At NRO, Charles Cooke sagely asserts that Words Don’t Pull Triggers in a pointedly even-handed refutation of the accusation (and now lawsuit) that the Southern Poverty Law Center is responsible(-ish) for the attempted massacre at the Family Research Council.

He recites previous attempts to link political rhetoric to rampage shootings—all of them from the Left, of course— to illustrate that if it’s absurd for the Left to recklessly assign blame to the opposition’s rhetoric, it’s equally absurd for the Right to lob back a well-deserved “tu quoque.”

But something doesn’t sit right with the parallels he provides—the dude what was going to shoot up the Tides Foundation (blamed on Glenn Beck), Jared Loughner (blamed on Sarah Palin), and an allusion to Clinton blaming Rush for McVeigh.

He presents the decidedly “hateful” warning by a John-Adams-friendly newspaper in 1800—

If Thomas Jefferson wins, murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced. The air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes. Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames, female chastity violated, and children writhing on a pike?—

and then rightly observes that no one attempted to off Jefferson in that gun-happy, Secret-Service-free era.

Even so, the fact that it is SOP on the Left to immediately blame “hateful rhetoric” on the Right for all acts of random violence—even before the truth has gotten its first boot on—does not exculpate all rhetoric all the time. First of all, the parallels that Cooke cites are hardly parallels at all.

To blame talk radio for McVeigh or Sarah Palin for Loughner is absurd because the culprit himself didn’t claim to be influenced by that rhetoric nor is there external evidence to support such causality. McVeigh claims to have been angry at the Fed’s handling of Waco and Ruby Ridge—hardly an extreme position, given that they WERE badly botched—but there were no ties between the Murrah building and either of those operations; McVeigh was likely more interested in causing mayhem than anything else. Furthermore, no one in talk radio had ever implied that federal buildings—much less any federal building in particular—ought to be destroyed, nor had it ever suggested that revenge ought to be taken against government properties or persons because of Waco and Ruby Ridge. There isn’t even evidence that McVeigh listened to talk radio of any kind.

Ergo, Clinton’s faulting of “the atmosphere” or whatever was pure political bullsplat.

Similarly, there is no evidence that Jared Loughner was even vaguely aware that anyone at all had used the word “target” in reference to Giffords’s district. A paranoid schizophrenic, he had previously quizzed Rep. Giffords about a conspiracy to devalue our currency and our grammar, and the poor woman was unable to give an answer that Loughner found coherent. He concluded that she was “in on it” and therefore had to be taken out.

Again, the accusation scrum that exploded on Twitter within minutes of the incident was a premeditated strategy to accuse the Right as soon as the next crazy person detonated in public. Same with the Batman shooter. Same with the guy who crashed his plane into the IRS building. No evidence whatsoever to support the accusation that “right-wing hate speech” had sent someone over the edge.

So the only actual parallel to Chick-fil-A guy would be Byron Williams, an obsessive fan of Glenn Beck, who has railed against the Tides Foundation.

All right, then. Can we say that these would-be rampagers were “provoked” or “incited” by mere words? Did Glenn Beck “give permission” to Williams to shoot up the Tides Foundation? And the SPLC—though they obviously did not pull the trigger—did they nevertheless point potential rampagers at the FRC?

I dunno. I can’t remember if Byron Williams was found to be mentally unstable. If he was, then it’s hard to fault Glenn Beck (who also darkly warns that if we take up arms, we will lose the Republic to another French Revolution-into-Terror-into-tyranny). If Chick-fil-A guy is similarly a head case, we have to dismiss “heated rhetoric” as well.

And yet.

Rhetoric is not always blameless. If it were, there would be no such thing as propaganda. The demonization and dehumanization of “impure races” was instrumental in the [Godwin’s Law]. How much rhetoric fed the appetite for violence of Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground? Of the Black Panthers? Of the lynch mobs in the Old South? Of Madame Guillotine in 1790s Paris? Of John Wilkes Booth?

Were the Founders themselves not inspired to declare independence by the force of tremendous rhetoric—from Paine’s pamphlets to pulpits?

The warning about social degeneration should Thomas Jefferson be elected did not—and could not—incite violence because the paper’s readership knew it was mere hyperbole and mud-slinging. (Didn’t Jefferson say that Adams was a hermaphrodite?) It was not believed. Nobody really thought that the author of the Declaration of Independence was capable of raining down horror on society from the White House (or whatever they had back then).

As Dennis Prager says, the worst atrocities occur when populations believe lies: The filthy, impure Jews did it. Africans are subhuman. The rich people took your stuff.

There is every reason to believe that rank-and-file lefties actually think that “hate groups” are genuinely evil and that they have a righteous duty to loathe them back. Ace remarked, “After all, we all know if that if we had a time machine, we could, morally, go back in time and kill Hitler. Well, you don’t need a time machine to go to the FRC, and if they’re just like Hitler…. might as well shoot them, eh?”

Glenn Beck’s ranting against the Tides Foundation arose from playing “follow the money” with their funding trails, which he painstakingly traced out on his infamous chalkboards. Whether their funding patterns are good or evil depends on your perspective. Glenn obviously finds Tides to be insidious, but at no point did he tell lies about them, nor has there been a national meme—not even among the Tea Partiers—that Tides is the embodiment of the Antichrist. The ‘tubez aren’t all atwitter about how evil the Tides Foundation is. Nobody gets fired when it’s discovered that they have donated to Tides. No boycotts (or buycotts) have been organized around a business’s opinion or support of Tides. The MSM doesn’t use loaded language to insinuate bad things about them. Radio talk-shows rarely mention Tides—not even Glenn, anymore (whose fixations are intense but brief).

The Tides Foundation and its activities just aren’t a subject of national controversy. The only people in the country who have even heard of Tides are their donors, their beneficiaries, and Glenn Beck’s audience (and most of them can’t remember the particulars of Why Tides Is Bad).

It appears that One Unbalanced Fan fixated on Tides after hearing Glenn talk about them, but nobody else seems to give a rip. On the other hand, August 1 saw long lines snaking around every Chick-fil-A in the country. People have been affixing “No H8” twibbons on their avatars for a few years now. Numerous referenda on SSM have been defeated after extremely bitter battles that don’t abate after the election. People DO get fired, friendships are lost, and businesses ARE boycotted/buycotted because of their stance on SSM.

Given the intense and intensifying emotions regarding SSM—and let’s not forget the disingenuous, dehumanizing use of the terms “hate speech,” “hate group,” and “h8r” by one side only—at what point can you rightly accuse someone of yelling “fire” in a crowded theater?