Motherboard

He’s reminded us of our terrible political discourse and gun control policies, but the insane 22-year-old who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six bystanders on Saturday isn’t a representative of Tea Party vitriol. A believer in government slavery and hologram worlds, a lover of Alice in Wonderland and Mein Kampf, and a master of mind control, Jared Lee Loughner is a testament to the darker, more deranged corners of the country that flourish on the Internet. Before bullets, his main weapon against the system wasn’t just a cache of really weird Youtube videos; it was really weird grammar.

At a campaign event in 2007, Loughner had a chance to ask Giffords a question: ‘What is government if words have no meaning?’" However she answered, it didn’t satisfy him. He subsequently told a friend that Giffords was ‘a fake’ — a term perhaps resonant with other conspiracy theorists’ views of the world as a series of “fictions.”

His interest in “conscience dreaming” points to the influence of David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist who says the world is controlled by a race of reptilian aliens, and urges “conscious dreaming” as a way of stepping out of our Matrix-like existence.

But Loughner’s grammar instructor, via the web of course, was likely an anti-government activist named David Wynn Miller, a self-professed genius with an IQ of 200 who travels the country preaching to people in the Sovereign Citizen anti-tax movement. His claim to fame, and insanity, is a linguistic remix he created in 1988, the year he discovered “the mathematical interface in the truth that certifies all 5,000 languages, frontwards and backwards.”

Use strange punctuation and you can alter your legal status as a person, making you impervious to legal prosecution and capable of tax evasion, argues Miller. For instance, David Wynn Miller can be taxed, but :David-Wynn: Miller cannot be. (Meanwhile, the U.S. government contends, in everyday English, that Mieller owes income taxes back to 1993.)

More specifically, as he explained at the Homeland Security Expo in Georgia in 2003:

The reason I use a full colon and a hyphen in my name, the first full colon, which is full colon David, it means for the David hyphen Wynn. That’s my given name, and it’s also a noun, because it uses a prepositional phrase. … Because I use prepositional phrases, through punctuation, which is classified as hieroglyphics, which makes me a life, l-i-f-e. Now, when you don’t punctuate your name … David is an adjective, Wynn is an adjective, Miller is a pronoun. Two adjectives are a condition of modification, opinion, presumption, which modifies the pronoun, pro means no on noun. So therefore, I’m not a fact. I’m a fiction.

Strange connections

This is far from mainstream, and even on the far right, reports the Anti-Defamation League, few people have any idea what he’s talking about. It’s also not clear that Loughner was influenced by Miller – although Miller’s theories are typical of the bizarre internet where the loner shooter apparently spent much of his time. And their deranged philosophies of language echo each other.

“The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” Loughner writes in one video, adding that “words don’t have meaning.” His hypnotic, tautological claims seem to prove that point:

If I teach a mentally capable 8 year old for 20 consecutive minutes to replace an alphabet letter with a new letter and pronunciation then the mentally capable 8 year old writes and pronounces the new letter and pronunciation that’s replacing an alphabet letter in 20 consecutive minutes.

Don’t spend too much time trying to dissect that with your Warriner’s.

The postmaster of Hawaii

For his part, Miller, contacted by the Daily Beast, suspects that Loughner is a victim of an Air Force program on mind control – or at least a victim television crime shows. “Murder is taught every day, one hundred times a week on crime shows,” he says. “They’ve been brainwashing this child for twenty years. It’s a wonder everyone isn’t walking around insane.” It sounds like a rare moment of sanity for a man with a long list of beliefs that could make the Unabomber sound like a tenured professor.

• The Anti-Defamation League calls Miller "one of the most unusual of the ‘common law gurus’ who travel the country holding seminars and offering legal advice.
  Miller claimed Bill Clinton and the entire Supreme Court of the United States were students of his.

• He’s also (unsuccessfully) assisted people convicted of abusing children, like a woman in Hawaii who broke the teeth out of her nieces’ and nephews’ mouths with a hammer (he claims to be the “plenipotentiary judge, ambassador and postmaster” of Hawaii).

• He believes that the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11 was part of a $12 trillion bank heist perpetrated by the U.S. Postal Service, which has run the world since 1873. Postal authorities sneaked into the towers, replaced all the chairs, tables and file cabinets with plastic furniture, and detonated it with a magnetic pulse started by plastic explosive.

• He argues that maritime law is the only worldwide governing authority because the Earth is a vessel in a sea of space.

• In 2012, Miller says the world as we know it will come to an end — and so will our grammar, giving us a chance to start fresh, “bring peace to this world,” end wars, crime and lying. The process will begin in Hawaii, he argues, using math, or something:

The last kingdom on Earth was Hawaii. The last monarch died on the 6th of December, 1872. And you subtract the 8, if you subtract 45 days under maritime law over the three-day grace period better known as the lemon law, you get the 22nd of October, 1872, was when Hawaii filed bankruptcy. If you add 70 years to that, you get the 7th December 7, 1941, the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Add 70 years to that, plus the 45 day laws of trust, the 3-day notice, and the 90 days that no law becomes legal, you have 4-6-2012.

“We’re trying to build a better world,” says Miller. Like Loughner, he makes no push for violence in his rants. But in imaginary worlds, the line between deranged action and deranged language can wear thin. That’s what this was about – not divisive politics but sound and fury, signifying nothing. Meanwhile, Congresswoman Giffords, who was shot in the head and remains in critical condition, will be lucky if she can speak normally ever again.