Free Speech, Stochastic Terrorism, and the Mega-Crisis Confronting U.S. Democracy

Note: This is a follow-up to an earlier article focusing on free speech issues. If you haven’t read the first article yet, I recommend it as background information. However, today’s article also stands on its own.

I’ve been watching with growing horror as the United States sinks deeper and deeper into political and social chaos. Over the last nine years — ever since Trump first ran for president in 2015–16 — it’s become increasingly and frighteningly clear that our society’s legal framework and once-accepted boundaries and guidelines are all failing to meet the moment.

In particular, we’re beset by a toxic, destructive combination of unfettered ‘free speech’ and stochastic terrorism. That is, our free speech ideals and laws are constantly being tested or transgressed by bad actors eager to take down ‘liberal democracy’ and replace it with an oppressive White Christian nation and society.

These bad actors hide behind the banner of ‘free speech’ and use it as a cover for their ever-increasing stochastic terrorism: terrorism that produces ‘random’ violent results or utilizes hateful speech to indirectly incite violence.

The key feature of stochastic terrorism is that it incites people to embrace and enact violence but seldom does so directly. Instead, it gradually builds a distorted, hateful ‘picture’ of its chosen target — a particular ‘despised’ race, sex, ethnic group, political party, or religion — and whips people into a murderous frenzy that inevitably leads to violence against the chosen victim.

Yet the words “Go out and murder as many of these nasty ‘subhumans’ as you can” or “Go bomb the nearest mosque or temple” are never uttered, nor is any direct verbal ‘order’ or suggestion to resort to violence. Thus, these stochastic terrorists are not technically breaking the law, and are still within the guidelines (barely) for free speech.

These bad actors, foremost among them Donald Trump, understand this unfortunate legal fact all too well — and use it to shield themselves and continue their intensifying abuse of our legal system and our society. They know that they’re safe, know exactly where the uncrossable line is… and then do everything in their power to incite hatred and violence without crossing that ‘red line.’

And that is a huge and perhaps insurmountable problem for our liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy vs. far-right hate and oppression

At this point, I should clarify that liberal democracy is not ‘liberal’ in the modern sense of ‘liberal vs. conservative.’ The ‘liberal’ in liberal democracy is a much older term and refers to our underlying ideals of freedom and justice for all as well as our attempts to actualize these ideals. The use of ‘liberal’ here refers to effective freedom and equal opportunity for all citizens — as our constitution and nation intended and often (until very recently) reaffirmed.

So when I say that bad actors — mainly from the far right — are gunning for ‘liberal democracy,’ I mean that they are intent on undermining, destroying, and replacing our society and nation at the deepest, most fundamental levels. As their intensifying stochastic terrorism clearly reveals, they plan to elevate and empower White, Christian males while denigrating and abusing Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, LGBTQ+ folks, and women in general.

Their intentions are obvious, at this point, because they are no longer hiding them or being at all shy about them. Until this past decade, far-right groups and activists operated mainly in the shadows, on the outer fringes of society, and were rightly considered creepy and dangerous ‘fringe’ movements.

But no more. Today these former ‘fringe’ movements and groups have gone mainstream (largely due to Trump’s and Fox News’ toxic influence), and their hateful, violence-inciting rhetoric has likewise been mainstreamed — and is now deemed both acceptable and necessary by many Americans.

This development spells likely disaster for the United States and liberal democracy — no exaggeration. Participatory democracy depends completely on the good will and good faith efforts of its citizens, so if a vast cohort of ‘citizens’ no longer believes in or supports the basic tenets and values undergirding our nation — and is instead fighting hard to undermine and dismantle them — social chaos and collapse will likely follow, and sooner rather than later.

The four stages of stochastic terrorism

The Encyclopedia Britannica describes four sequential stages of stochastic terrorism:

“Law enforcement experts, sociologists, and psychologists often characterize stochastic terrorism as a process consisting of four stages, which may be designated as demonization, dehumanization, desensitization, and denial [my emphasis]. The process begins with the stochastic terrorist blaming a person, group, or community for some egregious social ill or injustice — a charge that is often false or at least greatly exaggerated. With enough repetition of the charge, the target’s humanity is greatly diminished in the eyes of the speaker’s followers and is eventually displaced by the idea that the person, group, or community is simply an “other.”

