“Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?”
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
I remember Northrop Frye, teaching Shakespeare at the University of Toronto, dwelling on that line from Richard II. His point, as I remember it, was that a king cannot simply bark out an open order for murder and remain a king in the full ceremonial sense. So the wish is spoken obliquely. Not kill him, but would that this fear were gone. Not a command exactly, but something more dangerous: a loaded lament that preserves deniability while inviting another man to complete the sentence in blood. Shakespeare understood the method long before our own age invented a technical vocabulary for it.
Sherlock Holmes would have understood it too. Holmes knew that deduction begins where coincidence ends. The inattentive mind sees scattered facts and shrugs. Holmes sees recurrence. He clears the brain attic of clutter, ignores sentimental fog, and examines the trace elements that keep returning in altered form. Once the same marks appear often enough, what first looked random begins to disclose design. That is the spirit in which our present political climate must be examined.
What are the facts?
Three major assassination attempts against President Trump, including the April 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, which the White House itself described as the third major attempt on his life. An armed man traveling to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home, equipped with a firearm, ammunition, pepper spray, zip ties, and burglary tools, telling police he was there to kill a sitting Supreme Court justice. The shooting of Republican lawmakers at baseball practice, leaving Steve Scalise gravely wounded after the gunman first asked whether the players were Republicans. The murder of Charlie Kirk. Attacks on ICE facilities and personnel, including the Dallas case in which Reuters reported that the suspect researched ICE facilities, tracked agents, and possessed an “ANTI-ICE” round. These are not fever dreams or partisan embellishments. They are part of the public record.
The usual maneuver is to explain away each event in isolation. This man was unstable. That one was disturbed. Another was acting from personal grievance. This rhetoric was overheated but harmless. That symbol was ambiguous. Each act is sealed inside its own little chamber and then politely forgotten. This is how a society performs abatement by fragmentation. Holmes would have brushed the whole exercise aside. The issue is not whether each case has its own local peculiarities. Of course it does. The issue is what larger inference becomes unavoidable when the incidents keep recurring in the same moral and political direction. And the direction is unmistakable.
For years now, Democratic politicians, media figures, bureaucratic grandees, celebrities, and the rest of the country’s professional sermonizers have maintained an unrelenting drumbeat of demonization against Trump, Republicans, conservatives, border enforcement, and the American Right more broadly. Trump is not simply wrong; he is a fascist, a tyrant, a singular threat to democracy. Republicans are not simply opponents; they are extremists, semi-fascists, enemies of constitutional order, contaminants within the republic. President Biden himself repeatedly described Trump and MAGA politics as threats to democracy and referred to the MAGA philosophy as “almost semi-fascism.” Reuters documented those remarks. The phrase is idiotic as political analysis, but highly useful as atmospheric poison. It does not clarify. It stains.
There is now a name for the larger phenomenon: stochastic terrorism. The concept remains relatively new and somewhat contested, but its core meaning is clear enough. The University of Florida’s research guide summarizes it as rhetoric that can inspire random acts of politically motivated violence without direct coordination or explicit command. Scholars writing in Perspectives on Terrorism describe it as a phenomenon with identifiable linguistic mechanics and a deeper psychological context. Another academic treatment, drawing on Hamm and Spaaij, defines it as the use of mass communication to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. That last distinction matters. No one can predict which unstable mind will act. But the atmosphere makes it increasingly likely that one will.
That is why the Shakespeare line remains so chilling. The communicator need not issue a clean command. He need only create the moral and rhetorical conditions in which a subordinate, follower, or damaged admirer hears the wish inside the ambiguity and turns it into deed which brings us to James Comey.
The argument here is not that a criminal prosecution must succeed in order for the conduct to be morally indefensible. Reuters reported that prosecutors treated Comey’s “86 47” seashell post as threatening, while Comey insisted it was political expression and denied violent intent; Reuters also noted that legal experts regarded the case as difficult on First Amendment grounds. Fine. Courts may argue over statutes. That is not the heart of the matter. The real absurdity lies in the defense itself.
