When we argue about whether or not something was staged, we miss the most important half of the conversation. #politics #trump #psychology

We are missing a full 50% of the conversation, so let's pause for a moment and come back to the surface so I can read to you a definition and you can decide how it applies. The definition is the public demonization of a person or group through hateful rhetoric, which incites random lone wolf acts of violence that are statistically probable but individually unpredictable. It uses mass media to provoke violence while keeping the speakers safely distant from the act, making it difficult to prosecute as direct incitement. This is the definition of stochastic terrorism, even though it's kind of a nerdy academic term that only arose about 15 years ago. It is an ancient phenomenon. But when we argue about whether something was specifically staged or not, we miss that entire half of the conversation. Because people who were in the room were saying this wasn't staged, I'm not a crisis actor. That is a painfully narrow definition of the word staged. We are talking about manufactured threats. To be completely honest, paying people directly to carry out a fake attack is probably the dumbest, simplest, and most easy to expose version of this strategy. What we're witnessing right now while still blatantly obvious is a little more sophisticated, referring to immigrants as criminals and worse, to asylum seekers as mentally ill, treating gay and trans people like freaks or invading cities and detaining children. These are textbook strategies designed to make people feel so angry and so hopeless. They feel they have no option left. We know not just from observing with our own eyes, but from listening to their response that this is exactly what they are doing. This is why before Alex Prattie's heart had stopped beating they were already calling him a domestic terrorist and a member of Antifa. He knows statistically that when they do what they do, those kinds of things are going to happen. But they also know because we have individual agency and have to choose to not commit crimes, the justice system will never come for the people speaking hate from a position of power. This is why I try to end every single video with a message of hope or optimism. I'm not a polyanna, quite the opposite. Instead, I simply understand that we are winning, not in every single battle, but in the long arc of defeating Donald Trump's legacy. But the only way we can get to the next phase is if we refuse to play the part he cast for us.