"A Conspiracy Theory About a Conspiracy Theorist": RELIGION DISPATCHES on David DePape

From Susannah Crockford's 11-2-22 RELIGION DISPATCHES article entitled "Pelosi Attacker's New Age Spirituality and Belief in QAnon Is No Contradiction":

Around 3 a.m. on October 28, David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband, with a hammer. During the attack, DePape yelled “Where’s Nancy?” raising concerns that his true intent was political assassination of the second-in-line to the presidency. The potential political motive for this brutal act led to questions about who DePape is and what he believes in, with early reports focusing on his “strange descent” and “political metamorphosis” from a one-time Green Party supporter to a spreader of right-wing conspiracy theories.

While he affiliated with the Green Party in his San Francisco voting records back in 2013, he has since posted on a range of conspiracy theories, including QAnon and 2020 election rigging, on two separate blogs and Facebook [...].

That DePape was both active on the far-right image board /pol/ on 4chan and linked to a house in Berkeley, California with a Pride rainbow weed symbol flag and a “Berkeley stands united against hate” sign is the source of much confusion from commentators so far. The juxtaposition of these symbols does appear, on the surface at least, to be contradictory. Of course, DePape no longer resides at that house. He did in 2013, when the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed his acquaintance Gypsy Taub, a nudity activist, about her upcoming wedding (at which DePape was to be the best man). In that article, it states that DePape made hemp jewelry for a living. Associating with nudity activists, particularly Taub, seems to locate DePape in San Francisco hippie culture.

Taub is a self-described rebel, Deadhead, and homeschool mom with a school bus who met her husband Jaymz Smith at a Rainbow Gathering and saw him as the reincarnation of her previous husband, Sergey. As well as yoga and raw food, she was interested in 9/11 truther theories, once running a public access TV show Uncensored 9/11, which she presented naked. In her subsequent show My Naked TV, no longer on public access, she and a guest would talk for half an hour naked, about almost anything. (There’s also a website, in which Taub leaves her own digital trail of blog posts.)

Despite the media focus on the connection between Taub and DePape, however, she clearly hasn’t been involved in any of his recent actions since she’s been in the California Institute for Women for stalking and the attempted kidnapping of a 14-year-old boy since 2021 [...].

Failing to understand the crossover between new age spirituality and conspiracy theories, many assume that those who present as hippies are necessarily left-wing, an assumption that only enables the political Right to deny responsibility. Almost immediately as details of the Pelosi attack emerged, a conspiracy theory about DePape emerged that he and Paul Pelosi were somehow sexually involved. Over the weekend, the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, tweeted and then deleted an article making this allegation from the fake news site the Santa Monica Observer. The conspiracy theory transmuted accusations of increasing right-wing political violence into a tawdry story of a domestic dispute between two men, coupled with an attempt to associate addiction and homosexuality with degeneracy.

On social media, this conspiracy theory spread, along with frequent use of the images of the Berkeley house with the Pride/weed flag and school bus (which displayed a sign about the psychoactive substance ibogaine as a “natural addiction treatment”), to claim DePape is both gay and left-wing, and that the attack on Pelosi was therefore not perpetrated by anyone on the Right.

What’s formed is essentially a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theorist, and it fuels a form of false equivalence—that ‘both sides’ have a problem with political violence—coupled with the familiar sense of bewilderment that disinformation brings. A sense that we can never really know the truth, so we should probably give up because comprehension is futile [...].

What’s often overlooked about new age spirituality is its roots in White supremacy, that long history of right-wing esoteric ideas that fuels the antisemitism, racism, and misogyny running through conspirituality [...]. Explicit QAnon conspiracy theories that prominent Democrats are blood-drinking, demon-worshiping, child traffickers are supported by generalized cultural assumptions that elites are exploitative and criminal.

Such conspiracy theories are fed by a sense of righteousness, of fighting on the side of the good against an evil cabal. People involved in new age spirituality are also fed by a sense of self-righteousness, a form of purity culture, that they make the right choices with their clean diets and spiritually superior practices. Therefore when bad things happen, there must be someone else to blame, and they have the right to punish evildoers. They only need to take a small step to find themselves in explicit White supremacy and fascism.

To read the entire article, click HERE.