Thank goodness Michael Shellenberger took the time to conduct his own investigation on the ground to get to the bottom of the Paul Pelosi attack story, "which has far more to do with drugs, homelessness, and pedophilia than QAnon, anti-Semitism, and January 6th."
It is good reporting that reflects badly on what's left of official journalism in the Bay Area. There at least five daily newspapers, a number of local television news stations, and various West Coast bureaus of national and international news outlets within a a short drive of the attacker's home and local neighbors willing to talk about him -- and the only reports heretofore have been quoting politicians' projections about this person's presumed affiliation with an unpopular-in-CA political party.
I don't like either party, but I spend part of each year in a similarly drugged and crime-riven area of Southern California where women, children, seniors and disabled persons cannot walk on the sidewalks at any hour without justifiable fear. (People advise each other to get bear spray and pit bulls.) The press in that region is busy telling voters how to vote on Nov. 8 but not yelling from the ramparts about the dismal facts on the ground."
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,” notedAP, 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.
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. CNNreported 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 Bay Area NBC TV affiliate, 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 21-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.
Thearticle, 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.
A few seconds after I knocked on their door, a young man who appeared to be in his late teens or early twenties appeared, asked me what I wanted, and then told me to go away. About a half hour later, the young man came outside to take the phone numbers of reporters. I asked him if he was the son of DePape or Taub and he said no. “I’m just the person who’s living here.”
However, he looked like the adult version of a boy, Nebospod, 10, who is sitting next to DePape in a photo that accompanied the 2013 San Francisco Chronicle article about Taub’s nude wedding to Smith, and three neighbors insisted that the young man was indeed DePape’s son. La Coste’s partner, who asked I identify her only by her first name, Trish, said the young man was “maybe 18, 19.” Another neighbor, Michael Haggler, said he was over 21 “because he goes to bars.” After another 30 minutes, the young man opened up and started describing his sexual adventures.
Said Trish, “There’s something strange about the whole household. He [DePape] is a bird of a feather with them. They are nudist drug abusers, and that’s who gravitates toward them. Many people lived in the bus, not just him. He [DePape] would come and stay for a little while and then be gone for months on end and then be back and stay for a while.” At one point, she said, the school bus was connected to electricity.
Both Trish and La Coste said they had seen DePape two or three times over the last year, coming in and out of the school bus parked out front. The most recent time they reported seeing DePape was two weeks ago.
La Coste said he wasn’t surprised to hear that DePape was a suspect in the assault on Pelosi “because there’s always something going on with these people. I’ve seen crazy domestic violence fights. Gypsy coming out sweating bullets looking like she was on drugs. They tried to give me sulfuric acid.”
Two other neighbors, Margarita Gonzalez, 57, and her husband Julio Gonzalez, for whom English is a second language, described the DePape and Taub family in a mixture of English and Spanish.
“These people are different from you and me,” said Julio. “They are people of the calle [street].”
“Homeless?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Julio and Margarita in unison.
“Drug users?” I asked
“Yes, yes,” they said.
“They acting like homeless,” said Margarita. “They do nothing.”
Another neighbor, who also appeared to be in his thirties, and who did not want to give his name, said, “The way they’ve all been acting, I know they were on something.”
Trish called it a “weird collective of hippy nudists.” She described frequent crying, yelling, and screaming coming from within the house. Trish said that Gypsy had offered La Coste ibogaine, a psychedelic drug, as a cure for his bipolar disorder. “They go to Mexico and they get this drug [ibogaine] that’s legal there,” said Trish, “and then they bring it back here and treat people’s mental health illnesses. They say it’s like a three-day psychedelic trip.” A sign on a camper van in front of the house advertises “Natural addiction treatment” and promises a “90% success rate.”
La Coste and Trish described Taub as having become increasingly paranoid. One Christmas Eve, they said, Taub accused them of plotting to steal a guitar, and called the police. “They pick fights,” said La Coste. “Right after she got locked up they hid a bunch of boxes under their back porch because they knew the cops were coming.”
Trish described Taub’s left-wing politics as insincere. “On one side, they’re super like, ‘Oh, we want to fight for the people who are down. We want to lift up people who are hurt.’ And then on the other side, they’re like, ‘Everyone’s trying to break into my house! Come and arrest them!’
