David DePape Represents New Trend in Domestic Terrorism

The violent attack on Paul Pelosi this weekend could be a sign of a new trend in the realms of political violence and domestic terrorism in the U.S. where such attacks are carried out by individuals who have become radicalized without joining a group.

On October 28, 42-year-old David DePape broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and allegedly attacked her husband, Paul Pelosi, reportedly striking him with a hammer and fracturing his skull. DePape later allegedly told members of the San Francisco Police Department that he intended to take Nancy Pelosi hostage and break her kneecaps over what he perceived as lies from the Democratic Party.

In the wake of the attack, details have emerged from DePape's personal life, painting a picture of a man reportedly beholden to numerous right-wing conspiracy theories, both fringe and mainstream. In addition to denying the results of the 2020 election, posts online suggest that he is also a skeptic of climate change and amenable to the ideas espoused by the QAnon movement. He has also decried the war in Ukraine as a ploy orchestrated by Jewish people.

As highlighted by a Politico report published on Tuesday, DePape's actions speak to a growing new trend in domestic terrorism known as "ungrouping," which refers to situations in which the perpetrators of such violence become radicalized by the information they access online without joining a formal group.

As authors Ryan Lizza and Eugene Daniels explained, the presence of conspiratorial ideas online, and the backing of those ideas by prominent leaders, is enough.

"We tend to think of the Oath Keepers and groups like it as the face of political extremism and violence in America," Lizza and Daniels wrote. "But domestic political terrorists are increasingly more like DePape."

"DePape's online writings suggest a recent explosion of interest in far-right conspiracy theories before he showed up at Pelosi's house with a backpack full of zip ties, tape, rope, gloves and two hammers," the Politico report said.

The concept of "ungrouping" was also discussed at length in an October 2021 Journal for Democracy report by researcher Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, titled "The Rise of Political Violence in the United States."

In the report, Kleinfeld said that "the nature of political violence has also changed" within the last several years, citing a statistic from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), which found that most acts of political violence in the U.S. are now being committed by people who are not members of any sort of group.

Ungrouping, Kleinfeld concluded, makes such violence more urgent and dangerous, with extreme ideas flowing freely through a culture, while also making it much harder to fight.

"Ideas that were once confined to fringe groups now appear in the mainstream media," Kleinfeld wrote. "White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities."

Newsweek reached out to domestic terrorism experts for comment.

In response to an inquiry from Newsweek, Kleinfeld said that she agreed with the assessment of DePape as an example of ungrouping and also added that such attacks will probably become more common against figures with enough focus put on them by figures in the MAGA sphere.

"I agree with that assessment. My sense is that America has hit the stage of stochastic terrorism in which enough people are primed for violence that targeted language from a MAGA leader is likely to send at least one particularly aggressive or unbalanced individual into action," Kleinfeld told Newsweek. "It's impossible to predict who or precisely when, but high probability that someone will now attack when enough ire is focused on an individual or agency as occurred with the FBI."

Updated, 11/1/2022, 6:25 p.m. EST: This piece was updated to include a statement sent to Newsweek by Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld.