Stochastic Terrorism is a truly clever piece of rhetoric that one can admire for its pure propagandistic potency.… the goal is not to establish the idea of Stochastic Terrorism and hold all people up to new, higher, standards but to establish and maintain rhetorical asymmetry.

And as this Substack article from 2022 makes clear, this didn’t start with Trump, and its title nails the bullshit that the Democrats have been pulling for a long time now, Stochastic Terrorism – A game of rhetorical asymmetry. The article starts with Jared Loughner’s murder of six people in 2011 as he attempted to kill Arizona Democrat Congresswoman Gabby Giffords:

Despite Loughner being immediately arrested, many had concluded that there was an accessory to the attempted assassination who remained at large: Former Governor of Alaska and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin:
“Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin” – Markos Moulitsas

Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos fame: man, that takes me back. Strange to see how far he’s fallen in influence from the glory days of the late 2000’s.

The reference was to an electoral map of the USA (see the link) that Sarah Palin had prepared where she had placed “crosshair” symbols over the seats of vulnerable Democrats, including Ms Giffords and the claim – usually implicit, sometimes explicit (as with Gawker) – that this was what had directed Loughner in his murderous rage. The screaming reached all the way to New Zealand, where I found myself in arguments with Leftists on Kiwiblog.

It was obvious that the goal was not to “lower the temperatures” or “reduce violence” but to damage the GOP in general and specifically on the matter of gun control, and Palin especially who was still deemed to be a great populist threat after her impact in 2008 and possibly in 2012 (in the end she would be the precursor for Donald Trump).

Palin and company fought back (not the GOPe of course, still harbouring hopes for Jeb Bush in later years) by pointing out that, for a start, the symbols were standard surveyors marks, such as could be found in any CAD System. As well as this juicy fact:

The Democratic Leadership Council had put out a similar map with the objectionable language “targeting” regions, and used bullseyes, which of course suggest a goal of sending a projectile into the absolute center. “Behind enemy lines” likewise suggests one is in a shooting war of some kind.

You can read the link for all the details (Loughner was a paranoid schizophrenic who’d been after Giffords for years), but the fact is that the Democrat strategy worked in the sense of leaving scars on Palin and the GOP, given that the MSM still had power in 2011, plus the power of the early Lefty web sites like Gawker and DailyKos.

“Worked” means that you still see references to it today from Lefties, and of course in 2017 none other than the NYT wrote an article explicitly making the old argument, which caused Palin to sue them for libel since none other than the NYT had earlier written an article saying the exact opposite; a clear case of malice. A court booted her lawsuit but I see that it’s back now: she deserves to win but probably won’t.

The article goes into more detail and history on Stochastic Terrorism than my article did and it’s worth your time to read to understand the stunts that the Left can pull with it in three moves – the goal is not to establish the idea of Stochastic Terrorism and hold all people up to new, higher, standards, but to establish and maintain rhetorical asymmetry.

Define it help your side
– “Stochastic Terrorism is a truly clever piece of rhetoric that one can admire for its pure propagandistic potency”.
– “It creates the illusion of sophistication and rigor. The phrase sounds to the average person as being very academic. Only very intelligent and erudite individuals may discuss complex subject matter such as Stochastic Terrorism.”
– Take control of the idea.

Spread the word.
–“Because the term does have a relatively easy to grasp concept, sounds academic and authoritative, and has serious experts who study it, people will copy and spread the idea.”
– Examples included LGBTQ+ people using it against J K Rowling.

Robust responses are needed if your opponents try to use it against you.
Be brazen in your hypocrisy:
The example used is James Hodgkinson shooting and wounding GOP members of Congress. Despite being almost killed, GOP Congressman Steve Scalise was not allowed to be a victim; he’d promoted anti gay marriage legislation among other things.

Have your counter moves ready to go:
Primarily “whataboutism” or tu quoque, which means “you too” in Latin. When their asymmetry is challenged — that is, when its pointed out they are not applying the same standards to all cases — they are able to claim you, the person on “the side” of the Stochastic Terrorists, are the one engaged in rhetorical games. “Why can’t we focus on the situation at hand (which maintains the asymmetry) and not be distracted by events of the past?”

Rinse, repeat:
Stochastic Terrorism can simply be ignored by reframing instances of major violence in context to the universe surrounding them instead of instances of violence being the end results of Stochastic Terrorism.
Examples of this dismissal include:
– Nicholas “punchable face” Sandmann.
– The “mostly peaceful” George Floyd BLM riots.
– The protests against SCOTUS judges while they decided on aborting Roe v Wade, where the random nature explicit in Stochastic Terrorism became a shield for the White House to refuse to condemn such things because for now violence is just a hypothetical. After the decision, when protests turned to threats (multiple examples given) and threats turned into pregnancy centres being vandalised and burned down, the same tack was taken:

Here we see again that the randomness and lone-wolf nature of “Jane’s Revenge” is used as an argument that those complaining are blowing things out of proportion by being concerned. The discussion of Stochastic Terrorism is nowhere to be found.

As the article concludes:

So the term is here to say. Just try to be aware of the game that’s being played.