RW blogosphere's silence over Beck-inspired shooting speaks volumes

Byron William made himself no friends within the GOP Noise Machine when he agreed to jailhouse interviews with reporter John Hamiliton and then proceeded to detail how Fox News' Glenn Beck had been like a “schoolteacher” to Williams in the months and weeks before his planned mass shooting.

Ever since Beck began mainstreaming a new brand of militia media and embracing insurrectionist rhetoric, his right-wing apologists have claimed it's not fair to connect Beck's rhetoric with acts of political violence because Beck deplores violence and can't control the actions of his listeners and viewers.

But now Williams has told his troubling tale and there's no longer any doubt about causation between violent political rhetoric and actual acts of violence. The denials don't work any more, so instead the right-wing blogoshphere has fallen silent in the face of William's own story, with virtually all of Beck's online defenders refusing to acknowledge the ugly truth, let alone try to argue against it.

Scanning the right-wing media horizon since Monday, I cannot find a single high-profile player in the opinion game who's been willing to touch the Byron Williams story; a story that blows a hole in the Beck defense.

Not even Andrew Breitbart and his bloggers, who are incessantly whining about supposed left-wing violence, and who ritually parade around the Kenneth Gladney story as proof that political violence is looming, even they won't touch the cut-and-dry Byron Williams story. Even they can't seem to find any opening to extricate Beck from his man-made mess.