A Challenge To Glenn Beck: Will He Cool His Paranoid Anti-Government Rhetoric?

By Ben Armbruster On Sunday, federal officials charged Jared Lee Loughner on two counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder in Saturday’s shooting rampage in Tucson, AZ that critically wounded Rep. Gabriel Giffords (D-AZ) and killed a federal judge and a Giffords staffer, among others. In the wake of the tragedy, many are wondering what motivated Loughner — whether he was a mentally-ill lone wolf vigilante or inspired by something else.

Information coming out about Loughner portrays the 22-year-old as “odd” and “isolated by his increasingly erratic behavior.” Moreover, video posts on his YouTube page give some insight into his thinking, and a few themes emerge from his writings: a twisted understanding of the U.S. Constitution; a feeling that there is a government conspiracy to control the American population; and, a belief that currency should be backed up by precious metals. For example:

– “The majority of citizens in the United States of America have never read the United States of America’s Constitution.” “Read the United States of America’s Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws.”

– “The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar.”

– “No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver!”

While the vast majority of the public appropriately considers these statements the deranged rantings of a madman, Glenn Beck fearmongers about these same subjects nearly every day before a large national audience that tunes into Fox News:

THE CONSTITUTION

– “Progressives have been patient for decades, creeping their way into the system in the cover of darkness. And this is their opportunity. They’re going to deal a final death blow to the Constitution if they can.” [1/20/10]

– Health care reform “is the end of the Constitution.” [1/04/10]

– Progressivism “is the poison that’s killing our Constitution”; “We’ve got to irradiate it.” [1/21/10]

GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY/CONTROL

– “I do not want the government controlling my diet.” [3/10/10]

– The government is using the census to “increase slavery.” [3/09/10]

– “The government is gearing up to conduct one of the biggest scientific experiments ever and you get to be a part of it. … They’re going to study us and find ways to essentially trick us into driving crappy hybrids and I bet that’s just the beginning.” [7/30/09]

– “[Net neutrality] will control every aspect of the Internet … We are losing our country.” [5/06/10]

– “They control your life. Now, they control financial reform. Through the financial reform bill, they control every dollar and how it’s spent. They now control not only how you live and die, but they control businesses, and which one lives or dies. They control your life and your pursuit of happiness. That leaves only one out of the three in the Declaration that you still have: liberty, life, pursuit of happiness.” [7/23/10]

THE GOLD STANDARD

– “One of the highest profile targets of this bizarre regulation is the gold industry, AKA, your pathway to acquire anything of value as they filet our currency.” [7/22/10]

– “The Fed made sure that your dollar would be devalued. They’re monetizing the debt — monetizing our debt — printing more than $600 billion. Now, if we were on the gold standard and we just struck $600 million gold mine, that would be great because then — I just lost the gold coin.” [11/04/10]

– “Have the progressives grown the size of government? What was the tipping point? Well, the tipping point, really, there was one in the 1970s when we went off the gold standard and then the late 1990s when the Fed started just creating bubble after bubble after bubble because we had to continue to spend.” [10/28/10]

To be clear, there’s no evidence Loughner was a Glenn Beck watcher or that Beck bears any responsibility for Loughner’s actions. Still, these tragic events provide an opportunity to re-examine the implications of extreme conservative rhetoric. The danger is real: A person who genuinely believes that progressive governance is an organized conspiracy to destroy American liberty might feel justified in taking drastic measures in response.

Yesterday, Media Matters founder David Brock called on News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch to rein in Beck and Fox News contributor Sarah Palin. “You have the power to order them to stop using violent rhetoric, on and off of Fox’s air. If they fail to do so, it is incumbent upon you to fire them or be responsible for the climate they create and any consequences thereof,” Brock wrote.

For Beck’s part, any pleas for sanity will likely fall on deaf ears. Slate’s Dave Weigel reports that Beck responded to the tragedy in Tucson by flipping “it back and imply[ing] that the violent left needs to back down, too.” And his Fox News show yesterday, Beck spent most of the program defending himself from critics of his rhetoric. Ignoring his history of using violent rhetoric, Beck said “I don’t use it on or off the air. So I guess I’m in compliance, Media Matters.”

David Frum On Tucson Tragedy: Let’s Blame Pot Rather Than Easy Access To Guns

By Zaid Jilani Following Saturday’s tragic shooting of several people, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), by 22-year old assassin Jared Loughner, many have asked how someone who displayed so many obvious characteristics of mental instability was able to easily obtain access to a semi-automatic firearm. As Time Magazine’s Nathan Thornburgh points out, Arizona has particularly weak detection and reporting of mental health. (It is technically illegal to sell firearms to the mentally ill.) In a post on FrumForum, conservative pundit David Frum dismisses renewed calls for gun control and instead says that the incident should “remind us why we regulate marijuana,” noting that Loughner is suspected of being a marijuana user. He writes that there may be “renewed pressure to control the weapons that committed the crime,” but instead chooses to place blame on the “trend these days toward a more casual attitude and easier access to…drugs”:

After horrific shootings, we hear calls for stricter regulation of guns. The Tucson shooting should remind us why we regulate marijuana.Jared Lee Loughner, the man held as the Tucson shooter, has been described by those who know as a “pot smoking loner.” [...]

