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Jan. 5, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

13:06

1823 True News: Gabrielle Giffords, Jared Loughner and Madness

Three issues you will never see in the mainstream media about the recent shooting -- from Freedomain Radio -- http://www.freedomainradio.com

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Hope you're doing very well. It is Sunday the 9th of January 2011, and as I'm sure you are aware, there has been a tragedy, a shooting in Arizona, and a congressperson has been shot.
	This is Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona congresswoman, formerly a Republican, I think, who became a Democrat.
	Who has a mixture of left and right-wing policies.
	She is for the health care bill.
	She's also for stricter controls over moving slash immigration.
	And she is an advocate of gun ownership.
	And her shooter is Jared Lee.
	Now, I've heard a bunch of pronunciations.
	Lochner, Launer.
	It's L-O-U-G-H-N-E-R, which is interesting because if you spell it like doe, with the O-U-G-H silent, he actually becomes loner.
	Which is actually, I think, quite appropriate in many ways.
	Now, I don't obviously know much about it, and nobody does, but I'll toss my two cents in for anybody who's interested.
	The history of this guy, he's 21, some people say 22, some people say 21, but he's very young.
	And he was living at home with his parents.
	And over the past year or two, he's been exhibiting increasingly delusional behavior, There are YouTube videos apparently where he is saying that there's an invisible parrot on his shoulder, that he wants to add letters to the English language and numbers to the numeric system, and he talks about conspiracy theories and the fiat currency.
	Okay, well that one's not a conspiracy theory.
	And he lists, of course, among his books that he likes, some Ayn Rand, so of course people are going to say that's responsible.
	He lists some George Orwell, which probably people aren't going to say are responsible.
	Alice Through the Looking Glass, I'm sure Lewis Carroll gets off the hook.
	Mein Kampf, the Communist Manifesto, and he was a pot smoker who apparently was not very keen on religion, so naturally all pot smokers and all people who are skeptical of religion are going to be cast into this camp of craziness.
	Everybody's going to try and make as much political hay out of this tragedy and disaster as they can.
	What that means, of course, is that additional government controls, additional government regulations, additional paranoia, additional security, additional bills to the taxpayer, or rather the future taxpayers who aren't even born yet.
	And that is natural and inevitable.
	Whenever something like this occurs, there is an extension and expansion of state power, as if the massive extensions and expansions of state power in the past We're not enough.
	Just a little bit more, and we'll all be safe.
	Now, interestingly, about 30 years ago, in Congress, there was virtually no security of any kind.
	Not even a little bit.
	You could go in, you could wander the halls, you could knock on people's doors, there was virtually no police presence whatsoever.
	And then a series of bombs and the anthrax scare, of course, after 9-11 led to vastly increased security.
	But it's very interesting.
	If you go all the way back to the beginning of American history, American presidents such as Jefferson, he actually swam naked in the river near the White House and had chats with perhaps somewhat surprised constituents while he was hanging naked and dangling to the four breezes.
	So this is the degree to which the increases in state power lend themselves to increases in violence as a whole.
	Now, it is, of course, completely tragic.
	This woman has been shot through the head.
	A nine-year-old girl was also murdered.
	She was actually in a horrifying circumstance of fate.
	She was born on 9-11, and she was nine years old, and she died in this just absolutely appalling and horrible way.
	That having been said, this woman was on the Armed Services Committee, therefore she was responsible for running, at least to some degree, these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have claimed the lives of over a million people.
	It will be a good day in human history when you receive, let's just say, even one-tenth of one percent of empathy, shock, horror, and sympathy for the victims of America's wars as we do for those who are running them.
	I do feel sympathy, of course, for this woman.
	I feel much more sympathy for the victims of the wars that she's helping to prosecute.
	I'm sorry to say it, but it is a basic fact that this is the reality of what happens.
	The other, I think, thing that's interesting is, I think it's fairly safe to say that this Jared fellow is mentally ill.
	This is obviously, I'm not competent to give a diagnosis, and this is at a great distance, but about six months ago, he was in college, and he disrupted the classrooms with shouting out nonsensical and confusing phrases to the point where he The administration suspended him from school,
	and they called the parents in for a meeting, his parents in for the meeting, and told Jared's parents that he was unwell, mentally ill, and that they would not accept him back into the school until he got clearance from a mental health evaluation.
	He dropped out in October, a spokesperson for the college said.
	And this is something you won't hear about, I doubt.
	There are a couple of things you're not going to hear about, and I'm not going to talk about the mainstream stuff, because you can get that anywhere.
	The things that you're not going to hear about this tragedy are, first and foremost, what on earth were this boy's parents doing?
	He lives in their house.
	They're paying his bills. To my mind, that makes you sort of morally responsible for what it is that your child is doing.
	Because in a sense, and he was an adult, so I mean to be fair, but by paying his bills, they're shielding him from the consequences of his craziness, right?
	So if he's out there and he has a job and he's going crazy, then he's going to need to contact social services.
	He doesn't have a safety net, so at least in terms of the family.
	But if you're paying the guy's bills and giving him his computer and his internet access so he can post MySpace and YouTube videos, and if you're giving him all of these resources, then you're kind of responsible for him.
	And so the responsibility really falls upon the parents who were informed, according to the college officials, who were informed of his deteriorating mental health status.
	Nobody knows, as far as I can tell, whether he did receive psychiatric treatment or whether he did receive a mental health evaluation.
	It seems somewhat unlikely because he did not go back to school.
	So either he received the mental health evaluation and failed, Or he received it and passed, in which case he would have been back in school.
