You may notice a particular strain of media discourse after certain public acts of violence.
When an insane criminal broke into former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) home and assaulted her husband, Scientific American ran an article somehow tying the attack to an online conversation in which conservatives Tucker Carlson and Christopher Rufo objected to drag-queen story hours for little children.
When a masked vandal shot a steel ball through the window of a bar hosting drag-queen story hour a few years back, the New York Times editorial board tied the attack to a Marco Rubio ad that stated, “The radical Left will destroy America if we don’t stop them. They indoctrinate children and try to turn boys into girls.”
This was “stochastic terrorism,” the New York Times argued — rhetoric aimed at demonizing transgendered people, thus increasing the likelihood of violence against them.
Stochastic terrorism was a theory invented by academics during the Bush-era “war on terror” to try and make terrorist attacks more intelligible. Sure, terrorists like the shoe bomber and the Times Square bomber may be “lone wolves,” some scholars argued, but they tend to spring from certain social and media environments.
“Stochastic” is a mathematical term signifying something that is random yet on a large scale predictable. The argument was that given enough poverty, scapegoating, religious extremism, and violent imagery in a culture, someone — we can’t predict who — will act out with a terrorist attack.
Once Donald Trump came to office, the news media Democrats began applying this concept to American politics. Specifically, they have argued that conservatives, by “demonizing” Democrats, transgendered people, abortionists, immigrants, or powerful Democrats, are guilty of stochastic terrorism. Conservative or Republican political speech, they argue, indirectly incites random people to violence.
(Crucially, the Supreme Court has ruled that incitement is not protected by the First Amendment.)
Yet something odd happened in 2024. Two different men tried to assassinate then-presidential candidate Trump, and then a rich kid angry at the health insurance industry assassinated the CEO of UnitedHealthcare — and yet no major newspaper, no cable network, and no Democratic politician came out to condemn the dangerous rhetoric that had led to these attacks.
In fact, the same people who often call conservative speech “terrorism” decided the shooting of UHC CEO Brian Thompson was the occasion to empathize with those who wanted him dead.
It’s enough to make you wonder if all the talk of “harmful rhetoric,” and the entire concept of stochastic terrorism, is not sincere or scholarly but is instead just another attempt by the intolerant Left to justify censoring the people they hate.
When is terrorism not terrorism?
Thompson’s assassination taught us a lesson about the folks who use the term “stochastic terrorism.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) makes an effort to introduce ideas from left-wing academia into mainstream political discourse. It’s part of her larger goal of shifting the country further left. For instance, she succeeded in replacing the word equality, which suggests equal treatment, in the Democratic lexicon with the word equity, which demands equal outcomes.
Ocasio-Cortez has been perhaps the most aggressive Democrat peddling the concept of “stochastic terrorism.”
“It’s uncomfortable serving with people who engage in what many experts deem stochastic terrorism,” Ocasio-Cortez said of her House colleagues after the GOP majority kicked Ilhan Omar (D-MN), now-Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) off of the House Intelligence Committee.
She defines stochastic terrorism as “an incitement of violence using digital means and large platforms.”
In 2022, Ocasio-Cortez called Tucker Carlson a stochastic terrorist. “Every time that dude puts my name in his mouth, I mean this is like what stochastic terrorism is. … And then when something happens, because it’s indirect, you say, oh I had nothing to do with it, because it’s indirect.”
By Ocasio-Cortez’s definition, if the wrong person, a conservative with a large audience, simply names her critically (“puts her name in his mouth,” as she would put it), they are making violence against her more likely, and thus her critics are responsible for any threats or actual violence against her.
Although the First Amendment’s freedom of speech exists primarily to protect criticism of government officials, Ocasio-Cortez is arguing that some criticism of some government officials is “incitement.”
So, what did Ocasio-Cortez say after Thompson was assassinated? You can guess she didn’t condemn anyone who “put Brian Thompson’s name in his mouth.” She didn’t call on people to cool the rhetoric against healthcare companies or corporate CEOs.
