Conservatives like Tucker Carlson who passionately argue against the increasingly depraved policy agenda of the Left are terrorists, according to a trendy new definition of terrorism being pushed by leftists.
The new definition may have support in the Biden-Harris regime.
Oh, scratch that – of course it does. The “Disinformation Governance Board” and the fact that the illegitimate regime coordinates with social media platforms to crush conservative thought, including opposition to vaccination mandates, ought to convince you of that.
To leftists, conservative speech is inherently hateful and antisocial, and after floating around long enough, it eventually pushes somebody over the edge so they commit a heinous act, or so they have convinced themselves.
Two days after Payton Gendron, a disturbed 18-year-old white man, allegedly shot and killed 10 people May 14 at a Tops Friendly Market in a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, government-funded academic Kurt Braddock blamed the Fox News talk show host for the massacre.
Since many articles out there gloss over what Gendron did, let’s recount what we know.
Gendron is now being processed by the criminal justice system. FBI Special Agent Christopher J. Dlugokinski swore out an affidavit June 15 in support of the criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York in United States of America v. Gendron, court file 22-mj-124.
Gendron’s “motive for the mass shooting was to prevent Black people from replacing white people and eliminating the white race, and to inspire others to commit similar attacks,” Dlugokinski said.
Gendron’s rifle, recovered after the shooting, “had various writings on it, including, but not limited to, the names of others who have committed mass shootings, racial slurs, the statement ‘Here’s your reparations!,’ and the phrase ‘The Great Replacement,’” the FBI man stated. A search of his home recovered a handwritten note in which Gendron told his family he “had to commit this attack” because he cares “for the future of the White race,” Dlugokinski added.
Somehow Tucker Carlson is to blame for all of this because of things he’s said.
In a blizzard of May tweets documented by Thomas Lifson at American Thinker, Braddock, an Assistant Professor of Public Communication in the School of Communication at American University, avoided saying what exactly Carlson supposedly did to provoke the attack. Instead, Braddock retreated into the pseudointellectual world of leftist academic jargon to smear the conservative polemicist without actually producing evidence to support his bold claim.
Braddock accused Carlson of something he called stochastic terrorism, which he defined as “a form of incitement, where the speaker uses coded language, dog whistles, and other subtext to justify, promote, or advocate the use of violence without providing overt directives to do so.”
“Whether the shooter was directly motivated by Carlson is salient, but just as important is how he has normalized ideas that advocate violence like what we saw in Buffalo,” Braddock tweeted as he called for a debate about “whether and how stochastic terrorism is allowed to occur.”
Displaying all the integrity and fidelity to facts of a Media Matters attack dog, Braddock tweeted: “Literally just wrote a paragraph about far-right media motivating acts of terrorism by legitimizing conspiracy theories before I saw the news about #Buffalo. I noted
Tucker Carlson’s normalization of the Great Replacement bullshit.”
“Carlson is a danger to U.S. domestic security,” Braddock concluded.
In other words, this academic thinks conservative ideas kill innocent people and something needs to be done.
In reality, Carlson has never urged whites to harm blacks, and Braddock would be hard-pressed to explain how exactly Carlson “normalized ideas that advocate violence like what we saw in Buffalo.”
The lack of a connection between words and evil deeds doesn’t matter, because, according to Braddock, Carlson, who in reality shares well-researched information and often-nuanced, intelligent views with his audience, is on the wrong side of political issues such as immigration, woke-ism, and multiculturalism in America, which, by the way, happens to be the least racist nation on earth.
Braddock is clever. He readily admits that there is no direct causal link between Carlson’s rhetoric and violent massacres, so he relies on hocus-pocus to argue that the TV commentator’s repeated comments over time somehow inspired violence.
He accuses Carlson of deliberately using subtext to spur killers to action. “Stochastic terrorism is about the use of subtext to justify the use of violence,” Braddock tweeted June 15 of this year.