“They have a Black Lives Movement sign on their window,” said Trish, who said her father is black. “But the reason why so many black lives are lost is because of overreaction in terms of a police response. They’ve called the police and made threats. That’s like the definition of a Karen.”
“So some paranoid behavior?” I asked.
“Yeah, absolutely,” said Trish.
“Psychotic behavior, too?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Tons of drug use. Mental instability. Screaming. Calling the police about hearing conversations that were never had. The wailing at night. I’ve seen them like looking really unreasonably sweaty at night. That’s kind of like a hint to me that they’re using drugs.” (Heavy sweating, known as diaphoresis, is indeed a common reaction to ibogaine use.)
Trish said family members once pulled the school bus in front of their driveway in order to get take down shoes that were dangled over the telephone wire. “They were trying to knock it down and their reasoning was, ‘I think these shoes will fit the neighbor’s kid.’ And when I looked at them, they were sweating bullets and their eyes were dilated.”
Another neighbor, Kathy Vuong Natan, described “weird stuff” since moving in, including having her bike stolen five times, a dumpster fire that caught the fence on fire, and a tenant who had reported Gypsy dancing naked around the fire.
Oxane “Gypsy” Taub
La Coste and other neighbors described frequent nudity. “I was with my 13-year-old niece and we were going upstairs and [Gypsy’s] oldest son was sitting in the back butt naked,” he said. “And before Gypsy got locked up, there were sex dolls drying on the back of their porch that I’m assuming she bought for her sons. They’re off the wall… I’ve had shouting matches with her kids all the time. They don’t go to school. They sit there all day. They’re up all night being loud.”
Margarita Gonzalez said that she once asked Taub if she worried about leaving DePape alone with her children. “I said, ‘Do you feel comfortable with him? Isn’t it problematic for the kids?’” recounted Gonzalez.
“Well, he already abused the kids,” said Taub, according to Gonzalez.
“Why didn’t you send him away?” asked Gonzalez.
“I called the police and they won’t do anything,” said Taub.
Trish said Taub told her the same thing. “In the most matter-of-fact manner, she told me that the father of her boys raped or molested them. I was trying to be consoling, but later I thought, ‘That was the rudest thing you could ever tell me. Like, those are your kids in their trauma. Why are you telling me this? There was no sensitivity in her voice. The next morning we got contacted by the police because she said we tried to sell them cocaine, which I’ve never even tried.”
While there is no proof that DePape sexually assaulted his children, police arrested Taub for sex crimes against a minor in 2019, held her in jail for two years, and a jury convicted her in 2021 of 20 criminal violations including stalking, child molestation, dissuading a witness, and attempted child abduction.
Taub’s victim was a 14-year-old boy who had been a friend of Taub’s son. Taub sent him at least 44 emails and handwritten notes. Police said Taub drove by the boy’s home “at a slow and ‘crawl-like’ speed… as she peered and stared” through the boy’s bedroom window. His mother got a restraining order in June 2019 but Taub ignored it.
Natan showed me a 2019 flyer that Gypsy gave her that, on the front side, announced a “Nude Summer of Love Parade & Rally to Legalize Psychedelic Medicine,” particularly Ibogaine, and the back side contained an open letter where she defended herself against the criminal allegations against her.
Return To Reality-Based Journalism
Yesterday, Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, echoed the comments of Biden, Newsom, and state Sen. Weiner. “Unfortunately, the attack against Paul Pelosi appears to be a symptom of a much larger problem within our democracy,” said Thompson (D-MS). “In recent years, we have seen a rise in domestic terrorism fueled in part by violent, racist, antisemitic, anti-democratic rhetoric.”
But the picture of DePape as a domestic terrorist is ridiculous. Terrorists are quintessential, ideologically-driven fanatics, like the climate activists who are throwing food at paintings and gluing themselves to roads, walls, and tables. They are like the Nazis and Communists described by Eric Hoffer in his classic book, The True Believer. DePape was, by contrast, a lost boy who fell under the spell of Taub’s exhibitionist and malignant narcissism in 2003. After Taub cast out DePape, for whatever reason, he spiraled downward further with the aid of heavy drug use, which drove him into homelessness that appears to have lasted years.
