David DePape and the Legacy of GamerGate

This is the story of David DePape: gamer, nudist, and rightwing conspiracy theorist.

In the early morning of October 28, 2022, Depape broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House. She was in Washington, DC, with her security detail. But her husband Paul Pelosi was home. DePape beat him with a hammer, fracturing his skull and injuring his arm and hands.

Within minutes of this news being announced, hot takes were being posted on Twitter. I looked, and here is what I saw: on the political right, the claim was that DePape was a crazed leftist. The “proof”? Well, come on, he lived in San Francisco! He had long hair! Googling the man turned up a history of participating in nudist protests. That couldn’t be a conservative! Oh, look, he listed his occupation in a newspaper article from a decade ago as a hemp jewelry artist. What could be a more ridiculous, emasculated lib-type job for a man? So, hmm, if he’s a leftist, why did he break into the Pelosi home and attack Paul, when the Pelosis are also anti-American socialists? It must be he was just a thieving vagrant, or high. Or, no: it was a lover’s spat! Maybe Paul Pelosi and David DePape each had a hammer, and were going at eachother! I guess Paul shouldn’t have tried to short DePape when paying the bill for the, er, services rendered, har har.

This wild speculation led in various directions. In one camp, jokers generated Da Pepe memes, featuring the green frog claimed as a mascot by 4chan-flavored rightwing trolls. In another, posters issued melodramatic warnings about how the FBI and mainstream media would soon “disappear the facts” showing DePape was a communist nudist, and replace them with a narrative that DePape was a MAGA Republican: “Just watch and you’ll see it happen in front of your eyes!” Then there was Camp Q, which—surprise!—said DePape was a pedophile. His wife (or no, former housemate, oops) was convicted of stalking a teenaged boy. Oh, and he was a communist supporter of Fidel Castro! (Whoops, actually the Castro mentioned in an article about DePape was a neighborhood—the Castro district where he’d participated in a protest. Well, surely everyone who lives there is a communist. . . )

Meanwhile, the more buttoned-up Fox News adherents took another line. Their claim was that DePape had no coherent ideology—he was just driven crazy by today’s “cold civil war” rhetoric, for which Joe Biden is obviously to blame. Bill Maher intoned his opinion on Fox that people like DePape emerge when they can’t get their ideas out due to social media censorship, and are silenced by cancel culture and Biden fanning the flames of the culture wars. Fortunately, he proclaimed, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter can save us all from such violence in the future by giving people the free speech outlet they need. Reporting by Fox's "news" arm on the attack by DePape took a different tack, speculating at length on a pedophilia angle, and noting that a decade ago, DePape had registered as a Green. Rumors that DePape was a conspiracy theorist who supported Trump, if true, claimed the reporters, could only show the man had no organized belief system, taken in by whatever nonsensical idea he came across!

None of the immediate rush of MAGA tweets or first day of “news” reports on rightwing media mentioned anything about the large body of writing DePape had generated over the past six years, and put out there on Facebook and his two personal blogs for anyone to read.

But you can bet people did go find and read it. . . (The accounts have all since been taken down, but it took hours for that to happen, during which time many reporters and social media posters screencaptured and analyzed the content.)

And as readers of the content posted and mainstream media reported, DePape’s mass of posts covered a long, long list of rightwing conspiracy favorites. They were full of misogyny, racism, transphobia, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. DePape posted about a range of Covid conspiracies, about “the steal,” about QAnon, about gun rights being taken away. He hated Hillary Clinton (“Hitlerie”), and feminists, and how nasty women were supposedly oppressing men with the collaboration of Hollywood elites. He decried communists, and claimed queer and trans people were normalizing pedophilia. Democrats were infested by pedophiles. “Equity” was just wokespeak code for the oppression of white people! DePape also reposted a video by Michael Lindell, the ”My Pillow Guy,” about supposed election fraud by Democrats, and denounced the Congressional investigation of the January 6^th attack on the Capitol. Oh, and he was a Holocaust denier, who claimed Jews were the ones who financed Hitler’s rise and controlled him. He approved Ye’s attacks on Jews. And he ranted over and over again about evil woke elites trying to suppress and control the populace.

These are not the positions of a leftist. True, DePape also posted speculations about UFOs and the paranormal, and those are all-American obsessions that cross all party lines. But the bulk of his posts and shares were quite clearly related to conservative conspiracy theories.

