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You are here: Home / Politics / America / Taking Stock of This Week’s Domestic Terrorism Campaign: Social Learning, Neutralization and Drift, and Terrorism

Taking Stock of This Week’s Domestic Terrorism Campaign: Social Learning, Neutralization and Drift, and Terrorism

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As we slip towards the weekend I wanted to take a moment and reflect on where we are at. First, we are very, very fortunate that Cesar Sayoc was a better sticker aficionado than he was a bomb maker. We all need to keep in mind just how much danger he created for Americans and people living in or visiting America over the past week. And that’s provided that the US Postal Inspectors, the FBI, and the ATF have tracked down all of the additional bombs he put into the postal system. Every postal worker, everyone along each delivery person’s route, everyone at the offsite receiving and scanning facilities, and/or everyone at the locations where the packages actually were delivered were all at risk. If any, let alone all, of the pipe bombs that Sayoc had mailed to his intended victims had gone off at any of the stages of handling, shipping, and delivery by the US Postal Service we could have been looking at one or more mass casualty situations. It is important to keep in mind that by the sheer blind luck of Sayoc’s lack of talent as a bomb maker a lot of people weren’t hurt and killed. And that this week’s campaign of domestic terrorism created only fear and stress and not injuries and fatalities. Sometimes it really is better to be lucky than to be good.

We also need to realize that what we’re dealing with is social learning driving terrorism and low intensity political violence. While Tom Nichols, who has been working through his own theory in regard to radicalization where he refers to these types of terrorists as Lost Boys, identified Sayoc’s domestic terrorism campaign without explicitly referring to it, it is actually the social learning and social behavioral drivers of terrorism.  This includes the normal four components of learning: 1) Primary associations, 2) Definitions favorable, unfavorable, and neutralizing to behavior, 3) Imitation, and 4) Reinforcement. It also includes the social learning components of neutralization (of definitions unfavorable to behavior) and drift.You can see this in the third and fourth tweets below.

Nichols is a political scientist and international relations scholar and national security practitioner, not a criminologist, so it is not necessarily surprising that he isn’t read up on social learning theory. I, however, wrote my doctoral dissertation on social learning explanations for terrorism and low intensity political violence* and have several publications and numerous analytical reports for the Army dealing with this topic. As I wrote here back in August 2016:

But not all of Nichols lost boys are actually boys. Robert Dear is 57. Major Nidal Hasan is in his 40s. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel is 31. The common denominator for all of these men, as well as for Dylann Roof, Micah Xavier Johnson, Rizwan Sayeed Farook, and others from even farther back in time such as Timothy McVeigh, Eric Robert Rudolph, Shelley Shannon (a woman), and Ted Kaczynski, is the need to alleviate their strain. Regardless of the source of the strain and regardless of whether their grievances are objective, subjective, or a combination of the two. The real question is how does one go from being socially** strained to externally directing one’s response to their strain. The answer, I think, is hashtag radicalization and terrorism. And this type of radicalization and terrorism has an empirically definable pathway.

In the 1950s Sykes and Matza put forth a variant of social learning theory called neutralization and drift. Their intention was to clarify the social behavioral pathway that leads to delinquency, deviance, and crime. Sykes and Matza theorized that delinquency, deviancy, and crime are based on justifications that are used to rationalize behavior. And they called these justifications the techniques of neutralization, which allow one to drift into crime, deviance, and delinquency. Or in the cases we’re interested in extremism, terrorism, and/or mass violence. They are divided into five types of neutralization: 1) denial of responsibility; 2) denial of injury; 3) denial of victim; 4) condemnation of the condemners; and the 5) appeal to higher loyalties. The first three justifications all deal with denial. They allow the offender to rationalize his behavior as outside of his control. He or she is not really hurting anyone. And even if someone is hurt they may have deserved it. The fourth justification allows the offender to invert the knowledge of her wrongdoing back upon those criticizing it by asserting that the condemners are hypocrites, do equally bad things, or are out to get her. Finally, the fifth rationalization allows for the justification of behavior on the basis of loyalty to one’s group rather than one’s society.

What we have seen this week with Sayoc’s terrorism campaign, as well as with conservative and/or Republican elites and notables (elected officials, appointed officials, pundits, and commenters) and just supporters of the President who continue to toss around the idea that this is all a false flag or a hoax or somehow actually perpetrated by the intended targets to harm the President or the GOP’s electoral chances in two weeks, are perfect examples of social learning in general and neutralization and drift in specific. We can clearly observe:

  1. Primary associations in regard to being an objective or subjective supporter of the President.
  2. Learning definitions favorable, unfavorable, and neutralizing of behavior. Sayoc clearly learned from the President, as well as other Republican and conservative authority figures, that it is okay to target and vilify former and current Democratic officials or officials appointed by them, center left to left of center funders of liberal and progressive causes, CNN and other news media outlets that the President doesn’t like and often denigrates, and outspoken elite and notable critics of the President. We can also see this at play in the attempts to wave away this terrorist campaign by claiming it is fake news or a hoax perpetrated by the victims.
  3. Reinforcement is also clearly present. Specifically, Sayoc received reinforcement from conservative news media and conservative social media as current and former Republican officials, news media figures, commenters, and pundits, as well as just a large number of the President’s supporters talked about and magnified Sayoc’s actions through the attempt to dismiss it with whataboutism and bothsiderism, as well as calling it fake news or a hoax or denying the legitimacy of the victimization of the actual targets.
  4. While we haven’t specifically seen imitation yet, it will, unfortunately, likely appear in copycat actions over the next couple of weeks. And potential copycats do not necessarily have to copy the method of trying to make and use pipe bombs sent through the mail.