The problem here is that interpreting subtext, as any literature student knows, is an inherently subjective activity. If a novelist writes that the curtains were blue, an English professor may say it reflects the melancholy of a character. But what if the novelist just decided, for other reasons or for no reason in particular, to make the curtains blue?
Subtext is in the eye of the beholder, but Braddock wants subtext to be enough to deem people to be terrorists.
If Braddock wants to employ a weird kind of disparate impact-like analysis to Carlson, disingenuously blaming him for the murder of minorities because he inveighs against harmful policies enacted to benefit minorities, he is free do so.
Leftist politicians have been doing the same thing for decades, attempting to smear their enemies by saying that conservatives have sinister ulterior motives.
Former Congressman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) famously said tax cuts were racist, presumably because in leftist thinking they would help wealthy whites but not lower-income minorities.
“It’s not ‘spic’ or ‘n—–’ anymore. They say, ‘Let’s cut taxes,’” Rangel said.
But Braddock’s approach would squelch vitally important debates on the issues of the day.
If Mexicans are illegally streaming across the border, speech identifying the problem is by definition stochastic terrorism (and possibly so-called hate speech), because, the theory goes, it will lead to violence against Mexicans. And if Muslims are committing actual real-life terrorist attacks against America, speech pinpointing the problem is also stochastic terrorism that will necessarily result in violence against Muslims.
Braddock is far from the only academic out there spewing dangerous, crazy ideas, but it’s a problem that he is sponsored by the U.S. government.
At a June 14 congressional hearing on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s terrorism-prevention grant program, Braddock testified he has taken in more than $550,000 from DHS for research projects. Unsurprisingly, he has also called former President Donald Trump a stochastic terrorist, The Epoch Times reported.
Trump-hating turncoat, Elizabeth Neumann, who was a senior DHS official until early 2020, leveled the same bizarre accusation against the 45th president months after abandoning him.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Neumann wrote that Trump was fomenting violence.
“Language from campaign materials and Trump’s extemporaneous speeches at rallies have been used as justification for acts of violence has repeatedly been confronted with this fact. He and his supporters retort that he has, eventually, denounced violence and white supremacists. But the issue is not whether he has ever condemned those ideas and people; it is that he is inconsistent and muddied in his condemnations. Extremists thrive on this mixed messaging, interpreting it as coded support.”
What does stochastic actually mean?
To this word nerd, “stochastic” is an odd descriptor to apply to terrorism. Maybe its strangeness, its distance from common parlance, is why it was chosen.
Merriam-Webster defines the word as meaning “involving a random variable” and “involving chance or probability.”
That’s not particularly satisfying, is it?
“Stochastic” itself as a concept is difficult to master. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, in the 1660s it meant “‘pertaining to conjecture,’ from Greek stokhastikos ‘able to guess, conjecturing.’” Later it took on a more specific meaning: “The sense of ‘randomly determined’ is from 1934, from German stochastik.”
According to Google’s English dictionary, provided by Oxford Languages, stochastic now means “randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.”
When stochastic is prepended to terrorism, something magical happens: somehow the resultant phrase takes on the meaning of “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted,” according to Dictionary.com.
Although there is evidence “that the term dates back to at least 2002, the term stochastic terrorism, as we are using here, spreads in the 2010s, popularly credited to a blog post in 2011. Terrorism experts, security analysts, and political observers have been increasingly using the term stochastic terrorism in the late 2010s, especially in terms of how rhetoric from political and religious leaders inspires random extremists, typically young men considered to be radicalized by ISIS or white supremacist groups,” the website states.
“We are no strangers, alas, to significant spikes in search for stochastic terrorism. The term trended up over 9,000% last October on Dictionary.com amid discussion of the news that bombs were being mailed to Democratic leaders,” according to the post dated August 8, 2019.
Obviously, it is an expression ready-made for attacks on anyone who refuses to toe a particular line.
Obama hack popularizes term
The term was apparently popularized by leftist Juliette Kayyem, an academic-activist with a long Democrat pedigree. Kayyem was then-President Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. Previously, she was then-Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s Homeland Security Advisor.