Now: in today’s highly polarized political milieu, any time there is a mass shooting or an assassination attempt, there’s a quick scramble to decide whether the perpetrator played for Team Red or Team Blue, so that information can be deployed by the “innocent” party against the losing one. Of course, determining the truth about anything is only possible if you agree that there is some shared objective standard by which that can be judged—and conspiracy theorists don’t agree with that premise. So, in this case, when people on the left claimed victory, based on DePape’s online writings, the conspiracists on Twitter who had jumped out within minutes of the news breaking to set a narrative that DePape was a leftist about whom the FBI and mainstream media would manufacture false claims said, “See! Toldya.” And those whose "gut" supposedly told them a longhair from Berkeley had to be a communist, not a conservative, dismissed the online record as noise—fake news. Over on Fox News, the extent of the concession to DePape’s online postings was a single sentence noting that DePape was said to have embraced Covid conspiracies—nothing about his raving bigotry or Q-flavored rants. And that sentence was buried in the long reports on DePape’s having been housemates with a nudist woman convicted of stalking a teenaged boy, and how DePape had served as best man at her wedding. Oh, and Fox issued a bunch of reporting on how excellent the police response had been, saving Paul Pelosi's life, and how Nancy Pelosi’s expressing gratitude for that illustrated the hypocrisy of the police-defunding left. Violent crime was everywhere due to Democrats' policies!

Returning to a review of responses on social media, what did people on the political left focus on? A lot of people posted on DePape’s cries of “Where’s Nancy?!” as he perpetrated his attack, underlining that this is what bands of men roaming the Capitol on January 6^th had called out. DaPape was MAGA, and this was what MAGA hath wrought, stated Vote Blue posters: an ongoing onslaught of political violence. But on the right, posters expressed disbelief. Why should they believe a nudist Green had magically converted into an unhinged far-right partisan? Either the later online record must have been manufactured as a false-flag operation, or all it showed was that DePape was incoherent and unstable.

The response on the left has been to dismiss these rightwing objections by saying, “People change. Lots of people got radicalized during the pandemic.”

But that is unconvincing—not just to the conservative Twitterverse, but to me. DePape was posting his rightwing diatribes long before Covid struck. And if the issue was just that people got locked down and had too much time on their hands to devote to watching YouTube and TikTok videos, if DePape had gone into quarantine as a lefty nudist, why would he not have become a more radicalized leftist?

If we don’t have a way to explain how David DePape moved from being a Green in 2012 to a raving rightwinger a decade later, we’re missing a large part of the story, and are left with an incoherent one. And that's what many media reported. As Yahoo! News put it, DePape had “hazy politics” but “fell down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about Covid-19.” The pandemic is blamed for DePape’s attack, naturalizing it. Now, I am sure that the pandemic exacerbated DePape’s rage—he posted a lot about Covid-related matters. And the pandemic has left so many people with ongoing anxiety and exhaustion, both due to social disruptions, and as long Covid symptoms. But experiencing mental health challenges doesn’t explain why someone would adopt a particular rightwing political ideology. A New York Times piece seems in fact to assert the opposite: that, in essence, DePape was “crazy”, and hence doesn’t really hold any political stance that can be deemed meaningful. (Hey, that’s exactly what they were saying over on Fox!) This is ludicrous and ableist. The Times piece implies that since DePape posted about UFOs and paranormal creatures and abilities, he must be too irrational to hold a true political ideology--but his beliefs are commonplace in the contemporary U.S.. A New York Times article from a couple of days prior noted that between 40 and 50% of homeowners today claim their houses are haunted. Do the Times editors believe that half of Americans are insufficiently sane to be said to have political positions?

In fact, most of the time, most people with mental health challenges can hold and articulate beliefs and ideologies, and engage in analyses, and affirm their moral commitments. This is very important to underline when we are talking about assassins and mass-murdering purveyors of hate. In the eyes of most, to shoot up a synagogue or Black church or Sikh temple is the act of someone not just angry, but “mad”. We must take great care not to elide this with lack of moral responsibility due to “insanity.” Such a framework results in us absolving all hate-murderers of responsibility, based on a misunderstanding of mental illness. It would have us see the actions of people like DePape as random, meaningless, and impossible to explain.

But there is in fact an explanation of David DePape’s descent into rightwing hate and conspiracy theories—one based on his interests and history—predating the pandemic by years. And it’s one we should be aware of.

The thing that switched DePape’s politics, and sent him down a road that eventually led to homicidal violence, was GamerGate.

When asked about what David DePape was like as a child, his stepfather said he was a nice kid, but quiet and shy. The stepfather disapproved of how David spent most of his free time: always playing video games. I find this really relatable. How many millions of kids have been introverted or socially awkward, and have found solace in gaming, though family members may have nagged at them to stop spending so much time in front of screens?

Then, in his early 20s, DePape moved to Hawai’i, then followed a girlfriend to the San Francisco Bay Area. There he worked hard at coming out of his shell. That’s nice! He tried to demonstrate to himself and others that he was unafraid of being in public and expressing himself. And there was a very Berkeley-style movement going on at the time that allowed him to go all the way in showing himself publicly. It was the naturist movement, celebrating nudism. David DePape got involved, and let it all hang out at a number of protests, which he enjoyed. He made friends, and there are photos of him serving gleefully as best man at the (naked) wedding of the naturist couple with whom he lived for some time.

