This is starting to look like it could be another Joe Stack case.
What do we know right now? What information do we have on him? Practically nothing besides his Youtube account and screenshots of his Myspace page.
Yes, he lists Animal Farm and We The Living, both well-known anti-Soviet novels, but he also lists The Communist Manifesto. Why would a right-wing lunatic acting on a tendency to violence "encoded in conservative DNA" show such support for communism? And why would someone who is agnostic at the very least be so influenced by the Tea Party's rhetoric, which has a significant Christian element?
And look at the Myspace page screenshots. Notice the vague rants about how "the fucking pigs are genociding". "I know your brainwashed to love them fuckin cops", he wrote. Does this sound at all like the rhetoric of a right-wing authoritarian? I thought the Tea Party wanted more police presence, at least according to the left! Can't they make up their minds? And why would someone influenced to murder by the generally patriotic Tea Party burn a flag?
Why blame right-wing rhetoric at all, for that matter? He read the Communist Manifesto and liked it enough to list it as one of his favorite books. Doesn't that contain violent rhetoric far more explicit than anything to come out of the Tea Party?
We really don't have all that much information yet, but the information that we do have doesn't support the position that many in the media are pushing: that Loughner was influenced by Sarah Palin, American Renaissance (a relatively well-known white nationalist magazine), and "right-wing rhetoric". There is no reason to claim that Loughner will "inevitably" be linked to the far right, since, contrary to the claims of the liberal media, the "tone of Loughner's rantings" is not "almost exclusively conservative". So let's not jump to conclusions.
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