The man who bludgeoned the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a hammer last year consumed a steady diet of right-wing conspiracy theories before an attack that took place with the midterm elections less than two weeks away.
As the 2024 presidential campaign progresses, experts on extremism fear the threat of politically motivated violence will increase. From ‘Pizzagate’ to QAnon to ‘Stop the Steal’, conspiracy theories that demonized Donald Trump’s enemies are morphing and spreading as the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination seeks a return to the White House.
“These conspiracy theories and highly divisive and vicious ideologies are no longer segregated at the margins,” said Jacob Ware, a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations who focuses on domestic terrorism. “They are now infiltrating American society on a massive scale.”
A federal jury convicted David DePape on Thursday of attacking Paul Pelosi at his San Francisco home on Oct. 28, 2022. Before the verdict, DePape testified that he planned to take Nancy Pelosi hostage and “break her kneecaps” as the Democratic lawmaker lied to him while he questioned her about what he considered government corruption. She was in Washington at the time of the attack.
In online rants before the attack, DePape reiterated the tenets of QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that has been linked to murders and other crimes. A core belief of QAnon adherents is that Trump has attempted to expose a Satan-worshipping cabal of prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites engaged in child sex trafficking.
Trump has expanded social media accounts promoting QAnon, which went from the far-right edge of the internet to a fixture of mainstream Republican politics.
Many of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, embraced the apocalyptic beliefs of QAnon online before traveling to the nation’s capital that day for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally. A message board formerly known as TheDonald.win was buzzing with plans for violence days before the siege.
Before QAnon, many Trump supporters embraced the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that prominent Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring out of the (non-existent) basement of a Washington pizzeria. In 2017, a North Carolina man was sentenced to prison for firing a gun at the restaurant.
In his 2024 campaign, Trump has stepped up his combative rhetoric by talking about retaliation against his enemies. He recently joked about the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi and suggested that retired Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for treason.
Threats against lawmakers and election officials are widespread, with targets that span the country’s political divisions: A California man awaits trial on charges that he plotted to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump nominee at his home in Maryland.
Trump’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election did not end the spread of QAnon-influenced conspiracy theories or its unrealized prophecies. The ever-changing ideology of the leaderless movement often adopts beliefs from other conspiracy theories.
“It’s very good at evolving with time and current events,” said Sheehan Kane, data collection manager for the University of Maryland-based Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START.
In a 2021 article, Kane and START senior researcher Michael Jensen examined QAnon-inspired crimes committed by 125 adherents since the conspiracy theory appeared on the 4chan imageboard in 2017. They found that there were more “extremist perpetrators” associated with QAnon than any other extremist group. or movement in the United States.
“In 2020, millions of people were radicalized because of this conspiracy theory. It’s really hard to say who is going to mobilize on behalf of a conspiracy theory,” Kane said.
DePape, Paul Pelosi’s attacker, testified that his interest in right-wing conspiracy theories began with GamerGate, an online harassment campaign against feminists in the video game industry. Starting in 2014, misogynistic gamers terrorized female game developers and other women in the industry with rape and death threats.
Brianna Wu, one of GamerGate’s original targets, said she wasn’t surprised when she learned nearly a decade later that it was linked to a politically motivated attack. Wu said GamerGate emerged from the same online recessions that spawned far-right conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and QAnon.
“This is a pattern of radicalization that we see again and again in every part of politics,” Wu said. “This is not a question of right versus left. This is a radicalization problem that is happening online. We need a policy response.”
DePape testified that he went to Nancy Pelosi’s home with plans to question her about Russian interference in the 2016 election. He said he planned to wear an inflatable unicorn costume during the recording and then upload the video to the internet.
DePape allegedly told authorities that his other targets included a professor of women’s and queer studies at the University of Michigan. He told jurors he learned about the professor while listening to a conservative commentator.
DePape’s spiral into conspiracy theories is a textbook example of radicalization, according to experts on extremism who say the mainstreaming of false, bigoted and harmful ideas on radio shows, cable news, social media websites and other public online forums has made them far more accessible.
The problem is exacerbated by lax content moderation on social media and a growing “conspiracy-creating cottage industry” that wants to use extreme rhetoric to raise money or broaden their audience, says American University professor Brian Hughes, deputy director of Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab.
“Some of the people in that broad audience are going to be people like DePape, who are going to deliberately commit an act of violence based on the false and damaging information that has been given to them,” Hughes said.
Conspiracy theories are attractive by design, causing some who are susceptible to them to fully engage, says Amarnath Amarasingam, an extremism researcher and professor at Queen’s University in Canada. DePape testified that before the attack, he regularly played video games for hours while listening to political podcasts.
Repeatedly hearing that political opponents or government leaders are responsible for evil acts gives believers a scapegoat for their problems and a “moral mission” to do something about them, Amarasingam said.
U.S. election years are often marked by violence, says Ware of the Council on Foreign Relations, whether it’s hate crimes in response to a particular candidate’s identity or violent reactions to unfavorable outcomes. “So we should definitely expect such incidents in 2024,” he said.
Trump’s return to the election next year, as well as his current legal battle, are sure to intensify politicized rhetoric and could lead to more extremist violence, experts say.
“Donald Trump has a knack for tacitly endorsing violence without necessarily saying anything that is really a clear endorsement of it,” Hughes said.
To combat potential violence, Americans should try to lower the temperature on political rhetoric and keep an eye out for loved ones who may be spiraling toward radicalization, experts say.
“Spending hours and hours consuming conspiracy theory material is intoxicating,” Hughes said. “It numbs you from the worries of your daily life, in the same way that certain medications do. And I think we need to reorient our thinking a little bit in that direction so that we can start to see this as the public health problem that it really is.”
___
Associated Press writer Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco contributed to this report.
___
The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to improve its explanatory reporting on elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.