Do you believe Glenn Beck has any liability in the Poplawski murders?

Great Debates
1

This is referenced in the Pit Threads on the Pittsburgh shootings but I wanted to make it the focal point of a debate. Since this is in G.D. I’ll be dispassionate and refrain from rhetoric and profanity.

For those who don’t know who Richard Poplawski is, he’s the white supremacist/neo-Nazi who murdered 3 police officers during a shootout in Pittsburgh this past Saturday. Details are still emerging, but among things known:

-The officers were responding to a domestic disturbance call by his mother (by some accounts an argument that began over a dog urinating in the house)
-Poplawski is a white supremacist, a member of Stormfront (that’s to their wiki, not their site), and had a history of violence with family, neighbors, and his girlfriends
-Poplawski was a fanatical anti-gun control advocate who in addition to owning many weapons and a bulletproof vest (that saved his life in the shooting) was convinced that the Obama Administration was going to take away privately owned guns.

The Glenn Beck association is that Poplawski evidently was a fan, repeated some of the same rhetoric about the “Obama gun grab” and apocalyptic projections of the U.S. under Obama (whose being a biracial Democrat of course didn’t endear him to Poplawski to begin with) and the need for some sort of revolution Beck has mentioned (though I don’t believe Beck has advocated violence). The only specific link twixt Poplawski to Beck seems to be his linking one of Beck’s YouTube videos on the Stormfront site. He seems to have been a fan of right wing pundits and personalities in general. Some left wing pundits including Andrew Sullivan and posters on Daily Kos and a lot of lesser known ones are making much of his alleged fondness for Beck and making a “know the tree by its fruits” link (my words not their’s). (Beck is making a whining disavowal, which is synonymous with “Beck has addressed a personal criticism”, though this one mentioning flight attendants which I think is new.)
Suppose that it is established that Poplawski was a major devotee of Beck. Suppose even that he outright states that Beck was a major factor in why he felt the way he did and why he opened fire on the police. Would you feel that in this as yet hypothetical case that Beck held some moral liability for his role in that?

A major clarification for this thread is:

I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT CRIMINAL LIABILITY. I don’t think any rational person feels he should be indicted and tried for complicity or anything like. I AM ONLY TALKING MORAL RESPONSIBILITY..

Do you believe Beck should be held MORALLY accountable in part for the actions of a clearly insane fan?

If yes, should a part of this accountability be shared by CNN which hosted Beck’s show at the time of the linked video and some of the inflamed rhetoric [Beck’s since moved to Fox])?

Obviously, this goes far beyond Beck and Poplawski: it could as easily be any fanatical pundit right or left. It’s more a debate about the reasonable limits of personal accountability for one’s statements (especially for the more vociferous, provocative, deliberately divisive/less factual and “fair and balanced” variety).

I have strong viewpoints of my own (that to be honest, and as much as I hate to say it, lean toward’s Beck’s position), but I’ll open the floor for exchange now and post them later.

2

Of course not. He’s only an entertainer. :rolleyes: No, wait, that’s O’Reilly’s and Limbaugh’s excuse for when people call them on their bullshit. Beck bears some responsibility for this, since he’s a fearmongering demagogue-wannabe, as much as he pretends to be an ‘independent newscaster’.

3

I am a big believer in personal responsiblity for an individuals actions. I know I am in a swiftly fading minority.

McDonalds didn’t make you fat. Guns don’t make you kill. If you fall off a ladder it is not the ladders fault, or the fault of the store that sold it to you. If you drive off the road and into a tree it is not the fault of the state for not having a guard rail there.

I do not expect the state to protect me from bad thoughts. Listening to some jackass, which is what Glenn Beck is, is our own decision, no one makes me or you listen. Turn it off and go outside and play.

And what a person does with the supposed ‘information’ one gets is their own idea, not the idea of the entertainer.

4

This is the Beck/Ron Paul YouTube vid that Poplawski linked to. It actually was Fox News and not CNN (one of his first Fox pieces taped in March).

Beck’s reply to his name being linked to Poplawski:

Keith Olbermann’s umpteenth "worst personing" of Beck and tearing into the flight attendant comment.

My view is that as much as I would LOVE to see Beck, who I regard as one of the most idiotic, pompous, obnoxious, hypocritical, stupid, ill-qualified-to-do-anything-more-complicated-than-his-most-base-physical-needs, encyclopedically ignorant and self-righteously vulgar wastes of air space and functioning kidneys in America today (if he can get a multimillion dollar contract there should be hope for every village idiot to one day be an astronaut) publicly pelted with rocks and offal and garbage, for this particular event I can’t muster more than a mournfully smirking “Gee, what swell fans you have there Glenn” indignation. Poplawski was a powder keg who’s had a murderous showdown in his destiny for years by all counts and if it hadn’t been Beck and white supremacy and Hannity he’d tapped into it would probably have been Fundamentalist Zoroastrian-Pentecostalism or macrobiotic Rosicrucianism. Beck didn’t push him over the edge but just happened to be among the most successful of the movement he hooked into. The only thing to be remotely glad about with Poplawski is that for once one of these cowardly nuts was taken alive.

That said, I have the same contempt for Beck that I have for the NRA when neo-Nazi bumper stickers and racist Obama shooting targets are sold at their gun shows and they say “We disavow that of course”. You teflon wanna be f*ckers, this is your core constituency and you’ll NEVER send them into the desert- they’re just either more extreme or less afraid of public censureship than you are. And you’d also think that sooner or later Beck would look at the acts of people who follow him (the church shooter with the Hannity bookshelves or the KKK members who quote Limbaugh or whatever) and think “My God what am I representing”, but I don’t think he’s that deep or that selfless while he’s on top financially. I wouldn’t cry if Beck one day lost control of his inner monologue, goes too far on air, and all the photo spreads of him reading the Bible with his family won’t put him back on top again and he winds up broke and pathetic like Morton Downey Jr., but ultimately I think anybody who listens to Beck as an authority on anything is too stupid, pathetic, and or insane to predict their actions.

