They're coming to take our guns away

[babylonsister]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/04/07/richard_poplowski/


They're coming to take our guns away

Cop killer Richard Poplawski is an extremist. But amid the deafening din of the right wing's anti-government rhetoric, how extreme is he?

By Gary Kamiya


April 7, 2009 | It would be convenient to pretend that Richard Poplawski, who killed three Pittsburgh policemen on Saturday with an AK-47, was just a right-wing nutcase. A devotee of the white supremacist Web site Stormfront, Poplawski believed that the United States was controlled by a secret Jewish cabal that had a master plan to abrogate freedom of speech and use the U.S. military to police Americans.

It would be easy for us to cordon Poplawski off, pretend that his ugly and paranoid worldview had nothing to do with the Obama hatred spouted by the American right. But the truth is that Poplawski's hateful views cannot be separated from the increasingly extreme ideology and rhetoric that characterize the contemporary American conservative movement. As his friend, Edward Perkovic, told the Associated Press, Poplawski feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon."

Such obsessions don't come out of a vacuum. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the GOP have been whipping up hatred and fear of Obama and "liberal Democrats" for years. Joined by the National Rifle Association, which has run false and irresponsible ads claiming that Obama is planning to take away Americans' guns, they have encouraged and helped to create a pathological right-wing subculture in which free-floating hatred of "the government" mixes with a maniacal fetish for guns. Poplawski is the diseased fruit of that ugly tree.

Yes, Poplawski dwelt in the most extreme part of the right wing. He is responsible for his action. You can't tar every conservative because a pathological murderer shared some of his or her core beliefs. There has been no epidemic of shootings carried out by whacked-out readers of "The Turner Diaries." Only the most unhinged neo-Nazi wing of the right will defend Poplawski's actions, just as only the most brain-dead "radicals" defended Lovelle Mixon's shooting of four Oakland police.

But the Lovelle Mixons of the world do not have a powerful media machine, not to mention a major political party, loudly whipping up fears that policemen are coming into black communities to terrorize their inhabitants. With the collapse of the GOP into the party of Rush Limbaugh, and as Limbaugh and his ilk grow ever more reckless in their attacks on Obama, the boundaries between "respectable" right-wing paranoid hatred and "extreme" right-wing paranoid hatred are getting more blurred. Right-wing fanatic du jour Glenn Beck teased his recent Fox show with images of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin and said that he was wrong to say that Obama was leading America to socialism -- because Obama is actually a fascist. "They're marching us towards 1984," Beck intoned. "Big Brother, he's watching."

snip//

If the right wing keeps whipping its troops into a frenzy by accusing Obama of being a fascist, gun-hating dictator, America may have a new group of outlaws to fear: freedom-loving, gun-worshipping "patriots" like Poplawski.

[doctor jazz]

1. Hysterical hit pieces like this are much more of a threat than

defenders of constitutional rights are.

[babylonsister]

2. You must be a Fox fan. You think this attitude is perfectly normal?

You think mass murders and stockpiling guns aren't being encouraged by some of these r/w talking heads? Do you live in reality?

[doctor jazz]

3. No, I am not a Fox fan, I simply accept that this phenomenon is vastly overblown by

badly-informed talking (writing) heads. I live in one of the 'reddest' areas in the country and have never heard any of these
idiotic statements from an actual person.

[babylonsister]

6. Then you must have missed these, and there are plenty more

where they came from. The r/w hate machine is stirring up these people whether you want to believe it or not.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=5403948
Pittsburgh Cop Killer was a fan of Glenn Beck's

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=5396826
Fox "News" and its connection to the Pittsburgh cop massacre

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=5392943
When Wingnut BS Goes Bad

[slay]

7. I don't think it's "overblown" when a man murders 3 cops for no reasons other than FEAR

and HATE - the type spewed forth by Rush Limburger and his minions every single day. Ask the wifes and kids of those dead cops if this guy's far-right lunacy is "overblown". Oh and I live in a very "red" area as well - one where republicans went around and took pictures of people's houses who had Obama signs. When asked why they were doing so - they said they wanted to be able to identify the traitors for the coming civil war. No shit. Just cause you don't know people like this by name (which is probably a good thing) these people do exist - and there are lots of them - Rush and Glen Prick and Bill Orally don't get huge ratings and HUGE paydays for nothin ya know. Fear and hate, wrapped in a flag with a gun in one hand and a bible in the other. Yee-haw.

