On Paul Pelosi Takes

A "meta" analysis on what went wrong with the story

What Happened

You might have heard that the 911 call and body cam footage from when Paul Pelosi was attacked has been released. For those out of the loop or reading this in the future, Nancy Pelosi’s husband was the victim of a home invasion October 28, 2022. David DePape was charged with assault and attempted kidnapping. The body cam footage from officers on the scene shows DePape hitting Paul Pelosi with a hammer and then being tackled by police. 

I’m not writing this about the attack. I’m actually interested in the meta: people on the online right toyed with conspiracy theories that the intruder was Pelosi’s gay lover. Back in October and November, I thought this was a bit much but didn’t pay it much mind. With the new videos putting the story back in the news, I’m concerned and upset about what is being said and about the unforced errors typical of the right. 

Before I get to that, some caveats: 

• I am aware that the footage had not been released in October

• I am aware that the media has covered up things in the past and that conspiracies exist. In fact I have a lot of sympathy for conspiratorial thinking. 

• I know that most people, even most terminally online people, didn’t buy this and that I am picking on a small number of people. 

• I am familiar with caveat emptor and that people should take Hot Takes Guys with a grain of salt

• I am also familiar with the concept of not punching right; please do not tell me that even if I am correct, I am meta-wrong for writing this

So what meta-happened: the twitter cons and RWers’ theory was loosely that the attacker was engaged in a sexual relationship with Paul Pelosi (perhaps hammers were involved) and had been invited into the home. Maybe it was a tryst gone wrong. Maybe it was insurance fraud. Regardless of the details, the story given by the press was a cover up. 

If we represent the sense making process as Evidence A + Evidence B + ... + Evidence N = Theory, some of the problem involves the addition and some of the problem lies with the evidence itself. The reasons for the theory that were presented were as follows. 

Security footage showed broken glass on the ground outside, which several people found suspicious, including Trump:  “The glass, it seems, was broken from the inside to the out and, you know, so, it wasn’t a break in, it was a break out.” This is an addition type problem; when you break a window, some of the glass falls on both sides. 

SF Police said “officers observed Mr. Pelosi and the suspect both holding a hammer.” Many people thought that he had said “both holding hammers” and thought about embarrassing reasons why two people might have hammers late at night. This is an evidence type problem: people hallucinated that the officer said something he didn’t say. I would rate this not as excusable as thinking the dress was white and gold, but more understandable than the fine people hoax. 

Paul Pelosi was in his boxers when the police showed up that night, which was also suspicious to some. I consider this an addition problem because, while being in your underwear with someone late at night is intimate, people often relax in their boxers late at night when alone. Using this as evidence of a tryst and cover up is a failure of analysis because it’s explained equally well by the official story that his home was broken into when he was alone late at night. (There was a line that DePape was also in his underwear. This would have been more suspicious, but I don’t know if this came from claims that DePape was a nudist, a game of telephone, or something else, so I can’t evaluate if this was reasonable or not. Now that the bodycam footage is out we know that he was not in his underwear, and due to some rough housing with the police unfortunately we can say that he wasn’t wearing any.)

People claimed that the attacker was friends with Paul Pelosi. I’m going to call this an addition problem, even though it's kind of an evidence problem, because I could break this down to ‘it was reported that Paul Pelosi said the attacker was his friend.’ We know now that on the 911 call Pelosi says that DePape said he was Pelosi’s friend, but Pelosi doesn’t know him. In my opinion this is a minor confusion, and I excuse the game of telephone. The question I’m interested in is could you have drawn the correct conclusion given the reporting available (the dispatcher’s communication to SFPD.) I say the jump between ‘dispatcher says Paul Pelosi said the attacker was his friend’ in a vacuum to ‘the attacker was friends with Paul Pelosi’ to ‘the attacker was Pelosi’s lover’ is large and avoidable, but there’s an argument to be made, especially if we try to avoid hindsight (which I am). Could I imagine an innocent reason for Pelosi to have told someone the attacker was his friend? Yeah, I guess. Could I imagine an innocent reason for Pelosi to have told the 911 dispatcher the attacher was his friend. Yes, definitely, and that explanation looks exactly like what we now know occurred. 

There were also two takes about security that people found suspect: first, Trump said that the cops showed up very quickly. I don’t think this is true factually, and I also don’t think there would be anything there if it were true. The second is that it’s weird there wasn’t more security. Were there suspiciously few security measures? I didn’t see that. Just because someone was able to break in doesn’t mean there was nothing trying to stop him, just that it didn’t work. I don’t find myself feeling very surprised that the cops showed up when they did, nor that someone was able to break in. Home invasions happen, and sometimes the people whose homes are invaded are able to call 911. 