5

Oh, come off it.

When a man makes his living distributing venom, he should be held accountable in part for the consequences of that venom.

6

And you pretty much demonstrate the principle that “personal responsibility” is just a means of avoiding responsibility.

In other words, “personal responsibility” is for the cannon fodder. Not for the person who talks other people into killing and dying.

And to answer the OP, yes Beck has moral responsibility for the predicable results of his rhetoric.

7

Why? Why is it someone else’s responsibility when you get talked into doing something you otherwise would not do?

I am not trying to be argumentative. I simply do not understand your point of view. Glenn Beck is a jerk.

I simply disagree with the premise of ‘the devil made me do it’.

8

YouTube of Beck’s disavowal. He claims that the guy wasn’t conservative or worried about his guns… okay.

He then goes on to say that it’s because people don’t report their neighbors anymore… uh… the guys neighbors had reported him numerous times. They were afraid of him. He then compares himself to Martin Luther King and Gandhi in his own call for revolution…

9

I do not believe Glenn Beck is morally responsible for the actions of this person.

The larger question is an interesting one. At some point we do hold people responsible for what they say. If Glenn Beck explicitly called for the armed overthrow of the tyrannical government by attacking law enforcement it would be clear to me that he is responsible. Obviously he hasn’t done that. However, many pundits are at the very least strongly implying that the current administration is tyrannical. At some point of escalating that rhetoric it would be reasonable to predict a violent backlash. After all, that would be a reasonable action against a truly tyrannical government (an unelected government, not just one where your side lost the election, as Jon Stewart points out). But at what point of pounding the point that the government is tyrannical do we hold the speaker legally or morally responsible? There is obviously a cutoff point.

10

Doesn’t Beck have to have morals before being morally responsible?

11

Beck’s most incendiary broadcast is probably playing stock footage of the Third Reich rallies and Nazi stormtroopers marching while discussing Obama, which he’s done several times. (On youtube if anyone’s interested.) Of course Hitler was a liberal in Beck-land.

12

When any “commentator” is saying something he doesn’t really believe in order to entertain and it hurts people, there is moral responsibility. If you try to persuade people to do something or take a certain view, you have partial causation for their actions because that person would not have done the action except for what you did. You can make the world a much worse place just by propagandizing. Joseph Goebbels bore some responsibility for the deaths of millions of people, even though he (probably) never personally killed or ordered anyone killed.

The things we say and the actions we take have consequences. We are responsible for those consequences if we intend them or a reasonable person could see them resulting from our actions.

13

I have a hard time believing that Poplawski became the sort of person who would shoot three police officers without provocation in the ten weeks since Obama took office. For all we know, he might have done the same thing a year ago if the circumstances had presented themselves.

That being said, there has been an uptick in the right-wing nutjobbery lately, and Beck is out in front on it. I don’t think there’s any question that we’ll see violence as a result of it; it’s just a matter of when and how much.

I mean, don’t the pro-gun people say that we need to keep the population armed so we can rise up against tyranny if necessary? Well, what if the country had been taken over by a Muslim fascist who isn’t even eligible to be President and who is going to surrender to our enemies, take away everybody’s guns, force our children into re-education camps, and generally destroy the American way of life? Is that not enough? Every single one of those points has been made in the past few weeks in mainstream news outlets, some even by members of Congress. If you really believed all that, why wouldn’t it justify violence?

No question Poplawski was a nutter, and I won’t be surprised when people like him start committing violent acts that are unmistakably motivated by the Beck/Hannity/Limbaugh/Malkin/Teabagger rhetoric. But I don’t think that’s what this was.

14

I don’t think Beck is culpable in this instance, however I think the type of insane comments being made on these right wing talk shows needs to be called into question. They are out and out calling Obama a tyrant. I mean, WTF? These are NEWS stations broadcasting this shit, the fact that this is allowed and apparently endorsed is a problem.

15

No Olbermann in that link. Just Beck and Paul.

16

Hey, you remember that time a few years ago when moveon.org had that video contest? And somebody uploaded a video that compared Bush to Hitler? And the people at MoveOn pulled it down almost immediately? And the right-wingers still shat themselves over it for weeks?

That was awesome.

17

Glenn Beck is *indirectly *responsible, in the same sense that a homophobic fundamentalist preacher is *indirectly *responsible for anti-gay violence. It’s a form of rabble-rousing, and can have deadly consequences. I’m not removing the blame from the person who committed the crime, I’m simply pointing out that hate-speech targets an audience of people who are receptive to this sort of pursuasion, and the people who preach it have to bear some moral, if not legal, responsibility.

18

Glenn Beck is every word Keith says he is, but he is not responsible for this.

19

I’m still trying to figure out how Andrew Sullivan counts as a left-wing pundit instead of an honest conservative, myself.

20

My bedrock moral principle is this:

You share responsibility for the foreseeable outcomes of your decisions.

I won’t bother defining each word here, but “foreseeable” is an important one. I’d argue that it’s foreseeable that if you rant daily about how the government is like Nazis, and you have an audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even millions, your words might push someone over the edge. This incident was foreseeable.

I’ll also mention “share.” Responsibility isn’t like a stick of butter, where if you get most of it, I only get a little pat of butter. If the sentence for a robbery is ten years in prison, and two people rob a store together, you don’t sentence each of them to five years. If Beck has some responsibility for this incident, it does not remotely lessen Poplawski’s responsibility.

So yes: I think Beck is morally responsible for his incendiary rhetoric. And no: I don’t think that civil or criminal law should address this situation.