Loughner’s Conspiracy-Fueled Rampage
Has Origins on the Fringe Right
Now, you don’t have to believe that Sarah Palin purchased the gun for Loughner and whispered in his ear about targets to believe that the 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. . . .
Zeitgeist in particular has echoes of anti-Federal Reserve theories popular with the John Birch Society.
The more you read by Loughner, or the more videos you see from him, they reflect these beliefs very strongly.
Permit me to observe that it is possible to be conservative — not “far, far right” or “fringe right” — and not be a huge fan of George W. Bush. Bruce Barlett certainly is no Bush fanboy, and there are many others within the conservative mainstream who would endorse Bartlett’s critique of the Bush administration.
But you see it’s “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” with the likes of David Dayen. Conservatism can be condemned for anything and everything Bush did — despite the many conservative voices that proclaim, as does Bartlett, that Bush was not really conservative — and yet, when it serves their purposes, they’ll condemn conservatism for “fringe” beliefs of people who’ve never had any active association with the mainstream conservative movement. This resembles a fallacy that we might call The Nixon Syllogism of Liberal Argument:
Nixon was a Republican;
Nixon did bad things; and therefore
Republicans are never to be trusted.
Liberals have these ironclad mental associations of “right-wingers” with various pre-demonized political scapegoats and the trick, in any debate over contemporary issues, is to conjure up these negative associations to say that today’s conservative personality is analogous to the scapegoat, be it Nixon, Joe McCarthy or George Wallace.
The argument begins with the conclusion — conservatives are bad — and all that is necessary is to adduce “evidence” to prove it. Anything at all will suffice as “evidence,” and liberals will ignore a mountain of information that doesn’t fit the conclusion in order to scream about the irrelevant molehill that they insist “proves” their point.
And if you don’t buy their argument, your disagreement merely reinforces their point: Conservatives are close-minded bigots and therefore, bad people.
This kind of circular reasoning is, of course, not actually reasoning at all. It’s tautological, an expression of partisan prejudice, and it does no good to enter into debate with such people. They’ve got their minds made up, and all you can say to them is, “I disagree. You’re wrong and you’re not going to persuade me.”
I’m not arguing with David Dayen with any idea that he’s going to have a Road to Damascus moment and recognize his errors. He’s too far gone for that. Nor is there any need to “preach to the choir.” This is merely another object lesson in how to confront the counterfactual and irrational mentality of the Left. (See, for example, yesterday’s encounter with liberal blogger Don Millard who pushed a discredited “Blame Palin” meme.)
The object of the argument in such a case is not to convert the fool to wisdom. Rather, it is to expose his folly for the benefit of those who encounter the argument not as participants, but as spectators. And speaking of which, here’s my latest column at The American Spectator:
Divided into three parts, Zeitgeist begins with a half-hour assault on Christianity as a myth. The film asserts that Jesus is “a literary and astrological hybrid… a plagiarization of the Egyptian sun-god Horus.” This is a thesis promoted in a series of books, including The Christ Conspiracy (1999), by author D.M. Murdock, who writes under the pen-name “Achyra S.” Murdock served as an adviser on Zeitgeist, and the film’s popularization of her “Christ-myth” ideas has brought it to the attention of Christian writer James Patrick Holding of Tektonics Ministry. He notes that many viewers of Zeitgeist claim it has “shown them the truth for the first time,” and that it evidently appeals to those “disaffected with the status quo.” Holding said Zietgeist “also seems to have appeal among what I call ‘fundamentalist atheists’ who are deeply hostile to Christianity.”
Deeply hostile, indeed, as the film tells viewers: “Christianity, along with all other theistic belief systems, is the fraud of the age.” This idea of fraudulent mythology is then carried over into the film’s second segment, about the 9/11 attacks: “A myth is an idea that, while widely believed, is false. In a deeper sense, in the religious sense, a myth serves as an orienting and mobilizing story for a people.”
“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, after the narrator has denounced “the stupefying downward slide” of American education. 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.” . . .
Go read the whole thing. I’ll have more about Zeitgeist later. For now, I consider it sufficient to say that a film which cites purveyors of anti-Masonic kookery and relies upon New Age authors as sources to attack Christianity is definitely not conservative. And anyone who thinks otherwise needs to have his head examined.
