(Independent author-journalist Victor Thorn was my first guest on the new weekday edition of Truth Jihad Radio. Listen to the interview here. Below is his new article on Jared Loughner.) 

Enter the mind of a mass-murderer. No, not the amateurish pop-psychology peddled by mainstream media sources who initially typified Jared Loughner in least-common-denominator terms as being a crazed reactionary enmeshed in a brewing cauldron of anger between conservative Tea Party members and President Obama’s socialist left. To the contrary, after embarking on this journey through the depths of existential violence, readers will encounter the latest prototype in a long line of ‘lone nut’ assassins . . . a phenomenon that is most uniquely carried out by Americans.

While trying to explain this tragedy where a 22-year-old gunman killed 6 individuals and wounded 13 others, TV talking heads have attempted to interpret the ensuing bloodbath in strictly concrete terms. But Loughner viewed ‘reality’ quite differently than they were able to convey in sound bites or sensationalistic headlines.

One of Loughner’s acquaintances, Zane Gutierrez, described the shooter’s obsession with alternate dimensions. “The dream world was what was real to Jared, not the day-to-day of our lives.” He characterized his friend as a ‘nihilist’ who fixated on “the meaning of dreams and their importance.”

In journals that he compiled prior to the Jan. 8 melee, the future killer felt, as Jack Shafer wrote in Jared Loughner’s World of Illusion, “The universe is malleable and a function of an individual’s will.” In other words, there is no single, absolute ‘reality,’ but instead a myriad of vastly different perspectives based on ever-changing individual perceptions.

In an article for Mother Jones magazine, Nick Baumann reinforced Loughner’s preference for ‘lucid awareness’ over the standardized ‘waking life’ embodied by most other people. From Loughner’s vantage point, “Conscious dreams are an alternative reality that a person can inhabit and control.”

According to another pal, Bryce Tierney, Loughner spoke of his attraction to nocturnal dreamscapes. “I’m so into it because I can create things and fly. I’m everything I’m not in this world,” Loughner said. Tierney added, “If you want to understand what goes on in Jared Loughner’s mind, his dream journals will tell you everything.” 

INCEPTION 

In a blockbuster 2010 film entitled Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio leads a cabal of corporate spooks who clandestinely intrude on the dreams of sleepers in order to steal valuable secrets. Similar to The Matrix and David Cronenberg’s Xistenz, moviegoers increasingly found it difficult to discern whether the onscreen actors were residing in a ‘real world’ or if what they saw was merely the product of deep somnambulistic imagery.

The ability of outside agents to tamper with someone’s unaware sleeping mind becomes clearer after reading Sheila Marikar’s Inside Inception: Could Christopher Nolan’s Dream World Exist in Real Life? The first line of her article begins, “Dream experts say Inception’s conception of the subconscious isn’t far from science.” She further elaborates, “The premise put forth in Inception seems fantastical, other-worldly, something out of Big Brother—the idea that someone can penetrate another’s subconscious to extract information or plant an idea.”

The troublesome notion of Manchurian Candidates now enters the equation, especially when considering the words of Jeremy Clyman, M.A. in Reel Therapy: Unraveling the Mind Through Film. Clyman explains the premise of Inception’s cinematic experience. “The central character (played brilliantly by Leonardo DiCaprio) is the best in the business at inception—the art of infiltrating the dreaming mind of another in order to steal ideas.”

Once dreams merge with other dreams to create a multitude of alternative dimensions that seem even more ‘real’ than ‘reality,’ an easily manipulated condition emerges. Inception cinematographer Wally Pfister boasted, “Our mantra was: dreams feel real.”

In Evil Deeds, forensic psychologist Dr. Stephen Diamond confronted the concepts of anger, madness and destructive behavior in relation to shifting definitions of ‘reality’. “The subjective world is as real as the objective world. Both have their own reality. One is not ‘more real’ than the other. But when subjectivity trumps objectivity, or vice-versa, we get into trouble. When hallucinations or delusions, for example, become so real for a person that they overpower and nullify objective reality, we call this dangerous state of mind ‘psychosis’.”