	So it seems unlikely that he did.
	I think that the parents have remained a completely invisible...
	I mean, they were mentioned in one news article out of the dozens that I perused last night.
	The parents have received only passing mention as if they're completely incidental.
	This Jared guy was creating videos where he's wearing a garbage bag setting fire to the American flag.
	He's living in a house with two parents.
	Do they not notice that he's going crazy?
	Do they not notice that he's going insane?
	If he has gone insane, then his moral responsibility becomes extremely lessened, if not eliminated, in the same way that you don't punish a dog who's got rabies.
	If I have a dog and the dog gets rabid and I don't do anything about that dog and it goes out and savages someone, if I don't get it treated, if I don't get it cured, then I'm morally responsible for what my sick dog does and I think that you're not going to hear much about where the parents are in all of this.
	The other thing that I can almost guarantee you're not going to hear about is whether or not he was on psychotropic meds.
	The first thing that I thought of which is I'm sure true for many people who know anything about this topic when you hear about these kinds of savage acts of violence is whether he's on psychiatric medication.
	He described what he called conscience dreaming.
	And I'm sure that he mistook the word conscience for conscious.
	The degree, this obviously intelligent guy, his reading and writing skills, again, it's a complete indictment of the public school system, but it's almost too blasé to even mention.
	He talked about conscious dreaming.
	He talked about feeling like he was sleepwalking.
	And this is something that has occurred for a lot of people who've ended up Committing these acts of violence that they feel completely dissociated from themselves.
	There was one report of a fellow who went to bed and woke up in an institution because apparently he'd shown up at school with a gun and he had no memory of this occurring.
	And he was also on these meds.
	The Columbine killers, of course, were on these meds.
	The Virginia Tech shooters' medical records were very quickly sealed and nothing was revealed about that, although he had spent time in a psychiatric facility at least one night.
	And... He also talked about, or seemed to, Jared, seemed to talk about quite powerfully about his lack of sleep.
	So sleeplessness, a sense of dissociation, a feeling like he's sleepwalking, conscious dreaming, an inability to differentiate between reality and non-reality combined with violent impulses.
	Again, I'm no diagnostician and you could take everything that I say with a huge grain of salt, but to my knowledge, these are extremely consistent with the effects of these kinds of meds.
	The other thing which we haven't heard about, and again, it may just be because it's a weekend, it may be that this, I'm guessing this stuff isn't going to be pursued, is the degree to which he had been on medication for mental illness or mental health problems.
	Throughout his time in school, as a child, as a teenager, these things are depressingly common.
	This kind of drugging of, quote, problem children is depressingly common in the U.S. educational system.
	And I doubt anyone's going to look very deeply into that because, I mean, there are huge and powerful interests out there that don't want these kinds of correlations to come out about the correlation between delusional acts of violence and these kinds of medications.
	So you're not going to hear much about that.
	Was he under the care of a psychiatrist?
	If the psychiatrist was taking care of him, wouldn't the psychiatrist have done a simple Google?
	Psychiatrists, of course, are supposed to ask, are you experiencing any thoughts of harm to yourself or towards others?
	And he was quite delusional and aggressive in his videos.
	Wouldn't the psychiatrist have done a quick Google rather than relying on the self-reporting of somebody who's obviously quite deranged?
	So you won't hear about the parents, you won't hear about the meds, and when you think about it, of course, The teachers he had for 14 years or 13 years had...
	Care, custody, and control over him and responsible for him.
	His parents had him for 21 or 22 years and are responsible for taking care of him and were obviously, I would say, deficient in that regard.
	So it won't be looking at the people who actually had contact with him and who had care over him.
	The only people who seem to have acted in any way to respond to his growing delusions were the officials at the college he was attending, but it may well have been too late at that point.
	My guess, he was abused as a child.
	My guess, he'd been on antipsychotic or Ritalin or other sorts of psychotropic meds for quite some time, or he'd been prescribed them more recently.
	He may have been going through a withdrawal.
	What does this mean about the moral culpability?
	Well, that's a very complex question, but...
	What's going to happen, of course, is people are going to try and associate him with Sarah Palin's crosshairs on her campaign map and saying that's the problem.
	They're going to try and associate it with him reading certain books.
	They're going to try and associate it with his drug use.
	They're going to try and associate it with his agnosticism or skepticism towards religion.
	Everybody's going to sail right over the only salient points around there, which is parents, teachers, mental health professionals, and medication.
	That's the only thing that people should be looking at, which means, of course, that it's the only thing that people will never look at.
	I hope I'm wrong about that, but I'm not holding my breath, because people just want to go on a witch hunt.
	And the last thing I'll say about this awful situation is that all of the tough guy politicians, congressmen and other politicians, judges, have been fairly unanimous in calling for this young man, obviously delusional, to feel the full weight of the law, and it would not at all surprise me, If he ended up facing the death penalty.
	And they talk about this wanton and senseless taking of life and that this young man needs to accept the full consequences of his actions in taking the lives of others.
	Well, that of course is master to slave language.
	Because this young man, murdered without a doubt, A number of people, including a child.
	Hideous, reprehensible and vile.
	What about George Bush starting a war that has claimed the lives of a million people?
	Is he never going to be held legally accountable for a million murders or more when this young man must face or probably will face the death penalty if he's not declared insane, which seems unlikely.
	He will face the death penalty for these murders when he was obviously in a delusional state while George Bush, who starts wars while not in a delusional state, gets a presidential library, a book deal, and a pension.

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