"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
Donald Douglas calls our attention to the latest cover of Newsweek, in which the gunman is wrapped in an American flag:
The cover story by Jonathan Alter is more than 2,000 words. And what one word does not appear in that article? Zeitgeist.
Remember when Newsweek used to do reporting?
UPDATE: Linked by Stephen Green at PJM’s Tatler blog. Thanks!
UPDATE II: Linked by Ed Driscoll. Thanks!
UPDATE III: Linked by the Lonely Conservative. Thanks!
UPDATE IV: Linked by the Rio Norte Line. Thanks!
In the immediate aftermath of the Tucson massacre, the mainstream media went chasing after “right-wing” phantoms, as the managing editor of Reason magazine explains:
In the meantime, people who actually knew the killer were talking to the press, dropping clues about what Loughner really was reading and viewing. Loughner’s friend Zach Osler, for example, told ABC that while the killer wasn’t interested in mainstream political debates, he was a fan of Peter Joseph’s 2007 documentary Zeitgeist. Joseph’s movie is one-third arguments that religion is a fraud, one-third 9/11 trutherism, and one-third conspiracy theories about bankers.
Loughner’s interest in Zeitgeist clears up the currency question a bit. . . .
Zeitgeist . . . belongs to the old money-crank tradition, a venerable worldview that stretches from the Greenback Party to the Social Credit movement and from the fascist poet Ezra Pound to the pop Buddhist Alan Watts. Joseph’s critique does overlap with the arguments offered by gold bugs, and if you download the study guide he offers online you’ll find them among the rainbow coalition of sources that he cites: libertarians (William Anderson, Ron Paul), leftists (John Kenneth Galbraith, Ferdinand Lundberg), Birchers (Gary Allen, G. Edward Griffin), even a cameo by Lyndon LaRouche. But his movie’s chief argument against the Fed is that it is a private institution that profits by lending money at interest; and it praises the old money-crank remedy of an “interest-free independent currency” that isn’t created by private banks.
In 2009 Peter Joseph founded a full-blown Zeitgeist Movement, with a platform heavy on futurism, sustainability, and utopian economics. There’s no sign, as of this writing, that Loughner’s love for the Zeitgeist movie extended into a love for the Zeitgeist Movement. . . . ABC unfortunately doesn’t seem to have asked Osler any follow-up questions about what exactly the killer liked about the documentary and what ideas he took from it. . . . But whatever he got out of the video is obviously just one element of the great big crazycakes combination that is the mind of Jared Lee Loughner.
My own guess is that Loughner’s interest in alternate realities was at the core of his worldview, and that he was attracted to those elements of fringe politics that might reinforce his suspicion that the waking world is a lie. . . .
She hates conservatives and doesn’t seem to care too much for me, but Sarah Posner at Religious Dispatches is at least willing to take a serious look at the Zeitgeist phenomenon:
Because the film draws on a jumble of disparate conspiracy theories — from religion to 9/11 to the Federal Reserve — to paint a vision of secretive, dark powers controlling our economy, politics, and social systems, it’s hard to characterize it as left or right, as Mike [Altman] discussed in his post about the religion section of the film. The film, a repository of conspiracy theories, seemingly incongruously is connected to a movement that has claimed its chief mission is sustainability.
While the Zeitgeist Movement sells itself as being about peace and sustainability, though, the film about the Federal Reserve draws mostly on conspiracy theories favored on the far right about “international bankers” controlling the economy, theories with anti-Semitic roots (replace “international” with “Jewish” — although the film doesn’t describe any of its villains as being Jewish). At one point the film flashes a scare quote attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws”– oft recycled on right-wing conspiracy websites, even though there’s no proof that Rothschild ever said it. . . . Conservative writer Byron York might believe they “resemble far-right paranoia from many years ago,” but if he pays a visit to the John Birch Society table at CPAC next month, he may be able to discuss similar conspiracy theories there.
OK, I’m going to interrupt here to point out that, whatever you say about them, the John Birch Society has never been anti-Semitic (or racist, for that matter). That the Birchers view the world through a conspiratorial prism, no one can deny, but it’s unfair to brand them Jew-haters when they’re not. And when you associate “right-wing” with anti-Semitism, you’re talking about a “right-wing” that hasn’t had any significant, practical influence among American conservatives since the days of Charles Lindbergh and the America Firsters. (That rara avis — a “peace” movement liberals hate.)
While I’m on this topic, how is it that, on the one hand, the Left gets away with Hamas-hugging and portaying the GOP as controlled by “neocons” — nudge, nudge — while on the other hand the Left routinely accuses conservatives of being anti-Semitic? It’s another one of those damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t traps where liberals arrange the terms of discourse in such a way as to put conservatives in a no-win situation.