“What is government if words have no meaning?”
Such was the question that Jared Loughner asked Representative Gabrielle Giffords at an event in 2007. Unsatisfied by Giffords’ response (or warranted lack thereof), Loughner targeted her with an apparently vengeful fixation.
The budding thought processes of this anarchical philosopher-wannabe clearly had nothing to do with then-obscure Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck – nor did they have anything to do with the then-nonexistent Tea Party. . . .
?From online message boards to YouTube videos to the classroom, Loughner demonstrated himself to be a pathological riddler who was angry at the world for refusing to answer his intellectually dishonest questions. As Loughner’s incoherent ramblings and love of conspiracy spiraled downward to senseless bloodshed, King Solomon’s warning proved true – “the lips of a fool consume him; the beginning of his talking is folly and the end of it is wicked madness” (Ecclesiastes 10:12-13). . . .
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.
Remember that I am a newsman by profession, and learned that trade on the job under the tutelage of Old School editors. So when I saw Jared Loughner’s friend Zach Osler tell ABC News that Zeitgeist had a “profound” impact on Loughner’s worldview, and then Ashleigh Banfield failed to follow-up with more questions, it pissed me off.
The director of Zeitgeist has threatened legal action against ABC News, and now Zach Osler is turning down interview requests from other reporters. So the opportunity fumbled away by Banfield may be difficult to recover.
UPDATE: Someone has finally re-uploaded the video to YouTube:
PREVIOUSLY: It was taken down by YouTube, but those greedy bastards at the Los Angeles Times got it through an open-records request and “embed disabled” it so you have to go to their Web site to see it.
However, unlike Jared Lee Loughner, I’m cool with the whole capitalist greed thing, so I guess I’ll just “tone down the rhetoric” before they take out a restraining order and get me locked up in a loony bin. Anyway, the takeaway from this creepy video is:
Jared Lee Loughner didn’t like “illegal wars,” which are “unconstitutional,” an opinion you might have heard a lot circa 2002-2006 if you were hanging out with smelly peaceniks at International A.N.S.W.E.R. marches or Ned Lamont rallies.
Jared Lee Loughner habitually used the term “genocide” to describe anything he was against — “Mom, this broccoli-and-cheese casserole tastes like genocide!” — just like every Chomsky-spouting punk who ever protested an Ann Coulter speech on a college campus.
Jared Lee Loughner’s interpretation of the Constitution is nearly as crazy as the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas.
Jared Lee Loughner hates cops, considers grammar a form of “mind control,” and felt that getting a “B” in class was a violation of his First Amendment rights. If he hadn’t become a mass murderer, he might have had a promising future as an ACLU lawyer.
Jared Lee Loughner is bonkers, wacko, schizoid, daft, zany, deranged, demented and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he’s batshit crazy and also quite likely nucking futz.
The Media has completely ignored the impact that conspiracy movie “Zeitgeist” had on Jared Loughner’s psyche. . . . Most likely, it is because Loughner’s Zeitgeist conspiracies do not fit the media’s narrative. . . . They have decided to just write him off as a lone wolf lunatic. And have moved on; awaiting the next Palin “scandal.”
What’s annoying as all hell is that it was ABC News that broke the “Zeitgeist” exclusive on Wednesday and yet they haven’t followed up on their own scoop.
Either they’re too stupid to understand the connection or else . . . Look, I hate to use the word “conspiracy” in this context, but if Loughner’s friend had told ABC News that Mark Levin or Michael Savage or Glenn Beck had a “profound impact” on the gunman’s worldview, don’t you think we would have seen some follow-up reporting by now?
In response to my descriptions of Zeitgeist — the conspiracy-cult movie that Jared Loughner’s friend says had a “profound impact” on the Tucson massacre gunman — I today received an e-mail from a British follower of the Zeitgeist Movement. He repeated the cult’s own mantras about substituting an egalitarian global redistributionist “resource-based economy” for the “monetary-based economy.” He repeated these things in such a way as to indicate to me that he did not recognize that he was the victim of a scam. Therefore I replied by e-mail:
You understand, don’t you, that the abolition of private property (and of prices) has already been attempted, and failed disastrously? Merely substituting the term “resources” for “property” in the old socialist dogma does not change the nature of the proposition. Neither does denouncing “monetary-based economy” differ in meaning from denouncing “capitalism” (as did Marx). A thing is what it is, no matter what you choose to call it.
