President Donald Trump issued a thinly-veiled threat of fascistic violence this week in an interview with the far right wing website Breitbart. While largely ignored on the right, Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale’s tweet on Thursday highlighting a disturbing quote by the President went viral.
Several experts on authoritarianism and others who closely follow President Trump’s moves and remarks reminded followers on social media Trump’s words are another example of “stochastic terrorism.”
If you’re like most people, the term “stochastic terrorism” is confusing at best. (So is pronouncing it.)
Clearly, many folks looked it up, because Thursday evening the people at Dictionary.com revealed that searches for the term are trending today on their site:
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent explains how Trump’s thinly-veiled threats of violence work:
Back in January Wired took a look at “stochastic terrorism,” which they define as, “Acts of violence by random extremists, triggered by political demagoguery.”
Bottom line: The President of the United States is engaging in fascistic behavior. Or, if you’d rather, he’s play around with fascism, trying it on seeing how it fits. And it’s becoming clearer and clearer that he thinks it fits just fine.
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Image by Spencer Means via Flickr and a CC license