence” that ran the following day, readers learned that “Members of Congress have watched warily in recent years as threats and harassment against them have crescendoed, privately worrying that the brutal language and deranged misinformation creeping into political discourse would lead to actual violence.” Finally, on the third day of coverage, the Paper of Record told its readers the truth that L.A. Times readers had learned in the immediate aftermath of the attack. In the story headlined “Pelosi, Vilified by Republicans for Years, Is a Top Target of Threats,” it noted that the attack came after a decades-long campaign by Republicans to “demonize and dehumanize Ms. Pelosi in increasingly ugly ways.” It’s quite a good piece and you should read it all. But what is most crucial about those attacks are the countless incitements to violence, subtle and not, that Republicans regularly employ when discussing the House Speaker. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the highest-ranking Republican in the House, has said, “I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it.” He also continued to attack her after the news of the attempted kidnapping broke. The story further mentioned “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that Pelosi was “guilty of treason,” to which she added, “it’s a crime punishable by death, is what treason is.” She liked a Facebook post that advocated “a bullet to the head” for Ms. Pelosi, according to posts unearthed by CNN. She was moreover “a particular fixation of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, who hunted for her and menacingly called her name. ‘Bring her out here,’ one woman yelled at the Capitol Police. ‘We’re coming in if you don’t bring her out.’” The article noted a number of other violent threats to her, up to and including murder. Might this have something to do with the fact that “Since 2018, Republicans have spent more than $227 million on advertisements featuring her” that “aired nearly 530,000 times.” In 2022 alone, Republicans have spent over $61 million on 143,000 advertisements that featured her. In addition, on November 1, four days after its original misfire, the Times also followed up with this helpful angle: “With Falsehoods and Ridicule About Pelosi Attack, Republicans Mimic Trump.”
Back to the Times’ bothsidesism: What’s the single stupidest paragraph you’ve seen this election cycle? Here’s my nomination. In an article headlined “Fears Over Fate of Democracy Leave Many Voters Frustrated and Resigned,” Jonathan Weisman wrote this: “Of course, just what is threatening democracy depends on who you talk to. Many Republicans are just as frustrated, convinced that the threat stems from liberal teachers, professors or media personalities who they fear are indoctrinating their children; undocumented immigrants given a path to citizenship; or Democrats widening access to voting so much that they are inviting fraud.” After resigning in shame, Mr. Weisman (and his editors) might wish to peruse this article in Mother Jones, “How Wisconsin Became the GOP’s Laboratory for Dismantling Democracy,” to learn the difference between actual evidence and unadulterated bullshit.
I spent countless hours of my benighted adolescence growing up in Westchester County at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. I was a little young to catch any of the six shows the Grateful Dead played there in 1971 (though I did see the New Riders of the Purple Sage a bunch of times). It’s been great, therefore, to be able to see so many Phil Lesh and Friends shows, which now top more than a hundred. I caught the final night of their residency this year, which took place on Halloween. Now, Halloween with Deadheads is a decidedly acquired taste, as is a concert floor where all the seats (below the balcony) have been torn out to give costumed Deadheads room to dance and spin. But hey, this iteration of Phil and Friends, which featured his own son along with Dicky Betts’s son on guitar, was terrific. It opened with a long, languid “Dancing in the Street” and peaked with a wonderful “Help/Slip/Frank,” broken up by “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and closed out with “Blue Sky,” with Duane Betts looking and sounding scarily like his dad. One always misses Jerry, but Phil’s, too, was a “band beyond description,” so I’ll just stop right here and let them do the talking.
Here’s “Dancing in the Street” and “The Music Never Stopped” (with the awesome Nicki Bluhm on vocals), and “Frank into Blue Sky.”
