Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [109]
“Let’s Roll”
But there is one right-wing leader who does truthfully seem sensitive to the violence . . . Glenn Beck. Alluding to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Beck admonished his audience, “If you ever hear someone thinking about or talking about turning violent, it is your patriotic duty to stop them. The only way to save our republic is to remain peaceful—forceful but peaceful.”49 But Beck offered a curious reason for his opposition to violence: he’s concerned that it would be counterproductive to the cause. Worse, it could give the evil progressives the excuse they’re looking for to crack down on the real Americans. As he explained:
Just one lunatic, like Timothy McVeigh, could ruin everything that everyone has worked so hard for, because these people in Washington won’t pass up the use of an emergency.50
In other words, the progressives want conservatives to commit violence. It’s all part of their secret plan. “Why are they trying to poke you and poke you and poke you?” Beck asked his audience. “They need you to be violent. They are begging you for it. You are being set up. Do not give them what they want.”51
See, it’s the progressives who are provoking violence, not the reasonable conservatives of Fox News and talk radio, not Glenn Beck. A few weeks before killing three cops, Richard Poplawski posted a YouTube video of Beck and Representative Ron Paul discussing paranoid allegations of secret concentration camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).52 But after the tragedy, Beck excused himself of any responsibility by comparing himself to a flight attendant:
Blaming TV or radio hosts for the nutjob who killed three Pittsburgh police officers over the weekend is like blaming a flight attendant after a terrorist takes down a plane. In other words: Giving passengers a safety talk to prepare them for a worst-case scenario doesn’t mean you are responsible should a terrorist make that worst-case scenario happen. One person is providing important information. The other is a nutjob who would’ve acted no matter what.53
Beck’s analogy isn’t quite right, however. He hasn’t been calmly telling the passengers where to find their life jackets and thanking them for flying with Fox News. He has been hysterically shouting, “THE PILOT IS TRYING TO CRASH THE PLANE! WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” For example, here is a “safety talk” that Beck delivered to his Fox News passengers a few months after he invoked the flight attendant defense:
I told you yesterday buckle up your seatbelt, America. Find the exit. There’s one here, here and here. Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash-landing because this plane is coming down because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees . . . They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered.54
That’s some safety talk. A safety talk like that might lead some passengers to do more than just buckle their seatbelts. It might even lead some “nutjob” to shout, “Let’s roll!” and rush the cockpit.
I highly doubt that Glenn Beck is deliberately encouraging violence, and I believe that he was sincere when he told his audience that violence would be counterproductive to the conservative cause. In this regard, he shows more sense than some of his colleagues who have avoided telling their constituents to calm the hell down. But that’s not the point.
Whether or not Beck and other right-wing leaders intend to provoke violence, their incendiary rhetoric has the effect of provoking it. When these leaders persuade people that a malicious and alien adversary is trying to destroy everything that they believe in, to appropriate their wages and property, to abolish their religion, to restrict their freedom of speech, and even to arrest or injure them, these