When Hate Speaks: The Psychology of Stochastic Terrorism
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. In this special episode, we're diving into the psychology of stochastic terrorism. It's a term that might sound abstract, but it has deadly real world consequences. This week, Charlie Kirk, a political pundit, podcaster, and founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed during a university event in Utah.
Leslie Poston:The online and offline reaction was swift and polarized. As with any death of a public figure who promoted violent viewpoints, people grappled with their emotional reactions versus societal norms, asking themselves, should people feel empathy? Should people condemn violence categorically? What do people do with the fact that Kirk was widely known for rhetoric that praised gun violence, demonized marginalized groups, demonized empathy, called for public executions and dismissed the humanity of others. This isn't an episode about justifying violence or justifying hate.
Leslie Poston:It's an episode about understanding our reaction to extreme violence because the words we use, the ideas we amplify, and the people we platform all shape the psychological landscape we experience. And when that landscape is filled with threats, dehumanization, and moral disengagement, violence becomes not just likely but inevitable. Let's explore how that happens. Stochastic terrorism is a term that describes how public figures use mass communication to incite violence indirectly. The keyword here is plausible deniability.
Leslie Poston:The speaker doesn't explicitly call for harm. They simply describe their targets as other, framing the targets in ways that make violence seem righteous, necessary, or inevitable to the speaker's audience. The term itself comes from the mathematical concept of stochastic processes events that are statistically predictable in aggregate but random in their specific occurrence. Applied to terroristic language, it means that while we can't predict exactly when or where violence will occur, we can predict that it will occur when certain messaging patterns reach sufficient saturation. Researchers in the field of threat assessment have documented how this works.
Leslie Poston:They found that stochastic terrorism requires several key components: a public figure with a platform, inflammatory rhetoric that dehumanizes targets, ambiguous language, and an audience primed to view violence as justified. It's the repeated use of phrases like they're coming for your kids or this is a war or we're under attack. It's framing teachers as groomers, immigrants as invaders, trans people as monsters, and progressives as enemies of the state. None of these words are explicitly saying go kill, but statistically, some listener eventually will. The psychological mechanism here draws heavily on loaded language, words that carry emotional weight beyond their literal meaning, creating mythological thinking where complex social realities get reduced to simple emotionally charged symbols.
Leslie Poston:It's not just Kirk. It's endemic within the right leaning podcast space and even in the Republican Party. Even Trump has done this repeatedly. Recall when he told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by on January 6 or when he said there would be big problems if he were indicted. These are all classic examples of rhetorical dog whistles, another component of stochastic messaging.
Leslie Poston:Marjorie Taylor Greene's implications about Second Amendment solutions follow the same pattern. The rhetoric operates through what Lakoff calls framing, the cognitive structures that shape how we understand events. When political violence is consistently framed as defensive rather than aggressive, patriotic rather than criminal, or necessary rather than optional, it becomes psychologically easier to justify. And just because we tend to have more examples from right leaning speakers, don't think the Democrats are completely immune to this pattern. You can hear similar dynamics in the way some Democratic leaders and pundits reframe a problem as anti Semitism anytime anti Zionism is mentioned, even though anti Semitism often something else entirely.
Leslie Poston:Or in the way Democrats largely reject anti genocide movements or the way they encourage people to see protesters as an other and encourage police to use violence against them despite clear violations of their right to protest. However, here are the states: The scale, organization, and explicit nature of stochastic messaging is overwhelmingly concentrated in contemporary right wing political discourse. This isn't just about what's said. It's about how it's said, to whom, and within what psychological ecosystem. Our brains are not neutral observers of speech.
Leslie Poston:Language that Stokes fear, disgust, and rage doesn't just trigger thoughts. It triggers what neuroscientists call action potentials actual neurological pathways that prepare the body for behavioral response. Research shows us that when someone experiences what they perceive as morally justified disgust or fear, their brain literally prepares for physical action against the perceived source of danger. We talked about this more in-depth in a previous episode. This is where dehumanization research comes in.
Leslie Poston:When someone is described as a rat, a cockroach, a parasite, or a predator, we subconsciously activate a complex set of psychological and physiological responses that we originally evolved to help us avoid disease and contamination. For example, when people view others as dehumanized or disgusting, the regions of their brain associated with empathy and social cognition can literally shut down while areas associated with disgust and threat detection can become hyperactive. The semiotics here are important as well. These aren't random metaphors. They're carefully chosen symbols that tap into what Jung called archetypal fears.
