After a photo of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s vandalised San Francisco home started circulating online, it didn’t take long for people to call bullshit. Was the graffiti and seeming pig’s blood really the work of outraged leftists, or an elaborate psy-op perpetuated by some right-wing group to delegitimize progressives? Who the hell knows, but someone decided to recreate Pelosi’s garage door in VR to try to find out.
“Nancy’s Pelosi’s garage door got vandalised and everyone instantly concluded it was fake because everything is, is the context,” a VR developer who goes by Carpe_D 0 T tweeted yesterday. “It might still be fake but not for the reason everyone says, which is that they CLEARLY taped over the brick.”
everyone is asking “who taped off the brick?” but no real answers…so I thought I’d REVEAL THE TRUTH by spending all day sculpting a 3D re-creation of Nancy Pelosi’s garage door#NancyPelosi #BrickGate #BrickByBrick #Truth #TruthBomb https://t.co/HgxLvmDnk1 pic.twitter.com/L2TdDeiadl
— Carpe_ＤＭＴ (@Carpe_DMT) January 4, 2021
First reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the January 1 act of vandalism included graffiti reading “$US2K” with a line through it, “Cancel Rent!,” “We want everything!” and two anarchist symbols, all spray painted in black on the garage door of Pelosi’s Pacific Heights townhouse (Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel’s front door was vandalised to a lesser degree the next day). The graffiti was capped off with what appeared to be a severed pig’s head sitting in a pool of red liquid. It was a bit much, which is why some people were immediately sceptical that it was the work of those angry over Congress’ ongoing failure to provide adequate economic relief during the pandemic.
The focal points for suspicion were the anarchist symbols, which not only looked more like Avengers logos than the calling cards of political radicals, but also appeared to have been spray painted so tidily as to have missed getting on the nearby brick. Wood moulding is easy to paint over; unpainted brick is not. “Who taped off the brick tho lol,” read one tweet that went viral, followed by dozens more pointing to how obviously faked this made the whole thing look.
To get to the bottom of things, Carpe_D 0 T spent roughly six hours making a VR version of the crime scene in Adobe Medium. “Everyone is asking ‘who taped off the brick?’ but no real answers…so I thought I’d REVEAL THE TRUTH by spending all day sculpting a 3D re-creation of Nancy Pelosi’s garage door,” they wrote on Twitter yesterday.
Based on Carpe_D 0 T’s unscientific and completely inconclusive but nevertheless compelling findings, the black spray paint didn’t end up on any of the brick simply because the moulding around Pelosi’s garage door is so thick and angled that it naturally shielded the rest of the exterior from damage.
“She’s got this weird fucking rich person moulding all around her driveway and it’s making it so that if draw this ‘A’ here..IT’S NOT GETTING ON THE BRICK,” they said in a brief VR video re-enactment. “It’s because of the fucking moulding!”
“The angles are wild, the wall goes down and in like it was designed to be an optical illusion for paranoid leftists,” Carpe_D 0 T told Kotaku in a Twitter DM. They argued that it’s more likely the spray paint went off into the bushes, or was absorbed by the porous brick, than that the culprits purposefully taped off the sides of the garage.
While Carpe_D 0 T’s mini-Mythbusters attempt doesn’t’ necessarily prove anything, it’s still extremely entertaining and shows true dedication to elevating the online discourse. Like news networks using computer animation to create absurd reenactments of real world events, maybe virtual reality’s true future is in breathing 3D life into the most soul crushing online moments. VR Bean Dad anyone?
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