There is nothing new or different in the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project. It is merely a word-game, wherein some clever sophists have used a lot of up-to-date “green” language for some very old (red) formulations. Your failure to recognize the bogusness of their scheme — it is not innovative and honest, but derivative and deceptive — does not speak well of your supposed skepticism. Your problem is not that you lack intelligence, but that you lack knowledge. You might begin to remedy this deficiency by reading Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism and F.A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit, which expose the fundamental and inescapable errors to which you seem to have succumbed. I would further recommend Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed lest, having disabused yourself of the errors of socialism (for that is what the Zeitgeist Movement advocates, no matter what they call it), you should then fall prey to the errors of liberalism.
God bless you. Please don’t go on a murder spree.
Sincerely,
Robert Stacy McCain
Harsh words are necessary to rouse the dreamers from their dangerous trance. The delusions of these people deserve to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how.
The perpetrators of the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project scam are preying on the naïveté of gullible people who haven’t studied the history of socialism. As I say, it isn’t that such people lack intelligence. They are merely ignorant. Once they realize that they have been deceived and played for suckers, once they have taken time to educate themselves about the nature of the flimflam by which they have been duped, the ex-cultists will become the cult’s most powerful critics.
Remember: I used to be a Democrat. Talk about a phony scam . . .
It is my experience that, once cured of the socialist delusion, people’s disagreements about religion and other matters tend to be less disagreeable. Once we can agree what the answer to humanity’s problems is not, our arguments about the what the answer is become less contentious. And I would point out that the quest for an answer to humanity’s problems depends upon the question of what those problems are, and whether any “answer” to them is actually possible.
Because I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh’s discussion of the topic, I don’t know what source he cited. I’ll check his “Stack of Stuff” later. The point is, he mentioned it. Three days of hammering this Zeitgeist angle on one little blog may have sent ripples out across the Internet, and somehow the wave reached El Rushbo. His millions of readers are now aware of this phenomenon and they will begin to ask the key question: “Why is this important clue to the killer’s motives being ignored by major news organizations?”
The most interesting thing we can take away from this little calculation is that people are indeed wacko-conspiratory in Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Most of the Eastern european countries sport more than 500 of these nutters per million inhabitants.
“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
The producers of this film decided to market it virally, so it’s been available for free on the Web for three years.
PART I: Attacking Christianity as a ‘Myth’
This segment has been called “The Da Vinci Code on steroids.” Toward the end, the narrator says, “Christianity, along with all other theistic belief systems, is the fraud of the age. It serves to detach the species from the natural world and likewise, from each other. It supports blind submission to authority. It reduces human responsibility to the effect that God controls everything.”
PART II: 9/11 Was a Conspiracy
Not much to say here. You’ve seen one 9/11 “Truther” documentary, you’ve seen ’em all. But the guys at Loose Change can’t sue for copyright infringement because, hey, it’s a “documentary,” and you can’t copyright crazy.
PART III: TOTAL FREAKING KOOKINESS!
This is the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test of Zeitgeist where, if you’ve gone along with the Jesus-Was-a-Myth stuff and the 9/11-Was-a-U.S.-Plot stuff, you’re going to find yourself throbbing helplessly in spasms of conspiratorial ecstasy, covered in kook-splooge. The U.S. government and “international bankers” scheme behind the scenes to control every damned thing in the world — and plant computer chips in your brain, to boot!
So there you have it: A couple hours of anti-Christianity, 9/11 “Trutherism” and the familar sort of “New World Order” paranoia beloved by connoisseurs of tin-foil everywhere. And Jared Loughner’s good friend says this two-hour video stew of high-grade kookery had a “profound impact” on the guy who (allegedly) killed six people and wounded 12 others in Tucson on Saturday.
It should go without saying that none of this cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs crackpot stuff has been promoted by Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh or any of the other usual suspects whom Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas and Sheriff Clarence Dupnik rushed to blame for the Tucson Massacre.
UPDATE JAN. 16: The Google Video versions of the movie originally embedded here — which had been online for more than three years and had hundreds of thousands of views — have apparently been taken down. (Wonder why?) I’m in the process of replacing them with YouTube versions.