An image of Loughner’s confused state of being is clearly recognizable in the above analysis. Diamond continued, “Inception pays respect to the powerful reality of dreams. In the film, the main infiltrators of the dream-world (along with the audience) tend to become so confused between inner and outer reality, dreaming and waking, that one of the only means they have of distinguishing between the two is by carrying with them a ‘totem’; something they can use to tell them whether they are still dreaming or not.”

On the morning of Jan. 8, Loughner’s totem (i.e. a semi-automatic weapon)—with all the accompanying symbolism that guns represent—could not provide a return from the madness occupying his pandemonium-addled mind. 

PHILIP K. DICK 

Following the Tucson massacre, psychology ‘experts’ agreed with the prognosis that Loughner suffered from schizophrenia. Interestingly, Loughner’s favorite author was science-fiction pioneer Philip K. Dick, who penned classics such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Maze of Death.

Dick, plagued throughout most of his life by varying degrees of mental illness, as well as being a frequent drug user, was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and spent decades struggling with the maddening symptoms of this affliction. On the other hand, this condition contributed to Dick’s fantastic creative output. Jack Shafer suggests, “Dick harnessed the schizophrenic’s worldview of mirror-worlds, parallel universes, and scrims behind scrims behind scrims to power his fiction. In Dick’s world, the schizophrenic response to the world is not just normal; it is heroic—and doubly heroic when the protagonist breaks through the reality barriers that have marginalized him.”

If one watches Loughner’s videos or reads his journals, it’s obvious that he views himself as an “outsider hero” who has transcended the drudgery and frivolities of those who mock him or don’t sympathize with his point-of-view. The correlation between Loughner and the characters in Dick’s surrealistic sci-fi novels is evident, not to mention the shooter’s misguided impression that he’ll somehow become heroic by engaging in a murderous rampage.

As time is bended, distorted and reoriented in these alternate realms, Shafer adds, “In Dick’s world, the paranoid view is almost always the wisest one to embrace.” Charles Manson similarly urged his “family” members to become like coyotes, for they were the most paranoid, and thus most aware, of all animals in the desert.

Akin to other reality-bending films such as Donnie Darko, Shafer expands on a concept dear to Jared Loughner prior to his Jan. 8 onslaught. “In Dick’s fiction, characters are trapped and liberated as the realities around them melt, buckle, and turn inside out. He [Dick] defined reality in a 1978 essay as ‘that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.’ But he characteristically amended this thought several paragraphs later, writing, ‘If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.’”

Of course, Loughner babbled incoherently about ‘grammar’ in his rants. Along these lines, Bryce Tierney told Nick Baumann, “By the time he was 19 or 20, he [Loughner] was really fascinated with semantics and how the world is really nothing—illusion.” In this context where words become a type of control mechanism popularized by Beat author William Burroughs, it’s easy to understand Loughner’s gravitation toward Philip K. Dick.

Alexander Star opined for the New Republic in 1993, “To enter a novel by Philip K. Dick is to enter a zone of disappearing worlds, nested hallucinations and impossible time-loops. Dick systematically blurs the boundaries between mind and matter.” 

WAKING LIFE 

Reminiscent of the above filmmakers and authors is another Loughner preoccupation, specifically the 2001 movie Waking Life. In its revolutionary use of animation and digital trickery, director Richard Linklater projects a persistent dream-like atmosphere onto the main character . . . one who, in a strangely serendipitous way, is unnamed and anonymous (as Loughner was prior to the Tucson bloodbath) as he randomly encounters an array of sages and philosophers. During the course of these meetings, the protagonist is constantly in search of what is ‘reality’ and what is a dream.

Again, Jack Shafer sets the stage. “Loughner especially loved the movie Waking Life, which chronicles one man’s adventures in the dream pool as he walks in and out of dreams, exploring ideas about the fleeting nature of identity.”

In Really Big Ideas: Waking Life, Rand Richards Cooper depicts a scene where Jared Loughner’s life imitates the art he so adored. The actor Wiley Wiggins “has a habit of levitating from his bed and floating over the city. We’re led to believe this is all either a dream from which Wiggins can’t wake up—or possibly a lost, slippery, extended moment of consciousness between a car accident and death.”

