Greg Olear explains how Muskrat's idea of "free speech" is so deadly

[CousinIT]

https://gregolear.substack.com/p/death-groomers

This is how stochastic terrorism works: Violent rhetoric is pumped into the discourse by cynical politicians, conservative influencers, retrograde church leaders, and far-right provocateurs. The ugly, mendacious narratives saturate the airwaves, the social networks, the fringe channels. Over and over and over, the hate speech is repeated. And someone, somewhere, snaps. Enough is enough, he decides. (It’s almost always a “he.”) He picks up his gun—there are always plenty of guns lying around—and takes action.

“The idea behind stochastic terrorism is that repeated demonization of individuals or groups of people can inspire unstable ‘lone wolves’ [and] others to violence,” explains Bryn Nelson, a science writer who wrote a piece on the phenomenon for Scientific American. “The individual attacks aren’t predictable, but the words increase the odds of an attack.” . . .

“Stochastic” means “random.” The provocateurs don’t know when, where, or by whom the violent act of terror will be committed. But they do know that, if the hate speech is repeated enough, violence invariably will follow. Hate speech is a spell, an incantation, a summoning of dark forces. When the summoning is done by a trained warlock, and amplified by the magical Marshall stack that is social media, the dark forces show up and show out.

Violence is the ultimate goal of hate speech—which is why Elon Musk allowing banned provocateurs back on Twitter is so dangerous and ill-advised. Steve Bannon figured this out long ago, during the “Gamergate” controversy: yes, people sitting home at their PCs could be compelled to take action IRL. Pizzagate was further proof of concept. And the violent rhetoric of Donald Trump and his surrogates—“trial by combat,” Rudy Giuliani said on the night of January 5; “Hang Mike Pence!” the insurrectionists chanted—spawned the besieging of the Capitol and the attempt to overthrow the government. Whatever the old saw says, words can cause exponentially more harm than sticks and stones.

The hateful messages are compelling because they play on genuine human emotions. The men who commit the violent acts generally do so because they think they are making a positive impact. Who doesn’t want to save the children? Welch raided Comet Ping Pong because he legitimately believed there was a pedophile sex trafficking ring operating there. Anderson Lee Aldrich seems to have shot up Club Q in Colorado because he believed that the drag performers were “groomers.” In both cases, the men were flat-out wrong—tragically, horrifically wrong. There was no underground sex trafficking operation at Comet Ping Pong. Drag show participants are not “family members or close family friends seeking to gain the trust of a child in order to sexually abuse them later”—the definition of groomers in this context.1

Drag queens are not groomers. That’s a false equivalence, a sick narrative propagated by rightwing provocateurs. Child grooming “has nothing to do with LGBTQ people or drag and saying it does is harmful to real child victims,” explains Kat Tenbarge, a tech and culture reporter for NBC News. “All these people, Libs of TikTok, Tucker Carlson, etc. are causing real harm to child victims and their advocates by muddying the waters of what grooming actually is and creating false targets. They are distracting from the crisis of actual child grooming that occurs.”

[OneGrassRoot]

1. K&R and thank you. n/t

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. It's up to the rest of us to counter the provocateurs' message

Knowing the connection and proving a direct link between vile speech and vile actions are two different things. Most of the time, the demonizers know where the line is and stay just inside legality in their speech.

[TheProle]

4. +1

We must win in the marketplace of ideas.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

5. Or, as Popehat the lawyer says, the answer to objectionable speech is more speech.

[crickets]

3. Excellent piece. K&R for visibility.