In conjunction with the Historians of Terrorism Network, CSTPV is pleased to present an online seminar featuring Dr Tim Wilson from the University of St Andrews.
A recent spate of assassination attempts in American public life – including 2 near-misses for Donald Trump last summer (13 July and 15 September 2024); and the killings of Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson (4 December 2024) and Charlie Kirk (10 September 2025) – invite reflection on the role of such violence to achieve profound social destabilisation.
What is remarkable about all these attempts is that each appears to have been mounted by a lone assassin acting on their own initiative. Self-appointed, socially-isolated, politically-ambitious killers are by no means a new phenomenon: but they remain poorly understood and little studied. It therefore seems like a good time – albeit for ‘bad’ reasons – to take a fresh look at the ‘killer nerds’