In Looking Back on Waking Life, poet and professor Caroline Hagood continues this thread in determining the status of Wiggins’ Zen-like netherworld. “Linklater’s protagonist journeys through a host of dream modes as diverse as the ideas of its dream people. He has to face the difficult questions: Am I dreaming? Am I really living? Am I dead?”

Hagood further notes, “The film’s fundamental messages possess an enlightened simplicity, such as the concept that regardless of how we categorize our experience (i.e. nihilism or dream), it is ours to create.”

Thus, does absolute ‘reality’ exist, or is it merely a function of each individual’s subjective mind? Loughner would obviously lean toward the latter possibility. Coincidentally, Linklater optioned his movie’s title from a quote by philosopher George Santayana. “Sanity is a madness put to good use; waking life is a dream controlled.” Again, from what we know of Loughner, it’s easy to see his appeal to this maxim.

Hagood pushes the theoretical notions of dreams and their impact on our ultimate destiny to another level. “The main character exists in a dream-state from which he can’t seem to awaken. In dream travel, he understands things beyond his normal comprehension in waking life. Like a visit to the underworld, he meets various explorers of the dream realm who share their wisdom; they impart the knowledge that many people think themselves awake while they are, in fact, sleepwalking through their waking life or wake-walking through their sleep.”

One can’t help but think of Loughner’s assertion that he could accomplish more in his dreams than when during waking hours; in addition to philosopher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s premise that the vast majority of people merely sleepwalk their way through life without ever realizing its much larger potential.

Eventually, Waking Life meanders into the political arena, where a bitter activist spews forth a vehement rant, then engages in an act of overt nihilism by dousing himself with gasoline. Espousing his worldview of nothingness, the man—sitting lotus style—strikes a match and calmly sets himself ablaze.

If his final Internet posts and phone messages are any indicator, Lougher fully expected to be killed once he unleashed his destructive fury outside a Safeway supermarket in Tucson. His ‘goodbyes’ clearly signified a resignation (and acceptance of) death and nothingness. 

ZEITGEIST 

Despite not being a fan of the nightly news cycle or talk radio, Loughner did possess an avid interest in politics of a conspiratorial nature. His friend, Zach Osler, told interviewers of his obsession with a documentary entitled Zeitgeist. “He wanted to watch it all the time,” Osler revealed.

Critics have labeled Zeitgeist’s online sensation as being a byproduct of “New Age paranoia,” which may have been partly fed by the movie’s trailer, which warns, “There are people guiding your life and you don’t even know it.”

One-third of Zeitgeist is devoted to exposing and debunking the government’s preposterous ‘official version’ of 9-11 in which 19 Arab ‘terrorists’ under the command of Osama bin Laden supposedly hijacked 4 commercial airlines and crashed them into the World Trade Center complex and Pentagon. Anyone who has progressed beyond believing in Santa Claus can ascertain the underlying machinations of this false-flag attack, while all it takes is an eighth-grade understanding of physics to realize that New York City’s twin towers couldn’t have fallen in any way other than via a controlled demolition. The government and mainstream media lies required to cover-up this crime surpassed even that of the Warren Commission.

Osler stated, “The Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact on Jared Loughner’s mindset.”

Another element of this important film deals with the international banking conspiracy and how it’s used as a vehicle for insidious divide-and-conquer societal control.

Jesse Walker in The New Age Assassin explores this theme of monetary manipulation that Loughner so vociferously reiterated in his YouTube diatrbes. “The movie belongs to the old money-crank tradition which stretches from the Greenback Party to the Social Credit movement, and from Ezra Pound to Alan Watts. The film’s chief argument against the Fed is that it is a private institution that profits by lending money at interest; the filmmaker prefers an interest-free independent currency that isn’t created by banks.”

Michelle Goldberg reinforces this premise in her piece, The Cult Web Film that Inspired Loughner. She describes how the movie predicates a particular line of thought. “World events are controlled by a secretive banking cabal that is using debt to enslave us all.” Plus, “The United States is about to be merged with Canada and Mexico into a ‘North American Union’ that will use a new currency, the Amero.”

