The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession:
‘He Wanted to Watch It All the Time’

Posted on | January 16, 2011 | 34 Comments

Kudos to the Arizona Republic for this follow-up reporting:

Loughner began fixating on a documentary: “Zeitgeist: The Movie.”
The movie is a bramble of conspiracy theories involving Sept. 11, the international monetary system, and Christianity.
“There are people guiding your life and you don’t even know it,” the trailer for the movie intones.
“He wanted to watch it all the time,” Osler said. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
Loughner developed a seeming obsession with currency, grammar and literacy rates. They were becoming the objects of his rants and screeds. Those around him didn’t understand.

OK, so on Wednesday, ABC News was first to report on Loughner’s obsession with this conspiracy-theory cult flick:

“I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in.”
– Zach Osler, friend of Tucson gunman

Four days later, the Arizona Republic finally follows up on this angle and we learn how intensely involved with this movie the killer became. Loughner already had serious problems — drugs, alchohol, dropping out of high school — but it seems to have been the “profound impact” of Zeitgeist that signaled his descent into deadly schizophrenic madness.

In their haste to shift blame onto Sarah Palin, Fox News, talk radio and the Tea Party movement, the elite media have overlooked what appears to be a major clue to the motive of the Tucson massacre.

As of noon Sunday, there were 39 search results on Google News for “Loughner+Zeitgeist.” Most of those were passing mentions. Meanwhile, a Google News search for “Loughner+Palin” returned 10,395 results. There were 595 results for “Loughner+Limbaugh.”

By comparison, so far as I have been able to determine, by Sunday noon there had been exactly five substantial articles devoted specifically to the Loughner-Zeitgeist connection:

Thursday, the Washington Post published a 2,700-word profile of Jared Lee Loughner, and today the New York Times published a 5,000-word profile of the Tucson killer.

Neither story so much as mentioned Zeigeist.

The Big Boys of American journalism appear to be missing in action on this story. Even ABC News, which scored an exclusive in Wednesday’s interview with Zach Osler, has failed to follow up on this tantalizing suggestion of how Jared Loughner got so crazy. It will require a major New Media effort to force the MSM to focus on the Zeitgeist connection.

Zeitgeist: Watch the Conspiracy Movie
That Had a ‘Profound Impact’ on
Tucson Mass Murder Suspect Jared Loughner

Fortunately, the story is starting to break through. Rush Limbaugh mentioned it Friday. Last night, Instapundit linked here, and today he linked Jesse Walker’s story. I’ve been trying to encourage blogs to get on the story by instituting a total linkback policy — maximum Rule 4 FMJRA — and here are a few of the blogs that have joined the effort in the past three days:

So it’s an Army of Davids against the liberal Goliath that wants to play a dishonest connect-the-dots game with murder and the Tea Party.

“It appears quite possible that Zeitgeist was to Loughner what the Beatles’ ‘White Album’ was to Charles Manson.”


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Category: ABC, Arizona, Conspiracy Theories, Crime, New York Times, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, Zeitgeist

Comments

  • Bob Belvedere

    Methinks my comment and link went in the Spam Bucket…again.

  • http://twitter.com/AmPowerBlog Donald Douglas

    I’m taking a break from the Tucson blogging, and I’ve got you linked up on a Rule 5 roundup: ‘Britney Spears — ‘Hold It Against Me’ — Rule 5′.

  • Anon

    Keep beating that drum and eventually you’ll have the rest dancing to your tune.
    Props, Stace.

  • Charles Johnson

    Jason Loughner would have made a hell of a lizoid. If I was able capable of getting myself pregnant, I would like to give birth to a hatchling like Jason Loughner.

    Reptiles are capable of switching sex so it is not that big a deal.

  • Guest

    We had a lunatic guy pop up at one of our local conservative oriented blogs – not sure if he was just a troll or plain crazy. A lot of rambling, like this:

    “F**k Religion.

    Really ?

    Where’s your article and opinion about us bailing out the f**king chomo priests going bankrupt because of kiddy diddling ?

    Ah no of course…it’s all about CONTROL. I mean c’mon you’re a ex ‘patriot’ right ?

    You know all about slanted views getting us into unwin-able wars for private companies right ? Shit that was before Blackwater, I mean Xe. It’s always great you can rename your company when you f**k up things like killing people…right ?”

    Anyway, he was told that he needed to be watched by the proper authorities and that he is spending too much time watching “Zeitgeist”, and after that, he seems to have gone away. And he does have his own blog, so he won’t be too hard to track if necessary.

    By the way, something I learned this week: call a liberal commenter a “Soros-funded troll”, and they go absolutely & predictably ballistic. Try it sometime. You will be accused of being some kind of conspiracy believer – something on the level of a “truther” or “Palin/Beck/Limbaugh inspired shooting of a congresswoman in Arizona” conspiracy believer.

