"Pop" Poplawski(Pgh Cop Killer/Beck Fan), the High-Def Hucksters & Downward Spiral of Violence

[RamboLiberal]

-----

This is how hate talk is increasingly viral in America in 2010. At the bottom of the chain, a cop-killer like Richard Poplawski becomes a hero to a clearly deranged man like Hardy Lloyd. But who were Richard "Pop" Poplawski's heroes?

Glenn Beck, to begin with. Also a host of foul-mouthed shock jocks including non-political ones like Opie and Anthony, and also the community on the white-supremacist websites like Stormfront.org, which is basically the Facebook of neo-Nazism and has remained popular in a time of despair. The role of Big Media and hate talk or whacked-out conspiracy theories is particularly disturbing. While individuals like Poplawski are ultimately responsible for their warped action, what is the responsibility of media millionaires, "high-def hucksters" who now jack up their ratings not just by being provocative but by speaking of violence or irrational conspiracies -- especially when the evidence mounts every day that these ill-conceived words broadcast from coast-to-coast are motivating America's most unglued?

This January, I spent several days in Pittsburgh investigating the Poplawski case and seeking to learn more about what really motivated him to kill three police officers. The research was for a chapter in my book, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, which comes out at the end of the month. (Facebook group here.) I learned quite a bit -- including a couple of new details about the shooting and Poplawski's past that will be revealed when the book is published. But the main thing was that Poplawski's fears about the "Obama gun confiscation" was the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it came to his increasingly paranoid ideas that he seemed to glean largely from talk radio and from Beck.

"Rich, like myself, loved Glenn Beck," Poplawski's best friend Eddie Perkovic told me during a long interview in his narrow rowhouse on the steep hill running down to the Allegheny. (Perkovic had a lot of time -- he was wearing an ankle bracelet for house arrest because of an unrelated case.) Perkovic and his mom -- who also had a close relationship with the accused cop-killer, still awaiting trial -- told me that for months Poplawski had been obsessed with an idea -- frequently discussed by Beck, including in ads for his sponsor Food Insurance -- of the need to stockpile food and even toilet paper for a societal breakdown. Poplawski was also convinced that paper money would become worthless -- another claim given credence by the Fox News Channel host, particularly in close connection with his frequent shilling for the now-under-investigation gold-coin peddler Goldline International.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/pop-poplawski-the-high-de_b_675796.html