Senator Wiener either knew or should have known that DePape’s story is fundamentally about psychiatric disorder, addiction, and social dysfunction, not ideology, but instead chose to mischaracterize DePape as a right-wing fanatic for political purposes. Weiner admitted to The San Francisco Standard, a new digital-only newspaper, that he remembered seeing DePape with Taub. “I do recall him,” said Weiner, “because he was very associated with Gypsy Taub, who was one of the ringleaders (of the nudity protests) from 12 years ago. And, of course, Gypsy Taub was a conspiracy theorist. She was a 9/11 denier. So, it’s not surprising to me to see this guy be a conspiracy theorist who now apparently has migrated far right.”
Many big questions remain unanswered. The Standardreported late yesterday that the 22-year-old daughter of DePape and Taub, Inti Gonzalez, emailed the newspaper to report that her mother kicked DePape out “because of his toxic behavior.” Gonzalez stressed that she loved her father and that he was “never violent, yelled, or even swore.”
It’s not clear why, if Gonzalez is the daughter of DePape and Taub, why her last name is Gonzalez. When I called the phone number on the camper promising “natural addiction treatment,” the recorded message described it as the “Taub-Gonzalez” house. Margarita and Julia Gonzalez stressed that they were not related to anyone in the Taub household.
Whatever the case, Gonzalez made clear that DePape was in the grip of some combination of mental illness and addiction. “This attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband came as a shock to me, though not much,” Gonalez said. DePape “did genuinely try to be a good person but the monster in him was always too strong for him to be safe to be around.”
Aside from the personal drama, it’s clear that the system failed Paul Pelosi, the Berkeley boy sexually molested by Taub, DePape himself, and the children of Taub and DePape, if they were indeed victims of sexual abuse, as Taub alleged. Advocates of drug decriminalization like Weiner frequently describe drug prohibition as worse than the drugs themselves, but few would say drug prohibition is worse than attempted murder and sexual assault.
One lesson from the drama is that California must restore consequences for crimes resulting from addiction, such as public drug use and illegal camping, both of which can be viewed as cries for help. Had laws against both been enforced, DePape and Taub might have received the psychiatric help they needed before they victimized others. Voters know that addiction care must be mandatory, and increasingly the local media recognize that homelessness results, fundamentally, from addiction. The San Francisco Chronicle last year responded defensively to my book, San Fransicko, and published attack after attack on me while denying me an opportunity to response. But since the June recall of the city’s radical Left District Attorney, the newspaper has changed its tune.
A few weeks ago the Chroniclepublished a poll showing that nearly one out of four people in San Francisco had been assaulted or threatened with assault, while nearly half had been a victim of theft in the last five years. The San Francisco Standard, for its part, conducted a poll that found that 64% of San Franciscans feel less safe than they did one year ago and that 75% want repeated public drug users to be mandated treatment by the courts.
Politicians and biased reporters will remain biased, but the upcoming elections are likely to bring change. Democrats, who have dogmatically opposed mandatory drug treatment, will lose the U.S. House of Representatives and may lose the Senate. Reform candidates promising to address the drug addiction, homeless, and crime crisis may win in cities and states along the West Coast. Democrats will be forced to moderate their Woke agenda, which gave rise to rampant, drug-induced homelessness on the West Coast, or face becoming a minority party. The intellectual capitulation of progressives could create space for the parties to find common ground, as they have in the past, to address America’s worsening psychiatric and addiction crisis.
The greatest change must occur among the American people. We must reject the opportunism of politicians and activist journalists to blame addiction-and-mental-health tragedies on their political opponents. When fanaticism is behind violence we should hold the ideologies to account. But it was, fundamentally, mental instability, not political ideology, that drove DePape. My aunt who suffered from schizophrenia, and was raised in the 1950s, had delusions about Elvis and JFK. Psychotic homeless people I interview speak frequently of their communications with aliens. There is a huge difference between the mere rantings of a psychotic and the ideological drivers of a fanatic.
Finally, it’s simply not the case, as Biden claimed, that just “one party” lies, and talks of stolen elections; they both do. DePape’s alleged attack on Pelosi was not, at bottom, “the direct result of toxic right-wing rhetoric,” as Weiner said, but rather the direct result of America’s continuing failure to properly treat mental illness, dangerous psychiatric disorders, and drug addiction.
Here's a little gem.
https://www.smobserved.com/story/2022/10/29/news/the-awful-truth-paul-pelosi-was-drunk-again-and-in-a-dispute-with-a-male-prostitute-early-friday-morning/7191.html?m=true
Is there anything to the belief that Pelosi's attacker had a relationship with Pelosi, himself?? I just read something along those lines.