For his part, Loughner’s many screeds parroted these sentiments. For instance, he wrote [grammatical errors left intact], “Corrupt government officials are in power for their currency, but I am informing you for your own currency! If you are treasurer of a new money system, then you’re responsible for the distribution of a new currency. We now know the treasurer for a new money system, is the distributor of the new currency. As a result, the people approve a new money system which is promising new information that’s accurate, and we truly believe in a new currency.”

Taken to its extreme, Ms. Goldberg ponders what she deems to be a conspiracy theorist’s biggest fear: one world government. She pontificates in a decidedly mocking tone, “The government will implant microchips in all of your arms. In the end, everybody will be locked into a monitored control grid where every single action you perform is documented.”

However, Zeitgeist’s producers couldn’t have found a more welcome audience in Jared Loughner—an avowed atheist—than when they aired their suspicions of organized religion and Christianity. In essence, these sentiments struck such a resounding chord because Zeitgeist views Christianity as a sinister—yet effective—myth that has been used by the controlling elite for 2,000 years as a function of keeping the lowly commoners enslaved and submissive. By doing so, not only have humans lost their innate Pagan-oriented attachment to Nature, but it has also alienated people of opposing religions from each other.

Michael J. Altman’s Zeitgeist: A Blend of Skepticism, Metaphysical Spirituality and Conspiracy offers the following insights: 

• “Zeitgeist argues that Christianity originated in ancient sun-worshipping religions, that the Roman Empire accepted Christianity for political reasons, and then that the empire instituted the church in western culture as a means of social control. Jesus never existed, according to this theory, and his religion is a myth that functions to empower elites and control the masses.”

• “The film offers a detailed step-by-step comparison between Jesus and various sun-worshipping cults of the ancient world. Comparing Jesus to the Egyptian god Horus, the film outlines how Jesus was a mythic figure derived from pagan sun worship. He was part of a long line of mythic figures including Attis, Krishna, Dionysus and Mithra. They were all born of virgins, the film alleges, and also experienced death and resurrection.”

• “Jesus, in short, was just the latest in a long line of astral myths that use the movement of the stars as a source of mythic inspiration.”

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE  

As a 22-year-old atheist, it’s debatable whether Jared Loughner did any extensive research into history’s most profound philosophies. Yet, Kevin Root, a psychotherapist at the Carl Jung Institute, claimed that Loughner’s hero was none other than Friedrich Nietzsche.

Regrettably, Root is utterly misguided in his understanding of Nietzsche. For starters, he called Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s author “the father of nihilism.” Secondly, Root labeled Nietzsche “the father of terrorism.” Lastly, Root made this ridiculous stretch in reasoning. “If there’s not an assumption that God is alive, there’s nothing to fear or aspire to.”

Like so many others with a limited or specious comprehension of Nietzsche—most of whom never read any of his actual works—Root misinterpreted Nietzsche’s famous dictum, “God is dead.”

Similarly, those closest to Loughner referred to him as a ‘nihilist,’ thus bringing comparisons to Nietzsche. Oddly enough, evidence exists that Loughner read Nietzsche’s The Will to Power. But this connection creates confusion because, as Sean Kelly of Harvard’s philosophy department reveals, Nietzsche never proffered a “sustained treatment” of nihilism in any of the books that were published during his lifetime.

Nietzsche wasn’t a nihilist by any stretch of the imagination. On the contrary, he was a courageous thinker that promoted “living dangerously.” In his eyes, those who endured life by playing it safe and placing restrictions on their natural instincts were on par with lowly cockroaches.

Warren Hynson delivered an excellent analysis of the beleaguered German philosopher in his article, Loughner’s Terrible Violence and His Misunderstandings of Nietzsche.

Hynson begins, “God’s death implies that the monotheistic deity of Judeo-Christian tradition has ceased to carry any meaningful moral or ethical weight in an increasingly modern, secular, and pluralized world: He no longer plays his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live.”

After establishing this foundation, Hynson continued, “Nietzsche was sensitive to the fact that the death of God meant individuals were severed from their traditional ethical anchors and were now freely drifting on the open seas of morality.”

