If You're the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Media will Mistake Your Guesses for Gold.

So when the organization offered an opinion about Jared Lee Loughner's worldview, reporters paid attention. It was "hard to say" whether the murderer was "a right-wing extremist," spokesman Mark Potok wrote a day after the Tucson shootings, but it's "pretty clear that Loughner is taking ideas from Patriot conspiracy theorist David Wynn Miller of Milwaukee." Potok elaborated: "Miller claims that the government uses grammar to 'enslave' Americans and offers up his truly weird 'Truth-language' as an antidote. For example, he says that if you add colons and hyphens to your name in a certain way, you are no longer taxable." And since Loughner wrote that the government was performing "mind control on the people by controlling grammar"...well, you do the math.

We may well eventually learn that Loughner encountered Miller's odd ideas at some point. But it's worth noting some things that Loughner hasn't done. For one, he hasn't added any colons or hyphens to his name. Also, he hasn't declared that he isn't taxable. Miller's following, to the extent that he has one, consists of people who think his ideas will allow them to avoid penalties in court. Yet when Loughner was arraigned, just a day after Potok published his speculations, he didn't invoke a single Millerism.

And while Miller believes he has discovered a "Correct Language" (sorry, ":Correct-Language:") that everyone should be using instead of the "bastardized" English imposed by shadowy elites, Loughner's YouTube channel raised the possibility of creating new languages. What exactly he meant by that is anyone's guess, but it sounds rather different from Miller's project.

In the meantime, people who actually knew the killer were talking to the press, dropping clues about what Loughner really was reading and viewing. Loughner's friend Zach Osler, for example, told ABC that while the killer wasn't interested in mainstream political debates, he was a fan of Peter Joseph's 2007 documentary Zeitgeist. Joseph's movie is one-third arguments that religion is a fraud, one-third 9/11 trutherism, and one-third conspiracy theories about bankers.

Word. I can get in the first few days the left-wing media trying to pin this on the right-wing, but come on, it's been two weeks and just about every rational American should be looking past that tired old claim that has no basis in reality.