Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

This talk has been postponed to March 9th in response to a winter storm. Tickets for the March 9th staging of it are available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-wink-nod-kill Anyone who had purchased a ticket for January 26th will be getting a refund.

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.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/wink-nod-kill .[

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. (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. )

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Trump, Your Rights, and Resistance,” an overview of the legal landscape in the District of Columbia one year into Donald Trump’s second administration, with Scott Michelman, legal director of the ACLU of D.C. and lecturer on law and Shikes Fellow in Civil Liberties and Civil Rights at Harvard Law School.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-rights-resistance .]

Our nation looks a lot different a year after President Trump took office in January 2025. What has actually happened—and what does it mean for our rights?

Get an informed breakdown on the civil rights and civil liberties issues that have defined the past year with Scott Michelman, a legal scholar who last January gave an excellent talk on the legal guardrails potentially checking Trump’s actions.

He’ll discuss what has been happening with immigration policy, criminal justice reform, domestic military deployment, discrimination, and threats to free speech.

He’ll identify troubling patterns, explain where advocates have successfully pushed back in the courts, and outline the unresolved concerns ahead.

The talk will also explore what individuals can do next, from understanding their rights to participating in elections that will shape the future of this administration and our country. (Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The October 18, 2025 “No Kings Day” protest in Washington D.C. (Photo by Geoff Livingston / Wikimedia Commons.)

This talk has completely sold out in advance and no door tickets will be available.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Ballistic Missile Defense Question,” on the operation of a controversial defense system and the debate over its use, with Dean Wilkening, a physicist and defense system researcher formerly at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Stanford University’s Center for International Security, and the RAND Corporation.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-ballistic-missile .]

Ballistic missile defense has been a contentious political issue in the United States, especially after President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 speech calling for a “Star Wars” style barrier to Soviet nuclear weapons. Ballistic missile defense is also among the most expensive items in the Pentagon budget for research, development, test and evaluation, with funding estimated at $10.6 billion in 2026.

Most recently, ballistic missiles have been making headlines as a result of Iran’s recent ballistic missile attack against Israel, Russia’s ballistic missile attacks against Ukraine, and President Trump’s call for America to be defended by a “Golden Dome” similar to Israel’s Iron Dome system.

But is relying on ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems practical and wise?

Hear that question tackled by Dean Wilkening, who recently retired from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, has spent much of his life studying a range of defense matters such as hypersonic weapons and ballistic missile defense, and who has published extensively and advised national boards and government agencies on his findings.

Dr. Wilkening will discuss the technology underlying BMD systems, which seek to use precision guided munitions to essentially “hit a bullet with a bullet” to thwart attacks. You’ll learn about the support systems, including sensors and command and control systems, critical to making it all work.

Then he’ll give an overview of the debate over ballistic missile defense systems, typically split along partisan lines. We’ll look at the evolving missile threat, which includes both conventional and nuclear ballistic missiles as well as hypersonic weapons, and the potential for armed conflict with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.

Dr. Wilkening will look at whether BMD systems meet the test of working technically, being able to survive attack, and being cost-effective at the margins. Finally, he’ll take on the big-picture question of whether ballistic missile defense is inherently “destabilizing.” Do they stimulate arms races? Do they actually make nuclear war more likely? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A 2019 U.S. Army test of patriot missiles. (U.S. Department of Defense photo.)

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Venezuela’s Future—and Ours,” an analysis of how the Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela will affect that nation, the U.S., and the rest of the world, with Ernesto Castañeda, Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab at American University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nv-venezuela-future .]

On January 3rd, after a long military buildup, the United States used special forces to seize Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their residence in Caracas, Venezuela to stand trial here on criminal charges.

The development marked a major turning point in our relationship with Venezuela and the rest of Latin America and raised a host of complex questions, not just for Venezuelans living inside and outside that country but for American citizens and other nations of the world.

Coming to the stage to break down what all of this means is Ernesto Castañeda, a scholar of Latin America who has given several excellent Profs and Pints talks on immigration policy and has given dozens of interviews to media outlets around the world in the wake of the U.S. raid.

In a talk offering informed perspective on the latest news developments, Professor Castañeda will discuss various theories about why the U.S. conducted the operation to get Maduro out of Venezuela. He’s put our nation’s current plans for Venezuela into context by touching on previous U.S. military interventions in Latin America and beyond.

Professor Castañeda will look at the implications of recent events for U.S. politics and U.S. citizens and what such developments tell us about the balance of power in the United States. He’ll examine the distance between decisions made by the White House and public priorities, touching on how it all relates to our immigration policies and our views about peaceful protest and democracy.

He’ll consider how the Venezuela raid and our actions since have altered relations between the U.S. and other nations and provide scenarios about what the future might hold. (Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.