Profs & Pints DC: Wink, Nod, Kill

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Wink, Nod, Kill,” a look at implicit calls for violence and other speech that leads to bloodshed and threatens democracy, with Kurt Braddock, assistant professor of communications at American University and expert on terrorism.

Over the last decade, President Donald Trump and many of his allies have used language that implicitly advocates for the use of violence without directing it outright. From telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” to suggesting that legal acts of Democratic lawmakers should be “punishable by death,” Trump has consistently suggested that violence is a viable means of addressing political grievances.

Support for political violence—implicit or explicit—goes beyond the sort of spirited debate and disagreement upon which the American experiment was founded. It represents a gray area in the connection between violent language and violent acts, an area that Kurt Braddock has spent years studying.

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