title: black turnout soft in early voting boding ill for hillary clinton
text: loading posted on november   this professor devotes her life to countering dangerous speech she cant ignore donald trumps colby itkowitz washington post october   
  when susan benesch began looking at how speech could incite mass violence her research took her to farflung places like kenya and burma 
  lately shes been unable to ignore a case study at home in the united states 
  the american university law professor and harvard university faculty associate has grappled for months with whether donald trumps rhetoric constitutes dangerous speech as she has come to define it she has examined electionyear speech before but only abroad where the risks of mass atrocities were great 
  but in the past week with trump claiming that the election system and the media are rigged against him his messages have the type of undertone that increases the risk of violence between groups she said 
  benesch  has dedicated the past six years of her life to developing and testing a framework for identifying dangerous speech to rise to that level at least two of these five indicators must be true a powerful speaker with a high degree of influence over the audience the audience has grievances and fears that the speaker can cultivate a speech act that is clearly understood as a call to violence a social or historical context that is propitious for violence for any of a variety of reasons including longstanding competition between groups for resources lack of efforts to solve grievances or previous episodes of violence a means of dissemination that is influential in itself for example because it is the sole or primary source of news for the relevan t audience 
  trumps speech is very difficult in the sense that he is so often slippery with it benesch said in a recent interview the meaning is so often ambiguous 
  but when trump said his supporters could use the second amendment against hillary clinton it seems to me impossible that people didnt understand that as a reference to violence she said or when he suggested that clinton and president obama were founders of the islamic state something he alluded to again at wednesdays final debate that was a hallmark of dangerous speech to describe an ingroup member as the enemy she said 
  and now with trump trafficking in the conspiracy theory that if he loses the election it will be because of a rigged system against him hes definitely laying the groundwork for potential unrest after the balloting direct incitement of violence is illegal but trump falls short of actually calling for any kind of civil disobedience 
  because of that its still a gray area that surrounds whether trump does use dangerous speech 
  trump may well be undermining the extent to which his supporters trust the essential institutions and practices of us democracy benesch said some of themthose who are most susceptible to being inflamed by such messagesmay therefore be more likely to commit violence however the united states is not in danger of mass intergroup violence in my view it is deeply irresponsible though since it can undermine some americans belief in our own democratic institutions which can make them more susceptible to dangerous speech going forward 
  snip