Posted on | November 25, 2025 | No Comments
Psycho killer Jared Loughner
Remember this guy? On January 8, 2011, Jared Loughner used a Glock-19 with a 33-round magazine to kill six people and wound 13 others, including Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, at a political rally in Tucson, Arizona. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Democrats tried to blame the Tea Party movement generally, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in particular, for the shooting. These claims turned out to be false — as I will explain in a moment — but that 2011 shooting is back in the news because Giffords married Mark Kelly, now a Democratic senator from Arizona, and Kelly tried to leverage that fact to silence his critics:
Senator whose wife was shot fears for safety after Trump sedition accusation
Senator Mark Kelly — whose wife, Gabrielle Giffords, narrowly survived an attempted assassination while she was in Congress in 2011 — says he is worried about “increased threats” to his family’s safety after Donald Trump accused him and other Democratic lawmakers of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH”.
“This kind of language is dangerous, and it’s wrong,” Kelly said on Friday on MS NOW’s Morning Joe . . .
“My family has suffered from political violence,” Kelly said on Morning Joe. “My wife … was nearly assassinated — shot in the head at a political event. We have rising political violence in this country, even the president — two assassination attempts. He should understand that.”
Leaving aside Trump’s bombastic rhetorical style, and Kelly’s role in the “Seditious Six” video, let me instead call your attention to the man who shot Gabby Giffords, and what we know about his motive.
It matters, because I covered the story back in 2011:
The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” — parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist. . . .
“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, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.” . . .
You can read the rest of that article I wrote for The American Spectator in January 2011. Doing a critical analysis of that fringe conspiracy-theory video struck me at the time as work that was above my pay grade. Given the nationwide media attention to the Tucson shooting, and the fact that ABC News had reported about Loughner’s Zeitgeist obsession, wouldn’t you expect that someone on the staff of the New York Times or the Washington Post would have done that work? But for some reason, none of them did, and the only journalists who spent any time researching Zeitgeist were me and Jesse Walker of Reason magazine.
Threats against public figures should be investigated and the persons responsible should be arrested and prosecuted, but what Kelly has done here — invoking his wife’s shooting as a way to deflect criticism — needs to be called out as the cheap trick it is. “This kind of language is dangerous,” Kelly says, after recording a video implying that the President of the United States is giving “illegal orders” to our troops. As if that kind of language is not dangerous? But none of this had anything to do with what Jared Lougher did in 2011. It was not “dangerous” political rhetoric that motivated Loughner, it was a weird conspiracy-theory video and, of course, his own psychotic condition: “After his arrest, two medical evaluations diagnosed Loughner with paranoid schizophrenia and ruled him incompetent to stand trial.” Crazy People Are Dangerous.
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