Nietzsche urged men to create their own standards of conduct rather than relying on a remote sky-god. Hynson responded in kind, “Nietzsche was not proclaiming all moral values null or void, nor did he maintain, as Doestoevsky implied in The Brothers Karamazov, that if God did not exist then all was permissible. Instead, Nietzsche was asserting the need for a reorientation of moral authority from a traditional law-giving God to the internal moral compass of individual conscience. The notion that conceptions of personal purpose or moral meaning must now be created from within was an integral tenet of arguably Nietzsche’s most fundamental (though, again, often ill-understood) idea, the Will to Power.”

This profound paradigm shift in moral responsibility elicited further commentary from Hynson. “The Will to Power reflects the psychological rigor and self-mastery Nietzsche considered necessary for human moral development, self-realization, and thus individual moral responsibility.”

Due to severe misinterpretations over the past century, Nietzsche has been targeted as a pioneer of dark and destructive impulses, even as a quasi-mentor to the Nazis. But Hynson sets the record straight. “To say that Nietzsche was a nihilist is to presuppose that he considered existence devoid of any and all meaning.”

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In this light, Nietzsche’s idealistic outlook should be viewed as positive and life affirming. Hynson concluded, “The Will to Power was a constructive doctrine: the conscious subjective striving to distinguish oneself as a unique individual, one who has overcome their most base instinct to create a sound moral system and achieve their true human potential. The Will to Power was ultimately a means to self-control, not the infliction of pain on others.”

Nietzsche would have undoubtedly castigated Jared Loughner’s actions, or, for that matter, anyone else provoking destructive ends in his name. 

FIGHT CLUB 

As a product of the popular culture that enveloped him, some have compared Jared Loughner to Tyler Durden—an anarchist, aspiring revolutionary, primitivist and nihilist—who seeks to annihilate civilization in Fight Club, a movie based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name.

By engineering acts of sabotage against capitalist companies in an American society plagued by rampant consumerism, Fight Club emerged as a Generation X paean to lawlessness . . . one where civilization itself is undermined in order to create a new utopian paradise that lays on the ruins of our past industrialized world.

Where Nietzsche “killed God,” Fight Club’s Durden despises—and ultimately aspires to change—a mind-numbed plastic society that surrounds him. To combat this “meaningless generation,” Durden creates fledgling armies of combat-warriors who he hopes will eventually trigger pure mayhem to overthrow a vacuous horde of consumer lemmings that he so loathes.

Durden proclaims, “We are the middle children of history. We have no unifying cause. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.”

At another point he cries, “We’re all raised by television to believe that one day we’re all going to be millionaires, movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t, and we’re figuring that out now.”

To achieve maximum impact, Durden tells his followers, “Your father was your model for God, and if your father bails out, what does that tell you about God? Our fathers were our models for God. My dad bailed out on me; just walked away . . .”

As a result, Durden—played by Brad Pitt in the movie—raises his basement-oriented Fight Clubs out of the underground via Project Mayhem . . . his theater for mass destruction.

Chaos is the ultimate goal, as Tyler Bogdan describes in Morality and Nihilism in Fight Club. “In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, the alter ego of the main character seems to have no regard for any human social convention. Tyler rebels against even basic societal norms for a reason that is futile and will inevitably change nothing. Either he actually believes that what he’s doing is right, or he sincerely does not care about the consequences of his actions. The type of behavior that Tyler is exhibiting best describes that of the philosophical belief of nihilism.”

Bogdan adds, “Nihilism is the state of mind in which one does not believe that any action is preferable to any other action and therefore, in the eyes of a nihilist, morality does not exist.”

The havoc that ensued after Jared Loughner—as an urban gunman—uncorked a Pandora’s box of chaos is strikingly reminiscent of what Tyler Durden aspired to in Fight Club. Bogdan further relates, “The most extreme instances in which Tyler exhibits nihilism is the entire concept of Project Mayhem. Not only are the actions of Project Mayhem completely socially unacceptable, they are also absolutely illegal. He would seem to have no obligation to follow any boundaries, and the only reason that modern civilization follows boundaries is because of social obligations to adhere to laws and unwritten rules.”