Leslie Poston:Vermin represent contamination and invasion. Predators represent threat to offspring and community. Parasites represent resource theft and weakening of the host. Each of these metaphors activates different but overlapping psychological defense systems. Bandura's research on moral disengagement provides another piece of this puzzle.
Leslie Poston:He identified several psychological mechanisms that allow people to commit harmful acts without feeling guilt or empathy. These include moral justificationconvincing yourself that violence serves a greater good euphemistic labelingusing sanitized language to mask brutality and dehumanization viewing targets as less than human and therefore undeserving of moral consideration. What makes stochastic terrorism particularly insidious is how it systematically activates all of these mechanisms simultaneously. The speaker provides moral justification by framing violence as defensive. They use euphemistic language like Second Amendment solutions or Take our country back.
Leslie Poston:And they consistently dehumanize targets through metaphors of contamination, invasion, and predation. Research on the banality of evil also applies here. It calls attention to the ways ordinary people can be led to commit extraordinary acts of cruelty when the psychological environment makes such acts seem normal, necessary, or virtuous. Stochastic terrorism creates exactly this kind of psychological environment on a mass scale. The neurochemistry matters, too.
Leslie Poston:Research on stress and aggression shows that when people exist in a constant state of perceived threat, the kind created by relentless stochastic messaging, Their bodies produce elevated levels of cortisol and adrenaline while reducing production of oxytocin and serotonin. This neurochemical cocktail literally makes people more prone to aggressive behavior while simultaneously reducing their capacity for empathy and nuanced thinking. That's the psychological trick behind stochastic terrorism: the speaker doesn't need to pull the trigger. They just have to create the neurochemical and cognitive conditions that make pulling the trigger feel like a reasonable response to an intolerable threat. Let's talk about performative forums that masquerade as intellectual discourse.
Leslie Poston:Events like Charlie Kirk's Prove Me Wrong campus tour or YouTube videos from channels like Jubilee often pit a lone progressive, trans person, feminist, person of color, etc. Against a roomful of people who fundamentally oppose their very existence. These aren't debates in any meaningful sense. They're psychological warfare packaged in a pseudo civil discourse Trojan horse. Research on emotion and social interaction helps us understand what's really happening in these forums.
Leslie Poston:When someone is placed in a hostile environment where their fundamental worth is questioned, the mere exposure effect means that simply hearing a message, even if you disagree with it, makes it more familiar over time. That's why marketers repeat things multiple times in their messaging. More familiar messages feel more true, more acceptable, and more normal. This isn't a conscious process it happens automatically at the neurological level. Their nervous system shifts into defensive processing mode.
Leslie Poston:In this state, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for complex reasoning and empathy, becomes less active, while the amygdala and other threat detection systems become hypervigilant. This means the participants in these supposedly rational debates are operating from a place of psychological survival while simultaneously trying to engage intellectually and represent their demographic well in the face of potential harm. Goffman's work on presentation of self in everyday life provides another lens for understanding these dynamics, determining that social interactions are fundamentally performative, with participants playing roles designed to maintain or enhance their existing social status. In stacked debate formats, the goal is not truth seeking. It's status performance.
Leslie Poston:The crowd gets to perform their idea of ideological superiority while the isolated participant is forced into a defensive performance that makes them appear weak, emotional, or unreasonable, regardless of the substance of their arguments. The false equivalence embedded in both sides' framing creates normalization bias, the psychological tendency to treat extreme positions as merely alternative viewpoints worthy of equal consideration. Research demonstrates repeatedly how this kind of framing legitimizes harmful ideologies by placing them within the bounds of acceptable discourse. When someone's basic right to exist or to access fundamental human rights is treated as a debatable proposition, the very act of the debate becomes in itself a form of violence. It sends the message that maybe, just maybe, the person advocating for elimination or subjugation actually has a point worth considering.
Leslie Poston:This psychological priming makes actual violence seem like a reasonable escalation of an ongoing intellectual disagreement rather than a fundamental assault on human dignity. The research on moral foundations theory shows that different political groups prioritize different moral foundations: care versus harm, fairness versus cheating, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, or sanctity versus degradation. And when debates are structured around the assumption that all moral foundations are equally valid, they create a psychological environment where harm to outgroups can be justified through appeals to in group loyalty, traditional authority, or cultural sanctity. This is why platforming hate through civil debate is psychologically naive at best and actively harmful at worst. It doesn't challenge extremist views it normalizes them while simultaneously traumatizing their targets.
