Myopic Pundits Have No Idea What They’re Talking About

Political junkies live in a bubble. We thrive in communities in which everyone knows who someone like Reince Preibus is and is expected to have some sort of opinion about him; we can rattle off the names of every senator in Congress without a problem; we don’t have to Google Sarah Steelman’s name to remember who she is and what she stands for. Whether specialists or hobbyists, we eat, sleep, and breathe politics.

This echo-chamber mentality has its uses, but it devolves into a maddening lunacy when we begin to believe that everyone in the country immerses himself in the same partisan rancor that we do.

Since the weekend’s massacre, a depressingly large number of pundits and media figures have blamed it on “incendiary rhetoric,” “violent metaphors” and “angry calls for revolution” from the likes of Sarah Palin — pointing the finger specifically at her “Take Back the Twenty” campaign, which featured a map showing crossfire symbols over several Congressional districts, including Gabrielle Giffords’.

This reaction is astonishingly myopic — and demonstrates an utter lack of knowledge about the conspiracy-theory community to which the shooter, Jared Loughner, belonged.

For those of us who have spent time investigating this disturbing underground, his delusions are all-too-familiar — and have nothing at all to do with American political discourse. Someone like Loughner, who professes belief in CIA mind-control techniques and apparently belonged to organizations warning against a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, simply does not view Gabrielle Giffords in terms of her partisan affiliation. In his mind, she is first and foremost not a Democrat or a Republican, but a governmental agent of the conspiracy.

The unfortunate truth is that, based on what we know, Jared Loughner was a textbook-case lone nut, and we simply cannot guard against his types by toning down our rhetoric. If the Tea Party had never existed, Gabrielle Giffords would still have been shot.

What does it say about certain pundits that their first reaction to mass-murder was not to investigate the shooter’s beliefs, but to immediately assume, without a trace of evidence, that he must have been influenced by SarahPAC’s metaphors? We can and should debate the merits of Sarah Palin’s rhetoric — but it is absolutely mad to project partisan motives onto every person and event with a connection to the federal government. Are pundits really so out of touch with the rest of the country as to imagine that more than a handful of Americans knew of the existence of SarahPAC’s midterm strategy?

By the same token, conservatives are wrong to respond to left-wing accusations against the Tea Party by pointing out Loughner’s apparent taste for Karl Marx. If it is true that Loughner immersed himself in revolutionary literature, it is likely that he identified with the authors’ hatred toward all existing institutions, not with the finer points of Marx’s collectivist ideology.

To understand Loughner, we must step outside of the realm of political ideology and instead examine the psychology behind conspiracy theories. It’s an entirely different world, marked by completely different assumptions. More saliently, it has nothing to do with the likes of Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann.

There is more in this world than is dreamed of by partisan ideology. Loughner’s grisly act had absolutely nothing to do with American politics. Our nation’s pundits are becoming dangerously myopic if they cannot imagine that a person could commit an act without reference to Sarah Palin.