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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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Like other said, it is a real concept. I think even you would put the line somewhere - maybe directly beseeching your audience for somebody to do the killing with a promise of fame and eternal gratitude? If not that, setting up a monetary account similar to what actual terrorist groups do for suicide bombers? There has to be a line. Stochastic terrorism is just the level bellow that. "Please can somebody kill that motherfucker already? In Minecraft of course". Just thinly veiled plausible deniability.

Maybe somebody has a problem with the word itself - stochastic terrorism may look like some manipulation, using the scary word terrorism to astroturf a concept creep. But it is nothing new, this is just an annoying modern trend of noticing age old issue and inventing new word for it, there are hundreds of those such as "quiet quitting" being a hot new trend of age old "punching the clock", the same for other things such as ghosting, gatekeeping, gaslighting and many more.

Going back to stochastic terrorism, there are similar old parallels. Just to name one - the wave of anarchist assassinations across the globe toward the end of 19th century. The response by governments across the democratic west was swift and decisive: banning of anarchist newspapers, persecution of anarchist instigators, forming new counterterrorist forces by governments infiltrating anarchist cells and more. It actually happened in USA after McKinley assassination, you had Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 targeting immigrants with anarchist background, you had Criminal Anarchy act of 1902. You had famous cases such as Emma Goldman who was arrested many times until she was stripped of citizenship and deported to Russia in 1919 together with almost 250 other radicals. Anarchism and especially its propaganda of the deed died, the freedom of speech survived.