"Lone"...

But hardly alone: it's an ever-expanding crowd, the group of "lone nut" right-wingers wreaking as much violence as they can, against whomever they perceive as enemies.

In a world of ideologues and media eager to demonize Muslims: the horrifying scenes in Norway last weeks were acts of terrorism—until the moment it became known that their perpetrator looks like this, which transformed him into "lone nut."

Once relatively limited to lung power and street corners—
Alfred T. Palmer, 1941 or 1942
FSA/OWI caption:

The four freedoms. Freedom of speech is still the way of the land. Here is Columbus Circle, famous New York promenade, a "soap box" orator is giving forth his theories. A few steps away may be another unsung genius who, likely as not, will proceed to tear down everything his predecessor has said.

Now: very well-financed ravings are available everywhere, all the time.

But, it's not as if Breivik would have been influenced by U.S. propagandists.

Not by Andrew Breitbart...

Pamela Geller...

The climate change denial crowd...

Or any other part of the vast right-wing punditocracy.

In this country: Fox, Limbaugh and the rest blast out the daily barrage of blame and hatred of liberals. While messages vary in the degree to which they are overt, the underlying tone is always to suggest that the world would be better off without liberals.

In another corner of the global village: a liberal-hater poses as a policeman, to assassinate scores of teenagers—to prevent their growing up to be liberals.

To prove what Limbaugh, et. al., make their millions by mocking: liberal Norway responds to the massacre by vowing to uphold the country's democratic ideals.

The news from Norway was breaking just about the time this very powerful piece by Charles Pierce appeared.

Pierce writes about January 17 this year—of a narrowly averted bombing in Spokane's Centennial Park, targeting a Martin Luther King Day parade; of that planned act's connection to other politically-inspired acts of violence; of our society's unwillingness to make those connections—

Don't talk, then, about the wildness in our rhetoric today, and its undeniable roots in that deep strain of political violence that runs through our national DNA, on a gene that is not always recessive. Don't relate Centennial Park in Atlanta in 1996 to Oklahoma City to murdered doctors to Columbine, and then to Tucson and to the bag on the bench in Spokane. Ignore the patterns, deep and wide, that connect each event to the other like a slow-burning fuse to a charge. That there are among us rage-hardened, powerless people who resort to the gun and the bomb. That there are powerful people who deplore the gun and the bomb, but who do not hesitate to profit from their use. And when the gun goes off or the bomb explodes, the powerful will deplore the actions of the powerless, and they will reassure the rest of us that We are not like Them, who are violent and crazy and whose acts have no reason beyond unfathomable madness. But above all, they will say, Ignore the fact that there is still a horrible utility in political violence, the way there was during Reconstruction, or during the labor wars of the early twentieth century. If there were not, it wouldn't be so hard to get an abortion in Kansas, and assault weapons would not have been accessories of choice at recent rallies purportedly held to discuss changes in the way the country organizes its health-care system.

Or, as Driftglass observed at the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing: "First they came for the file clerks"...