Extremists’ violent rhetoric has predictable consequences
Conservative politicians and pundits, the supposed adults in the room, are with ill-informed and inflammatory, conspiratorial rhetoric busily stoking anti-government violence and sedition. In the wake of the FBI’s search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence, his allies have been “frantically cycling through excuses,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observed Monday, to explain why.
Trump stole boxes and boxes of government documents, some highly classified, and squirreled them away at Mar-a-Lago. The fault, they allege lies with a corrupt, out-of-control Department of Justice, Joe Biden administration, and an imperious, Deep State, federal bureaucracy Trumpists mean to dismantle should Republicans regain control of the White House after 2024.
Trump himself has not spared the wild accusations and victim-theater, a reprise of his stolen election gambit after losing the presidency to Biden in November 2020. The latter resulted in a deadly insurrection and the sacking of the Capitol on Jan. 6. The former last week claimed one Trumpist who died after attacking an FBI office in Cincinnati.
More are lining up to Pickett’s Charge their way into the civil war of their fantasies (Daily Beast):
On Friday, a Pennsylvania anti-vaxxer enraged over the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort allegedly vowed to murder as many federal agents as possible before they got him.
“Come and get me you piece of shit feds,” he wrote on social media. “I am going to fucking slaughter you.”
On Monday, 46-year-old Adam Bies found himself in handcuffs, instead.
Press critic Dan Froomkin calls out the media for not stating plainly what Trump and his MAGA allies mean to instigate at arm’s length:
The phrase they’re looking for is “stochastic terrorism.”
It may not trip off the tongue, but it needs to become part of the media lexicon.
Stochastic terrorism means terrorism that’s statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In simpler language, it means that when Trump or his allies encourage violence — when the say the kind of stuff they say all the time now — it is not just possible that someone at some point will do something about it, it’s damn near inevitable.
Trump and Co. will keep it up until they are held to public account. Because, as Pres. Bill Clinton once said, “because they think it works” for them. They won’t stop until it doesn’t.
When Donald Trump told white supremacists to “stand by” at the September 2020 presidential debate, then summoned them to Washington on January 6 and told them to “fight like hell,” he was engaging in stochastic terrorism.
When Fox personality Jesse Watters says “They’ve declared war on us and now it’s game on,” it’s not just talk. It’s stochastic terrorism.
Mother Jones, Froomkin notes, describes the tactic in its style guide:
A method of inciting extremist political violence by using rhetoric ambiguous enough to give the speaker and the speaker’s allies plausible deniability for any resulting bloodshed. For more, see Mark Follman’s reporting here and here.
Froomkin scrolls through the few instances when the national press called out right-wing extremists. But the press remains shy about assigning blame beyond extremist web sites to the politicians and pundits whose talk of civil war and enemies within stoke hatred there.
The rhetoric about violence is not limited to things Trump, of course. Lindsay Beyerstein wrote an important piece for AlterNet in April about how Republican allegations that political opponents are pedophiles “is a tacit incitement to violence.” She noted: “If a campaign is waged from huge platforms over a long time, as we’re seeing now, it crosses the line into stochastic terrorism.”
Alejandra Caraballo, who teachers cyberlaw at Harvard, tweeted in May in response to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene endorsing “war” against “groomer teachers.”
“This is going to get people killed. Stochastic terrorism in action,” Caraballo wrote.
Extremist rhetoric was not this hot when Timothy McVeigh truck-bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. He killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured 684. Fox News would not launch for another 18 months.
Fox’s stoking of anti-immigrant rhetoric and “replacement theory,” Froomkin explains, have had results that for too many are “not remotely abstract.”
As Martha Pskowski of the El Paso Times reported last week:
Politicians from Brackettville to Austin to Amarillo have embraced the language of a border invasion, language that El Paso leaders fear could inspire another attack on the majority Latino community. They say El Paso — where 80% of residents are Hispanic — cannot heal from the events of August 3, 2019, if elected officials are promoting the same hateful ideas the shooter believed.
It’s just a matter of time before it happens again. The key, going forward at least, is to identify, call out, and condemn stochastic terrorism by name, and explain the likely consequences, in real time — not just when the inevitable violence takes place.
For now, reporters continue to avoid blaming and shaming the reactionaries, perhaps for fear of becoming greater targets of violence themselves, if not for simple pecuniary reasons.
A friend observed that as revelations trickle out that Trump absconded with national security secrets (classification level is irrelevant) for reasons undetermined, political support for Trump may slowly be trickling away as Nixon’s did once investigators obtained his Oval Office tapes. One can only hope.
For now, nearly the entire Republican Party is engaged in stochastic terrorism. Peter Wehner concludes at The Atlantic, “This can’t end well.”
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