Both in the run up to today’s arrest and since Sayoc was taken into custody, all five elements of neutralization and drift that I delineated above are clearly explicitly observable. The Republican Party, especially its base membership, realigned to the perspective of the President, as well as conservative news media and conservative social media are all now a tool for radicalization. We can expect to see more Cesar Sayocs until conservative and Republican elites and notables make a stand. And I don’t mean the NeverTrumpers. They are, as far as the conservative movement and the Republican Party and the Republican base are concerned, traitors and unpeople. If the leaders of the conservative movement and Republican Party in the US do not make a stand soon, their movement, their political party and the news and social media platforms that support and bolster them will be no different than the ideological, doctrinal and information systems that allow ISIS and al Qaeda and the Putin backed neo-nationalists and neo-fascists to attract new members, radicalize both the new and longer term members, direct them at their enemies, and then sit back and wait for one of them to go operational.

Sayoc didn’t just appear fully formed this week. Nor is he a one off.

We’ve all seen vans or trucks or cars festooned like this. Some with fewer stickers, some with more (if that’s actually possible). One of my neighbors uses a handy man whose work truck is covered with stickers for auditing and ending the Fed, returning the US to the gold standard, statements that link back to the Von Mises Institute or Ron Paul’s foundation. I’m sure he’s very nice… There are more Cesar Sayocs out there. Just as there were more Dylan Roofs as we saw in Kentucky on Wednesday. And they’re marinating in the President’s and other elite and notable conservatives’ and Republicans’ toxic rhetoric. At some point they’ll reach the point where they have learned both enough of the definitions favorable to neutralize the prohibition against attacking other people, as well as who is an acceptable target from the President, from Republican elected and appointed officials, from Fox News, or from Rush Limbaugh or Hugh Hewitt or others on right wing talk radio, or from conservative social media across a variety of platforms, and when that happens they’ll take action. We can’t predict who the next Cesar Sayoc will be, nor can we predict who he or she, though it is most likely to be a he, will target, nor can we predict when it will happen. But unless something changes and soon, it will happen. And it will happen again and again and again.

Update at 9:05 PM EDT

Apparently the President couldn’t even contain himself for 24 hours. While I was writing this post, he went right back to his dangerous, radicalizing rhetoric at his rally this evening:

Stay vigilant! And remember to vote!

Open thread.

* Full disclosure: If you decide to (if you are so masochistic as to) actually try to get a copy of my dissertation as a reprint and read it, please be aware that it contains a significant methodological flaw that was not caught by anyone prior to my defense and submission of the final copy for archiving. Specifically, because terrorism data is non-linear, but also small n in its frequency, the appropriate statistical analysis would have been to run a Poisson distribution. The methodologist hired by the Department of Political Science during my final year as a doctoral student and candidate – and the department leadership and hiring committee were warned that the methodologist was using the hire to get back into academia, was not going to do anything he promised to do, and as soon as he was reestablished he was leaving for greener pastures, which he did – refused to review my or any of the other students dissertations who were preparing for defense and submission for methodological soundness because we weren’t “his students”. Neither of my dissertation chairs (one in political science and one in criminology), both of whom are excellent quantitative methodologists, worked with non-linear data. Nor had I had any real exposure to dealing with it as I had completed my methodological coursework prior to the methodologist being hired – it was simply not covered in the classes I took. As a result neither I, nor they caught that an ordinary least squares regression was not appropriate for the outcome variable I was working with because it violated the linearity rules of the Gauss-Markov theorem. Interestingly enough, once someone pointed out the issue to me after I’d completed my dissertation and I reran my model using a Poisson distribution I got almost the exact same results as I did from the incorrect ordinary least squares regression. Which actually demonstrates just how robust ordinary least squares regression is. This, as well as the fact that the dissertation is not structured in a way that allowed it to be readily revised into a book for scholarly publication, is why I never revised it and published it as a book. I did, however, publish a number of scholarly articles and book chapters based on parts of the dissertation, including the empirical explanations for terrorism and low intensity political violence.

Reader Interactions

157Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    Good, an appropriate place to vent. Here’s what Charlie Pierce has to say about the guy who was targeting our Democratic leaders.

    Reporters are now scouring Sayoc’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, looking for clues. At the moment, he just seems like yet another lost soul, a refugee in his own country, who had very little to cling to, unsuccessful even at crime, who finally found a place for his vagrant spirit in whatever it is that people heard in the siren call of the campaign that ended with the president* in the White House.

    There are a lot of dislocated people in the United States these days. The world has changed around them. The world has left them behind. The promise of the the country seems not just out of reach, but empty. There is free-floating rage, and resigned depression hangs on the country like a weighted shawl. Nobody can possibly fathom all of the incarnations this sodden zeitgeist may take. It shapes itself within the life of every individual citizen, for good or ill.

    https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a24276740/bombs-democrats-cesar-sayoc-donald-trump/

    I wonder if he would be so solicitous if the “lost soul” targeted someone he cared about.

    Ugh.

  2. 2.

    karen marie

    Your “full disclosure,” Adam, is totally hot. I believe you’re married. Is this how you won your wife? With talk like that? I have to go smoke a cigarette.

  4. 4.

    Omnes Omnibus

    I am so glad I got my BA in Government when the subject was largely study of political philosophy.

  5. 5.

    Mary G

    I was just looking at Nichols’ tweets and wondering what you would say about them. It seems to the decidedly nonacademic me that you are pretty much saying the same thing in different words. Don’t @ me.

  6. 6.

    Adam L Silverman

    @karen marie: Short answer: I’m not married. I have dogs.

    Long answer: I made a decision that as long as I do the type of work I do, where I am willing and able to potentially deploy, that being single and uninvolved is the best option for me. I made this decision after the woman I was dating in 2013 wanted to begin speeding things up just as I’d been informally asked, and agreed providing my command would deconflict my time (which they indicated they both could and would) to deploy for about four months to assist a theater strategic element operating in a war zone. Even though the deployment didn’t happen, it became clear to me that it was unfair to her or anyone else I might eventually get involved with, to bring this reality into a relationship with me. So I have dogs. Who, if I do have to deploy, will be pampered by my Mom.

  7. 7.

    Corner Stone

    @Mary G: If you go back a few more from before today you will find Nichols extolling the fact that Hillary’s email server was very, very, very bad and disqualifying to be President. Like two days ago he is still making this argument.

