On October 27, 2018, a man walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered eleven people during Sabbath morning services. In the weeks before the shooting, he had been consuming a steady stream of online content that described immigrants as invaders and Jewish organizations as the people funding the invasion.
On August 3, 2019, a man drove ten hours to a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and executed 23 people. He posted a manifesto before the attack explaining that he was responding to “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The language in his manifesto mirrored language used repeatedly by the President of the United States.
On August 12, 2022, a man attacked an FBI field office in Cincinnati with a nail gun and an AR-15. He did it days after Donald Trump posted on social media that the FBI was corrupt, weaponized, and out to get him.
None of these attackers received a direct order. No one told them to pull a trigger. They were never contacted by anyone in power. They acted alone.
But they all chose the same targets that a political leader had been publicly demonizing for months or years before they acted.
Psychologists wanted to understand why this keeps happening.
The Research
In 2021, forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy and retired FBI behavioral analyst Molly Amman published a formal analysis in the peer-reviewed journal Perspectives on Terrorism. Meloy is a board-certified forensic psychologist and former clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. Amman spent her career at the FBI analyzing threats, extremism, and targeted violence.
They were trying to answer a specific question. Why do lone wolf attackers keep appearing after political leaders demonize the same targets over and over? The leader never directly tells anyone to commit violence. But the violence keeps happening. To the same targets. Following the same rhetoric. With the same justifications. They wanted to understand the mechanism.
What they found has a name.
Stochastic Terrorism
Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communication to repeatedly demonize a person or group in ways that make violence statistically predictable but individually impossible to trace back to the speaker.
The word “stochastic” comes from statistics. It refers to a process that is random at the individual level but predictable at the population level. You cannot predict which specific person in an audience of millions will commit violence. But you can predict with near certainty that someone in that audience eventually will.
The speaker never says go hurt someone. The speaker says these people are destroying your country. They are coming for your children. They are traitors. They are groomers. They are vermin. They are an invasion. The country is being stolen from you.
Say it once and it is rhetoric. Say it every day, on every channel, to millions of people, for years, and it becomes something else entirely.
The math is straightforward. If you expose millions of people to repeated dehumanization of the same target, the probability that someone in that audience decides to act on it approaches certainty. You do not need to give the order. You just need to keep talking.
How It Works
Meloy and Amman’s analysis identified the psychological pathway that connects public speech to private violence. It operates through a concept in linguistics called pragmatic inference. The speaker uses language that carries an implied meaning beyond its literal content. The speaker does not say “kill them.” The speaker says “they are destroying everything you love and no one is stopping them.” The implied conclusion, that someone needs to stop them, is left for the listener to complete on their own.
This is what makes stochastic terrorism so effective and so difficult to prosecute. The speaker maintains plausible deniability at every step. They can always claim they were speaking metaphorically. They can always say they never told anyone to commit violence. And technically, at the level of literal language, they did not. But the pattern of outcomes tells a different story.
Meloy and Amman also identified that this process accelerates dramatically in conditions of what they call large group regression, a state in which a political movement begins functioning psychologically like a group under siege. Nuance disappears. The world is divided into pure allies and existential threats. The leader becomes infallible. And the perceived enemy becomes less than human.
The Pattern in Practice
The incidents are not isolated. They form a pattern that maps directly onto the rhetoric that preceded them.
In December 2016, a man drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., walked into a pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong, and fired an assault rifle inside the building. He was looking for a child trafficking ring that did not exist. The conspiracy theory, which claimed prominent Democrats were running a pedophile ring from the restaurant’s basement, had been amplified for weeks across social media and by political commentators aligned with the incoming Trump administration. The restaurant does not have a basement.
In October 2018, a man mailed pipe bombs to fourteen prominent critics of Donald Trump, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and CNN. The targets corresponded precisely to the people Trump had been publicly attacking in rallies and on social media.
In August 2019, the El Paso shooter drove ten hours to target a community Trump had repeatedly described as part of an “invasion.” His manifesto used the word “invasion” directly.
In August 2022, the Cincinnati FBI attacker acted days after Trump publicly accused the FBI of corruption and political persecution following the search of Mar-a-Lago.
In every case, the attacker chose targets that had been demonized by the same political leader or media ecosystem. In every case, the attacker believed they were defending the nation against a threat the leader had identified. In every case, the leader denied any connection.
No order was given. Just the same words. Every day. On repeat. Until someone decided the words were not enough.
The Deniability Problem
This is the feature of stochastic terrorism that makes it so dangerous and so difficult to address through existing legal and institutional frameworks. The causal chain between speech and violence is real but indirect. It operates through probability, not instruction. The speaker can always say they did not mean it. The speaker can always say the attacker was mentally ill, a lone wolf, unconnected to their rhetoric.
But the pattern is not random. The targets are not random. The timing is not random. And the language in the attackers’ own manifestos, social media posts, and statements to law enforcement consistently mirrors the language used by the political figures they follow.
Meloy and Amman’s work establishes that this is not a coincidence and it is not a mystery. It is a statistically describable phenomenon with identifiable precursors, predictable dynamics, and a documented body count.
The Current State
The rhetoric has not slowed. It has escalated.
Trump has called Democrats “the enemy from within” and said they should be handled “if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” He has called them “vermin” who need to be “rooted out.” He has described immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country” and as “animals” who are “infesting” the nation.
Fox News, Newsmax, and an ecosystem of aligned social media accounts amplify these characterizations to millions of people every day. The dehumanization is constant, systematic, and directed at the same targets.
Under the framework Meloy and Amman established, this is not political speech that may hypothetically lead to violence at some point in the future. It is the exact communication pattern that has already produced violence, repeatedly, with a documented trail connecting rhetoric to action.
The speaker never said do it. The speaker created the conditions where someone eventually decided to do it for them. That is what stochastic terrorism is. And it is happening in plain sight.
Sources
Molly Amman and J. Reid Meloy, “Stochastic Terrorism: A Linguistic and Psychological Analysis,” Perspectives on Terrorism, Volume 15, Issue 5, October 2021
Molly Amman and J. Reid Meloy, “Incitement to Violence and Stochastic Terrorism: Legal, Academic, and Practical Parameters for Researchers and Investigators,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 2022
Mark Hamm and Ramon Spaaij, “The Age of the Lone Wolf Terrorist,” Columbia University Press, 2017
FBI Criminal Complaint, United States v. Sayoc, October 2018 (pipe bomb mailings)
Patrick Crusius manifesto and El Paso shooting investigation, FBI and Department of Justice, August 2019
FBI investigation of Ricky Shiffer, Cincinnati FBI field office attack, August 2022
