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During the 2016 United States presidential campaign, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump routinely cast the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as perpetrating violence against" the economy"," small businesses"," energy companies", and" you". For instance, in a town hall meeting, Ted Cruz stated that EPA regulations were" strangling small businesses" and" killing jobs". Working at the intersection of cognitive science and environmental communication, we examined metaphorical violence on cable television news because metaphor is a powerful and fundamental way people organize and communicate concepts. Metaphors can quickly convey a lot of information, as one concept is framed in terms of another enables people to apply a lot of what they know about one domain to another domain. In a corpus analysis of cable television news, we counted the number of times (n= 161) the EPA was cast as the …