Leslie Poston:Stochastic terrorism thrives in a carefully constructed echo chamber. The contemporary right wing media landscape, from Fox News to ON to podcasts and social media feeds, creates an immersive, emotionally charged environment designed to keep audiences in a constant state of threat perception. Research on algorithmic amplification shows how digital media platforms function as inactive technologies systems that don't just transmit information but actively shape behavior through repeated exposure and reinforcement. The right wing media ecosystem has weaponized these mechanisms to create self reinforcing cycles of threat perception that grow more intense over time. The ecosystem uses repetition, soundbites, memes, and humor to obfuscate hateful messages while simultaneously making them more memorable and shareable.
Leslie Poston:Tucker Carlson's long running commentary on replacement theory, for example, provides a perfect case study. The idea that white Americans are being deliberately replaced by immigrants isn't just false and racist it's deadly. This conspiracy theory was explicitly cited by mass shooters in El Paso, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Christchurch. But Carlson never directly calls for violence. Instead, he uses meaning that's implied rather than explicitly stated.
Leslie Poston:By repeatedly describing immigration as an invasion, by characterizing demographic change as replacement, by framing these processes as intentional attacks on white Americans, Carlson creates hostile attribution bias in his audience, the tendency to interpret ambiguous events as hostile or threatening. Research on emotional contagion through media consumption shows how this works psychologically. When people consume content that consistently activates threat detection system, their baseline stress levels increase, their empathy responses decrease, and their tendency toward aggressive problem solving grows stronger. Over time, this creates aggression scripts, automatic behavioral responses that prioritize dominance and attack over collaboration and defense. The ecosystem doesn't stop with traditional media.
Leslie Poston:Memes equating trans people with predators tap into pollution beliefs. Tweets framing undocumented immigrants as criminals activate outgroup homogeneity bias. Podcasters calling for public executions like Kirk has represent the logical endpoint of this psychological conditioning. By the time audiences reach this level of explicit violence advocacy, they've been psychologically prepared through months or years of graduated exposure to dehumanizing language and threat framing. Doctor.
Leslie Poston:Susan Fisk's stereotype content model helps explain why this messaging is so effective. Her research shows that groups perceived as high in competence but low in warmth exactly how immigrants, progressive activists, and LGBTQ plus people are typically portrayed in right wing media trigger what she calls envious prejudice, which is strongly associated with support for hostile action against a group. While other political movements certainly use emotional appeals and us versus them messaging, The current right wing ecosystem is uniquely structured around constant threat escalation and dehumanization. The scale, organization, and explicit nature of this messaging represents something qualitatively different than normal political persuasion. Psychologically, this creates emotional contagion, a collective state of fear, disgust, and moral panic that spreads through communities like a virus.
Leslie Poston:Once these feelings are normalized and institutionalized, violence becomes just another possible response in the toolkit of political action. The United States isn't the only place that this happens, but American stochastic rhetoric is increasingly being exported worldwide, creating transnational extremist networks that share psychological techniques, symbolic frameworks, and strategic approaches. Historical examples provide contexts. In Rwanda, Hutu power radio called Tutsis cockroaches for months before the genocide began. Research on genocide propaganda shows how this dehumanizing language didn't just reflect existing hatred.
Leslie Poston:It actively created the psychological conditions necessary for mass violence by systemically breaking down the cognitive barriers that normally prevent people from harming others. In Myanmar, Facebook was used to spread anti Rohingya hate speech that directly contributed to ethnic cleansing. The Rohingya were consistently described as illegal Bengalis, terrorists, and threats to Buddhist purity. Documentation of this campaign shows how social media algorithms amplified the most emotionally charged content, creating virality bias the tendency for extreme views to spread faster and wider than moderate ones. In Nazi Germany, Jews were portrayed as vermin, disease carriers, and moral threats long before the Holocaust.
Leslie Poston:Research on the psychological preparation for genocide shows how this messaging followed a predictable pattern: first establishing group identity, then creating threat perception, then dehumanizing targets, then normalizing violence as a defensive necessity. But here's what's new and deeply concerning. American stochastic rhetoric is now being adapted and amplified globally through these digital networks. In India, Hindu nationalist leaders describe Muslims as threats to Hindu women in national identity, borrowing directly from American Great Replacement narratives and Protect Our Children messaging. The Hindu concept of love jihad, the conspiracy theory that Muslim men systematically seduce Hindu women to convert them uses identical psychological frameworks to American anti LGBTQ plus groomer rhetoric.