Lastly, Bogdan’s descriptions of Tyler Durden can equally be applied to Loughner’s failure to differentiate between dream worlds and ‘reality’. Bogdan states, “Another aspect of nihilism is the disbelief that there are any concrete objects at all, and that existence does not exist . . . Tyler is only an abstract entity, he has no physical existence. He is in fact non-existent. To him, everything is in fact not entirely existent because he only has access to objects when he is in control of his narrator’s body.”

When Loughner emerged in ‘reality’ with his ‘totem’ (i.e. a Glock semi-automatic pistol with a 31-round magazine), he finally took control of the narrative, as every news agency in our mass-produced consumer culture focused on his own personal Project Mayem. 

HEATH LEDGER’S “JOKER” 

Echoing many of the previously mentioned influences, Loughner’s friend Ashley Figueroa provided this thumbnail sketch of the troubled assassin. “He feels people should be able to govern themselves. We don’t need a higher authority.”

Framed within the context of this anti-authoritarian stance, another acquaintance, Zane Gutierrez, said of Loughner, “He loves creating chaos.”

A third sidekick, Bryce Tierney, ascribed Lougner’s motives for the Tucson carnage as such. “More chaos, maybe. I think the reason he did it was mainly to promote chaos.” Tierney followed with a comparison to the Joker of Batman fame. “He fucks things up to fuck shit up. There’s no rhyme or reason. He wants to watch the world burn.”

Heath Ledger’s Joker manifested himself as an “agent of anarchy.” In The Better Joker: Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger, Mike Walsh determined that the Joker’s degeneracy surfaced because “he sees the world as a cruel joke, and he only desires to make other people see the joke.” Loughner too wanted others to peer through the inane nature of grammar, money, and government control.

Dark Knight director Chris Nolan thought in similar terms where the Joker was concerned. “We wanted to show the pure anarchy of someone who wants to do harm purely for its own sake and for his own entertainment. Johnny Rotten [of London’s legendary punk band The Sex Pistols] was one of those we had in mind to help us achieve that.”

Actor Christian Bale, who starred as Batman, described Ledger as a “punk rock Joker.” In a review of The Dark Knight, Robin Ruinsky observed, “Nolan sees the Joker as a man devoted to anarchy, to creating mayhem for mayhem’s sake. He’s not in it for money, but for the joy of destruction.”

For his part, Johnny Rotten—the Sex Pistols lead vocalist—sang in Anarchy for the U.K.: 

I am an antichrist

I am an anarchist

Don’t know what I want

But I know how to get it

I want to destroy passersby

‘Cause I wanna be . . . anarchy 

One online commentator envisioned the Joker in hauntingly similar terms. “He was just Anarchist. He wanted to see the world burn, no government, just see it all go down. He had no care for anything other than bringing pain and destruction to the population of Gotham.”

Heath Ledger himself reveled in the clamor of his alter ego. “He has zero empathy. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a character, and probably will ever have.”

In a profound scene from The Dark Knight, the Joker illustrates how he views our existence as utterly absurd. He tells the bed-ridden character Two-Face, “Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. I just . . . do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon’s got plans. They’re schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts at controlling things really are . . . It’s the schemers that put you where you are . . . I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets . . . you know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying! If I tell the press that a gang-banger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics because it’s all part of the plan . . . Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair! You live . . . you die.”

After Jared Loughner’s “mug shot” was released to the press . . . one showing a bald-headed lunatic smirking at the camera . . . it’s not a stretch to imagine the Joker replacing him on the morning of Jan. 8, filling that parking lot in Tucson with a blaze of gunfire . . . just for the hell of it. 

TAXI DRIVER 

Thus, on that fatefully horrific day, Jared Loughner—with his head shaved ala Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver—erupted in a symphony of gunfire outside a Safeway supermarket. To augment the eerie synchronicity to Robert Deniro’s famous character, Loughner took a taxi to confront congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at her political function.