Leaving aside Sheriff Clarence Dupnik and the Left’s “blood libel” hysteria, let’s examine the factors that really motivated mass murderer Jared Lee Loughner. First, here is a four-minute Associated Press video interview with George Osler, father of Loughner’s friend Osler:
“There was a lot of talk about lucid dreaming and understanding reality. . . . And there were a lot of books and movies . . . things that I never would have heard about or watched — things like Loose Change about the 9/11 conspiracy . . . He watched things like that. . . . He had basically nothing going for him, and I think he just couldn’t deal with reality anymore. . . . I know that he was experimenting with the drug, or herb or whatever it is, salvia divinorum. And from what I hear, he used it quite frequently. . . . It’s like a hallucinogenic type of effect.”
Loughner, now 22, would come over several times a week from 2007 to 2008, the Oslers said.
The boys listened to the heavy-metal band Slipknot and progressive rockers the Mars Volta, studied the form of meditative movement called tai chi and watched and discussed movies.
Loughner’s favorites included little-known conspiracy theory documentaries such as “Zeitgeist” and “Loose Change” as well as bigger studio productions with cult followings and themes of brainwashing, science fiction and altered states of consciousness, including “Donnie Darko” and “A Scanner Darkly.” . . .
Roxanne Osler [said]: “Jared struck me as a young man who craved attention and acceptance.”
Altered consciousness, “lucid dreams,” conspiracy theories, sci-fi dystopias — you see the pattern. This is what I meant by the “Beta male” reference earlier today. Today’s feral adolescents are heinously cruel to those they stigmatize as “losers.” As George Osler says, Loughner was a failure in reality and therefore craved some sort of alternative reality where (he imagined) he could succeed.
Loughner’s disconnection from, and hostility toward, the real world obviously would have made the quasi-revolutionary utopian radicalism of Zeitgeist extraordinarily attractive. Secular Stupidest provides this three-minute video about Zeitgeist:
I’ll be back to update with some more background, but you can see from just these two videos — requiring a total of seven minutes to view — how far removed Loughner’s worldview was from anything connected to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party movement, conservative talk radio, etc.
“It takes a different value system if you wish to change the world,” Jacque Fresco said to a sold out crowd of over 800 in New York City’s Upper West Side. Though he may not need to convince these people, many his ardent followers, it will indeed take a restructuring of the mind for those unfamiliar with Fresco’s work to realistically accept the ideas he proposes of a new global society that has given up money and property in favor of a shared, sustainable, technology-driven community. . . .
March 13th, 2010 was the second annual celebration of ZDay. Coordinated by The Zeitgeist Movement, ZDay is an educational event geared toward raising awareness of the movement. . . .
[T]he movement declares itself as the activist arm of The Venus Project, an organization started in the 1970s by Fresco and his partner, Roxanne Meadows. The Venus Project distributes resources promoting Fresco’s vision of an improved society, with the main component being a resource-based economy, rather than a monetary-based one. In Fresco’s resource-based economy, the world’s resources would be considered as the equal inheritance of all the world’s peoples, and would be managed as efficiently and carefully as possible through focusing on the technological potential of sustainable development.
The impossibility of abolishing a “monetary-based” economy is one of the basic insights Ludwig von Mises explained in Socialism more than 80 years ago. That the objective of Zeitgeist is a global egalitarian redistribution of wealth classifies it as socialism and, as I think any orthodox Marxist would say, it is a utopian form of socialism.
This is why I called it “quasi-revolutionary”: Zeitgeist envisions an essentially voluntary egaltiarianism, as if the rich would gladly give up their “resources” (a word tendentiously employed) to the have-nots. At least Marx and Lenin were sane enough to recognize that such a redistribution could only be accomplished by force.
And as for the idea of resources being “managed . . . efficiently and carefully” — by whom? Who has the capacity for this technological management of “resources”? Where will this managerial authority be vested? With “experts”?
To any student of Mises and Hayek, this is simply the old “planned economy” fallacy dressed up in new clothes of globalism and “sustainabie development.”
Who are these young fools who fall for such recycled nonsense? What are they teaching kids in school nowadays, that they are so easily taken in by these Zeitgeist charlatans?