Leslie Poston:In Brazil, supporters of Bolsonaro used Trump style language about stolen elections and communist threats to justify the January 8 attack on government buildings in Brasilia. The messaging, visual symbols, and even the tactical approaches seemed directly imported from American extremist movements. European far right parties are now echoing American talking points about immigrants being invaders and multiculturalism being white genocide. The Alternative for Germany, France's National Rally, and Italy's Lega Nord all used messaging frameworks developed in American right wing think tanks and media operations. Meanwhile conspiracy theories and extremist content spread from American platforms to global audience through cascade effects.
Leslie Poston:Right wing conspiracy theories jumped from American image boards to German telegram channels to Japanese Twitter to Brazilian WhatsApp groups. The anti woke movement that originated in American conservative circles now drives political campaigns from Italy to Australia to Canada. Research on intersectional backlash helps explain why these American exports are so effective globally. Societies experiencing rapid social change often develop psychological resistance to diversity and inclusion that makes people susceptible to reactionary messaging that promises to restore traditional hierarchies and traditional certainties. The psychological pattern is clear: emotional manipulation through threat framing, reinforcement of in group identity, systematic dehumanization of targets, establishment of plausible deniability, and then violence.
Leslie Poston:This sequence appears across cultures and historical periods because it exploits universal features of human psychology. But American political and media innovations have made it more efficient, more scalable, and more deadly than ever before. The immediate focus after Kirk's shooting was on the violence itself the blood, the chaos, the manhunt. But the psychological aftermath of stochastic terrorism runs much deeper and lasts much longer than the initial incident. First, let's talk about the witnesses.
Leslie Poston:Emma Pitts, the reporter who was there, described seeing so much blood and said Kirk went limp. That's not just journalism. That's trauma testimony. The 3,000 or so people who attended the event, the students who ducked for cover, the security personnel who rushed in, even Kirk's children who were in attendance. They're all now carrying psychological wounds that will shape how they see political events, public spaces, and ideological conflict for years to come.
Leslie Poston:Research on trauma and recovery shows that witnessing political violence doesn't just create PTSD. It fundamentally alters how people process information about politics, safety, and social relationships. Trauma from ideologically motivated violence creates complex PTSD, which includes not just flashbacks and hypervigilance but also profound changes in someone's worldview, trust, and sense of meaning. Some Witnesses become hypervigilant, developing threat scanning behaviors, constantly monitoring their environment for signs of danger, avoiding public gatherings, feeling unsafe in spaces that remind them of the traumatic event. Others dissociate, shutting down emotionally to cope with overwhelming feelings.
Leslie Poston:Many develop learned helplessness, which we've discussed before on other episodes: the belief that political engagement is futile and dangerous, that violence is inevitable, and that there's no point in trying to participate in the democratic process. Research on shattered assumptions helps explain why political violence is particularly traumatizing. Humans operate from three basic assumptions: that the world is benevolent, that the world is meaningful, and that the self is worthy. Political violence shatters all three simultaneously. Witnesses lose faith that good people are protected, that political systems work rationally, and that their own participation in democratic life has value or safety.
Leslie Poston:But here's a psychologically dangerous part: Communities don't heal equally from this kind of trauma. Kirk's supporters, national organizations that rely on consumer participation like the Yankees, and the mainstream media are already framing him as a martyr, which creates sanctification effect, the tendency to view deceased leaders as more pure, more right, and more worthy of extreme loyalty than they ever were in life. This isn't grief processing. It's radicalization fuel. Research on sacred values and violent extremism shows how martyrdom narratives function psychologically.
Leslie Poston:When someone dies for a cause, their ideas become sacralized, protected from normal processes of questioning, criticism, or revision. Kirk's death doesn't just amplify his message. It makes that message psychologically immune to challenge among his followers. Meanwhile, Kirk's frequent targets and ideological opponents face a different kind of trauma. Moral injury occurs when someone is forced to act against their moral beliefs or witness something that violates their fundamental sense of right and wrong.
Leslie Poston:For people who were targeted by Kurt's rhetoric, being told to mourn his death while knowing that he advocated for violence against them creates profound psychological conflict. Research on moral injury in military contexts translates directly to political trauma. When people are forced to suppress their authentic moral responses to harmful events, they develop symptoms including rage, guilt, spiritual crisis, and social isolation. This is exactly what happens when marginalized communities are pressured to express sympathy for someone who denied their humanity. The broader community fragments in predictable ways.