Whereas John Hinckley, Jr.—Ronald Reagan’s alleged would-be assassin—harbored a love-struck obsession with teen actress Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Jared Loughner too is a confluence of pop culture influences that helped shape his distorted worldview. Of course, personal responsibility ultimately lies with Loughner himself, but the factors outlined in this work help society as a whole understand the un-understandable. 

Written: January 17, 2011 

JARED  LOUGHNER:  ANOTHER  MIND-CONTROLLED  PATSY? 

Mind-controlled lone-nut assassins have filled the pages of conspiracy books for decades. On Jan. 8 did 22-year-old Jared Loughner—who has been charged with killing 6 individuals and wounding 13 others during a Tucson bloodbath—add another chapter to these annals?

After completing two compulsory “diversion programs” in 2007 and 2009 while also identifying himself as a recruit at the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command (MEPS), did an outside agency capitalize on and exploit this obviously troubled young man?

After examining online posts that were allegedly written by Loughner, the similarity to patsies such as Sirhan Sirhan and Arthur Bremer is striking. For instance, Loughner’s obsession with Manchurian Candidate-style manipulation is obvious. One entry reads, “The government is implying mind control and brainwashing on the people by controlling grammar.”

He continued in a vein where it appeared as if Loughner couldn’t differentiate between dreams and the conscious world. “I’m a sleepwalker—who turns off the alarm clock. All conscience dreaming at this moment is asleep.”

More than a subtle hint of hypnotic actions taken without the subject’s recall is evident in Loughner’s rambling screed. “Sleepwalking is the act or state of walking, eating or performing other motor acts while asleep, of which one is unaware upon awakening.”

Such words could have been lifted directly from the diary of Robert F. Kennedy’s supposed killer.

Loughner also implies that external forces are eavesdropping on his thoughts. “I know who’s listening: Government Officials and the People. Nearly all the people who don’t know this accurate information of a new currency aren’t aware of mind control and brainwashing methods.”

After studying one of Loughner’s preoccupations (i.e. “My favorite activity is conscience dreaming”), clinical psychologist Jeff Kaye uncovered a YouTube post relating to this obscure topic. Kaye—a human rights advocate active in the anti-torture movement—described the video on Jan. 8. “Conscience Dreams includes two main characters: the Agent and the Assassin. How coincidental is that? In the end of the video, the Agent strangles the Assassin to death, and a third character, the Dream Maker, laughs diabolically.”

Loughner also linked to a bizarre video where a hooded figure wearing black sets fire to an American flag. Strangely, the background music, a song called Bodies by the group Drowning Pool, contains the following repetitive lines: “Here we go . . . Here we go . . . Here we go . . . Something’s got to give . . . Something’s got to give . . . Something’s got to give . . . Let the bodies hit the floor . . . Let the bodies hit the floor . . . Let the bodies hit the floor . . .”

Again, when compared to the psychic-driving nature of Sirhan Sirhan’s notebooks, troubling similarities cannot be denied.

Further, Loughner listed 21 of his favorite books. 3 of them have been cited by researchers as containing recurring mind-control tools used during MK-ULTRA experiments: The Wizard of Oz, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass. Four others depict dystopian societies that offer cautionary tales of totalitarian control: Animal Farm, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Despite claims by Janet Napolitano’s DHS that Loughner had ties to anti-Semitic organizations such as American Renaissance, in actuality the alleged shooter was described as a politically radical loner with liberal leanings who held Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in high esteem. He also appeared to be fixated on 2012 end-of-times prophecies.

Some television talking heads are characterizing Loughner as a schizophrenic who somehow experienced a psychotic break. But the study of alternative psychological literature goes a step further by mentioning the phenomenon of “dissociated personalities” where an individual that has been subjected to trauma-based mind control finds it necessary to compartmentalize areas of their brain as a defense mechanism to let them cope with day-to-day life.

However, when a certain trigger-word is utilized, the individual reverts back to or follows a pre-programmed command. When Loughner wrote, “I’m able to control every belief and religion by being the mind controller,” it makes one wonder why he possessed such an interest in this subject.

In one of Sirhan Sirhan’s notebooks the words “mind control mind control mind control” were repeated over and over. Birds of a feather certainly seem to flock together.
 

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