The next stage involves the speaker’s explicit or implicit call for violence against such an enemy. With repetition, the suggestion of violence ceases to be shocking and begins to be viewed as an acceptable and even a necessary reaction. In the final stage of the process, after the target has been violently attacked by one or more of the speaker’s supporters, the speaker denies responsibility for the crime, usually on the grounds that no specific plan of attack was ever offered. Some speakers even claim naivete, and any definitive motivation behind the speaker’s violent speech or missives is usually impossible to discern.”

One note about the last stage, denial: recently our politics took a super-dangerous turn after the second assassination attempt on Trump. Now Trump and the GOP are accusing the Democrats of inciting that violence and attacking them for the exact behavior Dems accuse Trump of — being “an ongoing danger to democracy.”

According to the GOP, it was dangerous and violence-inciting for the Dems to (correctly) assess that Trump IS a danger to democracy, so — in a major forehead-smacking display of denial and projection — they’re insisting that it’s not Trump and his obvious incitement that are the problem… not at all!

No, it’s those nasty, violence-prone Democrats who are busy provoking innocent, patriotic Republicans to violence!

Is the U.S. even CAPABLE of defending itself?

As all this deliberate fomenting of hatred, disgust, and social chaos keeps accelerating, what can the U.S. do to defend itself and its citizens from looming disaster and societal collapse? The truthful answer is: almost nothing.

Given our lax, wrong-headed notions about ‘free speech’ and our inability to set firm boundaries and enact clear legal deterrents, our nation is virtually helpless in the face of this right-wing onslaught.

Whenever we DO try to curtail or deter outrageous far-right hate speech and demeaning racial or sexual ‘profiling,’ for example, these bad actors start screaming ‘Censorship!’ and viciously accuse the ‘libs’ and hated Democrats of ‘canceling’ them and their views. It’s a classic ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ situation for our democracy — and there’s no good solution in sight.

European and other nations don’t face the same problems (at least not to this extreme) because they have much more stringent and well-defined limits on free speech, especially hate speech. These other nations know full well that allowing too much dangerous and violence-inciting speech is a sure recipe for disaster — so they’ve acted accordingly and wisely, and enacted strong limits and severe penalties for hateful speech and incitement.

But so far, WE in the U.S. are not willing to make these common-sense changes and reforms. We’re so attached to being ‘the land of the free’ that we can’t even see the major disaster-in-progress our extreme ‘free speech’ rules have encouraged.

Yes, we’ve unwittingly encouraged all this insanity. And even if we DO see what’s happening and want to reverse it — we don’t have the national will or consensus (so far) to actually change our free speech laws and guidelines.

Thus, as Einstein said about another issue (nuclear proliferation), “… we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” The far right is on a major roll in the U.S. and has managed to ‘own’ the free speech issue and twist it almost beyond recognition. With Trump, the GOP, the MAGA movement, and Fox ‘News’ all blaring constant support for far-right demagogues, overt racists, and misogynistic Christian Nationalists, the U.S. is literally under heavy sustained attack from within.

Pick your poison: every choice is difficult and dangerous

So, what to do? The free speech issue has always been a thorny one — to say the least — yet today it’s become vastly thornier due to right-wing stochastic terrorism and right-wing ‘ownership’ of the free speech issue.

As long as far-right bad actors, demagogues, and fake ‘patriots’ get to define (or redefine) free speech ‘in their own image’ — and then get to say and do almost anything they want — the U.S. will be utterly paralyzed: a tottering, helpless, pathetic giant.

It truly looks like ‘the beginning of the end’ for the once-proud U.S.A. The sad and deeply ironic twist is that our excessive longing for total ‘free speech’ and ‘freedom’ without social responsibility is proving our undoing — and will likely lead to intense oppression and the loss of most of our freedoms.

It’s looking like we’ll soon have to choose: do we want total free speech and all the horrors, violence, and oppression it unleashes — or do we want to set firmer, healthier limits on free speech and work to preserve our liberal democracy and our freedoms?

Do we want to allow dangerously hateful ‘free speech’ in the name of ‘freedom’ — and suffer the ongoing dire consequences — or do we want to rein in the worst and most dangerous speech and actually keep our democracy and most of our current freedoms?

So far, the first choice is winning out, consistently. Today, our nation is edging ever closer to mass hatred and violent collapse.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:

White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism

Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box

Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race

What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

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