  10. 10.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mary G: Pretty much. Basically I’m using technical criminological/sociological language that Nichols isn’t because he was most likely not exposed to them during his education and over the course of his career.

  13. 13.

    Adam L Silverman

    @satby: It may be that they simply haven’t found all of the pipe bombs that Sayoc put into the postal system yet.

  16. 16.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Villago Delenda Est: Yep. And while I was writing this post, the President went right back to injecting more radicalization directly into his supporters at one of his rallies:

  18. 18.

    pika

    I really appreciate your full disclosure, Adam–transparent and truthful (I’ll let Karen Marie’s assessment stand for itself). Really a master class in what to do…

  19. 19.

    gene108

    Republican Party in the US do not make a stand soon, their movement, their political party and the news and social media platforms that support and bolster them will be no different than the ideological, doctrinal and information systems that allow ISIS and al Qaeda and the Putin backed neo-nationalists and neo-fascists to attract new members, radicalize both the new and longer term members, direct them at their enemies, and then sit back and wait for one of them to go operational.

    As long as Republicans maintain power and none of their leaders get affected by the violence, they will do nothing to stop the rhetoric.

    They could have dialed it back 10 years ago by telling the Birthers to pound sand and that Obama’s a natural born citizen, but they decided birther nonsense helped them electorally and kept quiet.

    The fact is they do not want to stop it. The violent rhetoric keeps their voters engaged. They could have stopped it anytime in the last 10 years, but it wasn’t in their interest.

    Hopefully no one gets hurt, but some point, I think there must be a subset of elected Republicans, who agree with sovereign citizens, Oath Keepers, III%’s, and rest of the heavily armed militias that have ties to White supremacists, and are just itching for a reason to start a race war and murder the non-whites in this country.

  20. 20.

    encephalopath

    Aren’t Islamic Extremists just a religious variety of Right Wing Extremists? One is a religious conservative and the other is a political conservative.

    I don’t understand why those things are always broken out into different categories.

  21. 21.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    We can’t predict who the next Cesar Sayoc will be, nor can we predict who he or she, though it is most likely to be a he, will target, nor can we predict when it will happen. But unless something changes and soon, it will happen. And it will happen again and again and again.

    That’s not entirely true. We could just summarily execute anyone who wears a MAGA hat //

  22. 22.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Brickley Paiste: I put the link to it. Also, I’m most likely hiding typos. Or what Steeplejack would tell you are my pathological deficiencies with spelling and grammar.

  23. 23.

    trollhattan

    @karen marie:
    Heh. I’m hoping he extends the discussion WRT crossover with Gorka’s cute graphics with the ovals and arrows, demonstrating TERRORISM!

  26. 26.

    Fair Economist

    Interestingly enough, once someone pointed out the issue to me after I’d completed my dissertation and I reran my model using a Poisson distribution I got almost the exact same results as I did from the incorrect ordinary least squares regression

    This is the rule for statistical work. It’s rare that the exact model chosen makes a big difference. What does make a big difference is multiple reanalyses, which are routinely used to create a “significant” result when there wasn’t one there originally.

  30. 30.

    Jeffro

    * Full disclosure: If you decide to (if you are so masochistic as to) actually try to get a copy of my dissertation as a reprint and read it, please be aware that…I never revised it and published it as a book. I did, however, publish a number of scholarly articles and book chapters based on parts of the dissertation, including the empirical explanations for terrorism and low intensity political violence.

    I like my version better. So does my poor aching brain! ;)

  31. 31.

    Adam L Silverman

    @encephalopath: Things get broken into categories because it supposedly makes them easier to study and analyze. The reality is that right wing and religious extremism, whether or not it leads to the use of low intensity political violence, are very similar to each other and quite dissimilar to left wing extremism and left wing terrorism and low intensity political violence.

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    Preemptive action anticipating a Dem House?

    The Trump administration is drastically cutting back on who on Capitol Hill gets to see intelligence reports on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, according to multiple congressional sources.

    Under the new rules, only each party’s House and Senate leaders, along with chairs and ranking members of foreign relations and intelligence committees, get direct access to the reports. It is a drastic change from previous distribution of North Korea related intelligence reports which, for the most part, gave access to the entire committees and the staffers on those committees.

    The fear on Capitol Hill is that the limited distribution, which has been implemented over the past few weeks, will leave Congress largely in the dark when it comes to what U.S. intelligence has collected about North Korea’s motivations and nuclear developments.…
    [snip]
    “It will be problematic because even if you sit on a committee like [Intelligence], only the chair and ranking get that intelligence, not their staff. That is just kind of nuts,” explained another senior Senate staffer.
    [snip]
    What remains unclear is if lower level analysts at the State Department, Department is Defense and Department of Energy are also being denied access to intelligence reports. The State Department said they do not comment on intelligence matters and the office of the director of national intelligence declined to comment at all. Source

  33. 33.

    Adam L Silverman

    @trollhattan: I’ve already covered that. If I’m recalling the APSA annual meeting from 2002 or 2003 – whichever of those years it was in Boston – correctly, that mess of a graphic was plagiarized from someone who presented a paper on the typology of the hyper-terrorist that year. Gorka’s genius was in finding it, stealing it, bastardizing, and making it less coherent.

  36. 36.

    Corner Stone

    @debbie:

    I wish there was someone who could get through to Trump and actually get him to dial it down.

    I, personally, would appreciate anyone with that kind of access and influence to choose another course of action.

  40. 40.

    debbie

    @NotMax:

    Pretty stupid. Will a Dem House fund whatever the administration has up its sleeve if they don’t know what it is?

  42. 42.

    MisterForkbeard

    @NotMax: I guess they’reimiting the amount of people who see intelligence that Trump’s North Korea attempts were complete busts?

    Can’t think of another good reason unless they’re worried about sources getting burned.

