‘Stochastic terrorism’ is being used as an excuse to bypass the First Amendment and censor us.
What is stochastic terrorism?
It’s defined by dictionary.com 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 terrorist act is usually committed by a lone wolf.
Stochastic terrorism was seen on July 7, 2016, when five police officers were fatally shot in Dallas, Texas. The shooter ambushed the officers after being triggered by news reports of systemic racism that led to the deaths of Michael Brown and other blacks at the hands of police officers.
That’s stochastic terrorism.
The media demonized police. A probable stochastic event would likely occur, although the specifics of such an event were unpredictable. And it did occur; on July 7, 2016.
However, the far-left “mainstream” media pretends that stochastic terrorism is an exclusive franchise of the right and points to the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018 as an example.
As the Dallas shooter was triggered by the mainstream media, the Pittsburgh shooter was triggered by social media.
In an effort to control stochastic terrorism on the right, the far-left is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to control speech on social media sites; but not the mainstream media. In a sense, we conclude that the far-left has been adopting a form of stochastic terrorism (demonizing the far fight as anti-Semitic, racist, or *phobic) to combat stochastic terrorism.
Violence against members of a group that has been demonized is an age-old problem. Der Juden were demonized in Hitler’s Germany and Germans were later demonized in post-war Europe; both are examples of stochastic terrorism that led to unwarranted violence against individuals. Mao Tse-tung demonized intellectuals and scholars during China’s cultural revolution resulting in countless thousands of deaths.
Marxism continues to demonize bourgeois classes — real and imagined — by projecting these groups as “privileged” (as in “white privilege”) or “chauvinistic” (as in “male chauvinism”) resulting in unwarranted hatred and discrimination. The grossly exaggerated demonization of the male patriarchy coupled with the demonization of the “1950’s housewife” has created a cultural climate of angst that discriminates against traditional families and their components.
More recently leftists are taking to social media to blame stochastic terrorism on Donald Trump, oblivious to the fact that their hatred of Trump prompts acts of violence, such as the persistent bullying of a schoolboy who last name happened to be Trump.
Accusing the right of stochastic terrorism is an age-old strategy of the far left. A 2011 article, for example, blamed conservative media pundits Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly for “remote” terrorism.
While stochastic terrorism is a real threat, the notion that it is a problem exclusively inherent to right-wing ideology is short-sighted and negligent.