It was at this time that DePape registered as a Green, and claimed in a news article about a naked protest to be a hemp jewelry maker by trade. It’s easy to classify him as your classic “left coast progressive” based on these two facts. But we have no evidence of him participating in activity to aid the marginalized. What we know of his politics could more accurately be framed, not as progressive, but as libertarian left: a politics focused not on positive duties to others in need, but on negative freedoms for the self—in his case the freedom from bans on public nudity or cannabis. Don’t let “the Man” tell you what to do—be a rebel!

Once you realize that DePape was not a progressive but a left-libertarian, a movement over to rightwing libertarianism makes more sense. So what led DePape’s politics to slide to the right? Well, he tells us himself on his Wordpress blog “godisloving”. He says it all started when he got involved with GamerGate.

As a longstanding gamer, when GamerGate burst onto the scene in 2014, it’s unsurprising that DePape encountered it.

I’m not going to recap the entire GamerGate saga here. Basically, it was a campaign of online mob harassment of women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and others that the GamerGaters termed “SJWs” (social justice warriors). Victims of GamerGate attacks were all involved in video gaming, and in social media discussions of bias in games. At the time, the attacks on victims were not treated very seriously by the media or politicians or law enforcement, who saw the attacks as basically harmless, since the harassment campaigns were organized online, where sticks and stones couldn’t break your bones. Those targeted were told to just ignore their attackers, or stop going online. Meanwhile, the victims were suffering all sorts of consequences, not just in terms of their lives online being ruined, but offline, as they were doxed and swatted, and mobs sent emails to their employers calling for them to be fired, and they and their families were subjected to waves of rape and death threats, etc.

To ignorant institutions, GamerGate was just some overly-online people arguing about insignificant things, like whether there was anything wrong with the fact that so many videogame characters were cis straight men. But this dismissive attitude was wrong, and not just in its refusal to care about matters of representation. As many who were watching GamerGate unfold warned, there were thousands and thousands of people, disproportionately straight white men, who were being radicalized and mobilized by rightwing GamerGate influencers like Milo Yiannopoulos. Their interest in playing games that they liked and viewed as “theirs” was being presented to them as under threat, activating them. Then they were being indoctrinated to see the threat to their good time as not emanating from the huge corporations that produced and profited from videogames, but rather from people whose representation in their favorite games was minimal, and who were asking for better treatment. This was presented as an intolerable attack that called for violent counterattacks. GamerGaters were being wrought into a mob that took terrible sadistic pleasure in punching down, hearing howls, and seeing their targets’ lives destroyed. An enjoyment of destroying fantasy enemies on screens in games was transmuted into an even greater pleasure and fantasy-fulfillment in destroying real live people who held progressive values. And the aim of many influencers was to generalize this specific gaming-related campaign into politics at large, creating an army of young and enthusiastic online reactionaries—the so-called “alt right”—who could be unleashed on political enemies.

Well, it worked. David DePape was just one of so many thousands who went from a libertarian bro who really liked gaming, to irate champion of MAGA causes.

Once, DePape had just wanted the government to stop forbidding him from walking around in public naked. It was a modest libertariansm. But after becoming involved in GamerGate, his libertarianism metastasized to include a wide range of issues, and a wide range of opponents. Nobody should be allowed to tell him to mask or vaccinate! Not the state government, not the CDC, not medical experts, not corporations. Nobody should be able to tell him he couldn’t use slurs on social media, or that anything he said was misinformation, and that he couldn’t spread misinformation on social media—not the law, not big tech companies, not the supposed cabal of Jews making up a woke elite in academia and Hollywood.

Besides the huge expansion in issues regarding which DePape was incensed, a second legacy of GamerGate for DePape was the belief that he deserved to be centered. He now believed that every game character created by developers who was not a straight white man represented a personal attack on his rightful position in the gaming world. Similarly, every right granted to trans people or lesson taught in schools about racism or acknowledgement of the unfairness of men’s social privilege was a personal, intolerable attack on his rightful position in society. He was “the A-list gaming core”—the “base”.

A third “gift” of GamerGate to DePape was a constant sense of grievance. Once activated, he emitted spate after spate of Facebook posts and blog essays, mostly spluttering in outrage. By now this seems all too familiar: the unending aggrieved howling of a mass of offended people who frame the targets of their howls as tender “snowflakes” addicted to a victim mentality. Projection is the name of the game.

The fourth effect GamerGate had on so many people like DePape was to push them into conspiratorial thinking. It starts with a claim to believe, say, that women game developers got their positions not by merit but through sexual favors. And some years later, you find DePape arguing that the Holocaust never happened, claiming that Trump won the 2020 election, writing about the QAnon mythos, and (remember, the man once registered as a Green!) calling climate change fake news.

