What Are the Rules?

C onsider this a forlorn cry for exposition and specificity. Will someone, somewhere, in the name of all that is good and true, tell me what the bloody rules are for determining whether rhetorical bombast counts as mere everyday hyperbole or as the ineluctable prerequisite to political violence? I have looked and looked for a pattern, but, despite having pried up the floorboards and scoured the attic and investigated every last corner of the basement, I can find no standard that I find satisfactory. Surely, there must be more undergirding all this than just Calvinball?

Yesterday, Donald Trump’s life was threatened for the second time in two months. In response, I have seen two lines emerge from the media. The first is that the attempt should not be blamed on his critics but on the would-be shooter, who is crazy. The second line is that, by some extraordinary alchemy that I evidently lack the intellect to comprehend, the blame for his having been targeted lies with Trump himself. As a writer who has uniformly rejected the idea that political arguments ought to be blamed for the actions of vicious criminals, I am in instinctive agreement with the first approach. But I am also aware that, unlike myself, those who are currently advancing that case do not do so consistently. Thus, my inquiry: If my one-size-fits-all rule has not been adopted writ large, then what has been?

Back when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer, I was informed that, if the victim of an attack had at any point been “demonized” by a political party, then that political party was responsible for what follows. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of that ugly incident, the Washington Post recruited no fewer than three of its top writers to draw a direct line between the assault on Paul Pelosi and a series of anti-Nancy political commercials that were run in 2010 — twelve years earlier. The “years of vilification,” the Post proposed, “culminated Friday when Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer during an early-morning break-in at the couple’s home in San Francisco by a man searching for the speaker and shouting ‘Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?’” Lest anyone misunderstand what it meant by “culminated,” the paper made sure to spell it out. “For many Democrats,” the piece concluded, “the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband represents the all-but-inevitable conclusion of Republicans’ increasingly violent and threatening rhetoric toward their political opponent.”

If those are, indeed, the rules, then what should we make of the man who tried to kill Donald Trump — that’s the second man to try to kill Donald Trump, for those keeping score at home — having echoed a literal Kamala Harris campaign slogan on his Twitter account? On April 22, the suspect wrote “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose.” This is a phrase that Harris uses often. Does what happened in Florida therefore represent a “culmination”? Does it count as an “all-but-inevitable conclusion”? And, if it does not, then why not? What are the precise characteristics that make it different? Surely, it cannot be that Trump is subject to less damning condemnation than Nancy Pelosi? Elsewhere, Harris has submitted that Trump is “a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms,” called him a “dictator,” and noted pointedly that America “was founded” — by which, of course, she means it violently revolted — “in defiance of a King.” In the press, Trump is routinely cast as an “authoritarian,” as a wannabe “Hitler,” and as the likely author of America’s downfall. Am I to conclude that these words carry a happy affect when they are spoken by a Democrat or by a columnist or by a talking head?

Another question occurs to me: Why, given how fashionable it remains, has the term “stochastic terrorism” not been swiftly applied to this case? As I have previously contended, I consider the notion of “stochastic terrorism” to be a cynical, vague, hollow tool whose sole purpose is to permit America’s self-appointed “expert” class to “prove” scientifically that their ideological opponents are rotten. But others seem to take it seriously. So why not here?

Per Vox, “stochastic terrorism” is the process:

whereby an individual who you designate a stochastic terrorist, makes statements that seem to implicitly advocate the use of violence without actually directing it. It’s the kind of rhetoric that justifies or advocates the use of violence without directing it. The speaker gets this level of plausible deniability, where if somebody does carry out an attack, then they can say, “Well, I never actually directed them to do something.”

That most people wouldn’t engage in violence as a result isn’t relevant here, the argument runs, because:

Terrorism is a very low base rate phenomenon — typically a person’s likelihood of engaging in terrorism is a fraction of a fraction of one percent. But when you’re reaching millions and millions of people, you start to approach complete likelihood that at least one person will interpret what that person said as a call to violence.

“There have,” Vox notes, “been several cases where individuals have cited some of the statements that have been made by people like former President Donald Trump.”

To recap, then: Stochastic terrorism is when an individual makes a statement that seems “to implicitly advocate the use of violence without actually directing it,” that reaches “millions and millions of people,” one of whom cites “some of the statements” before going on to commit an act of violence.

Might this concept perhaps be useful here? Or is there a crucial distinction that I’m missing? If so, what is it? What rubric informs it? What part of the literature confirms it? What framework ought I to be using in order to fully grasp the divergence? I ask because, if you’ll forgive me the impertinence of saying so, what I am seeing on display in reaction to the events of yesterday afternoon is the usual pile of cynical, partisan, self-serving, fraudulent, hypocritical garbage — and, absent some extremely persuasive clarifications to the contrary, I’ve resolved to dismiss all of it, to permanently discount the opinions of anyone peddling it, and to persist in my gauche, old-fashioned conviction that, irrespective of whose ox is being gored, we ought to blame criminals, not strangers, for the transgressions they put on display.