UPDATE II: Here is the 5-minute video trailer for Zeitgeist:
The main question raised by Zeitgeist: How much salvia does a semi-literate paranoid psychotic adolescent have to smoke before that crap starts making sense? It needs to be re-titled Nonsense On Stilts.
Really, it makes Keynesianism seem sane by comparison.
UPDATE III: The founder of the Venus Project, whose ideas evidently inspired Zeitgeist, is 94-year-old Jacque Fresco. This is from his essay, “The Future and Beyond”:
We believe it is now possible to achieve a society where people would be able to live longer, healthier, and more meaningful productive lives. In such a society, the measure of success would be based upon the fulfillment of one’s individual pursuits rather than the acquisition of wealth, property, and power. Although many of the concepts presented here may appear as unattainable goals, all of the ideas are based upon known scientific principles. . . .
The answers do not lie in debate or philosophical discussion of values, but rather in methodology. Thus what is needed is an operational definition of a better world, which is as follows: To constantly maximize existing and future technologies with the sole purpose of enhancing all human life and protecting the environment. . . .
The future does not depend on our present-day beliefs or social customs, but will continue to evolve a set of values unique to its own time. There are no “Utopias.” The very notion of “Utopia” is static. However, the survival of any social system ultimately depends upon its ability to allow for appropriate change to improve society as a whole. The paths that we choose will ultimately determine whether or not there is intelligent life on earth. . . .
(Elaborate gibberish. Fresco anticipates the accusation of utopianism, and denies it, but this does not change the utopian nature of his scheme.)
As the amount of scientific information grows, nations and people are coming to realize that even in today’s divided world there are, in fact, many common threats that transcend national boundaries. These include overpopulation, energy shortages, pollution, water shortages, economic catastrophe, the spread of uncontrollable disease and so forth. However, faced even with threats of this magnitude, which are common to all nations, the direction of human action will not be altered so long as powerful nations are able to maintain control of the limited resources available. . . .
(“I’d like to buy the world a Coke . . .” Here we see Fresco beginning to encourage the reader to imagine the transcendent global sharing that is the foundation of his Don’t-Call-It-Utopian utopianism.)
There are growing indications of awareness on the part of people in many areas of the world that events have gone beyond the control of their political leaders. Everywhere we see political figures and parties come and go, political strategies adopted and discarded for their inability to satisfy the demands of one faction or another.
The reason that we do not suggest writing your congressman, or any number of governmental agencies, is that they lack the necessary knowledge to deal with our problems. Their focus is to preserve existing systems, not to change them. It appears that there are few within present-day societies who want to phase themselves out. In modern industrial societies the cause of inaction lies within the cumbersome political process itself, an anachronism in an era when most decisions can be made on any important issue in a split second by the objective entry of relevant data into computers.
The prime conditions that would really effect social change will come about when conditions have deteriorated to such an extent that governments, politicians, and social institutions no longer have the support and confidence of the people. What once worked is acknowledged to be no longer relevant. If the public were better informed, only then would it be possible to introduce a new and improved social arrangement. . . .
(Here Fresco is appealing to what might be called the super-political mythos: Our problems are too big for existing “status quo” systems to cope with. Ergo, to get past “present-day societies” — i.e., the real world, where geeky adolescent dopehead misfits can’t find a job or a girlfriend — will require some crisis that will cause people to support the introduction of “a new and improved social arrangement.”)
Along with the introduction of new paradigms towards human and environmental concern, there must be a methodology for making this a reality. If these ends are to be achieved, the monetary system must eventually be surpassed by a world resource-based economy. In order to effectively and economically utilize resources, the necessary cybernated and computerized technology could eventually be applied to ensure a higher standard of living for everyone. With the intelligent and humane application of science and technology, the nations of the world could guide and shape the future for the preservation of the environment and humankind. . . .
OK, enough of the interrupting in italics. What Jacque Fresco proposes here is Underpants Gnome socialism:
Phase 1: Abolish the monetary system. Phase 2:? Phase 3: A higher standard of living for everyone!
He goes on in this one essay for more than 10,000 words, along the way enumerating 16 “aims and goals of The Venus Project” (e.g., “Transcending all of the artificial boundaries that separate people”) before concluding: “It is not possible in this short writing to present the precise methodology and operation of a global resource based economy.”
