I'm not saying that Glenn Beck didn't have an effect - actually, quite the opposite.

For someone like Tim McViegh or the the guy who shot Tiller, there are direct connections with particular groups. These groups supplied the Philosophy, instruction of methods and the contacts (material and social) to carry out various acts. While these acts were not explicitly sanctioned by the group, casting the actor as a lone wolf and giving the group plausible deniability, there is no doubt that the act's genesis was with the group.

What we are seeing now is a step beyond that. These ideas and philosophies have gained a level of media and social saturation that inspires random actors without any group associations. Within this dynamic, the tea party is not so much a group as a low level symptom. I don't see Dick Aremy's PAC as a leader, but as a media manipulator/provocateur. They started something that they cannot control, even if they wanted to.

I referred to the Pittsburgh shootings in the previous post. The cops found literature from O'Rielly and Beck in his apartment, and these link to a particular dispenser of ideas. But this is going beyond that. There is such a media/social swarm of these ideas & philosophies that it has become impossible to trace it back to any particular source.

Our social system itself is creating these actors.