  43. 43.

    encephalopath

    @Adam L Silverman:

    The reality is that right wing and religious extremism, whether or not it leads to the use of low intensity political violence, are very similar to each other and quite dissimilar to left wing extremism and left wing terrorism and low intensity political violence.

    That has always seemed intuitive to me even though I don’t know anything about the subject.

    It’s strange to me that the right is continually howling about Radical Islam and completely ignoring its close cousin of wingnut terrorism on the Right. And no one in the media bothers to point that out or ask Republican politicians about that odd categorical disconnect.

  44. 44.

    Jeffro

    Just a reminder that absolutely no one, right, left, independent, or indifferent expects anything but a continued descent/unraveling by this president* and his administration. As in, we see the train out of control and on fire and it’s about to jump the tracks…and land on top of an orphanage…with a load of uranium and rattlesnakes…

    …but somehow, 40% of American adults think the train is actually doing good and necessary work, and the local newspaper seems inclined to report that ‘opinions differ on the purpose and trajectory of the train’. Something like that.

    What was that line about Afghanistan or Iraq? “Tell me how this ends?” Who sees a sensible, country-strengthening end here? It is just devolving. By Election Day, he will be calling for his supporters to open carry to the polls and to question anyone brown who shows up to vote.

  47. 47.

    Villago Delenda Est

    We can’t predict who the next Cesar Sayoc will be, nor can we predict who he or she, though it is most likely to be a he, will target, nor can we predict when it will happen. But unless something changes and soon, it will happen. And it will happen again and again and again.

    If the blue wave happens, and the Dems take the House, I guarantee this is what will happen. These people need to be dissuaded, in the strongest possible terms, from carrying out this agenda, or there will be blood spilled…and it will likely mostly be theirs.

  53. 53.

    Jeffro

    @Jay: true…but we’re keeping others from an opportunity to lose as well! Take THAT, um, ‘others’!

    FWIW quote was from Petraeus re: Iraq. (I had to look it up, it was driving me nuts)

  55. 55.

    gene108

    @debbie:

    wish there was someone who could get through to Trump and actually get him to dial it down.

    I had better odds of winning the $23 million NJ Pick-6 lottery on Monday, the $1.6 billion Megamillions on Tuesday, and the $600 million Power Ball on Wednesday, than anyone has in getting Trump to dial it back a notch, because this is what and who he really is.

    A vile racist, who cares about no one but himself, and has no standards other than winning at any cost, no matter what laws he has to bend or break to get his way.

    He has never gotten into trouble for his bad behavior, and had more often than not been rewarded by society and the media for his outrageous and morally dubious acts, like declaring bankruptcy and stiffing creditors, after he sucked up all the money he could, cheating on Ivana with Marla just got him in the news more, and same with his bullshit birther crusade that should have gotten him banned from the public for dredging up an already debunked conspiracy theory, but only got him more attention.

    People have already gotten killed because of his rhetoric*, but he doesn’t care and no one can now cut his mic, because he is president, and the president demands some level of media attention.

    * Indian IT worker shot and killed in a Kansas bar, the two men in the PNW, who were defending a woman from a knife wielding racist, and I am sure there are more acts of violence, but those two pop to mind.

  59. 59.

    Fair Economist

    @Adam L Silverman: I was, actually, in a doctoral program and helping a lot of my friends with these exact kinds of issues. That said, I’m kind of surprised nobody involved realized this model called for Poisson models. It rarely makes much of a difference but it is “important” like proper spelling is – it shows you know the rules and follow them.

  60. 60.

    NotMax

    OT.

    Makes only the best deals? Bwa ha ha ha ha ha.

    Donald Trump had no choice but to blow $10,000 in charity money on a giant painting of himself — because no one else wanted it, his lawyers claimed in court Thursday.

    Trump picked up the infamous painting — now at the center of a lawsuit brought by the state attorney general who alleges suspect spending by the charity — during a 2014 auction benefiting The Unicorn Foundation at his Mar-a-Lago country club in Florida.

    “So Mr. Trump donates $10,000 to start the bidding, and then when the bidding goes on and no one else bids, they’re stuck with the painting,” his attorney Alan Futerfas told Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Saliann Scarpulla as he asked for the case to be dismissed. Source

  62. 62.

    Chris T.

    I’m sardonically amused by the crazy people saying that the van proves Sayoc was a democratic plant. Obviously anyone wearing Trumpy hats and clothes and with Trumpy stickers on their vehicle is way over the top. At least a third of the people at every Trump rally are secret democratic plants!

  64. 64.

    Tenar Arha

    @gene108:

    Hopefully no one gets hurt, but some point, I think there must be a subset of elected Republicans, who agree with sovereign citizens, Oath Keepers, III%’s, and rest of the heavily armed militias that have ties to White supremacists, and are just itching for a reason to start a race war and murder the non-whites in this country.

    There’s been people already who have been hurt, even killed. But, our minds block out the increasing violence already experienced under this Admin. It’s possibly necessary so one can survive, but it’s quite horrible every time I realize that we do it so easily.

    I can no longer imagine we get out of the obvious repercussions of this moment, even after we hopefully win at least one House this election. The people radicalized & given permission by that &*^%$#@ and the revanchist GOP and their predatory propaganda arms aren’t going to react well to losing, or to winning either. And my hope in GOP legislators reconsidering died with Injustice Assault.

    I always wondered about when & how people decided it was too late to stop things & time to hunker down. I wondered what it felt like as news reports & rumors of increasing violence in Germany or the post-Reconstruction South slowly warped everything, until people were surrounded by neighbors who might do anything from treating you the same, to calling you names, to cheering at your hurt, to destroying your property, to beating or killing you, & all to prevent you from even asking for the dignity you were still entitled to under the law. In the meantime, thuggish & learned men joined together in government to re-write the laws, so that you had no recourse except capitulation or escape. We are not them and now isn’t then, but I don’t wonder anymore what it was like.