Leslie Poston:Research on collective trauma shows that societies typically split into three groups after political violence: those who become more radicalized than their existing beliefs, those who disengage entirely from political participation, and a smaller group who become motivated toward reconciliation and systemic change. Unfortunately, the radicalization and disengagement responses are typically much larger than the reconciliation response. This creates polarization amplification where political violence, rather than bringing communities together, pushes them further apart. Trust in our institutions erodes because they fail to prevent the violence. Research on social capital shows that when political institutions can't protect citizens from ideologically motivated violence, people lose faith not just in those specific institutions but in the entire concept of institutional authority.
Leslie Poston:Most insidiously, society becomes desensitized to political violence through habituation effects. When violent rhetoric leads to actual violence repeatedly, the shock value decreases. Media coverage becomes routine. Public outrage becomes performative rather than genuine. And the psychological threshold for accepting future violence gets lower and lower over time.
Leslie Poston:This is how stochastic terrorism gains traction even when the original speaker is silenced. The trauma it creates makes more violence likely, not less. The psychological wounds become infected with rage, fear, and despair. And that can last for generations. Now we arrive at a cultural pressure point.
Leslie Poston:The shooting of Charlie Kirk raises a difficult question. Are people supposed to mourn someone who didn't mourn others? Someone who actively pushed narratives that led to violence and pain? There's an expectation, especially in American culture, that everyone deserves a moment of grace when they die, that to speak ill of the dead is distasteful. But that simply isn't always true.
Leslie Poston:Research on psychic numbing helps explain this dynamic. Human empathy is tricky. We can genuinely care about individuals, but our emotional systems get overwhelmed and in some cases shut down when confronted with large scale suffering. This is why people can feel deep sadness about one person's death while remaining relatively unmoved by statistics about mass casualties. But empathy isn't just limited.
Leslie Poston:It's also reciprocal. Neuroimaging research shows that empathy requires shared neural representations. Our brains literally mirror the emotional states of others, but this mirroring only occurs when we perceive the other person as part of our moral community. When someone spends their career systematically excluding others from moral consideration, describing them as subhuman, threatening, or deserving of violence, they're not just expressing political views. They're actively working to break the neural mechanisms that make empathy possible.
Leslie Poston:We talk about authoritarians' relationship to empathy in another episode. You should check that out. When people do this, they're teaching their audiences to shut down the very brain systems that could generate compassion for their targets. Research on emotional labor becomes relevant here as marginalized groups are often expected to perform the emotional work that benefits their oppressors, smiling when insulted, staying calm when threatened, expressing gratitude for basic human dignity. The expectation that people should mourn Kirk falls into this pattern.
Leslie Poston:Asking someone to empathize with the person who denied their humanity isn't healing. It's a form of psychological violence. It forces them to suppress their authentic emotional, rational responses and perform emotions that serve others comfort rather than their own healing. This doesn't mean celebrating death, but it does mean refusing to be coerced into silence about its context. Psychological realism requires acknowledging empathy is reciprocal and has boundaries.
Leslie Poston:When someone spends their career advocating for violence against specific groups, those groups aren't psychologically equipped to grieve that person's violent death in the same way someone else might. Butler's work on grievable lives provides a framework for understanding this. Butler argues that societies decide which lives are worthy of mourning and which aren't through complex systems of recognition and dehumanization. Kirk argued that certain livesimmigrants, LGBTQ plus people, progressivesweren't worthy of full moral consideration. He actively used his platform to make their suffering invisible, acceptable, or even necessary.
Leslie Poston:When someone dies after spending their life making others ungrievable, it creates a profound psychological paradox. The very people he trained his audience not to mourn are now being asked to mourn him. That's not just hypocritical it's psychologically incoherent. The research on moral emotions helps explain why this feels so wrong to so many people. Doctor.
Leslie Poston:Jonathan Haidt's work shows that humans have evolved emotional systems for detecting fairness, reciprocity, and justice. When someone benefits from systems of exclusion and violence, their own exclusion from sympathy triggers moral satisfaction, the feeling that justice has been served. This isn't callousness or cruelty. It's a normal psychological response to moral imbalance being corrected. The emotional system that makes us feel bad when innocent people suffer also makes us feel satisfied when harmful people face consequences.
