How baseless conspiracy theories about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband spread into the GOP mainstream
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- Conspiracy theories spread fast after Nancy Pelosi's husband was attacked in their home.
- They were boosted by Elon Musk and a slew of influential Republicans.
- Prosecutors say the attacker was politically motivated and was looking for Pelosi.
On Monday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted a segment of his show to spreading doubt about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Ignoring key parts of official reports on the incident, Carlson asked how the attacker, David DePape, had gained access to the couple's San Francisco home, even though police said he in through a window.
He also asserted that the motive for the attack was unclear, although the attacker published a blog expressing support for far-right conspiracy theories and told police he wanted to break Nancy Pelosi's knees.
"This was politically motivated," San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins had said at a press conference earlier, and implored the public to "watch the words that we say and to turn down the volume of our political rhetoric."
—Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 31, 2022
Carlson's monologue alluded to conspiracy theories about the attack that spread across social media over the weekend, the goal of which seems to be to absolve Republicans of blame for possibly inspiring the attacker.
Far-right influencers pushed rumors, all without evidence and explicitly refuted by police, that Pelosi knew his attacker, or was even involved in a gay relationship with him.
Matt Gertz, a research at Media Matters, a liberal media-monitoring group, described the conspiracy posts as a way for their advocates to invert the truth.
DePape he said, is "a man who committed political violence because he was consumed by these right-wing conspiracy theories about how depraved the left is, and they're turning it into a new conspiracy theory about how depraved the left is."
Baseless claims about the attack started to circulate on social media within hours of the news being reported on Friday, with far-right influencers quickly seizing on details from initial reports to spin an alternative narrative.
They highlighted a tweet by a local reporter, later retracted, saying that the attacker had been found partly clothed, layering on that a suggestion of sexual impropriety.
They also claimed police statements suggested that a third individual had let police into the property to stop the attack.
Officers later said that interference was false, stressing that Pelosi and the assailant were the only people there when officers arrived and didn't know each other.
—Terry Castleman (@TerryCastleman) October 31, 2022
"The way these conspiracy theories are generated and propagate is through a really vast number of individuals on social media, on pro-Trump message boards, who are looking around for the sort of raw materials to build these sorts of alternative narratives," said Gertz.
He said the claims are then cited and pushed by conspiracist and far-right websites, and make their way "up the food chain" to more influential figures.
The Pelosi conspiracy theory received an unexpected boost when it was shared on Saturday by Elon Musk, Twitter's new owner, who has pledged to roll back policies on the site designed to restrict the spread of disinformation, casting himself as a champion of free speech.
Responding to a tweet by Hillary Clinton blaming Republican rhetoric for the attack, he shared a report by a fringe site, The Santa Monica Observer, on baseless rumors about Paul Pelosi knowing the attacker.
The site has been identified by the LA Times as a fake-news outlet that seeks to mimic local news publications but instead pushes disinformation. Its past reporting has included the claim that Hillary Clinton is dead.
Musk later deleted the tweet, and pivoted to criticizing The New York Times.
Right-wing influencers have hailed Musk's takeover of the platform, but he has difficult decisions to make in the future over whether to indulge his fondness for stirring controversy, and risk alienating advertisers.
"Advertisers don't want to run ads on a platform that is a complete and total cess pit," said Gertz.
By Monday, attempts to discredit the facts about the attack were spreading among mainstream right-wing figures, including Donald Trump Jr and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, having initially expressed sympathy for the Pelosis, retweeted a conservative influencer, Matt Walsh, questioning the ideological loyalties of the suspect, and the prosecutors' version of events.
And on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump in an interview with podcaster Chris Stigall referenced baseless speculation that broken glass found at the scene suggested there had been no break in.
"Weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks. The glass it seems was broken from the inside to the out so it wasn't a break in, it was a break out," said Trump.
—steven monacelli (@stevanzetti) October 31, 2022
For Gertz, it falls into a familiar pattern of how right-wing influencers seek to manipulate information.
"They're finding little pieces of information and holding on to them and merging them together. And in doing so, creating an alternate narrative that is useful for them politically, even as it seems to bear no connection to reality," he said of those promoting the claims.