Since the assassination of Democratic presidential candidate Senator in 1968. Congresswoman Giffords remains in critical condition in a Tuscon hospital. Giffords was one of 9 people shot. Six people were killed including John Roll, the chief federal judge for the state of Arizona. A 9 year old elementary school girl was also gived. 13 others were wounded in the shooting spree.
The alleged assassin, Jared Lee Loughner, had had a history of mental illness. He had been suspended from his community college after erratic and intimidating behavior. Students at the community college recalled being frightened of him. The college administration suspended Loghner barring him from returning until he underwent psychiatric evaluation and produced a note by a psychiatrist indicating he wasn’t a danger to the public. Loughner apparently didn’t re-enroll and attempted to enter the US Army. It’s quite revealing that the US military, desperate for recruits and known to be extremely relaxed about who it accepts, rejected Loughner. Loughner’s Internet postings, including his You Tube channel, seemed to be that of one suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. His videos were erratic and cryptic messages about the government and monetary currency. While obviously neither cogent not coherent, the themes he espoused are the trade of the American far-right.
Gabrielle Giffords, along with fellow Latino House representative Democratic Congressman Raúl Grijalva, had long been the political targets of the far right both within Arizona and by the Tea Party. Giffords was named by the National Organization of Women and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League as one of the leading members of Congress devoted to the legalization of abortion rights in the country. Both organizations devoted money and resources to her re-election campaign. Giffords, who was originally a Republican before switching parties, has been one of the leading pro-choice politicians in the US Congress. Her pro-choice politics made her a despised figure among the far right Tea Party.
Congressman Grijalva was a target of the far right within Arizona because he is Latino and one of the leading advocates for the rights of both legal and illegal Latino immigrants. Grijvalva was the most vocal and outspoken opponent of Arizona’s Bill 1070, which criminalises all Latinos and those that look Latino as illegal aliens. Both Giffords and Grijalva were supporters for The Affordable Care Act. Both had received numerous death threats and had their offices attacked. The office window of Giffords had been shot out. Rocks were thrown through the windows of Grijvala’s office. Grijalva’s office had been vandalized with a Nazi Swastika spray painted on the exterior.
Federal judge John Roll has also been the target of death threats by the far right based on decisions he made regarding immigration cases. White supremacist anti-immigrant vigilantes have grown in number and patrol the streets and highways throughout the State of Arizona. Judge Roll and his family had 24 hour protection from the US Marshal Service.
The shooting of Giffords and Roll were clearly acts of political terrorism. Last year, the Tea Party, led by Sarah Palin organized violent protests across the country against President Obama and in opposition to health care reform. Tea Party activists attended town hall meetings held by Democrat congress members with loaded firearms. Leading up to the November Mid-Term elections, Republican Tea Party candidates all across the country threatened armed uprising and revolution if they didn’t win the elections. Giffords has been specifically targeted by Sarah Palin on her Twitter posts and other Internet pages. Palin’s site had a graphic of a map of the United States. There were cross hair targets of several congressional districts held by Democrats. Gifford’s district was located on the target cross hairs. In June, Gifford’s Tea Party Republican opponent Jesse Kelly promoted a campaign event on his website that read: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”
Encouraged by Kelly, during the course of the election campaign, right-wing protesters would gather weekly near her office carrying signs with slogans such as “It’s time to reload” and “One way or another, you’re gone.”
Giffords fearing for her life and quite possibly for Democracy spoke out warning: “When people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that action.” In response to such criticism, Palin replied on twitter, “Don’t retreat, reload.”
In the aftermath of the shooting in Tuscon, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik suggested Jared Lee Loughner may have been influenced by right-wing political rhetoric: “When the rhetoric about hatred, about mistrust of government, about paranoia of how government operates, and to try to inflame the public on a daily business, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with.”
This sentiment was echoed by Gifford’s father. When he left the hospital after visiting his daughter made it clear who was responsible for the rampage. When he was asked whether his daughter had any enemies, he said, “Yes, the whole Tea Party.”
Since Saturday, the entire right wing media has been on the defensive. On his Sunday radio broadcast, Alex Jones denied that the conservative and patriot movement had anything to do with the shooting rampage. Jones used the incident to even call for less restrictions of gun laws! “If Giffords had been packing heat, she would not have been shot. If anyone present had a gun, they would have been able to take him out before he was able to shoot others.” This sentiments were echoed by newly elected Tea Party Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky who repeated the trite cliché: “Weapons don’t kill people. People kill people.”
Not only are these statements dishonest but they also falsify the facts over the past two years. Alex Jones himself, led the anti-Obama crusade with his documentary “The Obama Deception” released within two months of Obama taking office. “The Obama Deception” calls Obama a “communist” and goes as far as comparing Obama to Adolph Hitler. Glen Beck of Fox News has devoted hours of airtime accusing Obama of being a “communist”. Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which included Fox, has stirred up racist angst against Obama. In Spring 2009, his newspaper The New York Post had an offensive cartoon depicting Obama has a primate that had been shot dead by the police. Since then, many pundits and hosts on Fox have openly called for Obama to be killed. For two years, the right wing media of Fox TV and AM talk radio has whipped up irrational fears about Obama and have called for his assassination.