Kayyem used the term in an inflammatory, loose-with-the-facts screed in the Washington Post titled, “There Are No Lone Wolves.” According to her, then-President Donald Trump was to blame for the mass shooting at the Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, 2019, in which Patrick Wood Crusius allegedly – he is still being prosecuted – murdered 23 people. Crusius allegedly said he was targeting “Mexicans” in the attack and wrote a manifesto saying the attack to come was a response to “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
In a fit of fabulist fantasy, Kayyem opines that Trump is to blame for the attack and other attacks against minorities because he “marks them as the ‘other’ and is mimicked by white supremacists” whom he “fails to shame.” Trump’s “rhetoric winks and nods, curries favor, embraces both sides and, while not promoting violence specifically, certainly does not condemn it (until after it occurs.)”
Trump has engaged in stochastic terrorism, which Kayyem says is:
“Public speech that may incite violence, even without that specific intent, has been given a name: stochastic terrorism, for a pattern that can’t be predicted precisely but can be analyzed statistically. It is the demonization of groups through mass media and other propaganda that can result in a violent act because listeners interpret it as promoting targeted violence — terrorism. And the language is vague enough that it leaves room for plausible deniability and outraged, how-could-you-say-that attacks on critics of the rhetoric.”
The ever-popular Charlottesville Lie
Trump, according to Kayyem, also “fails to shame white supremacy. That is all anyone needs to know. And a responsible president — one who was appalled that his language might have been misconstrued and was contributing to the greatest terror threat in America today — would surely change his rhetoric.”
Of course, listing all the things that the woke Left wants conservatives to shame (and apologize for), would require writing a book. And Americans aren’t even convinced that there is such a thing as “white supremacy” in America, a land where all minorities are free to live their lives as they please. In fact, minorities want to be in America so badly that they risk life and limb every day to get here.
But this failure to shame a leftist hallucination is a grave thought crime in the eyes of our woke betters as they devise new and improved ways to punish their enemies.
Kayyem repeats the Left’s favorite lie about Trump – the one that insists, evidence be damned, that he praised violent white nationalists after the ill-fated “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. Although the rally attracted neo-Nazis, many others were in the vicinity at the time, including conservatives, to protest the proposal to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a nearby park.
Kayyem repeated this lie that won’t die when she wrote that Trump was praising the white nationalists and neo-Nazis when he said there were “very fine people on both sides.” The out-of-context quotation comes from Trump’s August 15, 2017 press conference, as PragerU has documented in a video.
The 45th president doesn’t like neo-Nazis and has condemned them. Trump has a Jewish daughter, son-in-law, and grand-children, and at the presser he was explicitly referring to those people who were concerned about the statue controversy.
“You are changing history, you are changing culture,” Trump said. “You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
Trump also said there were some “very bad people” on both sides in Charlottesville but that some who were protesting the removal of the Lee statue were “fine people,” a statement that is no doubt true.
Trump said: “You also had some very fine people on both sides. … You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of—to them—a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
Trump followed up, saying, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists. They should be condemned totally.”
In the PragerU video, CNN commentator Steve Cortes noted that the New York Times, reported August 16, 2017, that Michelle Piercy, a night shift worker at a Wichita, Kansas retirement home, “drove all night with a conservative group that opposed the planned removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee.”
“After listening to Mr. Trump on Tuesday, she said it was as if he had channeled her and her friends… who had no interest in standing with Nazis or white supremacists…”
No matter how many times PragerU and other people of good will lay out the evidence, the Charlottesville Lie will continue to live because leftists don’t care about facts.
This is hardly a revelation to conservatives.
But now leftists seek to weaponize the absence of damning facts as proof of conservatives’ bad ideas and intentions.
Code words, dog whistles, and subtexts are all that these people have.
This column by Matthew Vadum appeared June 30, 2022, at FrontPageMag.
Photo shows Tucker Carlson. Duh.