Bad Faith, Cowardice, and Terror In A Small Town
There’s something undeniably cowardly about the way JD Vance has brought fear and loathing to Springfield, Ohio.
I remember lying in the backseat of my 1998 Mercury Sable while the gas pumped in the eerie quiet of a terrorized place.
It was the fall of 2002, the country paralyzed by the fear of terrorism a year after 9/11, and there was a shadow sniper taking out random folks in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia region. Just when you thought it was over, a new breaking news report would appear on your TV screen like the most viscerally frightening horror movie jump scare you’ve ever seen, and the gory details of a new sniper shooting would unfold before you.
Oh hey, that lady was shot in the head near the driving range I frequent. Oh look, that guy was extinguished from the earth at a gas station I pass five days a week. No one knows who is doing this or why they’re doing it. Knowing this guy’s deal would have, for some reason, brought some comfort to the terrible situation. I guess it’s the same reason we ask how a young person died -- we need an explanation that makes sense and helps us pretend to understand the world and all its chaos and fragmentation and senselessness.
When I needed gas for my gas-hog Sable, I would go to a gas station that had a clear view from all sides, no trees or brush in which a gunman could sit and wait to put a bullet in me while I typed in my zip code on the little gas pump screen. I would frantically get the pump going, then duck into my backseat like the rest of the good, fear-addled folks filling up their cars in the new Age of Terror. The pump would stop and I would scramble to put things back the way they were and gun it out of the station, thinking all the time I could catch one in the back of the head if this sniper was as good as they said. Maybe he’d get me in the neck and I would have to live through my final excruciating moments as blood spilled onto my lap and my Sable veered off the road. These are the thoughts that ran roughshod through one’s mind when terror rules.
I lived with my parents at the time, and about 200 yards from their front door was a tree-filled hill – a perfect place to camp out and pick off people leaving their homes for work or school. Every morning I would look at those trees on that hill for any sign of rustling. I didn’t have a plan for what to do if I detected someone in those trees beyond pissing my pants and crying. But it made me feel better to be alert. It made me feel alive in all the worst ways.
That’s my experience with terrorism.
When The Terrorism is Stochastic
There’s something undeniably cowardly about the way JD Vance has brought fear and loathing to Springfield, Ohio.
Vance, along with his addled running mate, has seized on migrant hatred as their last stand against Kamala Harris as she takes a commanding lead in the presidential race (as long as you’re not grinding Nate Silver’s polling numbers). They have strategically spread the lie that tens of thousands of Haitian migrants – families who are in the US legally – are destroying the fabric of an otherwise idyllic small American town simply by being there. These people, Vance says, are not of here and do not belong here. It might remind you of how Tucker Carlson talks about immigrants: As non-humans who destroy developed nations with their backward and unclean ways.
I’m not going to repeat the reprehensible lies Vance and Trump have used to gin up hatred of Springfield’s Haitian community – you can rewatch the most recent presidential debate for a taste of these disgusting claims – but suffice it to say their charges sound an awful lot like a certain ascendant fascist movement that I’ve written about extensively due to its stomach-churning similarities to today’s political landscape.
Denny Carter
Vance’s coordinated attack on Haitians in the state he represents in the U.S. Senate because his Silicon Valley daddies made it so has led to a series of shooting and bomb threats that have shut down local schools, colleges, and hospitals. Haitian mothers and fathers have pulled their children out of school for fear of harassment and violence.
Vance has taken all the hatred and fear he has built up in his own black and vile heart and spilled it onto an unsuspecting community that is now living in terror. They are being terrorized. And the language Vance is using is reminiscent of Donald Trump’s howling about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the country,” another fascist dog whistle meant to express solidarity with the worst among us.
That Vance went on cable news the other day and admitted to “creating stories” that fit his fascist narrative of 21st century America and promoted his heinous and inhumane solutions to the problem of black migrants in a small Ohio town does not matter. In a previous political era – say, a decade ago – such an admission would be career ending. Vance would be doing infomercials for super glue by Christmas. Today, in a post-truth environment in which media outlets do not hold Republican candidates to account for fear of a lopsided, uninteresting race, Vance’s admission is non-news, a mere blip on the content radar that will draw some clicks and fill some air time, but will soon pass into the roiling background of our toxic, capital-dominated political culture.
