![]() ![]() After Charlottesville, reporters began to dig into Discord servers, alt-right posting boards and sites, including Stormfront, in the hopes of exposing and naming the fascists in our midst. I’d trace the origins of Reddit profiling back to the Boston Marathon bombing, when an unruly mix of reporters and posters believed they could perform a manhunt using claims about a police scanner and some screenshots with a bunch of lines drawn on them. This kind of rapid triangulation through bits of online information-I call it Reddit profiling-has become the Internet’s emergency response for understanding men who do terrible things. “Suspect in assault at Pelosi home had posted about QAnon,” a Washington Post headline read. He posted a daily stream of garden-variety conspiratorial bigotry that mostly seemed to just stick to the hatred of the moment, whether of Communists, Jewish people (via a defense of Kanye West), immigrants, or trans people. This was met with the unearthing of what appears to be DePape’s blog activity. It is festooned with LGBTQ flags, BLM signs and other Leftist propaganda.” Even Elon Musk joined in, sharing and later deleting a sensationalist conspiracy theory about the details of the attack. Lidia Curanaj, a talk-show host, tweeted, “Reportedly Paul Pelosi attacker is David Depape-a Castro supporting nudist transient from Berkeley CA (he’s on the far LEFT literally and figuratively).” Sebastian Gorka tweeted out a photo of the Woolsey Street home with the caption, “Here is the hippie commune Pelosi’s pro-hemp nudist attacker lived in. The whole Berkeley and nudist thing was enough for some to conclude that DePape was “on the left”-whatever that means. The story includes a photo of Taub, Smith, DePape, and Taub’s three children watching “South Park” together. ![]() DePape, identified in the piece as a hemp-jewelry maker, was the best man. Their connection was one of the early details unearthed in the initial online manhunt, a ritual that seems to follow any notable act of violence these days: in 2013, Taub was getting married to a man named Jaymz Smith, and SFGate had published a story about the upcoming wedding. One of the buses on Woolsey Street had its message written above the windshield: “You Are Beautiful.”ĭavid DePape, the forty-two-year-old man who is accused of breaking into Nancy Pelosi’s house and attacking her husband with a hammer, appears to have once lived at this address with a nudist activist who went by the name of Gypsy Taub. ![]() They evoke a decades-long history of degradation, as the city’s youthful idealism has pooled itself into decrepit front yards filled with overgrown native plants, broken-down R.V.s, and signs making vague declarations of social justice or affirmation. Houses like this one aren’t exactly rare in Berkeley. Two short school buses were parked out front, in various states of conversion into God knows what a weather-beaten banner hanging over the garage touted a “Natural addiction treatment” with an “over 90% success rate.” Last Friday morning, as news about the attack on Paul Pelosi was still seeping out, I pulled up in front of a run-down Victorian on Woolsey Street in southwest Berkeley. ![]()
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