Now that Byron Williams has been convicted of attempting to murder four California Highway Patrol officers during a July 2010 shootout on a freeway in Oakland, it’s time to talk about Glenn Beck.

No, Beck wasn’t charged with the shooting, nor — as he told his audience shortly after the incident — did he encourage it.

But Beck had been regularly denouncing the Tides Foundation, a low-profile, liberal San Francisco nonprofit, for months before the 45-year-old Williams set forth from his home in Tuolumne County in his mother’s pickup truck, with a supply of guns and a suit of body armor, to pay a visit to Tides and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Beck, who was then on Fox TV and radio, had mentioned Tides 29 times in the 18 months before the incident, according to press accounts, and attacked the foundation for four straight days in the following week. He called Tides a “shady organization” that funneled money to “some of the most extreme groups on the left” and was part of a progressive plot to “create mass organizations to seize power.”

After the shootout, a police investigator said Williams told officers he had been hoping to start a right-wing revolution by killing “people of importance” at Tides and the ACLU.

Williams was stopped by the CHP while speeding and weaving in and out of traffic on westbound Interstate 580. Prosecution and defense lawyers disagree on who opened fire first — Williams claimed he was only defending himself from officers’ gunfire — but an Alameda County jury found him guilty Monday of charges that carry a potential life sentence.

As Williams was being treated in a hospital for his wounds after the shootout, his mother, Janice, told The Chronicle that her son was a regular watcher of conservative TV and was upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.”

Williams later gave jailhouse interviews to the liberal Media Matters for America and to San Francisco’s Examiner.com. He told Media Matters that Beck was “like a schoolteacher on TV” who had been “breaking open some of the most hideous conspiracies.” Beck “would never advocate violence,” Williams said, “but he’ll give you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need.”

He told Examiner.com that he’d already known about the Tides Foundation before Beck’s verbal attacks, and had become frustrated by the commentator’s unwillingness to endorse conspiracy theories or advocate violence. “I think that violence, revolution is probably the only way you are going to get this corruption out of here,” Williams said.

He didn’t say much about Tides or his intentions during his testimony at the trial, mentioning only that he’d hoped to kill 11 people, the same number who died in the BP oil platform explosion and spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. According to a conspiracy theory floated by Beck, endorsed by Williams and unsupported by any objective evidence, the spill was plotted by liberal financier George Soros, who allegedly had competing oil investments. Beck also claimed Soros controlled the Tides Foundation, although the foundation said he’s never been a major donor.

Williams’ lawyer, Eric Schweitzer, said after the verdict that his client had been upset and distraught but hadn’t really settled on a target before his encounter with the Highway Patrol. Williams “has and will continue to protest improper collusion between business interests (and) the government,” but expressed regret after the shootings that “his anger at realizing such things had caused so much misunderstanding of his true cause,” Schweitzer said by e-mail.

So there’s no reason to hold Beck at all responsible for the independent actions of an apparently disturbed viewer?

That’s certainly true legally. Morally? You make the call. But one final word from Beck himself.

A couple of months after the shootout, the commentator told his audience he had a message for the Tides Foundation: “I’m coming for you. …Oh, no, not … Glenn Beck making threats. …I’m coming for you on the battlefield of ideas.”