  65. 65.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @gene108:

    the $1.6 billion Megamillions on Tuesday,

    Not to detract from your point, which is spot on, but somebody from South Carolina already bought the winning ticket for the Mega Millions. Must be another time traveler.

    the two men in the PNW, who were defending a woman from a knife wielding racist

    I remember that case. Guy had absolutely no remorse. He was caught dead to rights, too. I don’t say this often, as I’m generally against the death penalty, but I hope he gets it.

  66. 66.

    Jay

    So I assume all the people that said it was a false flag or that the bombs weren’t real won’t be invited back on TV to offer opinions anymore, right?

  69. 69.

    schrodingers_cat

    I don’t think that Poisson distribution would necessarily be better. Its generally used in physics to model exponential decay like for example radioactive decay. It is the limiting case of a binomial distribution when the occurrence of an event is low and the rate at which the said event occurs is constant. And the events are independent of each other.

  71. 71.

    A Ghost To Most

    Too many words. They’re greedy spiteful assholes with no boundaries.

    I’m glad I was an engineer.

  74. 74.

    Mike in NC

    @Jeffro: In 1966 the CBS News correspondent Eric Sevareid visited South Vietnam and said afterwards, “I don’t think anybody has thought this thing through”.

  77. 77.

    gene108

    @encephalopath:

    It’s strange to me that the right is continually howling about Radical Islam and completely ignoring its close cousin of wingnut terrorism on the Right. And no one in the media bothers to point that out or ask Republican politicians about that odd categorical disconnect.

    This country was founded and operated under the principle of white conservative men being able to use violence, whether state sanctioned or not, to get what they want*. It is only in the last 50 to 55 years that white people actually go to jail for crimes against minorities.

    I don’t think the media understands how baked into everything this position of power is, when they cover something like the Kentucky Kroger murders.

    The white murderer is a mentally ill lone wolf. To admit otherwise is to break the illusion that so much racism in this country has been enforced through violence, and would still be in “post-racial” America, if we weren’t vigilant in tracking white supremacists.

    We are not as evolved as we would like to believe. And this is hard for people to admit.

    * You can go back to the colonists driving out the natives, to maintaining slavery, to trying to reintroduce it, after emancipation, at the point of a gun, throw the Plains Wars, to murdering Civil Rights workers, in the 1960’s.

  79. 79.

    Jay C

    @encephalopath:

    It’s strange to me that the right is continually howling about Radical Islam and completely ignoring its close cousin of wingnut terrorism on the Right. And no one in the media bothers to point that out or ask Republican politicians about that odd categorical disconnect.

    Why is it “strange”? It’s a basic cultural divide (at least as far as most Americans are concerned): Radical Islamists are “THEM” – Swarthy Foreign Others impelled to violent barbaric acts by the perverse injunctions of their violent barbaric religion. Domestic wingers – even the most violent – get somewhat of a pass because they are, nominally, part of “US”. And it’s a basic human impulse, apparently, to tend to make excuses for bad actors “in the family”

  80. 80.

    Ruckus

    @gene108:
    I think you are exactly right. There are too many similarities between the republican crazy class and the republican political class. One of the small differences is that the political class up till now was not calling for actions. They weren’t doing anything to try to stop them either mind you. Now the “leader” of the political class is calling for actions and they still are not doing anything at all to even attempt to stop them and in fact seem to be egging them on. The have regressed into a terrorist organization. It was a short trip and took them about 30 seconds to complete.

  81. 81.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @NotMax:
    I’m against it mainly for pragmatic reasons. The justice system isn’t perfect and makes mistakes. In this light, I don’t believe the state should be allowed to execute someone. One innocent person executed is one too many.

    However, the fact that he was caught red-handed, defiantly expressed no remorse for his murders, and the pure viciousness of it, is what makes me want to see the asshole dead.

    If somebody like the Joker existed, I’d want him to get the death penalty, too. Not just because he’s an evil POS, but because he’s just keeps getting out; IOW, he’s a clear menace to society. IIRC, most murders are crimes of passion and the murderer wouldn’t likely murder again if released. I’m also generally fine with those convicted of murder getting life without the possibility of parole. That way, an innocent person has the chance to be exonerated.

  82. 82.

    cain

    @Adam judging from the reactions from the women contributors here, it’s almost like you’re the main character in a spy pulp fiction book. I’m thinking David Baldacci’s John Puller – a military investigator. :-)

  83. 83.

    Matt McIrvin

    @encephalopath:

    Aren’t Islamic Extremists just a religious variety of Right Wing Extremists? One is a religious conservative and the other is a political conservative.

    I don’t understand why those things are always broken out into different categories.

    Because they have different political effects. A Muslim extremist killing people for religious reasons strengthens Republicans’ arguments for nativist/Christianist right-wing authoritarianism; a Republican killing people for political reasons weakens them.

  84. 84.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: One of the dog’s tummy’s is out of whack. So I had to get more chicken breasts to boil up for the temporary chicken and rice diet.

  86. 86.

    Ruckus

    @Mike in NC:

    Dude, you cannot use the words “Gorka” and “genius” in the same sentence.

    You can if sneak in a couple extra words.
    Try “can not be considered in any way a……”
    Or “is fucking not a…….”
    Or “Gorka is a genius only in his own mind. The rest of us understand the word moron should replace the word genius.”

  87. 87.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Villago Delenda Est: Unfortunately there has already been blood spilled. Win or lose, these people have been convinced and have convinced themselves that they are the only true victims.

  90. 90.

    Amir Khalid

    @NotMax:
    Donad Trump overestimated the potential appeal of a giant portrait of Donald Trump. Then when nobody wanted the painting — oh, the humiliation! — he stuck his charity with the tab for it when he could have done the obvious and right thing: pay the ten grand out of his own pocket. How typical.

  92. 92.

    Adam L Silverman

    @schrodingers_cat: In the social sciences it is the right model for small n, non-linear data. Unless you’re dealing with really small n, in which case you use a binomial distribution. I’ve got the little green Sage methods manual. Ironically it was written by the methodologist that hosed the department.

  93. 93.