OK, so we return to Posner’s Zeitgeist article:
Even though it draws on the right’s conspiracy theories, the film is disdained by the segments of the right, even before it was linked to Loughner. As Julie [Ingersoll] has documented, Christian Reconstructionists share a disdain for the Fed and believe it to be “unbibilical.” But the Christian Reconstructionist group American Vision years ago ripped into Zeitgeist’s segment on religion, calling it “cavalier nonsense.” . . .
But unpacking Zeitgeist may be more interesting than for understanding Loughner. The movement has a following, and unknown numbers — perhaps millions — of people have watched the films. . . . How those conspiracy theories made their way into a film which claims to be about peace and sustainability, and were blandly accepted by people buying the sustainability narrative, might be more interesting than how the film influenced Jared Loughner.
Exactly. Forget about trying to play a partisan game of pin-the-tail-on-the-scapegoat. The apparent connection between the Zeitgeist phenomenon and the Tucson massacre is such a potentially fascinating story that it frustrates me to no end that major news organizations are ignoring it.
Y’all hit the tip jar. I’m going to keep digging on this story.
“If the movies you go see tell you that your government was behind the downing of the trade center and the Pentagon in 9/11 — as the movie Zeitgeist did, a documentary — if you were told by Michael Moore that all of this was done on purpose, if you’re told that the rich have taken what’s rightfully yours, if you’re bombarded with this every day as part of a political message, what would you be capable of doing? . . .
“You take people who are unbalanced, weak, susceptible, impressionable and you bombard ’em with that message in the Democrat Party and their willing accomplices in the media every day, and what the hell kind of person or people are you going to create running around out there? Then you show ’em the Michael Moore movie or show ’em the Zeitgeist movie, their government — led by a Republican — lied, took us into war in Afghanistan, lied to take us into war in Iraq, lied about weapons of mass destruction, lied about being responsible for 9/11, purposely wired those buildings to blow up and blamed it on some innocent Muslims, what are you gonna think? Are you not gonna run around confused and filled with hatred?”
— Rush Limbaugh, Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2010
This is my 14th post about Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist obsession and, as I remarked on Andrea Shea King’s show Monday night, I’m afraid I’m nearly as obsessed with it as Loughner was — but don’t worry, I’m not going to go crazy. However, I’m not going to stop blogging about this so long as those whom Limbaugh calls the Democratic Party’s “willing accomplices in the media” continue to ignore this crucial evidence that the Tucson shooter was suffering from an acute case of Bush Derangment Syndrome. The absurd claim that Loughner’s was suffering from right-wing paranoia is completely debunked once you begin digging into Zeitgeist’s worldview as a progressive New Age phenomenon.
Ed Driscoll jokes, “Funny, I don’t recall seeing that film running during the last National Review Cruise,” but it’s no joke. Maggie’s Notebook has watched the whole movie and yesterday pointed out that the Artivist Film Festival — which gave its 2007 “Best Feature” award to Zeitgeist — is funded by the Brazilian petroleum company Petrobras, in which George Soros held a major stake until that became politcally controversial.
The producers of Zeitgeist have put a transcript of the film online and, while it isn’t actually complete — there are parts of the narration missing — it’s important to look at what Zeitgeist actually claimed:
“September 11th was the jump start for what is now an accelerating agenda by the ruthless elite. It was a staged war pretext, no different than the sinking of the Lusitania, the provoking of Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin lie. In fact, if 9/11 wasn’t a planned war pretext, it would be an exception to the rule. It has been used to launch two unprovoked illegal wars, one against Iraq and one against Afghanistan. However, 9/11 was a pretext for another war as well. The war against you. The Patriot Act, Homeland Security, the Military Tribunals Act and other legislations are all completely and entirely designed to destroy your civil liberties and limit your ability to fight back against what is coming. . . .
“[L]et’s recognize how history repeats itself. In February 1933, Hitler staged a false flag attack burning down his own German Parliament building, the Reichstag and blamed it on communist terrorists. Within the next few weeks he passed the Enabling Act which completely eradicated the German Constitution, destroying people’s liberties. He then led a series of pre-emptive wars all justified in German people as necessary to maintaining “homeland security.”
Yeah: 9/11 was the Reichstag Fire. Remember that Zeitgeist was released in 2007. How many “Bush = Hitler” posters did we see at left-wing anti-war rallies back then, when 18-year-old Jared Lee Loughner was becoming obsessed with Zeitgeist?
Liberals who tried to blame Sarah Palin, Fox News, talk radio and the Tea Party movement for Loughner’s crime cannot be permitted to ignore the progressive roots of the killer’s insane rage.
“The last thing the men behind the curtain want is a conscious, informed public . . .”
