I’d like to introduce you to a term you may not have heard before. It’s called “stochastic terrorism,” and it’s deeply challenging—both as a concept and as a reality—to both sides of our partisan divide. You can find a good short definition of the term in a recent piece by Todd Morley in the Small Wars Journal. He described it as “a quantifiable relationship between seemingly random acts of terrorism and the perpetuation of hateful rhetoric in public discourse, accompanied by catastrophising and fear generation in media sources.”