"Impact cards" on stochastic violence & extremism: A quick and dirty lit review
Or, ammunition for an ongoing debate on "who the actual threat is"
Calls to violence based on misinformation, disinformation and malinformation are a critical aspect of the “heightened threat environment” for the United States
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin - February 07, 2022 02:00 pm, National Terrorism Advisory Service, Feb 07, 2022
The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation. While the conditions underlying the heightened threat landscape have not significantly changed over the last year, the convergence of the following factors has increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment: (1) the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions; (2) continued calls for violence directed at U.S. critical infrastructure; soft targets and mass gatherings; faith-based institutions, such as churches, synagogues, and mosques; institutions of higher education; racial and religious minorities; government facilities and personnel, including law enforcement and the military; the media; and perceived ideological opponents; and (3) calls by foreign terrorist organizations for attacks on the United States based on recent events.
Concern over being a victim of terrorism is at an all-time low
Gallup, Gallup In Depth Topics A to Z: Terrorism, accessed April 7, 2022
There are dead-obvious, sharp overall increases in stochastic terrorism rates during the Trump years (2016 - 2020)
Jones, Doxsee, et al., The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States, CSIS Briefs, Jun 17, 2020
Global Terrorism Database figures concur: right-wing extremists were responsible for a significant increase in terrorism rates during the Trump years
Kleinfield, Rachel, The Rise of Political Violence in the United States, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 32 Issue 4, Oct. 2021
Far-right extremists are statistically the biggest threat
Jones, Doxsee, et al., The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States, CSIS Briefs, Jun 17, 2020
This analysis makes several arguments. First, far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators, including from far-left networks and individuals inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years. Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020. Second, terrorism in the United States will likely increase over the next year in response to several factors. One of the most concerning is the 2020 U.S. presidential election, before and after which extremists may resort to violence, depending on the outcome of the election. Far-right and far-left networks have used violence against each other at protests, raising the possibility of escalating violence during the election period.
CSIS figures show increases in the proportion of terrorist attacks caused by right-wing actors in 2016-2020
Jones, Doxsee, et al., The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States, CSIS Briefs, Jun 17, 2020
Specifically, the biggest threat sub-groups are religious Q, misogynists across both left and right, and racists on the right
Kleinfield, Rachel, The Rise of Political Violence in the United States, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 32 Issue 4, Oct. 2021
Two subgroups appear most prone to violence. The January 2021 American Perspectives Survey found that white Christian evangelical Republicans were outsized supporters of both political violence and the Q-Anon conspiracy, which claims that Democratic politicians and Hollywood elites are pedophiles who (aided by mask mandates that hinder identification) traffic children and harvest their blood; separate polls by evangelical political scientists found that in October 2020 approximately 47 percent of white evangelical Christians believed in the tenets of Q-Anon, as did 59 percent of Republicans.5 Many evangelical pastors are working to turn their flocks away from this heresy. The details appear outlandish, but stripped to its core, the broad appeal becomes clearer: Democrats and cultural elites are often portrayed as Satanic forces arrayed against Christianity and seeking to harm Christian children.
The other subgroup prone to violence comprises those who feel threatened by either women or minorities. The polling on them is not clear. Separate surveys conducted by the American Enterprise Institute and academics in 2020 and 2021 found a majority of Republicans agreeing that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast” that they “may have to use force to save it.” Respondents who believed that whites faced greater discrimination than minorities were more likely to agree. Scholars Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason found that white Republicans with higher levels of minority resentment were more likely to see Democrats as evil or subhuman (beliefs thought to reduce inhibitions to violence). However, despite these feelings, the racially resentful did not stand out for endorsing violence against Democrats. Instead, the people most likely to support political violence were both Democrats and Republicans who espoused hostility toward women. A sense of racial threat may be priming more conservatives to express greater resentment in ways that normalize violence and create a more permissive atmosphere, while men in both parties who feel particularly aggrieved toward women may be most willing to act on those feelings.
