I posted this 4 1/2 years ago. This morning Jake Tapper-trying to use the word he had just learned from interviewing Juliette Kayyem–said “schotastic.”
–Mb
stochastic terrorism: the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.
Until today, I’d only encountered the word “stochastic” in the economic term dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. (Don’t ask me what it means). The latest addition to my political vocabulary is stochastic terrorism. For the average person, it’s simpler and infinitely more useful.
Stochastic means having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely. There doesn’t seem to be much of any literature on the subject of stochastic terrorism, but nonetheless, it provides a useful label for describing the actions of the right-wing noise machine and a credible hypothesis for its effects. Once upon a time, it would have taken a Bircher to produce the kind of rhetoric and a major league demagogue to have any effect. Today, it’s part and parcel of the Republican presidential campaign. This week the terrorist shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic. In June, it was Dylann Roof shooting up an African American church and some members of its congregation.
Raw Story gives Cliffs notes explanation of stochastic terrorism:
In an incident of stochastic terrorism, the person who pulls the trigger gets the blame. He—I use the male pronoun deliberately because the triggerman is almost always male—may go to jail or even be killed during his act of violence. Meanwhile, the person or persons who have triggered the triggerman, in other words, the actual stochastic terrorists, often go free, protected by plausible deniability. The formula is perversely brilliant:
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A public figure with access to the airwaves or pulpit demonizes a person or group of persons.
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With repetition, the targeted person or group is gradually dehumanized, depicted as loathsome and dangerous—arousing a combustible combination of fear and moral disgust.
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Violent images and metaphors, jokes about violence, analogies to past “purges” against reviled groups, use of righteous religious language—all of these typically stop just short of an explicit call to arms.
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When violence erupts, the public figures who have incited the violence condemn it—claiming no one could possibly have foreseen the “tragedy.”
The usefulness of the term stochastic terrorism is that it provides a label for a phenomenon and an explanation for how it works. Thoughtful people can certainly disagree about the exact relationship between right-wing extremist rhetoric and lone-wolf terrorism, but it’s hard to dispute the fact that words have consequences and that terrorists get their ideas and energy from somewhere. Anti-abortion terrorism is real. As Raw Story enumerates the shootings since 1993:
- March 10, 1993: Dr. David Gunn of Pensacola, Florida was shot and killed after being depicted in “Wanted Posters” by Operation Rescue.
- July 29, 1994: Dr. John Britton and a clinic escort, James Barrett, were both shot to death outside another Florida clinic, which has been bombed twice including in 2012.
- December 30, 1994: Two receptionists, Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols, were shot and killed in Brookline, Massachusetts by an abortion foe who had previously attempted murder in Virginia.
- January 29, 1998: Robert Sanderson, a security guard at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, died when the clinic was bombed.
- October 23, 1998: Dr. Barnett Slepian was killed at his home in Amherst, New York, by a shooter with a high-powered rifle.
- May 31, 2009: Dr. George Tiller, who provided late term abortions, was shot and killed in the lobby of his church, where he was serving as an usher.
- November 27, 2015: Two civilians and a police officer died during a five hour siege in which a “lone wolf” assaulted patients and providers at a Planned Parenthood Clinic in Colorado Springs.
This list does not include the vandalism, threatening phone calls, assaults, and worse–at least one clinic was set on fire–suffered by an organization that provides legal health care service for women. Some people have a hard time referring to the more extreme acts on this list as terrorism. That’s denial. It’s time we call it what it is. Stochastic terrorism may be a mouthful, but it’s a concept that has long needed a name.
Thanks for the helpful definition. For the victims and policy makers who want to protect them, just saying terrorism is probably a lot simpler. I do agree though that this president and too many in our government continue to engage in schotastic terrorism.
Juliette Kayyem is great by the way. An essential person to follow on Twitter.
As I recall saying when you posted this the first time, I still have concerns about the implications behind what sounds like a complaint that those who trigger by their words go free. Of course they go free because we have freedom of speech, which is only necessary to protect when we include even the most vile and controversial speech.
The ecology of public speech has changed in the 21st Century. Public speech was once much more limited, and public utterances were carefully controlled by gatekeepers. Now individuals can find or be an audience for whatever they find interesting, no matter how sick or destructive it might be. Political polarization has a lot of causes, but I think the largest and most unstudied is the unlimited opportunity for confirmation bias. A 20th-century perspective may be insufficient to understand or deal with public speech in an era of Facebook, Twitter, and 8chan. We may find ourselves considering limits beyond screaming fire in a crowded theater. In fact, we may find we are living in a crowded theater.
I’m fairly absolutist when it comes to free speech. We all have access for better or worse to what you describe above, but I will always believe that the best way to fight free speech is with more free speech.
I wonder if there are ways to better tie free speech — especially published free speech — to liability.
There is a world of difference between somebody standing on a street corner shouting radical slogans and a major broadcast network that half the nation relies on for news (for better or worse) broadcasting out-and-out lies.
Another area where we can significantly tighten limits is “editorial control”. There is a difference between a newspaper that exercises strict control over what is published on its pages and a bulletin board in a store that allows anyone to post anything they want. The courts have long ruled that in the former case the publisher has legal liability for whatever is published, while the owner of the bulletin board in the latter case does not.
Newspapers have cited “editorial control” for decades as a reason for not publishing even advertisements for “adult” material. That protects the publishers from any claim that they are publishing legally obscene material.
Even sites like BMG already walk a somewhat delicate line when any sort of moderation is practiced, because any moderation at all is generally considered the exercise of editorial control and editorial control in turn implies liability for the resulting content.
“Free speech” applies to GOVERNMENT restriction of speech. It does not restrict the ability of any publisher to determine what content that publisher will distribute.
Publishers can do what they want, but once we introduce liability we are inviting the government in the form of civil courts to intervene.
It’s an interesting thought. I don’t know liability law.
I loved this piece when it was first posted and love it now.
Chip Berlet, who has spent his life tracking the right-wing, prefers “scripted violence” which has been used historically to “stochastic terrorism” which is a more modern term.
This idea goes back at least to “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest? (sometimes expressed as troublesome or meddlesome priest),” an utterance attributed to Henry II of England, which led to the death of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170.
By either term, it is, unfortunately, a more and more common occurrence.
On Tuesday, October 4, 2016 as part of the Lennox Seminar on Propaganda and Political Persuasion, Chip Berlet delivered a talk titled “Trumping Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Right-Wing Propaganda, and Scripted Violence.” Please be sure to visit the student interview with Chip Berlet on the site propagandaseminar.com
http://propagandaseminar.com/index.php/public-lectures/chip-berlet-lecture/
Which Henry repented for for the rest of his life, but that line could be construed as too direct to be protected.