— Zeitgeist (2007)
“If conservativism is defined as standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’ Zeitgeist is looking the other way yelling ‘Go!’ Have you seen any major media reports on Zeitgeist? Why is that?”
— John Saxton, “Three Exculpatory Facts the MSM Continues to Overlook in the Arizona Shootings,” Hot Air
Which is the drum I’ve been beating since last Thursday: It is truly astonishing that, after ABC News broke the story of Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist obsession on Jan. 12, there was no substantial follow-up reporting by any major national news organization.
The Washington Post did a 2,700-word profile of Loughner on Thursday and the New York Times did a 5,000-word profile of the accused gunman Sunday, and neither story so much as mentioned Zeitgeist. We got some more reporting in a Sunday story by the Arizona Republic, but the rest of the major media seem determined to ignore this clue to Loughner’s lunacy. Meanwhile, conservative bloggers have begun digging into this two-hour conspiracy cult film and calling attention to crucial elements of Zeitgeist that point away from the absurd claim that director Peter Joseph was pushing a “right-wing” paranoia.
In addition to its 9/11 “Truther” orientation, Zeitgeist won a progressive film award and the movie’s key sources are associated with the New Age movement. And now Maggie’s Notebook points to another telltale clue of the movie’s political orientation:
After listening to every word, along the way it came to Fox News. Eight frames showing Fox anchors and Fox news-talkers – in the context of television “lying” to the people and “manipulating” the news. . . .
Added to everything else we know, is there still anyone out there willing to stand up and say Zeitgeist is a product of the “right-wing?”
In analyzing Zeitgeist, it is important to look at the way the film uses imagery to convey meaning, a point to which I alluded Monday in my American Spectator column:
“They do not want you to think too much. … You had better wake up and understand that there are people guiding your life, and you don’t even know it,” says one of the film’s “experts,” anti-Masonic conspiracy theorist Jordan Maxwell, near the end of Zeitgeist . . . A few minutes later, while images including Jesus Christ, Bill O’Reilly and Saddam Hussein flash across the screen, the narrator says: “The last thing the men behind the curtain want is a conscious, informed public, capable of critical thinking, which is why a continually fraudulent zeitgeist is output via religion, the mass media and the educational system.”
Wake up and smell the Bush Derangement Syndrome, people.
The Tucson massacre provides arch-Tory Peter Hitchens an excuse to stick his thumb in the eye of libertarians:
The most likely cause is Loughner’s daily cannabis-smoking habit. The link between this drug and serious mental illness grows clearer every day. Wickedly, the dope lobby still tries to deny this and seeks to legalise it.
Loughner has been, for much of his short life, a habitual smoker of this so-called ‘soft’ organic drug. This is not in doubt. Police records, the testimony of U.S. army recruiters who rejected him partly on these grounds, and the accounts of several friends confirm that Loughner is a marijuana victim.
Yes, I know. Not all cannabis-smokers lose their minds. And not all cigarette-smokers get cancer. [Oooh! Taking shot at his brother Christopher? — RSM] But in both cases the risk is enough to cause concern.
When police caught him driving a car that stank of marijuana, Loughner was let off,
as he would have been here. So much (as usual) for the non-existent ‘war against drugs’.
Cannabis is now effectively legal in Britain and in several parts of the USA, where this dangerous and unpredictable poison is ironically permitted for ‘medical use’.
Arizona voters, fooled by years of cynical and shameful ‘cannabis is harmless’ propaganda, approved just such a stupid law in November.
The town council of liberal Pima (scene of the murders) last week took the first step towards licensing ‘dispensaries’ for dope.
Arizona has always had plenty of guns. America has always had heated political rhetoric. What is new is that it now has legal dope as well.
Those who are seriously interested in public safety should worry less about guns and radio shock jocks, and more about the little packets of madness on sale in every school.
Certainly a controversial opinion, but let me ask you try something. Take five minutes to watch the opening sequence of Zeitgeist and tell me if you don’t see its psychedelic element:
If you have any background in psychology, would you say that young people under the influence of marijuana — or salvia divinorum or cocaine or psilocybin, which were among the drugs Loughner reportedly used — are highly suggestible?
And did you notice what happened in that video from 2:45 to 3:05? A man writes “1+1 = 2.” A Bible is laid down, and a U.S. flag is laid atop it. Then, fading in over the red-and-white stripes of the flag, we see scenes of the jet flying into the World Trade Center on 9/11.
What does it mean? What is being symbolized and suggested by that 20-second sequence? Why do you think the drug-addled Jared Lee Loughner was so obsessed with Zeitgeist? And what ideas did it convey to him?
