The Pelosi Attack, Election Denial, COVID Skepticism, Gaslighting, And The Midterms

Yesterday I pointed out that even if we rely on consensus mainstream reporting on the Paul Pelosi attack, supplemented by court documents, there continue to be puzzling questions about precisely what happened at the front door of the Pelosi home after police arrived and why security there was so lax that a disorganized psychotic could enter the home without tripping an alarm, as well as how the Capitol Police could have missed the incident on their live camera feed.

This comes after nearly everyone discarded theories that David DePape was Paul's gay lover or was in the home for other questionable purposes -- although it must be acknowledged that SFPD Chief Scott's initial statements were so poorly written that they left room for misinterpretation until other sources like court filings became available. The problem is that the media consensus stubbornly continues a lack of transparency over even the current revised version of the story.

NBC News pulled a report Friday that claimed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband didn’t let on that he was in any danger when cops showed up at his home just prior to the hammer attack on him.

The now-deleted clip said Paul Pelosi, 82, answered the door for cops who responded to a 911 call at the San Francisco home, but the officers were “seemingly unaware they had been called to the home of the speaker of the House.”

Pelosi didn’t “declare an emergency” or try to leave, but instead walked several feet back into the foyer toward armed attacker David DePape, who had broken into the home last Friday and was carrying a hammer, sources told NBC.

The report, which cited sources familiar with the matter, said it wasn’t clear what Pelosi’s mental state was or if he had already been hurt.

The NBC report from Friday was taken down with the explanation, “The piece should not have aired because it did not meet NBC News reporting standards.”

Nevertheless, experienced police officers, lawyers, and laypeople like me who are informed on police issues have unresolved questions about the incident. Why didn't Pelosi simply push past the door toward the officers when he opened it? Instead, accounts suggest that after he opened it, he returned to struggle with DePape over the hammer.

Why did the police apparently hesitate at the entryway long enough to allow this to happen? They had full legal authority to enter as soon as they recognized something was wrong, but they waited until DePape struck Pelosi in the head with the hammer. This leaves aside the question of why the Capitol Police didn't monitor the live feed or why the security system, with Pelosi alone in the house, was apparently not armed at 2:30 AM. What was Pelosi's mental state? Who knows? Is this something the family would prefer not be published? Are there nevertheless issues that need to be made public here?

According to the Washington Post, though,

On Tuesday evening, The Washington Post reported that the Capitol Police had a live feed of the Pelosi couple’s San Francisco house during the attack but that no one was monitoring the feed. In short order, a new demand emerged: Release that video! Release the video of the responding police officers! What are you hiding?! Because this is how the conspiracy theory continues to ooze forward. There’s always some information out there being suspiciously hidden that will prove the conspiracy theory correct. If that information is suppressed, it reinforces the conspiracy theory. If it is released, it becomes evidence that contributes to the conspiracy theory — colored yarn is pinned to it — or attention just turns to some other just-out-of-sight information.

. . . the public understanding of how logic works is too weak. One of the common responses to Trump’s false claims about election fraud was that it was up to the media to prove rampant fraud didn’t happen, which is nothing more than shifting an impossible burden away from the conspiracy theory.

As the 1960s song put it,

What will you do if we let you go home
And the plastic's all melted
And so is the chrome?
. . . What will you do when the label comes off
And the plastic's all melted
And the chrome is too soft?

Notice how the elite reason for withholding information on the Pelosi attack, however innocuous its release might be, elides into election denial and Trumpism. The public has proven they can't handle logic, so they must trust the accounts they're given lest they fall victim to conspiracy theories. This applies, of course, to COVID skepticism as well, which is the one issue over which media has been most assiduously suppressing "misinformation". Despite this level of censorship, Alex Berenson, one of the best-known COVID skeptics, has persisted in publishing his contrarian research. For instance, he discusses the research of Milwaukee County Medical Examiner Dr. Brian L. Peterson into the actual cause of deaths attributed to COVID on death certificates (paywall):

As far as Peterson knows, only one other county medical examiner in the United States performed a similar review. It is possible that Peterson has looked at medical records for more individual Covid-related deaths than anyone else.

Roughly 20 percent of deaths that physicians certified as Covid-related were not. Some would have been obvious to a layperson - the classic example being a homicide victim who happened to have a positive Covid test.

. . . Another 20 percent of deaths came in people with very late-stage cancer or other terminal conditions who did have Covid and symptoms specific to it when they died. Those people would likely have died in days or weeks even if they had not been infected, Peterson said. Still, he added Sars-Cov-2 to their death certificates as a secondary cause, since the virus had hastened their deaths.

In other words, about 40 percent of all the deaths attributed to Covid had either a marginal link to it or none at all.

. . . In [the remaining 60 percent of] cases, Peterson agreed that the coronavirus was the primary cause of death and reported it that way on their death certificates.

Stil, the people who died of Covid were almost always very unhealthy, he said.

“Even those folks had comorbidities that were substantial.”

Even in the current environment, views like these must clearly be published with great circumspection lest everyone involved be canceled for spreading "misinformation". Note that Emily Oster's call for a COVID amnesty in the Atlantic specifically excludes those who spread such "misinformation" -- notwithstanding her tacit acknowledgement that culpable errors were made that must be forgiven, forgiveness must nevertheless preserve the comfortable narrative and gloss over questions like how the virus originated or how the destructive policies were decided.

This brings us to the current election cycle. The narrative, as we see in the Washington Post op-ed at the link or President Biden's increasingly shrill warnings about Donald Trump and election denial, involves a US population that's unwilling to accept packaged versions of events and is thus vulnerable to "conspiracy theories" and "misinformation".

I've already said that COVID is the big, but largely unspoken, subtext of the campaign leading up to Tuesday's elections, and it's because a substantial part of the US population recognizes it was bamboozled. Indeed, the COVID crisis, which is looking more and more as though it was largely manufactured, preceded and heavily influenced the 2020 election. Even if it can't be proven that it was stolen via quantifiable election fraud, there's an inescapable sense that the issue swung the election in some uncomfortable way.

Thus the continuing need for the elites to condemn this mindset as "conspiracy theories", which is really just an acknowledgement that the electorate is deeply suspicious of all packaged narratives at this stage. The elites wanted to spin the Pelosi attack as a revolt of the deplorables, but it's turning out that attack couldn't have come at a less opportune time for them, raising continuing questions about current leaders and the people surrounding them. People can figure it out when they're being gaslighted.