She should be working with Katherine Vanden Heuvel at The Nation
magazine, that communist publication (don't believe me, check the
history of it).
On 01/23/2011 10:11 AM, Tommy News wrote:
> The Cult Web Film that Inspired Loughner
>
> by Michelle Goldberg
>
> We now know a little bit more about the matrix of ideas that helped
> inspire Jared Loughner's murderous rampage on Saturday. According to a
> friend of his interviewed on Good Morning America on Wednesday, the
> conspiracy documentary Zeitgeist "poured gasoline on his fire" and had
> "a profound impact on Jared Loughner's mindset and how he views the
> world that he lives in." He was also, according to his friend's
> father, influenced by the documentary Loose Change, a classic of the
> 9/11 Truth movement. This does not mean that either of these movies is
> responsible for making Loughner do what he did, but it does show how
> his madness was shaped by a broader climate of paranoia, and offers a
> clue as to why he targeted Gabrielle Giffords.
>
> According to his friend, Zach Osler, Loughner "didn't listen to
> political radio, he didn't take sides, he wasn't on the left, he
> wasn't on the right." Naturally, conservatives have seized upon this
> to exonerate themselves of charges of incitement. But it's not that
> simple. It's hard to place Zeitgeist and Loose Change on the
> conventional partisan spectrum—both come from a shadowy conspiracy-mad
> subculture where the far right and the far left meet. Yet it's the
> contemporary right, the right of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, that
> has mainstreamed ideas from this demimonde in an unprecedented way.
>
> To understand how, it helps to look at the career of Alex Jones, an
> Austin radio host and the country's most prominent conspiracy
> theorist. Jones was the executive producer of Loose Change, and chunks
> of Zeitgeist are taken from his documentary Terrorstorm. Jones
> disagrees with elements of Zeitgeist—he's a Christian, while Zeitgeist
> attacks religion—but he's said he supports 90 percent of what's in the
> movie, and he promotes it on his show. "A lot of people find my work
> because of Zeitgeist," he said during an interview with the
> documentary's director, Peter Joseph.
>
> The point, again, is not that Alex Jones, Zeitgeist, or The Tea Party
> are responsible for Loughner's crimes. The point is that he targeted
> Giffords for a reason, one rooted in his unhinged interpretation of
> recognizable conspiracy theories.
>
> Both Zeitgeist and Alex Jones promote the idea that world events are
> controlled by a secretive banking cabal that is using debt to enslave
> us all. Zeitgeist echoes Alex Jones in warning that 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." "When the time is
> right," Zeitgeist informs us, "the North American Union, The European
> Union, the African Union, and the Asian Union will be merged together,
> forming the final stages of the plan these men have been working on
> for over 60 years: a one-world government." This government will
> implant microchips in all of our arms. "In the end, everybody will be
> locked into a monitored control grid, where every single action you
> perform is documented," it says.
>
> Zeitgeist, which came out in 2007 and has since spawned two sequels,
> is an Internet phenomenon. The two-hour documentary is available for
> free online, and according to its creators, it has been viewed tens of
> millions of times. Its claims are heatedly debated on Ron Paul forums
> and anarchist websites; excerpts appear on numerous Tea Party pages.
> It has a global following: When it played in a South African theater,
> the Cape Times described it as a "disturbing reminder" of "the subtle
> move towards a micro-chipped society, with the world's population
> potentially destined to be logged onto a monitored grid, leading up to
> a centralized one world economy."
>
> The idea of control and manipulation is the movie's real theme,
> knitting together its disparate parts. Zeitgeist's second-third
> rehashes classic 9/11 Truth theories that purport to show that the
> attacks were actually an inside job. This was done, the final section
> argues, at the behest of a banking cabal that has repeatedly goaded
> the United States into war in order to solidify its wealth and power.
> Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at the think tank Political Research
> Associates and one of the country's foremost experts on right-wing
> movements, points out that Zeitgeist borrows liberally from the G.
> Edward Griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island, an "expose" of the
> Federal Reserve System popular with the John Birch Society, Alex
> Jones, and some Tea Party groups. It also draws on ideas from the
> Protocols of the Elders of Zion, though it never mentions Jews.
>
> Right-wing conspiratorial beliefs have long festered on the fringes,
> but in the Obama era, they've been injected into the center of our
> politics like never before. The distance between figures like Alex
> Jones and the contemporary conservative movement has shrunk
> alarmingly.
>
> Steeped in the rhetoric of the militia movement, Jones has promoted
> just about every conspiracy theory out there: He even accused the
> Illuminati of putting its symbols in the Starbucks logo as a taunting
> show of strength. Though rooted in the right, he also occasionally has
> guests from the far left—he's hosted Democratic Congressman Dennis
> Kucinich [Kucinich is on the "far left"? -- WH] as well as Texas
> Republican Louie Gohmert. His political hero is Ron Paul—he runs
> RonPaulWarRoom.com, and Paul is a frequent guest on his radio show.
> But until recently, most conservatives disdained him. In 2007,
> Michelle Malkin argued that Paul's association with Jones was enough
> to disqualify the congressman from participating in GOP primary
> debates.
>
> Since then, though, Republican politics have become a lot more
> paranoid. Tea Party groups and Fox News started echoing Jones'
> warnings that the swine flu virus was really a pretext to establish
> martial law. Lou Dobbs went on Jones' show in 2008 to discuss the
> coming North American Union. In March 2009, Jones released The Obama
> Deception, which argued that Obama is the front man for a
> transnational oligarchy working to create a one-world totalitarian
> state. The day after it came out, the online Fox News show Freedom
> Watch did a joint broadcast with him. "I appreciate what you're
> exposing," Fox host Andrew Napolitano told Jones. "I must tell you
> that there was a time when the types of things that you are warning
> against was not discussed openly and publicly." Glenn Beck
> fictionalized Jones-style conspiracy theories in his 9/11 truth-themed
> novel, The Overton Window.
>
> People who study the right have worried for months about the
> consequences of paranoid beliefs about treasonous government plots. In
> 2009, Berlet authored a report titled, "Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy
> Theories, Demonization and Scapegoating." It traced the history and
> dissemination of the kind of conspiracy theories floating around the
> right, and said, "People who believe conspiracist allegations
> sometimes act on those irrational beliefs, and this has concrete
> consequences in the real world."
>
> Loughner was caught up in the sort of conspiratorial fantasy Berlet
> was describing. His YouTube videos are often unintelligible, but in
> their moments of lucidity, they rail against manipulation of the
> currency system and the illegitimate power of the federal government,
> obsessions of the right-wing populist milieu. In this milieu,
> politicians like Gabrielle Giffords weren't simply wrong, they were
> agents of an intolerable tyranny manipulating the economy and turning
> Americans into slaves. Hence the vitriol and intimations of violence
> that scared Giffords and her staff well before Saturday's shooting.
>
> The point, again, is not that Alex Jones, Zeitgeist, or The Tea Party
> are responsible for Loughner's crimes. The point is that he targeted
> Giffords for a reason, one rooted in his unhinged interpretation of
> recognizable conspiracy theories. Right-wing activists and politicians
> have traded on such theories, giving them far more mainstream exposure
> and credibility than they ever had before. Experts on political
> violence have been arguing for months that this is extremely
> dangerous. People like Loughner are the reason why.
>
> To read it all:
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-13/zeitgeist-the-documentary-that-may-have-shaped-jared-loughners-worldview/
>
>
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