BAD PARENTS ARE THE ORIGINAL STOCHASTIC TERRORISTS

Right-wingers think they've caught liberals in a desperate act of retconning. Here's Bonchie at RedState:

Insane Narrative Shift Occurs After Bombshell Revelation Q-Club Shooter Is ‘Non-Binary’

(It's Club Q, not "Q-Club," but go on, Bonchie.)

Man oh man, how things can change in a flash. For the last several days following the deadly mass shooting at an LGBT club in Colorado, the press and its leftwing allies have been railing against the right, suggesting that its opposition to the sexualization of children provoked the killings.

... And then, like a ton of bricks being tossed off a cliff, news dropped that the killer is “non-binary” and that he will go by “they/them” pronouns in his court filings and appearances.

How could that be? Nancy Pelosi had already pronounced “MAGA Republicans” as responsible for inciting the shooting. The White House had blamed a right-wing environment of “LGBT+ hate.” Then there was NBC News’ Ben Collins, who fancies himself a “misinformation reporter” (he should mean that literally, as you’ll see). He went on a rampage, accusing right-wing media, including Breitbart and Libs of TikTok for the heinous crime....

What was Collins to do with the news that the shooter wasn’t actually a Trump-loving, Tucker Carlson-watching Christian conservative? Well, he needed to shift the narrative, and he needed to do it fast. Instead of admitting his error, noting that he never should have jumped the gun, he quickly shifted to defending the shooter....

The Colorado Springs suspect was 15 when they requested a name change to Nick Brink.

Brink was subject to a "particularly vicious bout of online harassment," and had one YouTube video, a profanity-laden cartoon dubbed “Asian homosexual gets molested."https://t.co/zJoX6kv4Z0

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 23, 2022

Encyclopedia Dramatica, the hate site that compiled years of records of online bullying of the Colorado Springs' suspect, updated the page when they realized Aldrich had an entry for years, adding Aldrich "SHOT UP A GAY BAR BECAUSE HE WAS TIRED OF ALL THE 'HARRASSMENT'!" pic.twitter.com/22vUhnQyRN

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 23, 2022

... According to Collins, the fact that this lunatic was bullied online seven years ago explains why he decided to shoot up a nightclub. It couldn’t be that the guy was just a mentally-ill nutjob who had kidnapped his family a year prior, never facing charges for some inexplicable reason. Instead, because Collins is so married to always blaming the right for everything, he’s now willing to defend a murderer in the process.

When this story broke, I thought liberals should wait and see whether the motive for the shooting was speciically anti-trans hate. It was known that the day after the shooting was Trans Day of Remembrance, and that a drag show was scheduled at the club that day. But America is full of homophobes who aren't plugged in to the right-wing network that directs haters' attention to facts like this. It was always possible that the shooter had anger against LGBT people but didn't know that. And it was possible that the shooter had other motives, like personal animus against the club or someone in it -- though the right's notion that this was a mentally ill person choosing a target completely at random that just happened to be a gay bar always strained credulity, and still does.

We now know, as I mentioned in my previous post, that the shooter's father, a spousal abuser, convicted weed dealer, and former(?) meth addict who made 326 porn films -- 19 and Anal, Fuck My Mommy and Me 2, and 324 other films (complete list at IMDb) -- reacted to news of the shooting by expressing relief upon realizing that his interviewer was telling him that his son had shot up a gay bar, not that he actually is gay himself. Dad said he's a conservative Republican and a Mormon -- "We don't do gay." He said he “praised [his son] for violent behavior really early. I told him it works. It is instant and you’ll get immediate results.”

That's how it starts.

We talk about "stochastic terrorism," which is defined 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." Here's another definition:

Stochastic terrorism is a specific type of extremist violence that occurs when an environment has "othered" a population or individual to a significant enough extent that results in subsequent violence against them, Eric K. Ward, senior advisor to the Western States Center, [said].

The classic example of stochastic terrorism is jihadist online demonization of Westerners, which inspires audience members to commit violent acts, even though no one has ordered them to commit those acts. Anti-trans demonization from people like Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh, and Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok seems to fit the definition also.

But when Dad tells you that the worst thing you can possibly be is gay, he's doing the same thing -- especially when he's also telling you that you need to learn to inflict violence on your enemies. Anderson Lee Aldrich's online harassers undoubtedly learned to hate and "other" LGBT people from adults and older siblings. They acted on this, and then the bullied Aldrich, who may be lying about being non-binary to reduce his legal culpability but was certainly called all the homophobic names until it was unbearable, shot up a gay bar.

When Dad and the world tell you who deserve to be hurt and you decide to kill, we need to start calling that stochastic terrorism, too. And it doesn't have to be a mass murder. Random violence against LGBT people and other "others" starts this way too.