    Adam L Silverman

    @cain: Never read them. I like to think of myself, for various reasons, as basically Robert B. Parker’s Spenser.

  94. 94.

    Chief Oshkosh

    Why are so many people saying that Sayoc is insane? He’s probably just as sane as most of the Trump supporters I’m forced to be around daily. In their world, he’s totally sane and they wish they were as “brave” as he was.

    But I’m asking because calling him insane just gives him, and the whole Republican/fascist universe, an out. As in: Hey, the guy was insane. Whaddayagonnadoo? Whoocuddanode?

    Nope. Not buying it. Sayoc is totally sane and acting sanely within the world created by VRWC. They have created the violent mob, and the only “fringe” aspect is that most of the mob members are scared of their own shadows and would never take action. Luckily, as TL points out, these people are incompetent and only a few are as “brave” as Sayoc.

  96. 96.

    JLowe

    They have to go find the propaganda, and when they do, they mainline it.

    Did I hear that right?

    This struck me as the same as the lame “from a certain point of view” crap Obi Wan hands Luke for lying about his father. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Dr. Nichols the possibility exists that the propaganda is also weaponized speech which is designed and disseminated widely for the purpose of activating said potential lone wolves? Or, that a fruitful line of inquiry might be to look at other historical examples of state-sponsored terrorism in the information age to see if any parallels exist. It’s understandable that in the role of public intellectual, he’s advocating a tone of moderation. And, I suppose speaking truth to power isn’t the best way for an academic working for the government to retain their position. But it’s poor problem formulation which leads to biased and unreliable risk analysis.

    And he teaches at the Naval War College.

  97. 97.

    lamh36

    OT, but ICYMI: PBO was on FIRE tonight!

    Former Pres. Obama: “We don’t need more mealy-mouthed elected officials who claim they’re ‘disappointed by this bad behavior’ but then don’t do anything about it.”

    “We need leaders who will actually stand up for what’s right, regardless of party.” abcn.ws/2hFejwL

    Cough…Jeff Flake…cough…Susan Collins…cough, cough.

    Check out video and more snippet at this twitter thread:
    https://twitter.com/abc/status/1055935537943592961?s=21

  98. 98.

    lamh36

    @lamh36:

    Former Pres. Obama: “In Washington, they have racked up enough indictments to field a football team. Nobody in my administration got indicted.” abcn.ws/2EMILjx

  101. 101.

    Don

    @Adam L Silverman: I read my daughter’s dissertation several years ago, and immediately spotted a couple of typos. I have yet to review my own from 1975; the era of Selectric typewriter publication at $1.50/page.and the backups were the previous version with marginal and editorial notations.

  102. 102.

    Mary G

    @Jay: @Adam L Silverman: It’s a bad look for the American people when this article in the WaPo yesterday has been up more than 24 hours and only has 21 comments. It’s by a retired Army major:

    The war in Afghanistan grinds on with no end in sight. The Trump administration’s strategy appears to hinge on coaxing the Taliban to the negotiating table, but so far their response has been to escalate violence. It’s time for President Trump to acknowledge that we are no closer to developing an Afghan military capable of defending its government than we were 17 years ago. He should end the advisory mission and bring those soldiers home. Enough Americans have died at the hands of our Afghan allies.

    Of course, there’s no way in hell that Twitler would do it, and even Obama fell for the “surge” bullshit.

  104. 104.

    Schlemazel

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:
    The death penalty is like porn, “I don’t know what it is but I know it when I see it”. Chuck Manson, Ted Bundy, MAGABomber are easy to see the need . . . except if the courts got it wrong. Courts get it wrong all the time and plenty of people are just positive that the condemned has it coming.

    The death penalty is about vengeance not justice. it would be better if we did away with. Although I am willing to delay that until after the guillotines are done in DC

  105. 105.

    TriassicSands

    Adam, I look at the pie chart and I can only arrive at one conclusion: Both sides do it.

    74:24:2 Wow! It is truly amazing that political murders are so evenly distributed across the political spectrum. It is even more obvious — inescapable — when I put on my special MSM Corrective Lenses.

  106. 106.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Amir Khalid:
    I don’t feel this way about any other case I’ve come across. I suppose I identified myself with the two men who that psycho slayed. I can imagine myself coming to the defense of those being victimized by some asshole like the murderer. It disturbs me to realize that I could just as easily be killed by some Nazi just for standing up to them.

    His open defiance and lack of remorse also make me feel the way I do.

  107. 107.

    Dan B

    Adam; Thanks for your post. It’s timely for me. A friend of mine is an influencer in the local gay and social justice communities. He’s a hispanic guy with a white husband and two white 5 year olds, also white. He fears that he’ll get arrested for suspicion of kidnapping his own kids. I believe it’s quite possible.
    He’s been acting out by seeming to blame every well off white gay man of being racist. I called him on it today because it seemed everyone else was trying to tell him it was counterproductive … in the gentlest way. This gentle approach was not getting through.

    It turned out that he was trying to call out one person who was vilifying refugees and Muslims – brown people. This rich white guy is doing what you detailed: neutralizing our friend’s defense of people of color and refugees. The rich gay is afraid they’ll overwhelm liberal democracy. He’s buying into and repeating right wing tropes and John Birch propaganda.

    Your thesis’ points will be a tool for me to explain why my friend can’t make a dent in the rich gay’s racism.

    I’m also working on getting my friend’s most powerful tool – tying his fear of being profiled (and kids taken away) to the way rich gay’s anti-brown refugee stance helps feed the racism that puts brown people in jeopardy. My friend is most powerful, I believe, when he’s telling his story about his love for hus kids and his rightful fear that he could lose them even temporarily. He obviously is traumatized by the kids in McAllen, Texas. Rich white gay feels he must neutralize my friends empathy.

  108. 108.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Schlemazel:
    I agree, which is why I said this:

    The justice system isn’t perfect and makes mistakes. In this light, I don’t believe the state should be allowed to execute someone. One innocent person executed is one too many.

