Here are some hints of Loughner's political "thinking." His YouTube videos:
ClassItUp10's Channel
Summing up Loughner's self-description: He's a military recruit, doesn't trust government officials, criticizes currency not backed by gold, says current laws are "treasonous," and admits he may fit definition of "terrorist."
But wait, there's more:
Suspect’s Odd Behavior Caused Growing Alarm
By Kirk Johnson, Serge F. Kovaleski, Dan Frosch, and Eric Lipton
In the text on one of the videos, for example, Mr. Loughner states, “No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver.” He also argues that “the current government officials are in power for their currency” and he uses his videos to display text about becoming a treasurer of “a new money system.”
The position, for instance, that currency not backed by a gold or silver standard is worthless is a hallmark of the far right and the militia movement, said Mark Potok, who directs research on hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“That idea is linked closely to the belief among militia supporters that the Federal Reserve is a completely private entity engaged in ripping off the American people,” Mr. Potok said.
But Mr. Loughner also posits in his Web postings the idea that the government is seeking to control people through rules and structure of grammar and language.
This is similar to the position of David Wynn Miller, 62, a former tool-and-die welder from Milwaukee who describes himself as a “Plenipotentiary-judge” seeking to correct, through a mathematical formula, what he sees as the erroneous and manipulative use of grammar and language worldwide. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Mr. Miller a conspiracy theorist, some of whose positions have been adopted by militias in general.
“The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” Mr. Loughner said in a video. He also defiantly asserted, “You control your English grammar structure.”
Mr. Miller, in an interview, said the argument sounded familiar. “He’s probably been on my Web site, which has been up for about 11 years,” Mr. Miller said. “The government does control the schools, and the schools determine the grammar and language we use. And then it is all reinforced by newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and everything we do in society.”
Law enforcement officials said they suspected that Mr. Loughner also might have been influenced by things like American Renaissance, a conservative magazine that describes itself as “America’s premiere publication of racial-realist thought.”
“We think that white Americans have an entirely legitimate reason to want to remain a majority in the United States because when a neighborhood or a school or an organization changes in demographics and becomes majority black or Hispanic, it is no longer the same institution or neighborhood,” said Jared Taylor, its editor.
He added, “It may be shocking to hear something stated so bluntly.”
By Jennifer Griffin
No direct connection, but strong suspicion is being directed at American Renaissance, an organization that Loughner mentioned in some of his internet postings and federal law enforcement officials are investigating Loughner's possible links to the organization. The organization is a monthly publication that promotes a variety of white racial positions.
"The group's ideology is anti government, anti immigration, anti ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), anti Semitic," according to the memo which goes on to point out that Congressman Giffords is the first Jewish female elected to high office in Arizona. A recent posting on American Renaissance's website on January 7 begins with an article entitled: "Exit poll: Whites are Different." The site goes on to list anti-immigration articles. Investigators are also pursuing Loughner's alleged anti-Semitism.
For more thinking like Loughner's, see Only Property Owners Should Vote?, Conservatives Hate Wikileaks and Indians, and Islamophobia Just Like Stephen's.
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For more on the subject, see:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-arizona-shooting-extremism-20110112,0,7697607.story
Loughner's ramblings appear rooted in far right
Most wind up concluding that Loughner suffered from mental problems. But experts said that several oft-repeated phrases and concepts—his fixation on grammar conspiracies, currency and the "second United States Constitution"—seem derived from concepts explored with regularity among elements of the far right.
"What you can see across the board in his writings is the idea that you can't trust the government—that the government engages in mind control against its citizens," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long monitored the radical right.
Loughner's assertion that he would not "pay debt with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver" is a running theme among right-wing opponents of the Federal Reserve system.
"The people who talk about the manipulation of currency follow it backward from the IRS to the Federal Reserve … that it's run by either secret, powerful elites or secret, powerful Jewish elites," said Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a nonprofit group that also monitors right-wing extremism.
Berlet wrote an article this week noting that similarly disjointed talk of government currency and money manipulation plots was found in the case of antiabortionist John C. Salvi III, convicted in the 1994 clinic shootings in Massachusetts that left two women dead and several people injured.
Potok said it appeared that Loughner's frequent references to government control of the public through grammar ("The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," Loughner said in one video) were drawn from David Wynn Miller, a far-right activist in Milwaukee.
Miller has argued to a small but avid following that the government launched a control program by writing citizens' names in capital letters on their birth certificates, and that if colons and hyphens are added to people's names in a certain way, they become a "prepositional phrase" no longer subject to taxation.
Miller said in an interview that he didn't know Loughner, and, in reference to the large number of people who have visited his website, added, "There's never been anybody in 31 years to act like this."
Berlet noted Loughner's declaration about a "second Constitution"—an issue debated by mainstream scholars and white supremacists alike over the markedly different character of the amendments that came after the Civil War.
The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments deal with citizenship and voting rights for freed slaves, immigrants and all those born in the U.S., the latter being a key point of controversy in the modern immigration debate. They also establish the validity of the public debt of the United States"—echoing, Berlet suggested, the issue of U.S. currency.
"Reading the second United States Constitution, I can't trust the government because of the ratifications," Loughner wrote.
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