Media Attempts to Link Alex Jones to Pittsburgh Shooter

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has posted an article on its website by Dennis R. Roddy attempting to link Richard Poplawski, the Pittsburgh man accused of killing three police officers on April 4, to radio talk show host Alex Jones.

	“Believing most media were covering up important events, Mr. Poplawski turned to a far-right conspiracy Web site run by Alex Jones, a self-described documentarian (sic) with roots going back to the extremist militia movement of the early 1990s.”

“Believing most media were covering up important events, Mr. Poplawski turned to a far-right conspiracy Web site run by Alex Jones, a self-described documentarian (sic) with roots going back to the extremist militia movement of the early 1990s,” writes Roddy.

Alex Jones is a paleoconservative and is not connected to the so-called militia movement. The militia movement Roddy mentions is largely a creation of the FBI, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the corporate media. Timothy McVeigh and the Nichols brothers — fingered as the poster children of the militia movement by the corporate media — were not connected to an established militia. “Militia units in Michigan wanted nothing to do with them,” Mack Tanner wrote for Reason Magazine in July of 1995. Tanner documents how the myth of a violent and even racist militia movement is the creation of the government and the corporate media.

Muriel Kane, writing for Raw Story, and Eric Boehlert’s blog on the Media Matters website reference the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story in an effort to connect Alex Jones to the Philly shooting.

According to Kane, the alleged cop killer Poplawski read Prison Planet and found the information there “disturbing.” Kane specifically mentions a September 24, 2008 article by Paul Joseph Watson, U.S. Troops In Homeland “Crowd Control” Patrols From October 1st.

In the article Watson reports on the deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team from duty in Iraq to the United States for the purpose of “civil unrest and crowd control” under the control of the Northern Command. This information was reported on September 8 by the Army Times.

However, it was apparently not disturbing enough to be reported by much of the corporate media, as noted by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who is hardly a frothing radical. “As is typical, very few members of the media even mentioned any of this, let alone discussed it,” he wrote on September 24. In October, CNN reported on the deployment.

The militarization of state and local law enforcement and the deployment of battle-hardened soldiers for the stated – by Northern Command – purpose of “civil unrest and crowd control” in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act are not extremist conspiracy theories — they are facts largely ignored by the corporate media. In many cases Alex Jones is the only source reporting this information.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Media report on Richard Poplawski.

If not for Alex Jones and his journalists, the Missouri Information Analysis Center would still be in the business of designating Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr as dangerous leaders of a violent “Modern Militia Movement.”

Kane would have us believe Prison Planet and Alex Jones shaped Poplawski’s worldview and somehow radicalized him to the point where he shot three policemen to death. According to the writer, Prison Planet was a sort of stepping stone that led Poplawski to “far more extreme sources” of information, in particular the white supremacist website Stormfront.

Kane’s insinuations, however, pale when compared to the those of Eric Boehlert, who cites the neocon blog Little Green Footballs (these are odd bedfellows: Media Matters is operated by the former neocon turned lib David Brock and LGF is a pet project of Charles Johnson, who describes himself as a lib before the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001).

“We’ve also learned, via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that Poplawski was an avid fan of conspiracist and radical talk show host Alex Jones. A ‘freak,’ was how the conservative web blog, Little Green Footballs, described Jones today,” writes Boehlert on the Media Matters blog, County Fair. “Who’s been mainstreaming the ‘freak’ Alex Jones in recent days? Who’s been embracing his loony conspiratorial rants and giving them a platform and legitimacy? Fox News, course.”

This is a reference to Alex’s appearance on Judge Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” program on March 18, 2009. During a simulcast Alex was asked by Napolitano what he was talking about on his show that day and Alex responded by saying he was covering numerous references to the New World Order in the corporate media (see the video here). According to Boehlert and Johnson, these mainstream news stories are “loony conspiratorial rants” and a disgrace to Fox News, never mind Obama, Gordon Brown, Henry Kissinger, and other establishment figures have taken to using the phrase repeatedly over the last few months and particularly since the G20 summit in London.

[efoods]As of this writing, a Google News search pulls up 52,136 matches to the search criteria “New World Order,” including matches from the likes of Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and other stalwart establishment newspapers and news outlets. Are we to assume the editors and publishers of AFP and the Wall Street Journal are loony too?

“During his webcast on FoxNews.com, Alex Jones also notes with pride how FNC’s Glenn Beck has recently been warning about the emerging New World Order on the air, just like Jones,” writes Boehlert. As should be obvious, there are distinct differences between Glenn Beck and Alex Jones, but Boehlert is not interested in pointing out such differences. Instead, he conflates all under the rubric of the “GOP Noise Machine,” even though Alex Jones is as opposed to the policies of the GOP as he is of those of the Democrats.

Finally, it should be noted that on numerous occasions Alex Jones has advocated non-violence and advised listeners to avoid confrontation with the police and authorities. None of the critics cited above have bothered to note this fact as they attempt to make a connection between the deranged Poplawski and Jones.

In the days ahead, we should expect the corporate media and liberal and neocon blogs to further link Jones to Poplawski and the Pittsburgh shootings. In this way the government, corporate media, and blogs on either side of the false right-left paradigm will attempt to discredit the message broadcast by Alex Jones — a message warning about the evils of a government controlled by international bankers who are determined to disarm the American people in order to impose slavery upon them.

This article was posted: Sunday, April 5, 2009 at 11:20 pm

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