The Tides Foundation has been depicted by Glenn Beck as being the Head Quarters of the evil Progressives whom Glenn Beck says are destroying America.
So the would be assassin received his erroneous information on The Tides Foundation more than likely from Glenn Beck and/or other members of the Right wing /Far Right / GOP Media Echo Chamber.
I-580 Gunman Byron Williams allegedly wanted a Revolution July 21, 2010.
So is Glenn Beck to be held responsible for the would be actions of Byron Williams ???
If you shout "fire" in a theater when there is no fire and someone is trampled to death in the stampede for the exits are you criminally liable for any such harm resulting from your actions???
In all seriousness Glenn Beck and friends should be at least chastised for their insane over the top rhetoric and if they refuse to calm down their rhetoric they should be shut down or even arrested for sedition and traitorous activities.
Is free speech allowed even if that speech is an attempt to incite violence and insurrection ???
As Matt Gertz at Media Matters draws the connections between Glenn Beck and Byron Williams- is it merely circumstantial or is there a direct link?
If we use Beck's own logic of "Guilt By Association " then there is a definite connection.
Beck's logic is taken it seems from the Joseph McCarthy's Paranoid Play Book -McCarthy is after all a hero amongst the Fox News and Far Right Glenn Beck anti-Progressives anti-Obama clan so their use of McCarthy's tactics is no surprise.
Their use of similar rhetoric , character assassination, rumor and innuendo and fear mongering while telling American citizens that America is in a crisis because of a Fifth Column of Communists or Progressives and Muslim Americans & Latino Immigrants legal or Ill-legal who are all to blame for America's crisis.
Their conspiratorial thinking and rhetoric is no more credible than that of extremist such as Alex Jones or David Icke & their New World Order conspiracy theories etc.
see: David Icke website ; Exposing The Dream World We Believe to Be Real
and Infowars at Prison Planet/ Alex Jones
The CA cop shooter and Glenn Beck: Here's what we know by Matt Gertz at Media Matters ,July 23, 2010
On July 18, Byron Williams, an ex-felon with a history of violent criminal behavior, was pulled over by California Highway Police on I-580. Williams, who was apparently intoxicated, opened fire at the officers as one approached his truck. He continued firing as eight additional officers arrived. More than 60 rounds were reportedly fired during the five to eight minute shootout; two officers were reportedly injured by flying glass after a squad cars window and windshield were shattered by gunfire. Williams was arrested and hospitalized with multiple gunshot wounds.
Williams was reportedly heavily armed with a handgun, shotgun, rifle and body armor. Shortly after the shooting, a CHP sergeant said that "There is no doubt in our mind, given the body armor and the extensive amount of ammunition he had, that he was on his way to do a very serious crime against either someone or a group of people" And indeed, Williams reportedly told investigators that "his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU."
The ACLU is a very well-known entity, but the Tides Foundation, which seeks to "promote economic justice, robust democratic processes, and the opportunity to live in a healthy and sustainable environment where human rights are preserved and protected," is much more obscure.
Williams may have been a disturbed individual who was destined to explode. But the question the media should be asking is why he decided to target Tides.
According to his mother, Williams "watched the news on television and was upset by 'the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.'"
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.
as Eric Boehlert points out in a recent article Beck's Incendiary Angst Is Dangerously Close to Having a Body Count at Media Matters that :
...the radical right's media rhetoric is no longer even political in a partisan sense. Instead, it's purely revolutionary. It isn't, "We think taxes should be lower" or "Obama should be more hawkish overseas." It's, "There's an insidious and deadly plot afoot by Democrats and progressives to strip Americans of their freedom and this country of its greatness." Obama is now the incarnation of evil (the Antichrist?), and his driving hatred for America, as well as for democracy, runs so deep that he ran for president in order to destroy the United States from inside the Oval Office.
and Eric Boehlert goes on to list some examples of Glenn Beck's violence inciting rhetoric:
Just listen to Glenn Beck:
Progressives "are sucking the blood out of the republic" and are "gonna start getting more and more violent."
"To the day I die, I am going to be a progressive hunter."