Comey’s carefully cultivated innocence wore thin long ago. A former FBI director cannot present a loaded political symbol as some innocent little beachside lark. He spent years at the highest level dealing with threats, coded language, unstable actors, organized menace, and the psychology of intimidation. Of all people in public life, he is among the least entitled to plead naivete. He may deny intent. He cannot credibly deny knowledge. He knows how suggestive symbolism is received in a country already saturated with assassination attempts, repeated warnings, and partisan hysteria. He knows how such a signal travels through politicized bureaucracies, intelligence circles, media chatter, and disordered minds. To pretend otherwise is to stretch credulity past the point of comedy.
And that is precisely where the Holmesian method matters. If one were investigating only one seashell post, one might dismiss it as tasteless, reckless, or juvenile. But Holmes does not isolate the footprint from the mud, the ash from the cigar, the stain from the shoe. He gathers the traces. He compares recurrence. He asks what pattern the fragments compose when seen together. Comey’s post matters not merely because of what it was in isolation, but because of the atmosphere into which it was sent and the man who sent it.
The newer literature on stochastic terrorism is especially useful because it forces a sharper question. The issue is not only whether a speaker explicitly ordered violence. The issue is whether public rhetoric, especially rhetoric of dehumanization and moral emergency, helps create the conditions in which violence becomes more likely. The scholarship keeps circling back to vilification, conspiracy language, and the construction of political “folk devils.” Once one side is repeatedly described as fascist, tyrannical, illegitimate, and beyond the reach of normal politics, some unstable person will eventually conclude that normal politics is no longer adequate. That is the pivot from rhetoric to action.
Democratic leaders and their media choir have spent years in precisely that work. They inveigh not merely against particular policies, but against the moral existence of their opponents. “Resistance” ceased long ago to be a metaphor and became a sanctifying word, a shibboleth meant to elevate routine partisan opposition into something closer to permanent insurgency. This is not loyal opposition in a constitutional republic. Loyal opposition accepts electoral legitimacy, argues within the rules, and prepares to win the next contest. Resistance implies usurpation, occupation, emergency, a regime so intolerable that ordinary restraints no longer apply. Once that language is normalized, one should not be surprised when unstable minds draw the final conclusion.
The defenders of this culture retreat into technicalities. No one explicitly ordered anything. No signed memorandum exists. No speaker can be tied with mathematical certainty to any particular bullet. That is the whole point. Stochastic terrorism does not work by memorandum. It works by probability. It works by atmosphere. It works by repeated emotional conditioning. It works by making violence more thinkable, more excusable, more imaginable to the man already unmoored.
This is why Holmes remains such a useful guide. He knew that truth often emerges only when noise is discarded. Our political culture does the opposite. It stuffs the public mind with distractions, euphemisms, side controversies, legal hairsplitting, therapeutic explanations, and moral fog. It tries to immure the pattern behind clutter. But once the clutter is cleared away, the line of continuity is hard to miss.
- Three major attempts on Trump’s life.
- An armed man at Kavanaugh’s home.
- Scalise nearly murdered on a baseball field.
- Charlie Kirk dead.
- ICE agents and facilities under attack.
- Years of “threat to democracy,” “fascist,” “semi-fascist,” “resistance,” “existential danger,” “enemy of the republic.”
- Then a former FBI director, of all people, sending out a symbol he knows perfectly well will not be read innocently.
At what point does one stop pretending these are unrelated? At what point does coincidence cease to persuade? The answer, I think, is that it already has.
This does not mean every Democrat secretly wants an assassin. It means something at once simpler and more damning: Democratic leaders, media figures, celebrity scolds, and bureaucratic elites have helped create a climate in which political violence against one side of American life has become increasingly imaginable. They have done so through exaggeration, dehumanization, moral hysteria, suggestive symbolism, and the constant presentation of Trump and his supporters as a kind of civic plague. That is enough. In a wounded culture, it is more than enough.
Holmes would not call this a rash of disconnected incidents. He would call it a pattern. Shakespeare would recognize the method. And the modern literature gives us the contemporary name for what older civilizations already understood: violence need not be ordered directly to be invited effectively.
At some point, the pattern becomes the fact. The public man who daily labels his opponents monsters, the media class that never stops its demonology, the former FBI director who sends out a loaded symbol and then affects surprise — all of them participate in the same atmosphere. They do not have to pull the trigger. They only have to keep preparing the mind that one day will.
