Breaking: Hey Right Wing, You Can Have Jared Loughner Back

Someone’s finally sorting out the mess that is Jared Loughner’s mind and discovering what most of us have suspected all along. Loughner has much more in common with rightwing extremists than with the political left. Justine Sharrock at Mother Jones explains what Loughner’s obsession with grammar means to people in the “sovereign citizen” movement, which among many other things, maps out strategies to avoid paying taxes.

Glenn Beck would no doubt be envious of the hairpin logic used by the “sovereign citizens”

Many of his seemingly random statements—on “grammar,” “the ratifications,” “the new currency,” and more—echo the teachings of the “sovereign citizen” movement, a right-wing school of thought alleging that Americans have been surreptitiously stripped of their God-given rights.

These are not random parallels, as I discovered in reviewing Loughner’s YouTube videos. In multiple instances, he uses the precise talking points sovereign-citizen theorists teach via a thriving cottage industry of books, websites, bogus legal companies, and seminars; one popular theorist, David Wynn Miller, told the New York Times that Loughner has “probably been on my website.”

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