Last week, The Gem State Patriot ran an essay by Robert Neugebauer unpacking a word most Americans had never heard: “stochastic.” It may be one of the most important concepts for understanding why our politics now feels one step away from bloodshed.
In statistics, a stochastic process is about probability, not certainty. You cannot say which specific event will happen, but you can say that, given certain conditions, something bad becomes more likely. Applied to politics, this is the essence of what scholars and security experts call “stochastic terrorism”: repeated, hostile rhetoric that raises the odds of ideologically motivated violence, even though no one gives a direct order and no single attack can be predicted in advance.
This process follows a recognizable pattern: First comes the originator—a politician, public figure, or organization—who relentlessly uses dehumanizing, threat‑laden language against a target. They don’t say “go attack them.” They talk in insinuations, metaphors, dark “jokes,” and constant claims that the target is an existential danger to democracy or public safety. It is not just reckless. It is, in moral terms, cowardly.
Then come the amplifiers: major media outlets, social media platforms, partisan influencers, and algorithms that reward outrage by pushing the message to ever‑larger audiences. Finally, there are the receivers—people already somewhat sympathetic to the ideology, burdened by personal grievances, and increasingly marinated in this message. Under sustained pressure, a few move from resentment to action. No one can say which person, on which day, will snap. But given enough time and enough inflammatory messaging, it becomes statistically likely that someone will.
That is the “stochastic” part. You cannot forecast the specific crime, but you can foresee the rising risk. And the beauty of the tactic, from the practitioner’s perspective, is that they get to wash their hands after the fact: “We never told anyone to do that.”
There is an old word for this kind of moral evasion: calumny. The calumniator does not say, “I know this man is a criminal.” He whispers, “Did you hear that he might be?” The burden of proof has been shifted away from the one spreading the suspicion.
Libel asserts a direct falsehood; calumny deals in insinuation. It thrives in the half‑light of suggestion and rumor. Stochastic rhetoric operates in the same shadows. Those who engage in it are not brave enough to state a direct allegation, accept the legal risk, and defend it with evidence. They prefer to plant the seed, let others water it, and then disclaim responsibility when someone harvests the crop in the form of violence or threats.
The architects of this strategy—and the legions who repeat their talking points—are moral cowards. They want the political upside of hatred without the legal liability of incitement.
Since Donald Trump descended that escalator in 2015, his opponents in politics and media have engaged in a relentless campaign of demonization. He has been painted not merely as wrong, but as a racist, a fascist, an authoritarian threat to the Republic—someone whose very presence in public life is intolerable. Late‑night comedians, daytime talk shows, editorial pages, and academic panels have all joined the chorus. When prominent Democrats or friendly media voices label the sitting president a racist, a would‑be dictator, or even a pedophile, they are not engaged in normal political criticism. They are telling millions of people that this one man is a clear and present danger.
Many of these same voices drove the “Russian collusion” narrative far beyond what the evidence ultimately supported, lent credence to salacious and unverified dossiers, minimized the cognitive decline of Joe Biden, and dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop as “Russian disinformation” until the proof became too obvious to deny. Each episode reinforced one theme: Trump is uniquely illegitimate, uniquely dangerous, and therefore a uniquely appropriate target for unhinged rhetoric.
And then, when a disturbed individual takes this message literally, we are told the blame lies only with the lone actor—never with the years of apocalyptic language that preceded him.
We now see a pattern of serious threats and attempts on President Trump’s life stretching from his first campaigns through his current term: shots fired at rallies, plots tied to foreign adversaries, security breaches at Mar‑a‑Lago, and other incidents that forced urgent Secret Service intervention. No one can prove that any given would‑be assassin was “activated” by a particular speech, article, or broadcast. That is exactly the point. Stochastic processes do not yield a signed confession reading “Cable News made me do it.” What they yield is a culture in which harming the president feels, to a small but dangerous minority, less unthinkable than it once was.
For years, many on the left claimed that Trump’s own rhetoric constituted “stochastic terror,” that his words might help create a climate in which violence against minorities or opponents became more likely. If they believed that then, they face a hard question now. Are they willing to admit that their own relentless portrayal of Trump as a mortal threat to democracy may have similar effects? Or does their doctrine of stochastic terror run only one way?
The left, from elected officials to media fixtures, has grown comfortable treating Trump as outside the normal bounds of moral consideration. When you depict a man as a tyrant, a criminal, and a subhuman menace, you are not simply “holding him accountable.” You are participating in the very process that experts have warned about: repeated demonization that can tip isolated, unstable individuals into violence, even in the absence of any conspiracy or direct instruction.
If the concept of stochastic terrorism means anything at all, it must apply to the years‑long barrage aimed at Trump. Otherwise, it is not an analytic tool. It is just another partisan weapon.
Those who engage in this rhetoric, and those who amplify it for ratings and clicks, ought to be named plainly: participants in a dangerous and deeply cowardly process. They want to mobilize the passions of the crowd while preserving their own legal and reputational deniability. They want the fire without the smoke on their hands.
If we are serious about lowering the temperature of our politics and preventing further attempts on any president’s life, we must confront stochastic rhetoric wherever it appears. That means holding accountable not only the lone actor with a weapon, but also the respectable figures who spent years telling him that his target was an existential evil.
