Cheerleading for domestic terrorism

I’m not sure, but maybe most of us can agree on a couple of things.

First of all, political rhetoric shouldn’t be criminalized. We ought to allow people to say outrageous things about the people who submit themselves for public office, and the policies and programs these people propose. In a free society, we ought to expect that people will distort and misrepresent and tell even outright lies in order to win the hearts and minds of the public. All we can do is hope that others—including a vigorous press corps—will challenge dubious statements, and that more often than not, reasonable people interested in learning the truth will be able to figure something out.

Secondly, you are morally responsible for everything you say or post on social media. Words have consequences. It is possible to incite the mentally fragile and the perpetually aggrieved. Not everyone is a rational actor who is able to parse hyperbole or satire. Some talk is reckless and dangerous. It ought to be condemned as such, even by those of us who feel generally aligned with the goals of the speaker.

It’s also pretty clear that you can’t talk to a psycho like a normal human being. Disturbed people might in fact be moved to act by the words of others—an undercover video showing a Planned Parenthood official talking about “tissue procurement” may very well have played a part in Robert Lewis Dear’s decision to shoot up a Colorado clinic, killing three people and wounding nine others. And Mark David Chapman might have genuinely found something in The Catcher in the Rye that made him believe shooting John Lennon was a good idea. Charles Manson might have really believed the Beatles were urging him to start a race war.

But the truth is that we really don’t know. Apparently Dear mumbled something about “no more baby parts” in a rambling interview that seemed to convince police that he was unbalanced and “definitely politically motivated.” I haven’t heard that interview, and you probably haven’t either. It may be that we’ll never know exactly what inspired Dear. He looks like a crazy man, and many of those who know him seem to believe he is psychotic.

Still, there’s a real difference in the rhetoric of some anti-abortion advocates and the prose of J.D. Salinger or the lyrics of “Helter Skelter.” There are those who regularly and repeatedly suggest that abortion providers and others who support a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy are deserving of execution. They were people who, in the aftermath of the Colorado violence, posted messages of approval on social media. These people are speaking in koans or riddles; they’re cheerleading for domestic terrorism.

When you create or contribute to a climate of incivility and hostility you must accept that you’ve made our world a little more dangerous. Just because you didn’t break the law doesn’t mean you exercised good citizenship.

And when you suggest that doctors who provide abortions and those who support a woman’s right to choose are worthy of execution, you pretend to be surprised when someone murders someone at a clinic. We might not know exactly what was going through Dear’s head when he strapped up and headed out, but we know that Paul Hill and Eric Rudolph weren’t shy about their motivations: they saw themselves as righteous avengers of inchoate souls.

There’s an idea floating around out there about something they’re calling “stochastic terrorism.” “Stochastic” means randomly determined, and the theory behind stochastic terrorism is that someone with a big enough platform—a celebrity, or a politician with a national following, or maybe a television preacher—can use that platform to incite random people who, other than attending to their message, have no connection to the speaker to commit criminal acts while maintaining plausible deniability by demonizing a person or group of people.

It’s sort of like when Henry II moaned, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” (Or words to those effect. As Simon Schma has pointed out, it’s more likely he said: “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”) As King of England, Henry could have reasonably expected his complaint would have been taken as a royal command, a fatwa on the head of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. Yet when Becket’s murderers sought Henry’s advice after the fact, the king was free to disavow them.

Of course, no one could have foreseen what those crazy knights would get up to. Just as no one could have foreseen the actions of Robert Dear.

It’s dangerous to buy into the idea of stochastic terrorism as a crime. But it’s obvious that the culture we create is a factor in how violent a society we have. Do bloody movies and video games make our country more dangerous? Probably. Does our infatuation with guns and gun culture? Probably. But how big a role these factors play is debatable. I don’t think we ought to get in the business of censoring movies or video games—censuring them is another matter—but we’re overdue for an honest discussion of how we might keep guns out of the hands of the likes of Dear and Jared Loughner. Reasonable people can and will disagree with me.

But I don’t think a reasonable person can disagree with the idea that words do matter and that we ought to consider how they might be interpreted. If you engage in a certain type of rhetoric, you might reasonably expect people to believe you mean what you say. Propaganda is part of the demagogue’s playbook because it works.

To be clear, I don’t think those who engage in what some people might term stochastic terrorism ought to be prosecuted. But I do think they ought to be ashamed. And that the rest of us, no matter what our political leanings may be, ought to shame them.