Who's Demonizing Whom?

Deconstructing the theory of stochastic terrorism

Berlin, 1938: scapegoating elevated to the level of national policy

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A hallmark of authoritarian and totalitarian societies is the concept of group responsibility and guilt. The Nazis (and many before and since) scapegoated the Jews. The Bolsheviks scapegoated the bourgeoise and the kulaks. For the sins, real and imagined, of individuals belonging to such groups, all members were made responsible and judged guilty. Thus in November 1938, when a Jewish refuge assassinated a German diplomat in Paris, this was made the excuse for a national pogrom against the Jews of Germany: Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) and its aftermath.

In liberal democratic countries, formal scapegoating of the kind practiced in totalitarian states has always been prohibited by law. But as the persistence of antisemitism in Europe (and its growing appeal in America) makes plain, no society is entirely immune from it.  The temptation to blame one’s travails on some other group—the Jews, illegal immigrants, etc.—is an ever-present facet of human nature.

It’s also, as the Russian and German examples show, a useful though despicable political tactic that can be employed to deflect blame from one’s own side, or to pin the responsibility for some outrage on the political opposition.

Admittedly, the assignment of political responsibility is not always false or unjust. Those of us who made the mistake of supporting Donald Trump bear some responsibility for his gross misbehavior in high office—we put him there, after all. Similarly, those voters in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District who elected Ilhan Omar to Congress bear some responsibility for the presence of that vile antisemite in the United States House of Representatives.

But when an unhinged Bernie Sanders supporter shot and seriously wounded a Republican member of Congress, neither the Senator himself nor his other supporters were to blame. And when some lunatic decided to shoot up a gay nightclub, supporters of traditional marriage and critics of gender ideology were not to blame either.

Not that Democrats and progressives trouble themselves with such details as facts, evidence, and elementary justice. Whenever they or one of their favored acronym cohorts are targeted, the cry goes up that Republicans and conservatives, as a group, are responsible, indeed guilty, have blood on their hands, as the saying goes.

In January 2011, Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic member of Congress representing Arizona, was grievously wounded in a mass shooting that left a total of six people dead and thirteen wounded. As had become usual by then, the cry went up that the NRA and other alleged opponents of gun control bore responsibility for the outrage. But there was an additional twist: Democrats and the media were quick to charge that the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, had been incited to violence by the Tea Party movement and Sarah Palin. The latter’s political action committee had recently released a “target list” of Democratic lawmakers to be unseated in the 2012 election, of whom Giffords was one. The PAC produced a graphic showing a map of the United States with crosshairs for each officeholder.

But this charge turned out to be a figment of the fevered progressive imagination. As usual in such cases, the shooter was a head case with a long list of zany obsessions and an irrational hatred of Rep. Giffords, but with no connection to the Republican Party, the Tea Party, or any political movement. But the facts didn’t stop the media from whooping up the story, and no doubt there are many people who still believe in it these ten years later.

The shoddiness and bad faith embodied in such charges must have been evident to those hurling them, because they appealed to the academy for some intellectual cover. For many years past, the chief business of the so-called social sciences has been to concoct theories purporting to support the progressive worldview: systemic racism, Whiteness, colonialism etc., etc. As a justification for such fables as the Giffords/Panin/crosshairs charge, a theory of stochastic terrorism has been propounded.

According to Dictionary.com, stochastic terrorism is “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:” This, to people unfamiliar with academic Newspeak, may seem impressive, even scientific. But let us deconstruct the definition to see what it really means.

In the first place, stochastic is a synonym for random or randomly determined. No doubt the unfamiliar word was chosen because if random had been used, the oxymoronic character of the term would be obvious. For there’s no such thing as random terrorism. An act of terrorism is always a purposeful act, launched against a chosen target to send a specific message or to provoke a specific response. It’s true that terrorism usually does not target specific individuals. But the target chosen always has some symbolic importance: a supermarket in Israel, an American embassy in Europe, the Twin Towers, a group of congressmen at a baseball practice. Properly understood, terrorism is a political act. This, incidentally, excludes most mass shootings, which are usually carried out by disgruntled loners with mental health issues.

So much for the term itself. As for its definition, that only confuses things more. The first clause, “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act,” seems all right, provided that a connection can be traced between “public demonization” and “a violent act.” But establishing such a connection is not the theory’s intent, as the second clause makes clear. Supposedly, the violent act is “statistically probable.” Wouldn’t you know it, though, the specifics of such an attack “cannot be predicted.”

The theory of stochastic terrorism is thus constructed of pretentious diction, designed to obscure its logical shortcomings. “Public demonization,” for instance, sounds portentous—but what does it really mean? If I go on Twitter to call Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez an entitled little twit who’s using her seat in Congress to boost her celebrity status on social media, am I publicly demonizing her? When Stephen King goes on Twitter to make comparisons between Donald Trump and Hitler, is he demonizing the former president? Have Gregg and King actually incited violence against Ocasio-Cortez and Trump? If they happen to receive death threats, are King and I responsible? Of course not!

Similarly, when people question or criticize some progressive craze—gender theory, for instance—they most assuredly are not “publicly demonizing” gays or trans people, nor are they inciting violence against them. The charge that they are is plainly dishonest, intended to stifle dissent—hence the need for some academic cover.

Then there’s the matter of statistical probability. Though one can imagine situations in which public demonization is highly likely to result in violence, the theory of stochastic terrorism stretches this possibility to an absurd extreme. In Germany during the 1930s, Jews were most assuredly demonized with the intent of inciting violence against them. Similarly, though to a lesser extent, the same was true of black people in the Jim Crow South. There can be no two opinions about cases like that.

Given the typical connection between mental illness and mass violence, there may be a case for statistical probability on that basis. But the most charitable thing that can be said about the connection between speech and specific acts of violence in America today is that it’s tenuous in the extreme. In short, the theory of stochastic terrorism is garbage. If it proves anything at all, it’s the intellectual decay and moral corruption of the social sciences.

So allow me to propose an alternate definition of the term: “a means by which Democrats and progressives can demonize Republicans and conservatives by blaming them for acts of violence like the Pulse nightclub shooting, though actually they had nothing to do with it.” Just another weapon in the defense of “our democracy,” eh comrades…?