#941: Ulysses S. Grant, Donald Trump, Kari Lake, Andy Biggs, Voltaire, Isaac Asimov and Stochastic Terrorism

Move over President Grant: As of this coming Tuesday, you will no longer be sui generis . . . in a class by yourself. For the past 151 years you have held the dubious distinction of being the only POTUS to have been arrested. If memory serves well, it was back in 1872 that you were arrested and taken into custody for speeding on a street in the nation’s Capitol. Truth to tell, you weren’t the only one racing a horse-drawn cart that day; a couple of your friends were engaged in competition . . . they likewise were cited. Your bail was set at $20.00 (the equivalent of $500.00 in today’s money) and you were released back to your residence: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The day after your arrest, you didn’t show up in court to answer charges, and thus lost your $20.00. Case closed.

This coming Tuesday (June 13, 2023), fPOTUS Donald J. Trump, along with his ‘Diet Coke valet’ Walt Nauta, will appear in Federal Court in Miami to answer a 49-page, 38-count Federal indictment (read here) including 31 counts under the Espionage Act of “willful retention” of classified records at his Florida estate and other locations after he left office on January 20, 2021. The product of more than 6 months of investigation under the leadership of special prosecutor Jack Smith the indictment is extraordinarily comprehensible; a word rarely associated with a Federal indictment It is also extremely nerve-wracking and makes one wonder just how well the fPOTUS is sleeping. It can’t be very well. I mean, in addition to this latest packet of legal pain, Trump is heading into Miami with two of his best attorneys no longer on the case. He has but one currently working for him . . . far too few for such a hydra-headed beast. Who knows what legal jeopardy all his former attorneys are themselves facing? (Methinks MAGA stands for “Making attorneys get attorneys”).

And he still has all his troubles in Georgia.

In great detail, the indictment recounts how Trump stashed hundreds of documents marked “confidential,” “secret” and “top-secret.” It also recounts how on several occasions (some were taped) he waved a document around in front of a visitor to Mar-a-Lago, telling them “This is really secret and I know I shouldn’t show it to you but . . .” Many contained highly classified military and even nuclear matters which, it they found their way into the hands of, say, Russia, China, Iran or North Korea, could be potentially catastrophic. The precise reason why Trump squirreled away all these documents is anyone’s guess:

For future sale?
As a form of “good-faith currency” for future business deals in foreign countries?
To feed his own ego?

Last night, Trump addressed several thousand Republican stalwarts in Columbus, GA at a brick building that ironically, was once an ironworks that manufactured mortars, guns and cannons for the Confederate Army in the Civil War. In this, his first public utterance since the indictment was released to the media, he resorted to using apocalyptic language, tying together a litany of personal afflictions and affronts - his indictments by prosecutors, his utter disdain for the DOJ and FBI, and his bid for the White House - as part of a “final battle” with “corrupt” forces that he maintained are destroying the country. “This is the final battle,” he told his supporters. I use the word “ironic” in describing the building in which he and his acolytes were gathered, because he is, of course, speaking in unguarded terms about a civil war.

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778)

What the fPOTUS is verbally engaged in is what some call stochastic terrorism. Coming from the Greek stochastikos, which means “skillful in aiming” or “proceeding by guesswork,” stochastic terrorism commonly 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.” To the best of my knowledge it first appeared in an article in the August 9, 2016 edition of Rolling Stone magazine in which author David S. Cohen used the term to describe Donald Trump's suggestion that "Second Amendment people" could "do" something about Hillary Clinton:

Stochastic terrorism, as described by a blogger who summarized the concept several years back, means using language and other forms of communication "to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable."

Long before Donald Trump, there was Voltaire, the French Enlightenment writer and philosopher who understood stochastic terrorism vis-à-vis people like Donald Trump and his MAGAites when he wrote “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities” ("Ceux qui peuvent nous faire croire à des absurdités peuvent nous faire commettre des atrocités"). Along these same lines, Isaac Asimov, one of our times’ greatest polymaths knew that “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

Try as I may, I cannot decide whether the fPOTUS’s mouthiest, seemingly most virulent cheerleaders - people like former Arizona newscaster (and failed 2022 gubernatorial candidate) Kari Lake, Arizona Representative Andy Biggs and Louisiana Representative Clay Higgins, among others - are really, truly as fixated on the idea of breaking up the United States through violence as they seem . . . or are merely in need of staying on 45’s good side. Speaking in lieu of former VP Mike Pence at the Saturday gathering in Columbus, Georgia (after Pence, at the last minute pulled out), she told the cheering crowd ““If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.” This is chilling stuff, to be sure. This is one wacky woman who has changed political affiliations and religions the way many of us change socks. She used to be a liberal Democrat (voting for both John Kerry and Barack Obama); now she is about as far right as you can get. She grew up as a Catholic, at one time identified as a Buddhist according to her friends, and as of 2022, she identified as a evangelical Christian

Then there’s Arizona Representative Andy Biggs, who chairs the Judiciary subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance (a most powerful position, considering what’s going on vis-à-vis Hunter Biden’s laptop). He responded to the 38-count indictment with the words “Eye for an eye,” which he wrote in a post on Twitter on Friday. Perhaps the most unhinged stochastic voice out there belongs to Louisiana Representative Clay Higgins. In a cryptic tweet that prompted thousands of angry responses – and confusion – online, Higgins called the arraignment "a perimeter probe from the oppressors." He also used language interpreted by one author as a call for right-wing militia groups to mobilize in support of Trump when he is arraigned Tuesday in Miami.

In language that few (including yours truly) can translate, Higgins wrote: “President Trump said he has been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.” Though Higgins did not respond to a request for clarification, author, journalist and professor Jeff Sharlet took his words as a call for war. Sharlet is a scholar who knows of what he speaks: his latest book, "The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War," is an in-depth look at right-wing extremism.

Parsing/translating Higgins’ highly jargonized tweet, Sharlet wrote Friday on his Twitter account: “Take this seriously. ’Perimeter probe’: Higgins thinks indictment precedes bigger attack. ‘rPOTUS’: real POTUS, Trump. ‘Hold’: stand back & stand by. ‘Buckle up’: prepare for war. ‘1/50 k’: military scale maps (mostly publicly available that show nearby military installations). ‘Know your bridges’: militia speak for prepare to seize bridges.”

Indeed, we are living in extremely dangerous times. For many intelligent people, it is impossible to see how patriotic citizens could ever bring themselves to vote for such a flawed human being as Donald Trump for president. To understand how this could be, we return once again to the insights of Isaac Azimov:

“When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.”

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti- intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”