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.
Learn about research on the connection between real bloodshed and coded language, dogwhistles, and implicit calls for violence with Dr. Braddock, who has conducted research on communication and terrorism for several national and international organizations, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of State, and the United Nations Office of Counter Terrorism.
Professor Braddock will give his audience a firm grounding in the concept of “stochastic terrorism,” or political violence spawned by vague calls to violent action. Tapping into decades of research on communication and decision-making and accounts of specific violent acts inspired by implicit orders, he’ll show us that the threat posed by implicit calls to violence is real.
He’ll discuss whether implicit calls for violence represent a “new” form of political communication protected by the First Amendment, and he’ll describe the real-world dangers posed by these kinds of statements.
Among the questions Dr. Braddock will tackle: Why do politicians use this language if they can reasonably assume that someone may be motivated by it to hurt someone else? Perhaps most importantly, what can we do about it, especially given the sacrosanctity of the First Amendment?
His talk promises to give you a much more sophisticated understanding of recent events and a clearer sense of what might lie ahead. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: Right-wing pundit and podcaster Steve Bannon routinely uses violent rhetoric. (Photo by Nordiske Mediedager / Creative Commons. )