Election competitiveness, identitarian partisan division, “electoral rules that enable winning by exploiting identity cleavages, and weak institutional constraints on violence” are all risk factors for election violence
Kleinfield, Rachel, The Rise of Political Violence in the United States, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 32 Issue 4, Oct. 2021
Globally, four factors elevate the risk of election-related violence, whether carried out directly by a political party through state security or armed party youth wings, outsourced to militias and gangs, or perpetrated by ordinary citizens: 1) a highly competitive election that could shift the balance of power; 2) partisan division based on identity; 3) electoral rules that enable winning by exploiting identity cleavages; and 4) weak institutional constraints on violence, particularly security-sector bias toward one group, leading perpetrators to believe they will not be held accountable for violence.11
The rise of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) illustrates this dynamic. In 2002, a train fire killed Hindu pilgrims returning to Gujarat, India, from a contested site in Ayodhya. An anti-Muslim pogrom erupted. India’s current prime minister, the BJP’s Narendra Modi, was then chief minister of Gujarat. During three days of violence directed almost entirely against Muslims, he allowed the police to stand by and afterward refused to prosecute the rioters. The party won state legislative elections later that year by exploiting Hindu-Muslim tensions to pry Hindu voters from the Congress Party. The party has since stoked ethnic riots to win in contested areas across the country, and Modi reprised the strategy as prime minister.12
In India’s winner-take-all electoral system, mob violence can potentially swing elections. Though fueled by social grievance, mob violence is susceptible to political manipulation. This is the form of electoral violence most like what the United States is experiencing, and it is particularly dangerous. Social movements have goals of their own. Though they may also serve partisan purposes, they can move in unintended directions and are hard to control.
Today, the risk factors for electoral violence are elevated in the United States, putting greater pressure on institutional constraints.
Comparative party composition and post-COVID cultural trends make political violence more likely, including internecine political violence on the left/center
Kleinfield, Rachel, The Rise of Political Violence in the United States, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 32 Issue 4, Oct. 2021
A 2016 Pew Research Center poll found that 32 percent of U.S. citizens believed that to be a “real American,” one must be a U.S.-born Christian. But among Trump’s primary voters, according to a 2017 Voter Study Group analysis, 86 percent thought it was “very important” to have been born in the United States; 77 percent believed that one must be Christian; and 47 percent thought one must also be “of European descent.”16 According to Democracy Fund voter surveys, during the 2016 primaries, many economic conservatives, libertarians, and other traditional Republican groups did not share these views on citizenship. By 2020, however, white identity voters made up an even larger share of the Republican base. Moreover, their influence is greater than their numbers because in the current U.S. context—where identities are so fixed and political polarization is so intense—swing voters are rare, so it is more cost-effective for campaigns to focus on turning out reliable voters. The easiest way to do this is with emotional appeals to shared identities rather than to policies on which groups may disagree.17 This is true for both Republicans and Democrats.
The Democratic Party’s base, however, is extremely heterogeneous. The party must therefore balance competing demands—for example, those of less reliable young “woke” voters with those of highly reliable African American churchgoers, or those of more-conservative Mexican American men with those of progressive activists. In contrast, the Republican Party is increasingly homogenous, which allows campaigns to target appeals to white, Christian, male identities and the traditional social hierarchy.
The emergence of large numbers of Americans who can be prompted to commit political violence by a variety of social events is thus partially an accidental byproduct of normal politics in highly politically sorted, psychologically abnormal times. Even in normal times, people more readily rally to their group’s defense when it is under attack, which is why “they are out to take your x” is such a time-honored fundraising and get-out-the-vote message. Usually, such tactics merely heighten polarization. But when individuals and societies are highly sorted and stressed, the effects can be much worse. Inequality and loneliness, which were endemic in the United States even before the covid-19 pandemic and have only gotten worse since, are factors highly correlated with violence and aggression. Contagious disease, meanwhile, has led to xenophobic violence historically.
