A Teachable Moment?

Back in March I wrote:

I still recall the first time I saw Glenn Beck. It was one evening on CNN in October 2006. I’d never heard of Beck before, but my initial response was, “This guy’s a propagandist!”

Glenn Beck has made quite a career out of fear mongering and blackboard propaganda. His career just avoided taking an even nastier turn recently when the California Highway Patrol got into a shootout with Byron Williams on his way to kill him some progressives at the Tides Foundation. The good folks over at C&L followed the story. Williams’ mother explained he’d been watching TV and getting angry at “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.” Williams himself told police he wanted to “start a revolution” over whatever wrongs he imagined had been done to him.

But why target the obscure Tides Foundation? Where does it even get mentioned on TV? Media Matters tracked the references:

We don’t know what Williams was watching, or that television played a role in his decision to target Tides. However, if it did, according to our Nexis searches, the primary person on cable or network news talking about the Tides Foundation in the year and a half prior to the shootout was Fox News’ Glenn Beck.

According to our searches, since Beck’s show premiered on January 19, 2009, Tides has been mentioned on 31 editions of Fox News programs, 29 of which were editions of Beck’s show (the other two were on Sean Hannity’s program). In most of those references, Beck attacked Tides, often weaving the organization into his conspiracy theories. Two of those Beck mentions occurred during the week before Williams’ shootout.

Williams isn’t the first such character to go to guns. There was David Adkisson, the Knoxville Unitarian Church shooter and Richard Poplawski in Pittsburgh, for example. A paranoid, Tea Party-inspired video getting wide circulation this week virtually recommends Sharron Angle’s “Second Amendment remedies.” (The guy at timestamp 1:10 reminds me of the cultish-looking dude I thought might throw a punch when he went nose-to-nose with me outside the BOE in October 2008.) Digby says, “I guess I’d find this video more chilling if the people in it didn’t all look like sales associates at Sears.”

Today, Dana Milbank weighs in over at the WaPo:

Beck has at times spoken against violence, but he more often forecasts it, warning that “it is only a matter of time before an actual crazy person really does something stupid.” Most every broadcast has some violent imagery: “The clock is ticking. . . . The war is just beginning. . . . Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government. . . . You have to be prepared to take rocks to the head. . . . The other side is attacking. . . . There is a coup going on. . . . Grab a torch! . . . Drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers. . . . They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered. . . . They are putting a gun to America’s head. . . . Hold these people responsible.”

Beck has prophesied darkly to his millions of followers that we are reaching “a point where the people will have exhausted all their options. When that happens, look out.” One night on Fox, discussing the case of a man who killed 10 people, Beck suggested such things were inevitable. “If you’re a conservative, you are called a racist, you want to starve children,” he said. “And every time they do speak out, they are shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?”

Here’s one idea: Stop encouraging them.

Yup, Left Behind-ish, paranoid patriot thing is all fun and games until people start going to guns. That could one day end up on blackboards too.