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  • Anonymous

    This is the sort of crazed loony commenter that banhammers were made for.

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  • Greg Ransom

    Great work, Stacy.

    You were my go-to man the day this went down. Damn I can call them.

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  • Aussie54

    I must remember to do that more often when I recognize the trolls. Thanks for the tip. There is nothing like watching a troll go totally ballistic and off the rails. It is fun to watch their heads explode.

  • mike

    I don’t like the comparison of Zeitgeist to the White Album. The White Album was not provocative at all, and only an utterly insane man like Manson could have gotten any kind of political message from it. Zeitgeist, on the other hand, is By Crazies For Crazies and it’s not nearly as much of a leap from that to the kind of thinking that could lead to political violence.

  • Aussie54

    Stacy you are leading the pack because you have been reporting the truth. This Zeitgeist movie is indeed the key to Loughner’s descent into madness and schizophrenia.

    However, I also think that you need some focus on the herb salvia divornum (sp) since I see that as yet another key to understanding the descent into madness.

    My experience with schizophrenics and the mentally ill has shown that there is a link between mental illness and the smoking or ingestion in pot but that is only in some people who are already prone to mental illness. Loughner was a pothead, but the salvia divornum (sp) adds a new dimension. In this case it is the conscious dreaming. The salvia divornum (sp) seems to be the drug that he was taking in order to have this conscious dreaming. The Wikpedia article explains, but I must add there is a glaring error (based upon bias and ignorance of the author with regard to the Catholic Church) in that article, so only parts of it are useful.

    Keep up the good work because you are well ahead of the MSM.

    Also I note that Ulsterman has been extremely good on the subject of the manner in which the LSM have smeared the TEA movement as well as their libel against Sarah Palin in particular.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BPYCO5RCXDZQRHOK4ATE55H7CQ Dario

    keep grinding that axe, it has been proven that if you repeat something long enough people believe you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrNIuFrso8I

  • Anonymous

    Well, I have blogged about his use of salvia — in fact, my second post mentioning Loughner’s involvement with Zeitgeist was titled “Salvia, Zeitgeist and the Tucson Shooter.” BTW, I’ve seen somewhere that Loughner also used hallucinogenic mushrooms, although whether peyote or psilocybin, I don’t know. As psilocybin requires a moist climate — my freak buddies used to go out in cow pastures after a rain looking for them — I don’t know how he’d get that in Arizona. At any rate, Loughner’s evident love of hallucinogens certainly shouldn’t be ignored as a factor in his psychosis.

    My interest in the Zeitgeist angle is that this is apparently connected to the specific content of Loughner’s delusions. I think the proper term for these beliefs is “pseudo-politics” — that is to say, his bizarre notions were not part of any conventional or pragmatic political agenda, but rather were a simulacrum of politics, a failed attempt to make sense of a world that made no sense to his scrambled mind.

    What you have to understand about the schizophrenic is that his delusions about the world around him are an externalization of his madness. Rather than recognizing that his own brain is misinterpreting reality, he believes that he alone sees the TRUE reality, and others who don’t see it are blind to it. The kind of slow-onset schizophrenia Loughner apparently suffers from — called chronic schizophrenia, to distinguish it from acute schizophrenia, which develops rather suddenly — is very resistant to treatment. Usually, the chronic schizophrenia sufferer is described as quiet or shy. When the patient first starts thinking crazy thoughts and acting weird, his symptoms aren’t recognized as mental illness, and are dismissed as mere quirks of a guy who’s always been kind of quirky. But the irrational thought patterns build upon each other, over the course of a few years, and by the time anyone intervenes, the patient has been thinking “crazy” for so long that it’s almost as if they’ve lost the habit of normal thinking.

    Drug and alcohol abuse in such patients can be seen as an attempt at self-medication, but it can also be a triggering factor, a non-productive response to a problem that only makes the problem worse.

  • Anonymous

    Well, the analogy to the “White Album” is not perfect, but I still say it is apt. There are obviously many intelligent, decent, law-abiding people who are involved with Zeitgeist. They haven’t gone on murder sprees, and are not responsible for Loughner’s crimes. And Paul McCartney was singing about a playground slide — not an apocalyptic race war — when he wrote “Helter Skelter.”

    However, Zeitgeist appears to have provided some of the content of Loughner’s insane beliefs, in much the way that Charles Manson used the lyrics from “The White Album” to provide content for his own madness. Given that Loughner reportedly was obsessed with Zeitgeist — watching it over and over, just like Manson listened to the “White Album” over and over — the comparison struck me as the best way to explain this phenomenon.