"[Y]ou will have to shoot me in the forehead before you take away my gun" and "before I acquiesce and be silent."
"This game is for keeps"; "[Y]ou can shoot me in the head ... but there will be 10 others that line up."
"There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America"; "God help us in an emergency."
Once again Glenn Beck and the right have influenced another American citizen to take violent action against Obama and progressives whom the right and Glenn Beck have demonized as being an evil cabal out to transform America into a Marxist/Maoist/Communist or Fascist Nazi style state.
Glenn Beck & the right wing media in their hyped-up rhetoric have demonized Obama and progressives and argue that America is already lost to these leftist evil progressives and that robust action is necessary to reverse the gains made by leftist and progressives.
Beck uses similar rhetoric as the Know Nothing anti-Immigrant movement in the 19th century in America which led to mob violence against German and Catholic Immigrants.
The rhetoric that Glenn Beck and Fox News use can also be compared to that used by Hitler and the NAZIS in their anti-Semitic propaganda in which they demonized the Jews calling them the Enemy within who were out to destroy Germany.
Their anti-Semitic rhetoric compared the Jews to an infestation of vermin or rats or as a growing malignant disease such as Cancer destroying the German Nation from within.
Beck for instance has compared Progressives to the cancer eating away at America from within.
Beck also claims that the Progressives in America and in other Western Nations have been conspiring for at least a hundred years to destroy traditional America .
The anti-Semites also constructed a fictitious elaborate conspiracy on the part of the Jews which has been on going for centuries.
The GOP and Glenn Beck and Fox News and the Right are unable to accept that the Republican party was defeated by the Democrats and even more insulting to them is that the American electorate freely chose a Black Man as President.
So they construct elaborate conspiracy theories to explain what they refuse to accept.
They of course have a right to free speech and to voice their opinions no matter how fact challenged they may be.
But their rhetoric is over the top crazy and may lead to vigilantism and mob violence.
So what we have now on the right is rhetoric which is meant to incite violence.
So the question is at what point is it legitimate for the U.S. government,the FBI or Homeland Security to investigate Fox News and Glenn Beck for inciting violence against the Obama administration and against its supporters.
The logic of Beck et al is that if Progressives in America are a conspiring fifth column out to destroy America then according to Beck et al taking up arms against Progressives would be acceptable, permissible and necessary since the democratic process has been subverted.
Beck spreading hate and inciting violence
Beck says progressives are "sucking the blood out of the Republic," their "playbook" is to "lie, cheat, steal"
January 19, 2010
Beck acknowledges his role in "turning the light of day" on Tides Foundation by putting it on his blackboard
July 26, 2010
Beck: "The root of progressivism is evil" and "they enslave" people in poverty
From the August 2 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program:
Beck:"Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution"
February 20, 2010
Beck's Incendiary Angst Is Dangerously Close to Having a Body Count by Eric Boehlert via Media Matters | Report July 27,2010
...So yes, Beck has done all he can to scare the hell out of people about the Tides Foundation and "turn the light of day" onto an organization that actually facilitates non-profit giving.
And guess what? Everybody in America would have found out about the Tides Foundation last week if Byron Williams had had his way. He's the right-wing, government-hating, gun-toting nut who strapped on his body armor, stocked a pickup truck with guns and ammo, and set off up the California coast to San Francisco in order to start killing employees at the previously obscure Tides Foundation in hopes of sparking a political revolution.
Thankfully, the planned domestic terrorist attack never came to pass because California Highway Patrol officers pulled Williams over for drunk driving on his way to his killing spree. Williams quickly opened fire, wounding two officers during a lengthy shootout. Luckily, Williams wasn't able to act out the ultimate goal of his dark anger -- fueled by the TV news he watched -- about how "Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items," as his mother put it. Williams wasn't able to open fire inside the offices of the Tides Foundation, an organization "nobody knew" about until Glenn Beck started targeting it.
And thankfully, Williams wasn't able to take his place alongside a growing list of domestic, anti-government terrorists, such as the recent Pentagon shooter, the Holocaust Museum gunman, the kamikaze pilot who flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, and the Pittsburgh cop-killer who set up an ambush because he was convinced Obama was going to take away his guns.
