Former friend on Jared Lee Loughner's beliefs and motivations

Mother Jones has a profile of alleged gunman Jared Lee Loughner that paints Loughner as a man driven less by any particular political ideology than by paranoia, feelings of superiority, an obsession with lucid dreaming, and a desire to force other people to "wake up". A former friend says that Loughner decided Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was a "fake" when she didn't adequately answer his question—"What is government if words have no meaning?"—at a 2007 open forum. The part about words having no meaning apparently came from Loughner's lucid-dream related theories about the unreality of the physical world. He believed that if the real world wasn't real, then nothing said there was real either.