The confluence of these factors with sudden social-distancing requirements, closures of businesses and public spaces, and unusually intrusive pandemic-related government measures during an election year may have pushed the more psychologically fragile over the edge. Psychologists have found that when more homogenous groups with significant overlap in their identities face a sense of group threat, they respond with deep anger. Acting on that anger can restore a sense of agency and self-esteem and, in an environment in which violence is justified and normalized, perhaps even win social approval.18
The sorts of racially coded political messages that have been in use for decades will be received differently in a political party whose composition has altered to include a greater percentage of white identity voters. Those who feel that their dominant status in the social hierarchy is under attack may respond violently to perceived racial or other threats to their status at the top. But those lower on the social ladder may also resort to violence to assert dominance over (and thus psychological separation from) those at the bottom—for example, minority men over women or other minorities, one religious minority over another, or white women over minority women. Antisemitism is growing among the young, and exists on the left, but is far stronger on the right, and is particularly salient among racial minorities who lean right.19 On the far-left, violent feelings are emerging from the same sense of group threat and defense, but in mirror-image: Those most willing to dehumanize the right are people who see themselves as defending racial minorities.
Right-wing terrorists committed 57% of all terrorist attacks between 1994 and 2020
Jones, Doxsee, et al., The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States, CSIS Briefs, Jun 17, 2020
Between 1994 and 2020, there were 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States. Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57 percent—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25 percent committed by left-wing terrorists, 15 percent by religious terrorists, 3 percent by ethnonationalists, and 0.7 percent by terrorists with other motives.
Figure 1 shows the proportion of attacks and plots attributed to the perpetrator ideologies each year during this period. Right-wing attacks and plots were predominant from 1994 to 1999 and accounted for more than half of all incidents in 2008 as well as every year since 2011, with the exception of 2013. Most right-wing attacks in the 1990s targeted abortion clinics, while most right-wing attacks since 2014 focused on individuals (often targeted because of religion, race, or ethnicity) and religious institutions. Facilities and individuals related to the government and police have also been consistent right-wing targets throughout the period, particularly for attacks by militia and sovereign citizen groups.
Stochastic terrorism is a well-established phenomenon following a clear “formula”
Tarico, Valerie, Christianist Republicans Systematically Incited Colorado Clinic Assault, valerietarico.com (blog), Nov 28, 2015
In an incident of stochastic terrorism, the person who pulls the trigger gets the blame. He—I use the male pronoun deliberately because the triggerman is almost always male—may go to jail or even be killed during his act of violence. Meanwhile, the person or persons who have triggered the triggerman, in other words, the actual stochastic terrorists, often go free, protected by plausible deniability. The formula is perversely brilliant:
A public figure with access to the airwaves or pulpit demonizes a person or group of persons.
With repetition, the targeted person or group is gradually dehumanized, depicted as loathsome and dangerous—arousing a combustible combination of fear and moral disgust.
Violent images and metaphors, jokes about violence, analogies to past “purges” against reviled groups, use of righteous religious language—all of these typically stop just short of an explicit call to arms.
When violence erupts, the public figures who have incited the violence condemn it—claiming no one could possibly have foreseen the “tragedy.”
Stochastic terrorism is not a fringe concept. It is a terrorist modality that has been described at length by analysts. It produces terrorism patterns that should be known to any member of Congress or any presidential candidate who has ever thought deeply about national or domestic security issues, which one might hope, is all of them.
Stochastic violence follows a demonization, dehumanization, desensitization and denial “formula”
Gill, Gerard, COVID-19 Conspiricism and the Four Ds of Stochastic Terrorism, Global Network on Extremism & Technology (blog), Nov 25, 2021
Demonisation – a figure with a platform targets a person or group to be blamed for real or imagined ills.
Dehumanisation – with repetition of the demonisation, the target loses their personhood in the eyes of the audience, becoming a monster or symbol of evil and depravity.
Desensitisation – violent language and imagery is used in discussion of the target, and while no direct calls to use violence are issued, violent speech becomes an accepted part of the discourse.
Denial – when violence occurs, the stochastic terrorist denies any responsibility, pointing to their lack of direct involvement or instruction.