Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's first story on the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, an Oct. 28 piece by Bob Unruh, was surprisingly balanced by WND standards, though he did make sure to add a claim by the right-wing website Twitchy that Pelosi's assailant is ""a former Castro nudist protester." Things moved back toward normal WND standars in an Oct. 31 article by Art Moore complaining that hateful right-wing rhetoric against his wife, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, incited the attack:
Despite conflicting reports and many unanswered questions, President Biden and other Democratic Party leaders have used the assault by a hammer-wielding, apparently mentally ill, illegal alien on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband to rally midterm voters, casting the violent act as an inevitable result of right-wing, "election denier" rhetoric.
And Monday afternoon, announcing attempted-murder charges against 42-year-old David DePape, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins affirmed to reporters that prosecutors believe the attack was politically motivated.
But on closer inspection, the suspect – an illegal alien from Canada who was a member of the far-left Green Party and lives in a dilapidated bus on the Berkeley, California, property of "nudist drug abusers" who support Black Lives Matter and purportedly of late was circulating QAnon conspiracies – comes across more as a homeless, mentally unstable drug addict than a determined ideologue.
Nevertheless, establishment media aligned with the Democrats' narrative, with CBS correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti, for example, tying DePape's actions to "the January 6 Capitol Hill mob" because he allegedly shouted, "Where is Nancy."
Unruh has so far failed to correct his story to reflect actual facts instead of right-wing conspiracy theories. He did, however, return to the WND norm of spreading conspiracy theories in a Nov. 1 article:
What is known about a confrontation in the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is that a person arrested for injuring her husband, millionaire Paul Pelosi, was "mentally unstable" with a brain "addled by long-term drug use."
He is a former "pro-nudist activist, convinced that 'he was Jesus for a year,' who lived in a bus on a semi-commune and has embraced conspiracy theories from the left and right," according to columnist David Harsanyi at the Federalist.
So why, then, are so many questions remaining unanswered, including reports that Pelosi won't turn over home security footage of the fracas.
[...]
It is the Republic Brief that reported on one of the many unanswered questions about the event, that "there is no security footage being released to the general public, and the left is trying to pretend that it is no big deal and that everyone should just move along."
The Republic Brief is a right-wing site nobody has heard of that hides who runs it, so there's no reason for anyone to trust what it says. In fact, thte Capitol Police have a surveillance feed at Pelosi's home (thought nobody was watching it at the time of the attack), and there's no legitimate claim that Pelosi won't turn it over."
Unruh went to hype salacious "new details" in a Nov. 4 article:
A series of alarming details have emerged following the police investigation into an attack on Paul Pelosi, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, at their San Francisco home while she was in Washington.
Among them was that Paul Pelosi, apparently calm, "never let on to responding officers that he was in distress just seconds before he walked back into his house where an intruder bludgeoned him with a hammer."
The details are emerging in a report from the Daily Mail, which cited NBC.
Police already have identified and charged the intruder, David DePape, 42, a onetime nudism advocate and BLM supporter who was known by associates as diving into various conspiracy theories.
Earlier reports said DePape wanted Nancy Pelosi as a hostage, or to break her kneecaps.
While Unruh went on to note that "After posting the report, NBC abruptly removed it, citing its 'standards'", his story has yet to be updated to reflect the ract that NBC retracted the story.Instead, he took a sharp tangent to shoehorn in his own personal obsessions that have little to do with the attack:
WND has reported that despite the conflicting reports and unanswered questions, Joe Biden and other Democrat leaders are using the assault to try to rally midterm election voters to their agenda which mostly consists of abortion and transgenderism.
They also are characterizing Republicans as Nazis and claiming voters that a vote against Democrats is a vote against democracy.
WND largely abandoned the story after that -- apparently, it failed to live up to conspiracy-theory potential. Unruh gave it one last shot, however, in a Nov. 16 article that focused on the NBC story he previously refused to acknowledge had been retracted:
It's true that crimes often don't have simple explanations, but the incident in which Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their San Francisco home seems to be extreme.
Fox News has revealed that a report from NBC News that explained Pelosi had opened the door for police, and then went back into his house where he was bludgeoned with a hammer attack, was withdrawn for not being up to reporting "standards."
However, Fox noted, "A new NBC Bay Area report about the assault on Paul Pelosi last month includes several of the same details in NBC News' retracted national report that suggested Pelosi may not have been in immediate danger when police arrived prior to his attack."
That's lame even by WND standards -- even with the assistance of Fox News. No wonder it gave up on the story, and even WND's columnists couldn't workup much interest. Editor Joseph Farah's Nov. 1 column gushed over how right-wing Fox News host Tucker Carlson "pointed out that Nancy Pelosi is using the terrible hammer attack on her husband, Paul, last Friday morning for political theater. It's disgusting the way the media treated it." A Nov. 1 column by Andy Schlafly embraced the bogus video conspiracy: "Releasing the evidence concerning the attack on Paul Pelosi will help the public assess the Democrats' politicized narrative about it. Trump and Musk are right to question whether there is more to this story than the government admits, and Republicans should demand that the evidence be made public."
But as the Washington Post's Philip Bump noted: "The requests for video footage of the Pelosi attack, like the request for footage from the Capitol riot, is not primarily about the footage. It is primarily about using the request for the footage as a way to imply that something is being hidden." Indeed -- it's just conspiracy-mongering by another name.
