On Saturday January 8, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a 22 year-old man identified as Jared Lee Loughner. Congresswoman Giffords was Arizona's first Jewish member of Congress. An individual identified as Jared Lee Loughner had recently posted a number of videos on YouTube including one that listed Mein Kampf as a favorite book.
At first glance the videos, which consist of incoherent white text on a black background, appear to be the ramblings of a lone, mentally ill individual. Upon closer inspection however, they spew the rhetoric of an anti-semitic, anti-hispanic, "Christian" right wing confederacy known as "Sovereign Citizens." This loosely organized, little know managerie of militias, miscreants and misfits spawned such violent luminaries as Oklahoma City Bomber Terry Nichols and, more recently, father and son team Jerry and Joseph Kane who gunned down two Arkansas police officers during a routine traffic stop last May.
The Jewish Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been tracking the "Sovereigns" for over a decade.
The Southern Poverty Law Center posted this instructional video on YouTube on November 1, 2010 to assist law enforcement officers to identify potentially violent "freemen" on the highway and to take appropriate precautions when approaching them. The video shows Jerry and Joe Kane mowing down two policemen in cold blood. It also shows Jerry Kane threatening to murder government officials prior to the shooting. This video should be shown to every police officer in America.
Before Saturday's attack, Loughner posted disturbing videos citing the need for a new grammar and currency to escape from government mind control. Freeman redemption ideology includes the belief that the US Government was replaced by a pseudogovernment either at the time of the civil war or in 1933 when the United States decoupled from the gold standard. Repdemption specialists travel across the US like the traveling snake oil salesmen and southern preachers of yesteryear, teaching adherents to file liens against public officials (a practice known as "paper terrorism.") LikeJudge David Wynne Miller, who has something against adverbs, they believe that substitution of peculiar alternative grammar and punctuation in official-looking documents will magically cause their mortgages or credit card debts to disappear.
Unsurprisingly, they sound like lunatics to the uninitiated.
Here are some of Loughner's YouTube posts:
Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and other TV and radio hosts cater to and incite this racist, anti-semitic fringe to violence with their jabbering about "the real America," the "War on Christmas," "death panels" and other fictional travesties. By now, anyone paying attention to the news realizes that Congresswoman Giffords was one of ten members of Congress targeted after her vote for healthcare reform though Palin's infamous and (and finally, scrubbed) rifle sights to be "taken out" after a "reload" in 2010.
Here is Congresswoman Giffords' prophetic interview on the topic:
Here she is in her last official Congressional attack before the shooting reading the first amendment of the United States Constitution on the floor of the Congress:
Sadly, she was gunned down (along with a nine year-old girl born on 9/11 who has since died of her wounds) by what increasingly appears to be a right wing "patriot".
Maybe Speaker Boehner should should stop shedding crocodile tears and use his ridiculously oversized gavel to stamp out the hate rhetoric spewed so shamelessly by members of the Republican Party.