Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: The Republican Party Is the Party of Stochastic Terrorists
March 5, 2021
Former President Trump continues to employ the deadly rhetoric of stochastic terrorism. (Gage Skidmore)
By Bill Berkowitz
Despite having no say in the matter, I am nominating “stochastic terrorism” as the word of 2020. I am well aware that 2020 has more than its share of competing terms; social distancing, quarantine pods, toilet paper panic, essential workers, etc. And, I understand stochastic terrorism is two words. However, the Collins English Dictionary, which has announced a Word of the Year every year since 2013, designated “fake news” (2017) “single use” (2018) as the word of those years. And “climate emergency” was the 2019 Oxford Word of the Year, … so why not “stochastic terrorism?”
One of the most disconcerting things coming out of early congressional hearings about the January 6 insurrection is that Republicans in the room are consumed by: underplaying the gravity of the violence that day; trying to place the blame elsewhere; and, unwilling, in any serious way, to examine the ongoing threat to democracy from extremist right-wing groups. While, former President Donald Trump definitely owns the title of Stochastic Terrorist-in-Chief, earned through five years of inciting his most extreme supporters to extremist violence and the overt menacing of their opponents, with a handful of exceptions, Republican Party elected officials have become the party of stochastic terrorist enablers and abettors. After twisting themselves into logical and ethical pretzels, 43 GOP Senators claimed to have considered the evidence in the second impeachment Senate trial of Trump and voted to acquit him. Now, his GOP supplicants are lost in a morass of denial and obfuscation. The GOP is hell bent on turning a blind eye to, and providing cover for, those that repeated the president’s Big Lie, that the election was rigged, thereby encouraging the January 6th Insurrection at the Capitol.
In December of last year, Mother Jones’ Mark Follman reported that Elizabeth Neumann, who until early 2020 served as a DHS assistant secretary focused on counter-terrorism and threat prevention, “asserted in a Washington Post op-ed before the election that the president has been fomenting violence. ‘Language from campaign materials and Trump’s extemporaneous speeches at rallies have been used as justification for acts of violence.’” Neumann added that Trump “has repeatedly been confronted with this fact.” Follman noted that Trump’s half-hearted “denouncements of violence and white supremacists, she said, only exacerbated the problem.”
Stochastic Terrorism
Dictionary.com defines the principles of stochastic terrorism:
1. “A leader or organization uses rhetoric in the mass media against a group of people.”
2. “This rhetoric, while hostile or hateful, doesn’t explicitly tell someone to carry out an act of violence against that group, but a person, feeling threatened, is motivated to do so as a result.”
3. “That individual act of political violence can’t be predicted as such, but that violence will happen is much more probable thanks to the rhetoric.”
4. “This rhetoric is thus called stochastic terrorism because of the way it incites random violence.”
Merriam-Webster defines enabler as “one that enables another to achieve an end; especially: one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior (such as substance abuse) by providing excuses or by making it possible to avoid the consequences of such behavior.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines abettor as “someone who helps or encourages another person to do something wrong or illegal.”
Dictionary.com defines stochastic terrorism as “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted.”
The term “Stochastic terrorism” started trending again after Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and several Republican Party Representatives, encouraged the mob to march to the Capitol on January 6.
As Mother Jones’ Follman reported, stochastic terrorism was “Previously discussed in obscurity among counterterrorism specialists and national security wonks, the concept of stochastic terrorism first drew wider attention in 2018 when Juliette Kayyem, who previously served in the Department of Homeland Security as Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs, cited it in reference to Cesar Sayoc, a fervent Trump supporter who sent mail bombs to CNN and nearly a dozen Democratic figures, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.”
The term “stochastic terrorism” surged as a search term after the August 3, 2019 El Paso, Texas shootings that took the lives of 22 people, and injured many more, and the day after, which saw a shooter killing 9 more people in Dayton, Ohio.
In mid-January, Kayyem told Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick that in 2018, she had “been looking at what Trump was doing, and inciting violence was not the right terminology, because it was a particular type of violence. It was a violence that was directed toward political gain. Now, that could be whether it’s against a mayor he doesn’t like, or a governor he doesn’t like, or people he doesn’t like, or media personalities, as he’s often wont to do. And the means that he did it is stochastic terrorism. Stochastic means random.
“It’s a way of thinking about violence. And it’s when a leader uses his platform to motivate and incite violence in a way in which the violence is much more likely to occur, but who does it and where it’s done is utterly random. So, after a Trump speech, is it more likely someone might do something? Yes. Or a Trump tweet. And he’s able to do this or was able to do this by plausible deniability, that the incitement was sufficiently vague. It wasn’t “Go to Fifth Avenue and Central Park West and do this, you person.” It was things like “Liberate Michigan,” and things like what he said about the Proud Boys that they viewed as a victory at the debate. And so, that language would incite. And you could see the cases over the four years, the white supremacy or the attempted terrorism cases—almost all of them were deep followers of Trump and his Twitter feeds and all the craziness online.”
On Twitter, CNN, and in an op-ed for the Washington Post, Juliette Kayyem, used the term stochastic terrorism to discuss the El Paso shooter, President Donald Trump, and white supremacy.
Juliette Kayyem previously wrote in the Washington Post:
“Public speech that may incite violence, even without that specific intent, has been given a name: stochastic terrorism, for a pattern that can’t be predicted precisely but can be analyzed statistically. It is the demonization of groups through mass media and other propaganda that can result in a violent act because listeners interpret it as promoting targeted violence — terrorism. And the language is vague enough that it leaves room for plausible deniability and outraged, how-could-you-say-that attacks on critics of the rhetoric.”
“I don’t feel comfortable calling Trump a terrorist just because I think that then we’re going to get into that debate,” Kayyem told Slate’s Lithwick. “But it’s important to say that he’s the spiritual and operational leader of a domestic terrorism movement and that’s where we’ve landed. And that’s what I’ve been writing and talking about. And I did it not for name-calling but because now, I think, can we think about the prisms of counterterrorism as a solution?”
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