All the vigilante attacks appear to have been fueled by an almost pathological hatred for the U.S. government -- the same open hatred that right-wing bloggers, AM talk radio hosts, and Fox News' lineup of anti-government prophets have been frantically fueling for the last year, pushing doomsday warnings of America's democratic demise under President Obama.
And the sad the sad truth is we're going to see more like Byron Williams. We're going to see more attempts at vigilante violence during the Age of Obama simply because the right-wing media, led by Beck, continue to gleefully (albeit irresponsibly) stoke dangerous fires with the kind of relentlessly incendiary rhetoric that has no match in terms of modern day, mainstream use in American politics or media.
Just listen to Glenn Beck:
Progressives "are sucking the blood out of the republic" and are "gonna start getting more and more violent."
"To the day I die, I am going to be a progressive hunter."
"[Y]ou will have to shoot me in the forehead before you take away my gun" and "before I acquiesce and be silent."
"This game is for keeps"; "[Y]ou can shoot me in the head ... but there will be 10 others that line up."
"There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America"; "God help us in an emergency."
And don't forget about the unhinged response when health care reform was passed in March: "Get down on your knees and pray. Pray. It's September 11th all over again, except that we didn't have the collapsing buildings." After financial reform passed last week, Beck told his audience, "Your republic is over."
Meanwhile, Andrew Breitbart's website recently tagged Obama as the "suicide-bomber-in-chief," while the conservative Washington Times just last week published an op-ed -- by a former congressman, no less -- asserting the president poses more of a threat to America than Al Qaeda.
Note that the radical right's media rhetoric is no longer even political in a partisan sense. Instead, it's purely revolutionary. It isn't, "We think taxes should be lower" or "Obama should be more hawkish overseas." It's, "There's an insidious and deadly plot afoot by Democrats and progressives to strip Americans of their freedom and this country of its greatness." Obama is now the incarnation of evil (the Antichrist?), and his driving hatred for America, as well as for democracy, runs so deep that he ran for president in order to destroy the United States from inside the Oval Office.
also check out :
Bloody Monday: Glenn Beck, FOX News, Gov. Jan Brewer and the Louisville Massacre Anniversary by Jeff Biggers via C0ommonDreams August 2, 2010
FOX News host Glenn Beck's reportedly German (Catholic) immigrant ancestors would be ashamed.
As we learn more about Beck's inciting rhetoric against the Tides Foundation--his latest liberal obsession--and a troubled man's foiled armed assault on the liberal foundation in Oakland, and as the fear-mongering in Arizona against Mexican immigrants by Gov. Jan Brewer reaches absurd levels of "terrorist attacks" and "drug mule" accusations and Neo Nazi border patrols, I can't help but be reminded of the Bloody Monday riots that took the lives of at least two dozen immigrants and Americans in Louisville on August 6, 1855.
Beck's German ancestors would have reminded the TV host what happened this week in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1855, when a nationally prominent newspaper editor repeatedly let loose the hounds of hatred and fomented what would become the worst anti-immigrant massacre in US history--of German and Irish Catholics.
A Connecticut Yankee turned Louisville Journal newspaper editor, George Prentice was considered the best known commentator in the nation, according to the New York Times, who described him as a "bitter, unrelenting political foe, and several times had street fights." And, as the great editorial voice of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing party, Prentice relished attacking the "foreign hordes" of Germans and Irish that poured into the Midwest. Fearful of an election upset, he penned a series of editorials that would unleash the wrath of hired thugs on Louisville's darkest and bloodiest day.
On the eve of the riots, Prentice declared: "Let the foreigners keep their elbows to themselves to-day at the polls. Americans are you all ready? We think we hear you shout 'ready,' 'well fire!' and may heaven have mercy on the foe."
Fueled by rumors and booze, drunken mobs roamed the German and Irish wards the next day with rifles and muskets and pitchforks and torches, leading to street fights, leaving behind the smoldering remains of destruction, strewn and burned bodies, and at least 22 dead--most historians place the deathtoll much higher. In the process, hundreds, if not thousands of immigrants and sympathizers fled Louisville
and so it goes,
GORD.
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