Leslie Poston:It's just your brain working as intended. Understanding this psychological dynamic doesn't require celebrating violence, but it does require acknowledging that empathy is not equally distributed because harm is not equally distributed. When someone builds their career on denying empathy to others, they shouldn't be surprised when empathy is not extended to them. So what can people do to protect themselves and their communities from stochastic terrorism? First, we need to understand the warning signs.
Leslie Poston:Stochastic rhetoric typically includes language that invokes existential threat. You'll hear phrases like they want to destroy our way of life or this is our last chance. It includes repeated phrases that frame specific groups as subhuman or dangerous, calling people animals, parasites, invaders, predators, and similar. It includes calls to action disguised as metaphors or jokes such as Second Amendment solutions, helicopter rides, or joking about violence. And it includes rhetoric designed to humiliate, isolate, or demoralize specific individuals or groups.
Leslie Poston:Research on brainwashing and ideological control provides practical tools for resistance. People can build psychological immunity to extremist messaging through cognitive inoculation. Deliberately exposing themselves to weakened versions of harmful arguments along with strong refutationsimilar to how vaccines work. This is tricky, though. If it's not done well, it can end up amplifying the message.
Leslie Poston:This all means learning to recognize emotional manipulation techniques. Understanding how fear and disgust overrides rational thinking, and practicing responses to common extremist talking points. It also means developing metacognitive awareness, the ability to observe your own thinking processes and notice when they're being influenced by external manipulation. We also need to understand how stochastic messaging spreads through social networks. Doctor.
Leslie Poston:Dana Boyd and Doctor. Alice Marowicz's work is great for this. I'll link some in the show notes. Extremist content spreads through engagement hacking, deliberately crafting messages that trigger strong emotional responses because algorithms interpret engagement as value. This means being suspicious of content that makes you immediately angry, fearful, or disgusted.
Leslie Poston:Those three emotions are big red flags that something might be stochastic messaging. It means checking sources, looking for corroborating evidence, and being especially careful about sharing emotionally charged content that confirms your existing beliefs. And this is true on all, all areas of the political and religious spectrum. Media literacy becomes critical, but it needs to go beyond simple fact checking. We need emotional literacy, the ability to recognize when our emotions are being manipulated and by whom.
Leslie Poston:This includes understanding how repetition makes ideas seem more credible, how dehumanizing language shuts down empathy, and how false balance or debate can make extreme positions seem reasonable. We've talked a lot more about media, digital literacy, and AI media literacy in-depth in a past episode that can help with this. We can demand better from media platforms, not just through regulation but through individual choices about what we consume, share, and support financially. Money talks in America. We can speak out when people treat hate as a valid debate pointespecially in educational settings where young people are learning what counts as acceptable discourse.
Leslie Poston:We can teach historical awareness, helping people recognize how current stochastic messaging echoes past propaganda campaigns that led to mass violence. Pattern recognition is one of our best defenses against psychological manipulation. Most importantly, we can stay emotionally awake and morally grounded. Stochastic terrorism works by creating psychological confusion, making people unsure about what's true, what's fair, what's normal, and what's acceptable. Maintaining clear moral boundaries and trusting our authentic emotional responses to harm and injustice is essential for resisting stochastic messaging.
Leslie Poston:We can also recognize the global nature of this threat. When American politicians use stochastic language, it doesn't just affect American politics it provides a template for authoritarians worldwide. Our responsibility extends beyond our borders because our media and political culture have global influence. The most important thing is refusing to accept stochastic terrorism as normal or inevitable. Every time we let hateful rhetoric slide because it's not explicitly violent, time we platform extremist speakers in the name of balance, every time we treat human rights as debatable propositions, we're all contributing to the psychological environment that makes violence more likely.
Leslie Poston:If this episode helped you see something more clearly or helped name something you felt, share it with someone. Talk about it. Reflect on it. Hold your media accountable for how they report on this incident. Reconsider debate culture in the framework of perpetuating the problem of stochastic messaging.
Leslie Poston:This week's shooting in Utah wasn't an isolated incident. It was the predictable outcome of a system designed to make violence seem inevitable. The witnesses, the communities, the global movements watching, they're all part of this story now, and how they process this trauma will shape what happens next. Thanks for listening to Psyber Space This has been a special midweek episode.
Leslie Poston:Our regular episode will drop this coming Monday as usual, Sunday if I get it done early. This is your host, Leslie Poston, signing off and reminding you stay curious, stay grounded, and subscribe if you want to hear more of what I have to say about why things are the way they are.
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