[smoogatz]

10. Beck's ratings on Fox are through the roof.

There are obviously a lot of wingnuts out there who think he's got something to say to them. The NRA is also whipping people up, pretending that Obama's going to impose some sort of gun ban in order to generate buzz, memberships and gun sales. It's crass, it's irresponsible, it's obviously dangerous, and it's arguably seditious.

[wizstars]

12. "Vastly overblown"???

"never heard any of these..." what bubble do you live in???

[The_Commonist]

4. "Hysterical hit pieces" "defenders of constitutional rights"

Oy vey!

[mr1956]

5. Hysterical??

The article points out the fact that there are consequences for the lies and distortions being fed to scared people.

[izzybeans]

8. .

:rofl:

[1776Forever]

9. My question is "Will any of these hate mongering people like Beck be charged with incitement?"

After all isn't it true that if you are in a crowded building and you yell "Fire!" and there is none aren't you inciting a riot or are they truly able to continue this treacherous "free" speech without any consequences? I have tried before to get this message out and I would only get 3 or 4 comments and most of them would say, "I don't listen to Beck or Fox." Well someone in the government should be listening because these people are dangerous!

Yesterday I was in a place where they had Beck's show on and I overheard him say twice that President Obama WILL take their guns away. He said President Obama will either take them physically away or tax them to death because of them. Then he had someone on to debunk the Fema Camps he has been ranting about and then turned the tables on them and "joked" about them. What a case of manic illness this guy has!

Here is a great article on his atrocious behavior:

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/46929,features,glenn-beck-the-latest-blowhard-on-fox-news

Glenn Beck: the latest blowhard on Fox News
Now it’s Hitler instead By Charles Laurence

(snip)

It is hard to tell what he is talking about, or what he thinks the US should do

He features a "Doomsday Room" and a segment called "Economic Apocalypse". He warns that he has so far been unable to disprove rumors that FEMA, Washington's emergency response office infamous for it Hurricane Katrina failure, is "building concentration camps". He went on: "They're marching us to 1984. Big Brother, he's watching."

It is hard to tell just what Beck is talking about, or what he thinks America should actually do to fix its problems. He urges his listeners to "be the people you were on September 12th, 2001".

It is the style that counts, the performance. Media pundits explain that the trick to ratings lies in expressing the emotions of the angry and self-described dispossessed, offering them an identity in a lonely land. In the right slot – midnight, say, on cable feeds to cheap motels and Appalachian hollows - such balm to troubled souls might be a worthy contribution to society. But Beck's rapid rise is mainstream, in a just-before-prime time show on America’s most-watched cable news channel.

Ratings posted at the end of last week show that just three months into the Obama era, the Fox blowhards rule the cables networks..........

..........

What the H is going on with this kind of hate mongering talk they are hiding behind the 1st Amendment to incite?

[TheWraith]

11. This is one of the reasons I just bought another gun.

The wingnuts are getting increasingly wingnutty, and I worry that they're eventually going to fly off the handle in numbers greater than one.

[No More Bushbots]

13. Once again, a prime example of an attempt to trample the Second Amendment

By someone who screamed bloody murder about the Bushyt Misadministration's attempts to deny Americans their Fourth Amendment rights with warrentless wiretaps.
Its the Constitution, the LAW of the land.
It's also amazing that the same people that applaud the fact that the SCOTUS supports the woman's right to choose, deride them for ruling in the favor of private gun ownership.
This attitude also feeds the right-wing paranoia, but the anti-gun minority in this country refuses to admit it.

[nxylas]

15. How does providing context for the Pittsburgh shootings "trample the Second Amendment"?

The whole point of the article was that the attempts to infringe on Second Amendmant rights exist mostly, if not entirely in the minds of hysterical right-wing propagandists like Glenn Beck.

[wizstars]

16. it doesn't protect every Tom, Dick, & Joe's right to own an AK-47

Read it, count the commas (there are three), diagram the sentence (if that's not over your head), and maybe you'll be able to figure out what it really applies to.

[wizstars]

14. I don't have a problem with that

(taking guns away from r/w nutcases--or anyone else inclined to use one on another person.)