Vance’s attacks on Haitian families in Ohio (and across the nation) are not direct. He has not taken up arms and urged like-minded Americans to follow him into battle against those who have sullied the fatherland. There is nothing direct or honest about the way Vance has used his platform to bring Springfield, Ohio to its knees in a last-ditch effort to scare white Americans into holding their noses and re-installing Trump as president. Vance’s efforts have been as vague and indirect as possible. This is the very definition of “stochastic terrorism,” or “political violence that has been instigated by hostile public rhetoric that is directed at a group or an individual.”
The term stochastic terrorism, popularized by a DailyKos blogger way back in 2011, has been explained as "the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” You may recall one chilling and concrete example of stochastic terrorism from the 2016 election cycle, when Trump told rally goers, "If [Hillary Clinton] gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know." He wasn’t saying. He was just saying.
Stochastic terror predates Trump, of course. Former bloviating Fox News talking head Bill O'Reilly in the early 2000s hosted segment after segment about George Tiller, an abortion care provider in Kansas until he was murdered by an anti-abortion activist in 2009. O'Reilly, night after night, droned on and on to his national audience about "Tiller the baby killer." You do the math.
Avoiding explicit calls for violence against Haitians in Springfield gives Vance and the Trump campaign cover in case things go sideways and someone follows through with their threats of shootings or bombs in the town. We’ve seen stochastic terrorism curdle into very real terrorism with the right wing’s scaremongering around the Great Replacement Theory and its existential threat to white supremacy. These words – telling people they are under attack by hoards of undeserving Others – has real world consequences. Blood has been and will continue to be spilled thanks to stochastic terrorism.
The way Vance and Trump have turned national attention to some migrant families in a small town that has largely welcomed them has been another expert gaslighting campaign by men who can gaslight with the best of them. If something hideous happens in Springfield in the coming weeks, Vance and Trump can issue statements full of regret for senseless violence that they encouraged on the stump and on social media. They can say that they had no intention of inciting violence by calling migrants unclean and unsafe and a threat to everyone and everything that lives nearby. If some madman with a gun commits unspeakable crimes, that’s on him. We did not tell him to do that, they’ll say. We would never suggest such a thing.
And they’re right. No one will have said explicitly that someone should commit violent acts against schools or hospitals in Springfield. At the heart of every gaslighting campaign is bad faith, as Bad Faith Times readers know well. Vance and Trump are playing a game they know to be dangerous in hopes that it might help them sway the 100,000 weirdo undecided voters who determine every single American presidential election in our big, dumb electoral system. It is a profound kind of nihilism throbbing at the center of such dishonesty and bad faith.
The right will deny the very existence of stochastic terrorism. They will say anyone who invokes the term is attacking the free speech rights of their political opponents. They say this because they have learned to wield free speech as a weapon against those they hate, those who stand between them and a return to pre-Civil Rights America. The right does not believe in free speech because the right believes in nothing. Power is the goal. If free speech must be bastardized in the process, so be it.
In conversations with people in our lives, I think it’s incumbent on folks who understand this tricky linguistic dynamic to explain why and how anti-migrant rhetoric can lead to mass death and ruined lives. I had to do this on Sunday with my own dad, who has very carefully trapped himself into a nonstop whirlwind of right-wing disinformation that protects and affirms his worldview. My dad did not know about the threats to Springfield hospitals and colleges and schools because the media he consumes does not report on that. He couldn’t even grasp who it was who would make such threats.
A few minutes of explaining stochastic terrorism to him – without using the term, of course – brought some understanding to what’s really going on, and why my suburban Maryland dad is consumed with worries and fears about Haitian families 400 miles away, the way he was consumed with fear about Portland, Oregon during the racial justice uprisings of 2020.
Probably it’s all for naught, but I had to try. What else is there to do?
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads at @CDCarter13.
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