Instead, Ocasio-Cortez saw the assassination as an occasion to explain why it’s reasonable for people to hate people like Thompson: “I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence.”
Previously, Ocasio-Cortez had attacked health insurance companies harshly. “It’s unconscionable that insurance companies choose who lives & dies,” she wrote to her millions of followers in 2019.
She accused health insurance companies of killing people: “Every year we sacrifice human lives for the sake of our for-profit healthcare system, & next year is poised to get worse.”
To summarize Ocasio-Cortez’s views: Criticizing her can be “incitement,” which would justify censorship, and denying an insurance claim can be “violence,” which would justify violence in self-defense.
‘Violence is never the answer, but …’
It was a pattern: The liberals who branded conservative speech as “stochastic terrorism” were perfectly fine demonizing health insurance executives.
Jeet Heer is a left-wing journalist who used the Thompson assassination to reaffirm his prior call for a movie valorizing such killings, having spent years “othering” insurance executives.
“I think it’s a political mistake to frame the healthcare debate as a war between different people over the level of care they should receive rather than between ordinary people versus insurance companies,” he wrote in 2019 to his hundreds of thousands of followers.
At the same time, Heer spent years saying that right-wing political speech was “stochastic terrorism.”
If Heer, Ocasio-Cortez, or any of their preferred “stochastic terrorism” experts believed what they were saying, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) would be their prime target. She has a tendency to go viciously after the very types of people and organizations that in turn fall prey to left-wing violence.
After the UHC assassination, Warren railed against health insurance companies. “The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the healthcare system.”
The killing was “a warning,” Warren said — but not a warning about “violent rhetoric.” Rather it was a warning that corporate misbehavior might get you shot.
“Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” Warren said. “This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the healthcare to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”
Warren, on another occasion, spent months berating and promising to shut down pro-life crisis pregnancy centers — verbal attacks that were followed by a spate of arsons, vandalism, and bombings of those very centers.
If the editorial boards and Democratic congresswomen believed anything they said about stochastic terrorism, they would brand Warren a terrorist.
What inspires assassins
The three assassination attempts (one successful) this year ought to demolish the notion of stochastic terrorism, not because the assassins were on the Left (they weren’t) but because the assassins’ inspirations were obscure, sometimes incoherent, and not really part of any broader ideology or belief system.
Policy analyst Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry tied in the terrorist who crashed a car into a Christmas market in Germany. The German terrorist was a former Muslim who, by some reports, is an atheist. Online, he regularly criticized Islam. Germany’s government, according to the New York Times, “said that he had not fitted their profile of an Islamic extremist and that they had not categorized him as a potential threat.”
Thompson’s assassin was not apparently influenced by Ocasio-Cortez or far-left socialists or anarchists. Instead, he seemed to take in contemporary psychology commentators and self-improvement podcasts. The second man who planned to assassinate Trump seemed most passionate about supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Gobry noted archly that these were “centrist” terrorists. Indeed, this batch of assassins and terrorists undermines one of the main pillars of “stochastic terrorism”: the argument that “extremist” messaging makes terrorism more likely.
Will the stochastic terrorism police start clamping down on Jonathan Haidt podcasts, pro-Ukraine material, and critiques of religious extremism?
If that sounds absurd, so should the whole notion of branding certain political views, such as Marco Rubio’s ads or Tucker Carlson’s interviews, as terrorism.
The people who use the term “stochastic terrorism” are simply trying to build a permission structure to censor conservative arguments, such as opposition to transgender ideology or criticisms of Ocasio-Cortez. If they can brand these arguments as “incitement,” they can place them outside the safe harbor of the First Amendment.
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Even if they cannot get the government to ban such speech, they can convince Big Tech to ban it, and Big Media to treat it as out of bounds.
The proper response then, anytime anyone seriously uses the term “stochastic terrorism,” is to stop listening.