    Anyway, I think there’s a certain hypocrisy in executing someone for murder.

  109. 109.

    trollhattan

    @NotMax: @Schlemazel:
    Death penalty is inhumane and not something any civilized society engages in.

    A minority stance here in California BTW.

    There is justice and there is revenge. People confuse them.

  113. 113.

    Ruckus

    @Schlemazel:
    I want them to have life in prison. Every day one gets to think about not being free, to think about why they are in there, why they are not out and about. I want them to live in prison for a long, long time, eating the same cheese sandwich on plain white bread every day for lunch, drinking the same bad kool-aid or cold coffee. Worrying about someone doing to them what they did to others. Execute them and they don’t get to continue to pay. We all die, why should they not have to suffer as long as possible before they get there?

  117. 117.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Don: I usually try to get at least two people, whenever possible, to proofread my professional work before I hit send. There’s still always at least one or two errors.

  119. 119.

    Dan B

    @Jay C: God forbid (dog forbid?) that the wing nuts figure out that they’ve got much in common with Wahhabists and other radicals.

    But wait a minute, some christianists have been traveling to eastern Europe and helping organize opposition to “homosexual marriage”. They’ve had some success in Hungary, some other eastern European countries, and I believe in a middle eastern country. I’ll try to find the info. It’s disturbing because these folks have connections to foreign policy types close to the Trumpies.

  120. 120.

    Jay

    @Mary G:

    Sadly, there is no “easy out” in Afganistan. The Talib retired in 2002 but the Hunt for Bin Laden brought them back into the “game”, because they had to to survive. There is no Afghan Government, just collections of War Lords, Drug Lords, War Criminals and the odd principaled Politician, Cop and Soldier.

    The Reformers and Tribal Elder’s who could have reformed Afghanistan were neutered by the Bush Regime in 2002 and are either dead or in exile now.

  121. 121.

    Ken

    @TriassicSands: I’m sure the wingnuts will point out it’s from the ADL, which is one of those groups (wink wink) (nudge nudge) (dog whistle at tornado siren volume).

  122. 122.

    ruemara

    @Adam L Silverman: Not to be that type of person, especially as I’m chronically single & isolated, but the right person can decide for her own damned self if she can deal with that as part of the relationship. Just sayin in an interfering friend sort of way.

    I think I’ve had enough lunacy for the day. I’m going to slay things in Azeroth.

  123. 123.

    Dan B

    @Adam L Silverman: My (our) friend has great friends who have been trying to get through to him that his polemics against Rich White Gay Men who are Racist, Xenophobic, Classist, etc… were not productive. My partner was furious that I laid into our friend (I didn’t but was straightforward that I felt targeted, and not “rich” except by comparison.) Our friend responded instantly by DM. I was afraid to read it. It was immediately clear that he had no clue. We had a long exchange and he wants to learn from my 50 years of experience. Truthfully I’ve dabbled in social causes but got involved in a Forrest Gump way with some transformative moments. I feel like I finally have a handle on how some of the successful ones happen and how to describe them.

  125. 125.

    Dan B

    @ruemara: I trust that Adam has great and fulfilling relationships beyond his dogs and his Jackal fan club. Could be wrong but I’m glad he shares his brilliance with us so generously. I trust he knows it spreads some wisdom beyond the Balloon Dimension.

  128. 128.

    Aleta

    @Adam L Silverman: Did your chairs deny responsibility when the error was discovered? Here there’s a (sometimes politically driven) emphasis on how candidates and topics, and once even the degrees of the tenured professors, reflect on the dept.’s reputation. The fights have harmed the dept. a couple of times.

  129. 129.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Aleta: No, the chairs were both like: “Really? Crap. It happens. You’re still a doctor.” In their defense, this is not the type of statistical analysis they use. They do a lot of their work with survey and polling data, so the need to run a non-linear regression is almost zero. They’re good people and I was very fortunate to have them as my chairs, as well as to have the other members of my dissertation committee be on my committee. Had I converted the dissertation to a book for publication I would have corrected it. But since I didn’t, we just left it alone.

  130. 130.

    TriassicSands

    @Adam L Silverman:

    People who have never done it may not realize how difficult it is to remove all the errors from written work. The more technical the work, the more difficult the task. And it is a virtualy hopeless task for the author.

    I always find typos in every book I read — even those in later editions. The number of typos I find in the Times and Post is considerable and it seems to have gotten worse in recent years. Perhaps they are cutting costs by eliminating copyediting and/or proofreading.

  132. 132.

    debbie

    @TriassicSands:

    I always find typos in every book I read

    I do too. I remember back in the late 1970s, a reader contacted the publisher where I worked and complained about a typo. They actually reprinted the book!

  133. 133.

    Dan B

    @Adam L Silverman: People are on edge. I’m (thankfully) outta sync at the moment. An odd calm has overcome my anxieties. Much of it seems to have come from remembering that I survived Civil Rights, Vietnam protests, and Gay Liberation threats in rural Ohio, Cincinnati, Chicago, Tacoma, and Louisville. I saw people clubbed, gassed and arrested. Schoolmates died and lost limbs in the war. Guys we counseled at Fort Lewis were chained together and delivered to Vietnam. Another friend went to Leavenworth and was not heard from again.

    Then there were the gay rights struggles in WA state followed by AIDS. We managed to have some crazy fun times in the midst of the chaos. And I finally found enduring love.

    When I was a kid I encountered many adults who had lived through WW II and then Korea. They didn’t talk about it, especially the Jews who arrived from Europe. I always wondered what we could have gleaned from their stories but they were locked boxes.

    We would benefit from stories from our elders about how to survive and sometimes thrive in dark times and I guess I’ve got some to tell. Perhaps knowing a “purpose” gives me some center and calm. And knowing that things can come at you fast and without warning is less frightening. It reminds me of what was said about Andrew Gillum’s “Hit dogs always holler.” He knows his strongest supporters, Black Grandmothers. What wisdom do they have to share?

