(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Rogan/Hotez/RFK Jr. COVID Vaccine Kerfuffle Perpetuates Right-Wing Stochastic Terrorism [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-06-21
Stochastic Terrorism is not a common term. In fact, it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I first heard this expression when I tuned into Michael Moore’s podcast with his guest, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. According to Olbermann, “There might be some argument about whether [Trump] is simply a ‘terrorist,’ but there is no doubt he literally fits the definition of ‘stochastic terrorism.’” It is “terrorism by proxy.”
Debates over stochastic terrorism have burgeoned over the past few years. “Every time that dude [Tucker Carlson] puts my name in his mouth, the next day, I mean, this is like what stochastic terrorism is,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told “The Breakfast Club” radio show.
“It’s like when … you use a very large platform to turn up the temperature and target an individual until something happens,” she continued. “And then when something happens, because it’s indirect, you say, ‘Oh, I had nothing to do with that.’”
Q-Anon’s conspiracy theories claiming that Democratic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles are trying to control the world’s politics and media, have inspired violence. Right-wing pundits claiming the LGBTQ community is sexualizing children in an attempt to groom them have inspired a pedophile conspiracy theory that all-too-frequently leads to violence.
As Bryn Nelson, a science writer and Seattle-based author of Flush, The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure (Grand Central, 2022), pointed out in a November 5, 2022 piece in Scientific American (
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-stochastic-terrorism-uses-disgust-to-incite-violence/), “Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can provoke what scholars and law enforcement officials call stochastic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims.”
The use of the term stochastic terrorism re-surfaced recently during an “ongoing Twitter debate over vaccine misinformation between podcaster Joe Rogan and scientist Peter Hotez [that] has led a number of individuals—including billionaires Bill Ackman and Elon Musk—to urge Hotez to debate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., [and] purportedly led anti-vaxxers to show up at Hotez’s home to ‘stalk’ him,” Forbes’ Ana Faguy recently reported (
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/06/18/vaccine-scientist-peter-hotez-says-he-was-stalked-after-billionaires-and-joe-rogan-urge-him-to-debate-rfk-jr/).
Hotez is a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, who was part of the team that received a Nobel Prize nomination for their work to create a cheap and easy-to-make Covid-19 vaccine. He has appeared on numerous television talk shows – and frequently posted on Twitter – during the pandemic debunking misinformation, including misinformation spread by Kennedy.
Before we dive headlong into the Rogan/Hotez/Kennedy kerfuffle, here’s dictionary.com’s take on stochastic terrorism: Dictionary.com defines stochastic terrorism as “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.”
It traced the origin of the term to at least as far back as 2002. Its use spread in the 2010s, often credited to a 2011 blog post. “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.”
According to Dictionary.com, stochastic terrorism usually includes the following elements:
1. “A leader or organization [that] uses rhetoric in the mass media against a group of people.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. This rhetoric is thus called stochastic terrorism because of the way it incites random violence.”
The Rogan/Hotez/Kennedy dust up started after “Hotez tweeted a Vice article (
https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7zz9z/spotify-rogan-rfk-vaccine-misinformation-policy) that was critical of an interview Rogan did with Kennedy on his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, in which Kennedy presented false claims about vaccines—including links to autism that most experts have discredited—which Hotez described as ‘nonsense.’”
Then the fun began: Rogan responded by offering Hotez $100,000 – to be donated to his favorite charity -- for a no time limit debate with Kennedy. The billionaires then checked in, raising the stakes by several hundred thousand.
Faguy noted that Hotez at first agreed to go on Rogan’s show “to discuss getting more people vaccines and vaccine misinformation—an offer that Rogan didn’t see as a response to his request for Hotez to debate Kennedy.
“….Hotez told his Twitter followers Sunday that the Houston resident ‘was stalked in front of my home by a couple of antivaxers taunting me to debate RFKJr’—less than 24 hours after the initial Twitter argument began.”
Over the Father’s Day weekend Hotez appeared on an MSNBC program hosted by and Mehdi Hassan. "[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] is at it again," Hotez told Hasan. "But this time it has caused something really terrible and that is during the COVID pandemic -- I have a new book coming out that basically says 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they believed the anti-vaccine disinformation and refused to take a COVID vaccine during our Delta wave and the Omicron wave in '21-'22 after vaccines were widely available. So the point is that anti-vaccine disinformation has always done a lot of damage and harm but now it is a lethal force within the United States."
"That's why we have to have that discussion," Hotez said. "And I offered to go on Joe Rogan again -- I've been on a couple of times -- and have that discussion with him, but not to turn it into the Jerry Springer show with having RFK Jr. on."
And now -- speaking of stochastic terrorism, here’s a recent pronouncement from Kari Lake, the failed Republican Party candidate for Governor of Arizona. In early June, Lake dropped a paragraph of not-so-subtle stochastic terrorist triggers, saying: "If you want to get to President Trump, you're going to have to go through me and you're going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That's not a threat, that's a public service announcement. We will not let you lay a finger on President Trump. Frankly, now is the time to cling to our guns and our religion."
Christopher Rufo, Senior Fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who launched attacks on critical race theory - provoking heated school board meetings across the country – is a man of the moment for this era’s culture wars. In a piece for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Rufo claimed that invoking the label stochastic terrorism is a left-wing plot aimed at silencing conservatives.
Rufo, who now unofficially is advising Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign, and is one of DeSantis’ anti-woke gurus, explained that it was preposterous to link anything that he has said to violent acts.
As Bryn Nelson noted in his Scientific American piece, “Over the past few months, assailants repeating the [LGBTQ] groomer slur have threatened to kill drag queens and LGBTQ people, as well as educators, school officials, librarians, parents and lawmakers who have come to their defense.”
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/21/2176676/-Rogan-Hotez-RFK-Jr-COVID-Vaccine-Kerfuffle-Perpetuates-Right-Wing-Stochastic-Terrorism
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
