Gabriel Sterling. It’s never been easier to spot the courageous than right now.
Pressing Pause
Small steps toward thriving families, schools, and communities
Gabriel Sterling. It’s never been easier to spot the courageous than right now.
Pressing Pause 
Stochastic terrorism is “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.”
The word stochastic, in everyday language, means “random.” Terrorism, here, refers to “violence motivated by ideology.”
Here’s the idea behind stochastic terrorism:
A leader or organization uses rhetoric in the mass media against a group of people.
This rhetoric, while hostile or hateful, doesn’t explicitly tell someone to carry out an act of violence against that group, but a person, feeling threatened, is motivated to do so as a result.
That individual act of political violence can’t be predicted as such, but that violence will happen is much more probable thanks to the rhetoric.
This rhetoric is thus called stochastic terrorism because of the way it incites random violence.
Thanks Cody for that contextualization.
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