But it’s the fifth legacy of GamerGate to DePape that is so chilling. And that is how his actions went from ones that look like trivial online fandom griping to breaking an 82-year-old man’s skull with a hammer in a single day.

The day before he would break into the Pelosi home, DePape wrote a post on his blog about Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. It’s a clearly-written, cogent, and substantial (if whiny) post, which illustrates that the man was thinking rationally and analytically. In his post, like so many other graduates of the GamerGate School, DePape does a lot of groaning about how the movie is bad because it disrespects men by having women as heroes. He argues that the characters who are men are emasculated by not being allowed to sacrifice themselves, while two women he deems physically repellent do get to sacrifice themselves and be portrayed as brave. He terms the two characters the “uGly WoKe wAmEn diversity hire Asian” (Rose Tico) and “BiTcHiE wAmEn with PiNk hair SjW” (Vice Admiral Holdo). The rest of the post uses typical spelling and capitalization—only the character descriptions are written oddly like this. Why? Well, posters on moderated social media like Facebook and Twitter often use odd spellings to try to evade the algorithms of AI moderation which check for certain words and phrases that are used as triggers to initiate a review of the post for hate speech or misinformation. But this was a post on one of DePape’s unmoderated personal blogs, so such odd spelling was not really being deployed for that reason. Instead, I presume it is there to signify to the audience that DePape always feels censored and persecuted when writing about the marginalized groups he wants to persecute. His ability to freely post masses of speech online didn’t mean he enjoyed free speech, because he felt surveilled and judged!

Besides ranting about ugly feminist characters ruining everything in the Star Wars post, Depape also pokes a series of holes in the logic of the climactic final battle (laid out articulately and in great detail), and then claims the holes are there because woke Hollywood elites don’t care about story quality, and are happy to sacrifice it to please oppressive progressive loudmouths in the name of social justice.

This diatribe sounds like thousands of other misogynist and/or racist and/or homophobic and/or transphobic screeds you’ve probably encountered already, complaining about increasingly diverse casts ruining everything, and how it’s “not realistic” to have a Black elf or mermaid, or how it is an attack on men to have a woman Dr. Who or Ghostbuster. The generation of so many livid rants by angry white men often gets dismissed as insignificant: blah blah blah, people griping on the internet. Get a real life.

But we all should have learned by now the lesson that GameGate made clear: that online life is in fact real life. The whole thrust of GamerGate (and related hate movements like the one organized for years on Kiwi Farms to dox and destroy trans women) is to harm perceived enemies in real life. Connect online; hype yourself up online; then strike real-life blows. Make manifest the hero, or antihero, of your fantasies, and make yourself its flesh-and-blood avatar.

And so the day after David DePape wrote his Star Wars post, fencing ridiculously online with fantasy characters from a years-old movie, he broke into the home of political enemy Nancy Pelosi, and when it turned out she was not there, smashed her husband’s skull with a hammer.

Paul Pelosi required surgery to repair what I presume was a depressed skull fracture. For some reason, news stories say he’s expected to make a “full recovery,” but that prognosis seems highly unlikely in someone suffering severe and violent head trauma at age 82. “Expected to survive” is not at all the same thing as “expected to make a full recovery". . . 

That said, hopefully this exposition makes clear how David DePape’s actions, while heinous and unpredictable, were not inexplicable. Yes, he was a nudist in the past, but that doesn’t mean he’s a “lib” today. He’s someone who went from mildly libertarian to extreme libertarian, moving ever rightward as he did so. And the agent of that shift was GamerGate. He wasn’t, as mainstream news sources put it, just some confused or mentally-ill guy who fell randomly into a rabbithole when quarantined at home with too much screen time. He is the product of an indoctrination campaign, just like the followers of Tucker Carlson are products of an indoctrination campaign. These campaigns aim to constantly generate outrage in their participants or viewers, and to have that outrage direct their behavior, so that they will become politically radicalized, and direct their grievance and animosity toward real-life targets.

Not that they’ll ever admit that. GamerGate was “just about ethics in videogame journalism.” Fox News is “fair and balanced,” and it’s all the mainstream media that are biased! Banning slurs on social media is censorship, and is radicalizing people by denying them an outlet for their free expression! It’s a terrible violation! But allowing teachers to mention that little Lucas has two moms, or that the zoo employee bringing the lizards to school today should be called Mizzer Jackson, not Miss or Mister Jackson, because they are a nonbinary person and the students should politely respect that? Well, that’s “grooming” and speech that cannot be tolerated.

That’s where we are today. In a world that produces people like David DePape.

Oh, and Elon Musk, Twitter's new owner who would save us all by re-institution free speech? He tweeted out the conspiracy theory that DePape was a gay sex worker hired by a drunken Paul Pelosi.

 Yes, that's where we are today.