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  • Anonymous

    Thanks, Greg. The weird thing is, the “day this went down,” in those three or four hours before we knew the gunman’s identity or anything about him, I was actually concerned that the shooter would turn out to the way Yglesias, Markos and Krugman predicted: Angry far-right militia guy, survivalist fringe type or a skinhead. And if that had been the case, despite the yawning gap between such people and mainstream GOP conservatism, they’ve have crucified Palin and the Tea Party for it.

    By Saturday night, however, it was becoming clear that Loughner didn’t fit that profile and by Sunday — 24 hours after the shootings — it was clear that the gunman’s leanings were about 180 degrees opposite of the Palin/Tea Party theory. This was why, in those few hours of not knowing any facts about the shooter, immediatelyafter the shooting, I was cautious about leaping to conclusions. When something big like this happens, you can get yourself into all kinds of trouble by reacting instantaneously in the absence of good information. Just wait 24 or 48 hours — when dozens of reporters have had a day or two to work on it — and then a lot of things become clear that aren’t clear in the heat of the moment.

  • Anonymous

    Wait: You are the True Believer in the Zeitgeist cult, yet you want to link that video as if I am the one in need of lectures about conformity? That’s rich!

    Here’s what a “conformist” I am: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bob Barr!” You’ve got no idea how much crap I caught — and still catch from time to time — because I refused to vote for John McCain. But I’d taken a vow in February 2008 (at CPAC, when Mitt Romney quit and effectively handed the nomination to my crazy cousin) that under no circumstances would I vote for the Republican. Long before Super Tuesday, I’d argued that John McCain was unelectable, and said rude things about Bill Kristol and the great herd of other GOP pundits who held the contrary viewpoint. And on Election Day, I was one of about 600,000 people who voted for the Libertarian candidate.

    So I’m a conformist, and you are the courageous free-thinker! I’ll grant you this, sir: You have no shortage of gall.

  • Anonymous

    Man. I was thinking this guy was too busy listening to the voices in his head to pay attention to much else at all, let alone Palin and the Tea Party. I apparently underestimated the situation.

  • Bob Belvedere

    I’ll grant you this, sir: You have no shortage of gall.

    Poor, Dario…he’ll soon find out what Caesar did: that you can have too much of Gaul.

  • Susannah

    Stacy, thanks so much for the link. Oh, and by the way, great work on the whole “Zeitgeist” angle of this story.

    Take care. :-)

    X0X0, Suzi

  • Anonymous

    Zeitgeist explains the content, but salvia explains the dysfunction. You could show Zeitgeist to 1000 people, and not one of them would go out and kill someone. But if you put someone in a drug-induced state of detachment from reality and dysphoria (anxiety, irritability, etc.) for several years and then show them the movie, you have created a potential killer.

    Having studied the effects of hallucinogenic drugs for many years, including its advocacy by the left, when I saw the references in the Loughner case, my spidey-sense tingled. Loughner frequently referred to “conscience dreaming” and stated that he would dream for 14-16 hours a day. If he was referring to that level of salvia usage, it raises important questions. I believe after all the facts are in that the primary cause of this tragedy will be the physiological brain dsyfunction caused by intense use of hallucinogenic drugs.

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  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OD42K3ARU53PJTAZ3EFE5LRZMA nobanksnoborders

    Are you aware that the guy who made that connection hadn’t talked to the shooter in 2 whole years?

    Are you aware there are shootings every day? Why is there so much violence in our society? The Zeitgeist films? There’s a social problem here. We have a cultural problem.

    I suggest you all watch Peter Joseph’s new film Zeitgeist: moving forward. The whole first third of the film analyzes the cause of violence in people— and this was just released yesterday, he’s been working on it for years now. Its not in response to the shooting.

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  • Aussie54

    Stacy,
    what can I say? Your response is so brilliant. You have given a very good insight into the issue – an insight that I have not seen elsewhere.

    I agree with your take on the movie Zeitgeist and its influence on the mind of Loughner. It is a shame that the people who occupy positions at the NY Times and elsewhere refuse to do the necessary research.

    In particular, I do agree that the drugs and alcohol can be the triggering factor of the mental illness. I have known quite a few people that have had mental illness. The only one identified as schizophrenic is my niece’s husband. Of the others, one in particular stands out because he suffered paranoia during his mental illness. All of them were involved with taking drugs: pot, speed, heroin and I am not sure what else.

    The young person that I knew who had paranoia stood out because he talked to me about how he would panic when he heard police sirens, believing that they were coming to get him.

    There is one older person who had smoked pot when he was at university, and he was a total mess – I do not know if he was schizophrenic, but I can tell you that he used to walk around talking to himself. He had become mentally ill after his use of pot… and that is all that I knew about the situation.

    So far, other than the comments that I have seen from Charles Krauthammer and another psychiatrist whose column I also read,, you are one of the few that has honed in on the significance of the movie Zeitgeist.

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