Dude. Pass me the pipe. I’m gonna need another hit of salvia.
UPDATE IV: Brace yourselves, Glenn Beck fans, but I am currently researching a tip that Zeitgeist/Venus Project has received funding from — wait for it — George Soros. If that turns out to be true . . . well, can you imagine what Glenn’s chalkboard is going to look like when he explains this? Meanwhile, here’s a March 2009 New York Times story about the big “Z-Day” event:
In his goatee and mustache and tieless in a brown suit, [Zeitgeist director Peter] Joseph had been lecturing for nearly 90 minutes on the unsustainable nature of the money-based economy — on cyclical consumption, planned obsolescence, corporate malfeasance and piles of poisonous waste. “It’s time that we wake up,” he intoned, speaking solemnly through a wireless clip-on mike. “The doomsday scenario, the big contraction, might be happening right now. The system of monetary exchange is — in the face of advancing technology — completely obsolete.” . .
There, in the crowd, was Jacque Fresco, an industrial designer and the engineering guru of what people unironically called “the movement.” . . .
Mr. Fresco . . . [is] an author, lecturer and former aircraft engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio who has spent the last six decades working on the Venus Project, a futuristic society where (adjust your seatbelts, now) machines would control government and industry and safeguard the planet’s fragile resources by means of an artificially intelligent “earthwide autonomic sensor system” — a super-brain of sorts connected to, yes, all human knowledge.
It has come to my attention that various mainstream news organizations are beginning to run an association between my 2007 performance piece/film, “Zeitgeist: The Movie” and the tragic murders conducted by an extremely troubled young man in Tucson, Arizona. They are also slowly beginning to bleed the obvious line between my 2007 documentary work, my film series as a whole and The Zeitgeist Movement, which I am the founder. Frankly, I find this isolating, growing association tremendously irresponsible on the part of ABC, NBC and their affiliates – further reflecting the disingenuous nature of the America Media Establishment today. . . .
When we reflect on the history of seemingly random violence or other forms of highly offensive, irrational, aberrant behavior, we see a common pattern of reaction from the public and media in their attempt to explain such extreme acts. Rather than deeply examining the Bio-Psycho-Social nature of human social development and the vast spectrum of influences that create and morph each of us in unique and sometimes detrimental ways, they take the easy way out. The first thing they do is simply ignore all modern scientific, social understandings of what generates human motivation in both positive and negative regard, for to do so can only call into question the social system itself and hence the “zeitgeist” (meaning: spirit/intellectual climate of the time/culture) at large.
Generally speaking, it is historically accurate to say that the Mainstream Media simply isn’t in the business of challenging the Status Quo. The limits of debate are firmly set. Virtually all ideas, persons or groups who have succeeded in changing the world for the better, later to be hailed as heros in the public mind, started out being condemned by those in the Mainstream Media who latch on to the dominant world view of the time. Even Martin Luther King Jr., a peaceful, loving, wonder of a man who contributed more to our social progress than likely any humanitarian in the US history, was followed by the CIA and publicly humiliated as a “Communist” which he even had to defend in front of a Congressional Committee. In fact, you can rest assured that if King were alive in the current paradigm today and seeking an equal form of justice – he would be given the name: “Terrorist”.
So, again, rather than taking the scientific view, the Mainstream Media often seeks out or implies one point of blame and runs with it. After all, it is much easier, presentable and more simplistic for the public to think that the troubling reality of seemingly random acts of mass murder is the result of a “singular influence” and hence the logic goes that if that one influence is removed, then the world will be back in balance. This gives the public a false resolve and position of focus in an otherwise ambiguous, complex world of social and biological influences. And as far as the scapegoat itself, very often any group, media or dataset that is counter-culture or even hints at wishing to challenge the status quo, is a magnet for such blame.
For example, musical groups of a counter-culture nature have been a favorite scapegoat for acts of murder/violence historically. In 1990, the rock band Judas Priest was actually taken to court for their “role” in the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in 1985 of 20-year old James Vance and 18-year old Raymond Belknap in Reno, Nevada. In 2008, the band Slipknot was publicly tied/blamed to a high-school murder in South Africa. Even the Beatles song “Helter-skelter” was associated to the murders incited by Charles Manson. It goes on and on… and, frankly, it’s simply pathetic – avoiding the true nature of the problem – which is the Socio-Economic Environment itself.
