Jay, in response to my post earlier, you write:

But let me add a point, very elementary: No man is an island. No one lives in a vacuum. No one is hermetically sealed. What is poured into people’s ears matters. And not just theoretically.
Take the easy example of Germany. (I know you’re not supposed to.) The German people did not wake up one morning and say, “Hmmm. Why not kill all the Jews among us?” For years, they had been told, by people in authority, that Jews were both subhuman and threatening.
In the West Bank and Gaza, kids don’t come out of the womb wearing suicide belts, ready to kill Jews. They are “carefully taught.” They have lies drilled into them from the cradle. They are made into murderers, by all the authority figures in their lives: parents, imams, schoolteachers, political leaders.
Charlie, you are a person with an extraordinarily — extraordinarily — great independence of mind. And you are blessed with an accompanying intelligence. The two are probably related. I hope I don’t sound too Margaret Sangerish when I say that a lot of other people are more impressionable. And the impressions that people leave matter, for good or ill.

As it happens, I agree with this. But I think that the key here is that, thus far at least, there has only been one incident. As I wrote after the Isla Vista shooting, it is one thing to look at a mass movement and to blame those who are teaching its acolytes and inciting its fighters, but it is quite another to look at one person who has done something terrible and to conclude that the ideology he claims to have been representing was guilty of causing his crime:

Without ever quite making anything that could be reasonably described as a case, the Guardian’s Jessica Valenti argued yesterday for the collectivization of the killer’s guilt, maintaining that to describe the perpetrators of these crimes as crazy “not only stigmatizes the mentally ill — who are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it — but glosses over the role that misogyny and gun culture play (and just how foreseeable violence like this is) in a sexist society.” This is a rather impressive stretch. Insofar as the disturbed will draw from and respond to the culture in which they live, the contents of murderers’ manifestos are relevant and interesting. If we were to see a network of would-be killers develop, each member claiming to be acting in the same way for the reason, they would become especially so. But, really, that’s about the extent of their relevance.

Ismaaiyl Brinsley was one man, and he committed his crime as part of a broader spree. If we start seeing these incidents all over the country, I will likely change my mind about the impact that the movement is having — especially if we see a more direct link between the “incitement” and the behavior. But for now? I remain skeptical.