After the Tucson shooting, there may be renewed pressure to control the weapons that committed the crime. But what about the drugs that may have aggravated the killer’s mental disease? The trend these days seems toward a more casual attitude and easier access to those drugs. Among the things we should be discussing in the aftermath of this horror is the accumulating evidence of those drugs’ potential contribution to making some dangerous people even more dangerous than they might otherwise have been.

It should be noted that, of course, marijuana is illegal. However, the extended magazine that Loughner used in the shooting — which allowed him to get off as many shots as he did before he was subdued — was illegal until the assault weapons ban expired in 2004. Additionally, in an interview Mothers Jones conducted with Bryce Tierney, a friend of Loughner, Tierney claims that the alleged shooter quit drinking and doing drugs in 2009 — years before the shooting took place.

Update The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan notes that the Drudge Report is now exclaiming that Loughner is a "left-wing pothead."

Lax Gun Control Laws Allowed Mentally Ill Shooter To Buy Previously-Banned Magazine Clip

By Tanya Somanader The profile of 22-year-old assassin Jared Lee Loughner has triggered a debate over gun control, society’s treatment of the mentally ill, and “the dangerous intersection of the two.” The shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was a known recluse and a rejected Army recruit with a history of troubling behavior that he documented “in rambling postings on his MySpace page, YouTube videos and classes he attended at Pima Community College in Tucson.”

Railing against “new currency,” government “brainwash methods,” and his own mind-control abilities, Loughner’s mental health “prompted college officials to suspend him and tell his parents that he would have to get a mental health evaluation if he wanted to return to school.” However, despite evidence of his precarious mental state, Loughner walked into the Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson, passed a background check, and legally purchased a gun on Nov. 30, 2010.

Current federal laws prohibit selling weapons to the mentally ill but, as forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz notes, current gun control laws allow “no way to determine [someone] is a mentally ill person.” “The only thing the existing law does about that is quite absurd,” Dietz said, referring to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms form which only asks the applicant whether “they had been adjudicated dangerously mentally ill.” What’s more, there is no waiting period in Arizona unless someone is flagged by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). A measure even more unlikely to work in Arizona as the state is woefully behind in entering the 121,700 records of disqualifying mental illness into NICS, having entered only 4, 465 between 2008 and 2010.

But even with Loughner slipping through the system, the magazine clip he purchased with his gun wouldn’t have existed had gun laws been up to date. The now-expired assault weapons ban that existed from 1994 to 2004 prohibited gun manufacturers from marketing handguns with the high-capacity magazines Loughner used. Under the assault weapons ban, it was illegal to make or sell clips holding more than 10 rounds. The magazine used by Loughner held 31 rounds. The Brady Campaign said that, had he used a traditional magazine, “it would have drastically reduced the number of shots he got off” before reloading. While President Bush backed renewing the ban, it never passed Congress in 2004. The failure to address these gaps in gun control was not lost on conservative Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who said the following on C-Span this morning:

KRISTOL: I think it really would be terrible if our political discourse gets further poisoned by the kind of debate about this assassination attempt and these murders. Can’t we just agree that these murders are terrible? We can have a reasonable debate about what could be done about security. We can have a reasonable debate about policy issues, like gun-control. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to address. I wouldn’t do it the day after. It’s better to reflect a little bit about sensible legislation, but it’s not ridiculous for someone to say ‘let’s look at why this guy could got so many shots off so quickly.’ Maybe we should go back to at the assault weapons ban — I’m ambivalent about that, I think there are policy arguments on both sides — but that’s a kind of reasonable response.

Watch it (begins at 1:05):

While Kristol may recognize gun control as an important discussion, some conservative lawmakers remain adamantly opposed to such a “reasonable response.” Ignoring the failure of these laws, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) argues “we have state and federal laws on the books that already prohibit persons who have been deemed mentally insane” so “I don’t think we’re going to legislate our way out of the risk.” Believing Arizona’s weak gun laws were “unrelated to the shooting,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) stated more bluntly, “the weapons don’t kill people; it’s the individual that kills these people.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is leading a nationwide campaign against gun violence, said, the Tucson “shootings are just terrible examples, and a terrible reminder, of the gun violence that happens every single day in our country. … And so it will continue until we get serious about cracking down on illegal guns and protecting innocent people.”

