The alleged assassin’s MySpace page has been taken down, but you can read the text in this Huffington Post article. It also provides the YouTube videos identified as being from a “Jared Lee Loughner.”
The postings describe no coherent political ideology, said Mark Potok, an investigator with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks violent extremists. Loughner was not in the Center’s database of hate groups and radicals.
“He certainly sounds like he’s gone off the deep end, but at the same time, he is mouthing some rhetoric that is quite reminiscent of the anti-government movement … It’s hard to know what to make of his ideology.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center is a leftist organization, of course, that does its best to tie racists and extremists to conservatives at every opportunity. If they cannot find Loughner in their database, that’s a pretty good indication that he’s not a conservative activist. But of course that doesn’t stop their spokesman from tying him to “the anti-government movement”—and we know who they are.
One of the first headlines from The New York Times—“Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics”—did its bit to make that connection, too, but in another Times article we read something more specific about Loughner’s political views:
“As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy,” [a] former classmate, Caitie Parker, wrote in a series of Twitter feeds Saturday.
Don’t expect to find that quote repeated too often in the days ahead.
4:08 am on January 9, 2011
