Have you ever seen a western lefty commit anything remotely approaching this horror, at least during the last several decades? People like the black bloc anarchists are the scum of the Earth, but their violence normally doesn’t rise above the level of vandalism and occasional assaults on passersby. Like enraged baboons, lefty rioters are much more likely to pelt their enemies with feces than with bullets. The Oslo massacre almost equals the Madrid and 7-7 bombings, even though the latter were the work of trained terrorists who had the support of an international network with thousands of adherents and essentially unlimited funding.

This emphasizes a point I have made several times here: the radical right’s much greater potential for violence. They focus on weapons and study the subject systematically, many from childhood. Many of them are proficient with firearms and quite a few with explosives. They know the history of terrorism, and they have a vast literature of rationalization at their disposal. Tim McVeigh and a handful of accomplices murdered 168 people by means that are available to, and understood by, millions of people in this country and Europe. There is no rightwing equivalent of Al Qaeda but there doesn’t need to be.