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Credit to Author: Jonathon Keats| Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2019 11:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n n<\/em>. Acts of violence by random extremists, triggered by political demagoguery.<\/strong><\/p>\n When President Trump<\/a> tweeted a video of himself body-slamming the CNN logo in 2017, most \u00adpeople took it as a stupid joke. For Cesar Sayoc, it may have been a call to arms: Last October the avowed Trump fan allegedly mailed a pipe bomb to CNN headquarters.<\/p>\n No one told Sayoc to do it, but the fact that it happened was really no surprise. In 2011, after the shooting of US representative Gabby Giffords, a Daily Kos blog<\/a> warned of a new threat the writer called stochastic terrorism<\/em>: the use of mass media to incite attacks by random nut jobs\u2014acts that are \u201cstatistically predictable but individually unpredictable.\u201d The writer had in mind right-wing radio and TV agitators, but in 2016, Rolling Stone<\/em> accused then-candidate Trump of using the same playbook when he joked that \u201cSecond Amendment people\u201d might \u201cdo\u201d something if Hillary Clinton won the election.<\/p>\n Of course, Trump\u2019s people later said he meant they might \u2026 \u201cvote.\u201d That\u2019s how it works: Stochastic terrorism lets bullies operate in the open with full deniability, since the random element erases any provable causation.<\/p>\n Tellingly, the word stochastic<\/em> comes from the Greek stochastikos<\/em>, meaning \u201cproceeding by guesswork\u201d and \u201cskillful in aiming.\u201d Both are apt here. It takes a master demagogue to weaponize unstable individuals and aim them at political enemies.<\/p>\n This article appears in the February issue. Subscribe now<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n