Last year during the lead up to the final votes on Health Care Reform, thousands of protesters led by Glen Beck, took the streets of Washington threatening legislators with violence. Last April, thousands of Tea Party protesters held an armed rally and march across the Potomac River in Virgina. The midterm election campaign became increasingly violent leading up to voting day.
In January 2010, Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle raised the possibility of armed insurrection.
“You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second
Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.
I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this
Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”
In March 2010, now Speaker of the House John Boehner gave a deadly warning to a Cincinnati Democrat representative about supporting Health Care Reform providing federal funding for abortions:
“He may be a dead man. He can’t go home to the west side of Cincinnati. The Catholics will run him out of town.”
The same month Michele Bachmann, the chair of the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, incited her constituents to armed conflict:
“I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing, and the people — we the people —
are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.”
Before the Kentucky senatorial debate, Rand Paul supporters attacked and stomped on the head of MoveOn.org activist Lauren Valle. One of her attackers Tim Profitt went as far as to demand an apology from Valle!
In October 2010, Dallas, Texas Tea Party candidate Stephen Broden also raised the call for a violent overthrow of the US government: “Our country was founded on violence. That option is on the table. We shouldn’t remove anything off the table.”
Given the this highly charged political atmosphere, Saturday’s massacre shouldn’t come as a surprise. Indeed, it was quite expected. However, the massacre raises more questions. Who exactly is Jared Lee Loughner? On his You Tube and Internet postings, he mentioned “sleepwalking” and “conscience dreaming”. “Mind control” was also a common leitmotiv. His friends have told the media that he was “on a secret mission” for the US government. Furthermore, the police are looking for a second suspect. The suspect is described as a man being his is 50s and was reported seen with Loughner arriving at the event hosted by Congresswoman Giffords.
Since assassination of President John F. Kennedy, there have been a string of assassinations and attempted assassinations against politicians and celebrities. All of these incidents have been staged by “lone” gunmen with a history of erratic behavior and mental illness. Their targets have all been significant public figures. Yet nearly all the assailants didn’t seem to have specific political motivations for the actions.
Loughner seems to fit the mold of the assassins that killed Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon. Loughner was obsessed with mind control and the occult. Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. Sirhan had always contended that he had been hypnotized and that he was in fact under mind control. In 2005 Peter Evans,the British author of the book Nemesis , spent 10 years researching the book, has unearthed evidence to support Sirhan’s contention that he was hypnotised into being the “fall guy” for the murder. Evans identifies the hypnotist, who had worked on CIA mind control programmes and who was later found dead in mysterious circumstances. Sirhan’s lawyer, Larry Teeter, is convinced that the Palestinian activist was chosen to be a Manchurian Candidate-style assassin through hypnosis.
In a 2005 interview, Teeter told The Independent newspaper: ”I know it was done. It was consistent with the US government’s program developed by the CIA and Military Intelligence to enable handlers to get people to commit crimes with no knowledge of what they are doing.”
This past December 8 marked the 30th anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon. His assassin, Mark David Chapman, shot Lennon at point blank range in front of The Dakota apartment complex. Chapman was said to be in a daze after the shooting leafing through The Catcher in the Rye. In a BBC interview from prison Chapman recounted the event.
“He walked past me and then I heard in my head, ‘Do it, do it, do it,’ over and over again, saying ‘Do it, do it, do it,’ like that,” Chapman, preternaturally serene, recalled in a BBC documentary several years after going to prison. “I don’t remember aiming. I must have done, but I don’t remember drawing a bead or whatever you call it. And I just pulled the trigger steady five times.”
British lawyer/journalist Fenton Bresler, author of the book Who Killed John Lennon?, came to the following conclusion: Chapman was a brainwashed hit man carrying out someone else’s contract. Bresler thesis is that Chapman was a mind-controlled assassin manipulated by some right-wing element possibly connected to the newly elected (and not even inaugurated) Reagan apparatus of reaction.
Lennon was viewed as a dangerous subversive both by FBI founder and head J. Edgar Hoover and President Richard Nixon. Like Giffords and RFK, Lennon had made many enemies within the American far right political apparatus.
There’s a link between Shirhan and Chapman. RFK’s apparent lone killer, Sirhan Sirhan, and Chapman shared a defense psychiatrist. But while Dr. Bernard Diamond couldn’t skirt the obvious fact that Sirhan was under hypnosis (Diamond wrote it off as self-hypnosis), he labeled Chapman a “paranoid schizophrenic.”
There are still too few details in the Loughner case to date to make any concrete conclusions. The only reason why The Age of Nepotism is making a link between these 3 cases, stems from the fact that Loughner was obviously obsessed about mind control.
Regardless of whether or not Loughner was simply paranoid schizophrenic and truly a right wing lone lunatic, the fact remains is that Congresswoman Giffords and Judge Roll had made powerful enemies within the far-right of the American political establishment. They had received death threats and became victims of politically motivated murder. The right wing in the US from the Republican Tea Party to Fox News and Talk Radio bear the moral and political responsibility for creating polarized violent atmosphere of fear and madness.
The Union of the Republic is in grave danger. Democracy along with human and civil rights are imperiled. The political and social union of the country is facing its greatest threat since 1860. This has been the results of the attack of democracy led by the Republican Party over the past decade. The second part of this series will look at the stolen Presidential election of 2000 and examine the political and social disintegration of the country since then.