  135. 135.

    NotMax

    @Adam L. Silverman

    Speak fourfor yourself.

    Also too, copy editing; two words. Just as it is not filmediting.

    :)

    A blue pencil brings out the Sweeney Todd “At last my arm is complete again!” sentiment in this old coot.

  137. 137.

    Aleta

    @Aleta: Thinking back, one of those was when the dissertation was not within a single dept., and at a time of an absurd play for status and control. Last minute crisis for the poor student.

  139. 139.

    NotMax

    @Amir Khalid

    With you all the way on this. Particularly as you’re being more sober and measured than the “You can’t be a little bit pregnant” rejoinder I was going to use.

  143. 143.

    Bill Arnold

    @JLowe:

    Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Dr. Nichols the possibility exists that the propaganda is also weaponized speech which is designed and disseminated widely for the purpose of activating said potential lone wolves?

    Yes, and also microtargeted (and potentially much more manipulative) propaganda, often by written anonymous agents(even possibly multiple sock puppets), targeting the most vulnerable of such lone wolves.

  144. 144.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Bill Arnold: My data sets are set up, or were, for year after year. The outcome variable – total # of terrorist incidents – was not linear year after year. Some years it went up, some it went down,

  146. 146.

    Barb 2

    Trump bragged that he could shoot someone and get away with it. He can also get someone else to do his bidding.

    He has called out targets and so far one guy acted. His response was as if he was telling the next guys in line to hold off until after the elections. We all expected he to continue with the hate. All of the people whose names he mentions are at risk for the next wingnut who is going to answer the cult leaders instructions.

    The last religious revival meeting I attended was when I was in college. As this “revival” minister got hundreds of people all revered up to dedicate their lives to Jesus (or what ever) I realized what I was actually seeing – a cult and mob behavior. I had just been reading about this as part of a special project for my psy class. So I know a bit about real cults and mind bending. The Prosperity Gospel uses the same techniques – as did Reverend Jones of Kool-Aid fame.

    Trump copies what he sees and he sees how to manipulate people’s emotions – just like the pie in the sky, wait until you go to heaven for your rewards religions.

    Win or lose on election day in a few days – we still have a rough road ahead. Trump is getting reinforcement for his out of control behavior and he doesn’t care how many people are hurt or injured. I am glad that I am on this side the blue Democratic side – because I was forced to live on the other side as a child. I walked away. Those MAGA cult members are acting like a mindless mob.

  147. 147.

    dimmsdale

    @TriassicSands: Cold thread at this point, but yes, you’re right. Once upon a time when publishers acquired a title, they assumed responsibility for line editing, copyediting and proofreading. Nowadays they slough those functions off on the author, who is expected to either have a pal do it, or farm it out to a copyeditor/proofer and pay for it themselves. Even the self-styled top drawer publishers have acclimatized themselves to publishing books full of mistakes; just as the media has acclimatized itself to normalizing the tactics and utterances of unspeakable Republican scum. Ah well, ‘o tempura, o mores….”

  148. 148.

    J R in WV

    @Mike in NC:

    ….Dude, you cannot use the words “Gorka” and “genius” in the same sentence.

    Of course you can. Watch:

    Gorka, whatever studies he has made, research he has done, is no genius. Gorka is not even a Sub-Genius.

  149. 149.

    J R in WV

    @Barb 2:

    …I am glad that I am on this side the blue Democratic side – because I was forced to live on the other side as a child. I walked away. Those MAGA cult members are acting like a mindless mob.

    This is a pretty wise conclusion. I would make one change, personally:

    “…Those MAGA cult members are acting like a mindless mob.”

  150. 150.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @NotMax: Easy peasy. Gorka is to genius as Wrong Way Corrigan was to navigation.

    Yeah, but Corrigan meant to go “the wrong way.” Gorka, OTOH, really is a wackaloon.

  151. 151.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Chris T.:

    I’m sardonically amused by the crazy people saying that the van proves Sayoc was a democratic plant. Obviously anyone wearing Trumpy hats and clothes and with Trumpy stickers on their vehicle is way over the top. At least a third of the people at every Trump rally are secret democratic plants!

    You’re a genius, man! We just have to encourage them with this line of “reasoning”… that at least one out of three of their fellow travelers are liberal “plants,” funded by Soros and trained by Nancy Smash. All loyal MAGAts must seek out and destroy these infectious vermin!

    Genius, I tells ya!

  152. 152.

    Anonymous At Work

    @Adam, would getting a reprint of your dissertation and making *someone else* read it constitute a crime against humanity?
    Just asking…;)

  153. 153.

    Barry

    Adam, I disagree with: ‘Neither of my dissertation chairs (one in political science and one in criminology), both of whom are excellent quantitative methodologists, worked with non-linear data. ‘.

    If they don’t know how to deal with count and categorical data, then they have serious problems, which almost certainly can be resolved pretty easily. Their university likely has a stat group running classes.

  154. 154.

    mere mortal

    Thanks for this piece, it’s really valuable and informed stuff, and returns me again to the amazement of the community that Cole has managed to put together here.

    Interestingly enough, once someone pointed out the issue to me after I’d completed my dissertation and I reran my model using a Poisson distribution I got almost the exact same results as I did from the incorrect ordinary least squares regression.

    Yeah, I did this dance a few times when the stuff I was working on was headed to a top-flight or at least stat-addicted outfit. They always wanted the new hotness of stat tools, and whatever analysis was required almost never offered anything that OLS didn’t show.

  156. 156.

    Tehanu

    @Adam L Silverman: I spent half of this work week copy-editing an “implementation plan” written by two, count em, two holders of master’s degrees and a Ph.D., all native speakers of English… and “not fun” is the kindest thing I can think of to say. It absolutely amazes me that the very simple rules about apostrophes and hyphens — which I learned in 5th grade — seem to be beyond these people’s competence, not to mention agreement of subject and verb and recognition that “contiguous” does not mean “comprehensive.” OTOH, I guess that’s why I have a job….

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