Understand that it is not necessary, in the case of a schizophrenic, to single out a single factor in his madness. Dan Collins writes with the authority of experience:
As other observers have pointed out, [Loughner’s] age when he began gradually to withdraw is consistent with the usual onset of schizophrenia — in the late teens and early twenties. We also know that among those who are genetically inclined towards schizophrenia, the use of marijuana makes it significantly more likely that they will suffer an onset episode. Mercifully, I don’t have to go through a full recitation of the evidence, because Salon . . . has interviewed the psychiatrist author of Surviving Schizophrenia, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who lays out the case as elegantly as anyone could. . . .
Dan delves into the difficulty of decoding the typical “word salad” gibberish of the schizophrenic:
Jared Loughner’s ideolect is inflected with bits and pieces of deconstructive linguistic theory. The basic idea is that words only refer to other words, in a closed system of signification. . . . There is no “objective” (at least human) “reality” apart from the signification conferred on it by language. It depends on the definition of what “is” is. . . .
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! You may remember that, on the day after the Tucson shootings, Time magazine’s Joe Klein went on CNN and used what proved to be a very poor choice of words:
“I have used that very word, crap, to describe what appears on Fox News. . . . [T]he conspiracies that Glenn Beck promotes create this notion we’re about to fall off of the abyss, that helps to create a zeitgeist where nuts are empowered.”
You know who else hates Fox News? Yeah: The makers of Zeitgeist.
UPDATE II: Linked by The Lonely Conservative — thanks!
UPDATE III: Linked by Jacob Sullum at Reason‘s Hit & Run blog, where I contributed this comment:
Yeah, dopeheads are giving me hell in the comments on that blog post. This suggests to me that long-term marijuana usage makes people hypersensitive to criticism. I’m thinking about reporting their ISP addresses to the DEA and the FBI just to see the headlines: “ONLINE DRUG RING BUSTED.” Then the SWAT squad will kick in their doors, and Radley Balko will have another one of his cops-run-amok stories.
Crazy? Yeah. But wouldn’t it be fun?
It’s important to play on the paranoid fears of these drug-crazed hippies. Make ’em sweat, see? Every time they see a clean-cut, thick-necked guy in a dark sedan, they need to be thinking it’s a plainclothes narc doing surveillance, ready to serve an arrest warrant. And, hey, stoner — you see that van parked across the street? How do you know it’s not full of M-16-wielding SWAT cops getting ready to raid your house because they noticed your electric bill’s gone up since you put all those grow-lamps in your basement?
They’re coming to get you, dopehead scum!
You’d better flush your stash down the toilet now, before it’s too late, or else you’ll be handcuffed, locked up and sent to the state penitentiary.
“‘The keepers of the faith won’t enter into debate with [critics],’ the narrator [of Zeitgeist] says. ‘They ignore them or denounce them as blasphemers.’
“At that moment, Zeitgeist turns to — of all people — Washington pundit Tucker Carlson to pivot from the Christianity myth to the Sept. 11 myth. Interviewing a 9/11 skeptic on MSNBC in 2006, Carlson said, ‘It is wrong, blasphemous, and sinful for you to suggest, imply, or help other people come to the conclusion that the U.S. government killed 3,000 of its own citizens.’
“To the makers of Zeitgeist, that is an ‘Aha!’ moment: a skeptic being literally denounced as a blasphemer. From there, the movie recounts standard 9/11 truther stuff, like claiming plane crashes alone could not have brought down the World Trade Center towers.”
— Byron York, “Tucson shooter obsessed with bizarre Internet movie,” Washington Examiner
For the benefit of David Dayen, the liberal blogger who claimed that the 2007 film Zeigeist is “right wing,” here is a screen-cap from the movie:
The 911 Truth
Criminal Elements within the US Government
staged a “False Flag” Terror Attack on its own
citizens, in order to manipulate public
perception into supporting its agenda.
They have been doing this for years.911 was an Inside Job.
Click here to see the video (this part comes at 1:47 of the clip). And this is what gets me about fact-challenged dishonest dilberts like David Dayen: They can’t be bothered to do any actual reporting or research.
No, that would be beneath them.
Instead, it’s much easier to avoid that grubby work and take someone’s else’s word about what’s in Zeitgeist:
[T]he rhetoric on the far, far right played a role in amping up the paranoia of a mentally unbalanced man. In fact, one of the shooter’s friends focused on a movie that echoes many of the themes on the fringe right as extremely important to shaping Loughner’s worldview. . . .
C’mon: Whose “fringe” asserts that 9/11 was an “Inside Job”? When Zeitgeist was produced in 2007, who was hectoring us about “criminal elements in the US Government”? Continue reading Zeitgeist: 9/11 ‘Was an Inside Job’ Also: It Won a ‘Progressive’ Film Award and Is Based on ‘New Age’ Sources →