The last thing on my mind from when the story first broke is the claim that they are hiding the evidence/footage. In my singular experience with this sort of thing, footage took years to be released. Bodycam footage not being released right away is normal. You really have egg on your face when you declare that they’ll never release the footage and we’ll never know what really happened and then three months later the footage is released and we know what really happened. 

Given those pieces of evidence, is there enough to put your name to claims it was a tryst? That’s not taking into account pieces of evidence against, like the fact that there’s no reason to believe that Pelosi is gay. And also he’s 82. And also the guy had a hammer, and dispatch said he was there for Nancy Pelosi. 

Avoiding It Next Time

How I feel when people make unforced errors, illustrated by midjourney

One time I was riding a horse, and she knocked over a cairn on the side of the trail with her gigantic horse nose while trying to sniff it. This was frightening, so she spun around and bucked me off. I felt a bit irritated at her afterwards. You scared yourself, stupid! Do not be this horse. 

First of all, don’t go scaring yourself when you sniff around for trouble. I’m asking for footage that isn’t public, and they aren’t releasing it; it’s a cover up. Then the whole thing gets blown up, and there’s more energy in the coverup theory than the original story. 

Second of all, calibrate your level of reaction. Horses are prey animals and thus prone to flipping out at stuff. Just as it is in the nature of the horse to flip out, it is the nature of the reactionary to react. But you should try to own your instincts. Would that the horse could feel embarrassed for bucking me off over three stacked rocks. The conservative, capable of higher thought, should feel embarrassed if he thinks every shadow is a conspiracy. When you have a high strung horse you desensitize her, which means crinkling plastic bags in front of her and rubbing weird stuff on her back. This particular story, with its three month delayed resolution, presented a good opportunity to test our hindsight. 

If a CNN journalist warned you not to step on that rake over there, you shouldn’t step on it out of spite. ‘Democrats say it’s a MAGA guy who attacked Paul Pelosi, so I’m going to make bad faith claims of my own.’ ‘Don’t let anyone who says stupid things shame you into noticing you are saying something stupid.’ That’s not reasonable. 

“Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by fact.” What I’m observing now is people trying to feel confused by the truth now that it’s out. “The door magically opened when the police got there. Why was he holding a drink can? I’m more confused than ever.” No, you aren’t. I simply do not believe that. Lying to yourself is really really bad. You are better than this. You can be better than this. You should be better than this because you are making the rest of us look stupid by association. 

If you find yourself believing something really strange, double check the transcript. Hallucinating police reports is totally avoidable. Have you ever even heard of a sex act that involves hammers? Are you saying the democrats are so depraved they are doing things that don’t even exist in porn? What do you wear around the house at 10pm? These are all unforced errors. 

The point of the exercise is to show that even without all the evidence, you can avoid making mistakes. This incident is a good one to reflect on because the truth came out 3 months later, so we can check our answers. “I don’t know. I’m going to wait for the footage to be released” is a perfectly good response, but we can go even further to say with some confidence back in November that SFPD was not covering up Paul Pelosi’s gay lover after a hammer sex incident went wrong. If you don’t feel up to that, stick with “I don’t know.” Baby steps.

Why

You are not excused from bad behavior because someone else is behaving badly. We do not accept this excuse even from children. You do not need to accept it from pundits you follow and certainly you should not allow yourself to do it. 

I feel part of my frustration is that in addition to being stupid, it was pointless. Why did boomercon media get caught up in a whirlwind conspiracy that Paul Pelosi was having gay hammer sex with a 40 year old escort? (Challenge: answer without invoking a vast conspiracy to make boomercons look bad!)

Part of my answer is evaporative cooling. On the right, only the dumbest and most talentless grifters survive (unless the pundit reading this is someone I know. You are shrewd and your takes are novel). Part of it might be ingroup signaling; ‘I’m definitely hardcore because I believe the worst of our enemies.’ 

I liked this post by Scott Alexander working with the idea that some conspiracies exist because people work backwards from strong negative emotions: I feel strongly that my enemies are bad. Finally, some story has come out that my enemies are baby eating monsters! Everyone agrees eating babies is horrible so they will finally see that my enemies are bad. But I don’t think that theory applies in this case. Let’s say the guy had actually been a lover. ‘Paul Pelosi attacked by boyfriend.’ What is the drama here? You still make an ass of yourself and it doesn’t really make your enemies look bad. (I suppose there’s a scandalous 40 year age gap…) 

Think of it another way. Suppose I’m a member of the democratic party, and my job is to make right wingers look stupid and evil. With my infinite resources I can just barely scrape together my master plan: release an innocuous true news story where a democrat is the victim of a terrible crime. Only a machiavellian genius like me could mind control the right into saying crazy dumb conspiracy theories about hammer sex. Mwah hah hah.