Update The New York Times notes today that the number of Americans supporting stricter gun laws has been gradually declining over the last 20 years, decreasing from 78 percent in 1990 to 44 percent in 2010. While the 1999 Columbine and 2007 Virginia Tech shootings have had little effect on these views, 54 percent of Americans mark "substantially more support" for a nationwide assault weapons ban.

Update Longtime gun control advocate Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said today he will "introduce legislation banning high-capacity ammunition clips like the one linked to a weekend shooting." "The only reason to have 33 bullets loaded in a handgun is to kill a lot of people very quickly. These high-capacity clips simply should not be on the market," he said. Lautenberg will introduce the bill when the Senate returns to session later this month.

Who is Jared Lee Loughner?

by Mark Potok

Is Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged mass murderer who shot U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, a right-wing extremist?

It’s hard to say. When you look at the Internet material he purportedly produced, the first impression you get is that the 22-year-old now in custody for the shooting of 19 people in Tucson was completely out of his mind, or at least mildly deranged. His writings will be virtually impossible for most people to understand, what with his references to unexplained numbers, his fondness for weird syllogisms, his unexplained references and his apparent semi-literacy.

That said, there are some clues.

At one point, Loughner refers disparagingly to “currency that’s not backed by gold or silver.” The idea that silver and gold are the only “constitutional” money is widespread in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement that produced so much violence in the 1990s. It’s linked to the core Patriot theory that the Federal Reserve is actually a private corporation run for the benefit of unnamed international bankers. So-called Patriots say paper money — what they refer to with a sneer as “Federal Reserve notes” — is not lawful.

At another, Loughner makes extraordinarily obscure comments about language and grammar, suggesting that the government engages in “mind control on the people by controlling grammar.” That’s not the kind of idea that’s very common out there, even on the Internet. In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that Loughner is taking ideas from Patriot conspiracy theorist David Wynn Miller of Milwaukee. Miller claims that the government uses grammar to “enslave” Americans and offers up his truly weird “Truth-language” as an antidote. For example, he says that if you add colons and hyphens to your name in a certain way, you are no longer taxable. Miller may be mad as a hatter, but he has a real following on the right.

Loughner talks about how you “can’t trust the government” and someone burns a U.S. flag in one of his videos. Although certain right-wing websites are already using that (and his listing of The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books) to claim that Loughner was a “left-winger,” that does not strike me as true. The main enemy of the Patriot movement is certainly the federal government. And so-called Patriots have certainly engaged in acts like burning the flag.

Finally, I think Loughner’s reading list, although it included children’s books and a few classics, had an underlying theme — the individual versus the totalitarian state. Certainly, that’s the explicit central theme of Ayn Rand’s We the Living and Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, among others. I would argue that that’s the way Loughlin seems to be reading The Communist Manifesto and Hitler’s Mein Kampf — as variants of a kind of generalized “smash the state” attitude.

Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, which does similar work to that of Hatewatch, points out in a post earlier today that Loughner also makes a reference to a “second American constitution.” As Chip notes, that is commonly understood to refer to the Reconstruction amendments that freed the slaves and gave them citizenship, among other things. Chip says that “raises the question of a possible racist and anti-immigrant tie” in the Arizona shooting.

On top of that, Fox News is reporting on an internal Department of Homeland Security message suggesting some tie between Loughner and American Renaissance, a kind of white-collar racist group.

I can’t speak to those allegations. Outside of what Chip pointed out, I didn’t see anything that suggested racial, anti-Semitic or anti-immigrant animus in Loughner’s writings. Certainly, there’s nothing I saw at all reminiscent of American Renaissance, which focuses heavily on the alleged intellectual and psychological inferiority of black people.

At this early stage, I think Loughner is probably best described as a mentally ill or unstable person who was influenced by the rhetoric and demonizing propaganda around him. Ideology may not explain why he allegedly killed, but it could help explain how he selected his target.

One thing that seems clear is that Giffords, who was terribly wounded but survived, was the nearest and most obvious representative of “the government” that Loughner could find. Another is that he likely absorbed some of his anger from the vitriolic political atmosphere in the United States in general and Arizona in particular. Perhaps no one made that point better than Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, speaking to a press conference yesterday. “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government… The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

M.C.L Comment: Since this event happen the right are tripping all over themselves trying to paint Loughner a liberal, here's the problem with that I haven't heard too many liberals make Youtube videos railing against the government or talking about gold like a certain person who likes to talk about his 32 million dollar empire. The right can't find too many stories where liberals have lashed out in a violent manner against conservatives. But liberals can find many news stories when conservatives have taken the violent route to deal with political disagreement. The mainstream media have to hold their right wing cousins accountable when their incite their idiot followers to violence.