Two blogs that appear to belong to David DePape, the man who allegedly attacked the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), show he held a wide range of divergent beliefs, many of which appear uprooted from reality.
The beliefs range from mainstream subjects such as gun rights and climate change to a host of anti-Christian and antisemitic views.
The blogs suggest that DePape wasn’t strictly partisan, but rather developed his own peculiar beliefs.
“The recent overturning of Roe V Wade has Republicans cheering. and democrats up in arms. Your BOTH wrong. Your BOTH [expletives],” one part of the blog that allegedly belongs to him reads. Quotes from the blogs in this article are unedited and include all the grammar errors and misspellings of the original text.
On Oct. 28, the media reported DePape as the man who allegedly hit Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer earlier that day. Social media users then started to post links to the two blogs online and shortly after, the blogs were taken down. By that time, most of the blog pages had been saved in online archives.
The majority of the content was posted to only one of the blogs, with the address Frenlyfrens.com, but viewing almost all of the posts required a subscription, and internet archives only contain the headlines, images, and sometimes short snippets of text. It appears the earliest posts were dated Aug. 23, 2022. All were authored by a user named David DePape.
The domain “frenlyfrens.com” was registered on Sept. 8—under DePape’s name and with an address where he’s lived for the past year or two. The state listed was Alabama instead of California, but that may have been a simple mistake since Alabama is the first option in alphabetically ordered lists. It’s possible some of the posts were backdated—online blogging platforms allow that. Or it may be that the blog was set up earlier under a different domain. The platform he used, Wix, allows users to set up pages on the Wix domain and move them to one’s own domain later.
Each post was accompanied by a visually striking, often disturbing image. The pictures appear to be a form of artificial intelligence-generated art created by combining multiple images. It appears to have been an interest of the author’s.
“For these one’s I used multiple humanoid prompts so it would pull towards human features more,” the author commented in a snippet of a post containing a picture of a fairy.
Fairies seem to have been of particular interest to the author. Multiple posts were accompanied by such images.
The snippets of text available indicate that much of the blog’s content was written before August.
One post headlined “Feb 13 2022”—but dated Oct. 24—reads: “Okay so as far as the fairy. I’m writing this a couple days later. So the next day after it attacked my boss. I was walking to work and ...” The snippet cuts off at this point.
Another post dated Oct. 24 reads: “Email to Gypsy Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 3:29 PM Hi Gypsy [Expletive] you I have no interest in being friends with you Gypsy. You think I’ve been ...” The snippet cuts off at this point.
The post may be referring to Oxane Taub, better known as “Gypsy,” who used to be DePape’s life partner and with whom he had two children. She’s currently in prison for more than a dozen crimes, including attempted kidnapping of a 14-year-old. This post appears to be the only one revealing personal information that could be linked to DePape, save for the user name.
“He thought he was Jesus. He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him,“ Taub said. ”And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal.”
Back then, she said, DePape’s political views were “very much in alignment” with hers, i.e., “very progressive.”
There are some indications that the author underwent a reevaluation of his political views several years ago.
“I was so [expletive] shocked the first time I heard that communism had a death toll. My whole life I heard about the evils of fascism,” one snippet read.
Some of the blog posts were tagged with keywords such as “Climate Hysteria,” “Corruption,” “Guns,” “Voter Fraud,” and “Great Reset.”
DePape’s acquaintances from years before have described him as one of the Castro nudist activists. In 2013, he officiated a nudist wedding, which was covered by the media.
One of the more recent snippets says: “How did I get into all this. Gamer gate it was gamer gate,” referring to the controversy around gaming journalism in 2014 and 2015 accompanied by a wave of online trolling and harassment.
Other posts seem to have drawn on the often offensive parlance on the social media platform 4chan. Posts discussing black people, Jewish people, and women were tagged “Bleck,” “Da Jewbs,” and “wAmEn,” mimicking the intentional misspellings common on 4chan.
The author apparently harbored particular antipathy for Jewish people and their religion.
The author’s anti-Semitic sentiments appeared to be related to his beliefs, particularly references to Gnosticism, which, among other things, rejects the God in Judaism as a false god. It appears that in the author’s view, followers of Judaism were de facto Satan-worshippers. It also appears this belief of his predated his possible political transformation.
The other blog, hosted at the address godisloving.wordpress.com, contained several posts dated June 24, 2007, and another few dozen dated Aug. 25–28, 2022, which seem to be a subset of the posts also posted on the Frenlyfrens.com blog.
The 2007 posts mostly discuss the meaning of love and one’s relationship with God. In his spiritual musings, the author dismissed the existence of hell and professed that people should live in a constant state of “euphoria.” He also claimed that the God mentioned in the Old Testament is “satan” in what appeared to be a direct reference to Gnosticism.
Two posts on the other blog were directly headlined “Gnosticism.” Another read “What you look like to a Gnostic.” Several others read “Belief Creates Reality,” “Primacy of Consciousness,” and “Secret Teachings.”
Besides his objections to Judaism, the author apparently didn’t see eye-to-eye with Christians either, headlining one post “Jesus is the Anti Christ.”
The post’s snippet argues that “the church founding and the INTERPRETATION of Jesus that they choose to codify” is all wrong and equal to “the Anti Christ.”
The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, which represents DePape, declined to comment. In a previous statement, Adam Lipson, San Francisco Deputy Public Defender, said the office will look into DePape’s potential “vulnerability to propaganda and extreme political views.”
“There are a lot of rumors and speculation about this incident that will need to be sorted out in court once we review the evidence,” he said.
“I would ask the public to keep that in mind and try not to pass judgment on a complicated situation.”