Make no mistake: The Social System is to blame for the rampage of Jared Loughner – not some famous online documentary which is known as the most viewed documentary of all time in internet history. Are the other 200 million people who have seen the film also preparing for murder sprees? I think not.
In my new film: “Zeitgeist: Moving Forward”, I feature a prominent Harvard Criminal Psychologist by the name of Dr. James Gilligan who headed the Centre for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School for many years. In his life work of personally engaging the most dangerous, violent offenders the US system produces, he found some basic trends. The most common is the social issue of “shame”. Our socio-economic system inherently breeds social division and there is a natural demeaning of others generated as a result. It is a scientific fact that mass murderers and those who many just dismiss as “evil” today, are the product of years of being shamed, humiliated and demeaned. Their acts of violence is a reaction from these highly oppressive feelings and the real resolve to such acts can only come from removing the real source of such emotional hurt. You will notice that most other countries don’t come close to the level of violence we see in the United States. The US is the capital of violence with 30-300 times more acts of violence than any other country. We have produced more serial killers in America than all other countries combined. Why? You will notice the Mainstream never asks this question.
If anyone would like to understand why more and more people in the modern world end up like Jared Loughner and why these patterns are only going to get worse as time goes on in this system, I suggest the book “Violence” by Harvard Criminal Psychologist Dr. Gilligan.
In conclusion, let it be stated that the Zeitgeist Film Series is about critical thought regarding various social issues which challenge many erroneous notions held as fact in the modern culture. It also explicitly promotes non-violence, human unity and prosperous human development based on truth and science.
I am also in contact with my legal team and considering legal action against ABC.
-Peter Joseph
Yeah, “considering legal action” is one of those wonderful phrases, isn’t it? There are entire blogs devoted to denouncing the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project as a cult or a scam or some combination of both, and yet the director is “considering legal action” because TV networks interviewed a friend who said Loughner was into watching Zeitgeist.
And it’s all because he’s challenging the “status quo” of the “Social System” which, of course, the real villain. Also, Peter Joseph/Merola wants you to know that he is a persecuted humanitarian. So if you criticize him, you’re just like those people who called Martin Luther King a commie.
Peter Joseph, however, cannot blame the “mainstream media,” because it was Loughner’s friend — not a reporter — who said that Zeitgeist had a “profound impact” on Loughner. And, as extensively documented by the film’s fans and critics alike, the three main points of Zeitgeist are:
The falsehood of Christianity.
The 9/11 attacks were a government conspiracy.
The money-based economy is a plot by “international bankers.”
We can summarize Peter Joseph’s public-relations problem in four simple words: “Facts are stubborn things.”
The drug-addled mind of mass murderer Jared Loughner was under the spell of the crackpot socialist idea of a money-less, resource-based economic system, and other fallacies as old as Marx and Owen. . . .
You really have to read Mises and Hayek to understand why the fantasy of an egalitarian post-monetary society is . . . well, a fantasy.
There is no escape from prices, which are essential as information, and thus there is no way to make an economy function without money.
No matter how much or in what way government interferes with the market processes — through taxes, regulation, welfare, public-works projects, etc. — the market still exists. The fundamental realities of supply and demand remain, and cannot be escaped or transcended, no matter what government does. Joseph/Merola’s rantings against “our socio-economic system” convey exactly one thing: His near-total ignorance of economics.
Divided into three parts, Zeitgeist begins with a half-hour assault on Christianity as a myth. The film asserts that Jesus is “a literary and astrological hybrid… a plagiarization of the Egyptian sun-god Horus.” This is a thesis promoted in a series of books, including The Christ Conspiracy (1999), by author D.M. Murdock, who writes under the pen-name “Achyra S.” Murdock served as an adviser on Zeitgeist, and the film’s popularization of her “Christ-myth” ideas has brought it to the attention of Christian writer James Patrick Holding of Tektonics Ministry. He notes that many viewers of Zeitgeist claim it has “shown them the truth for the first time,” and that it evidently appeals to those “disaffected with the status quo.” Holding said Zietgeist “also seems to have appeal among what I call ‘fundamentalist atheists’ who are deeply hostile to Christianity.”
