By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, February 05, 2020
‘The threat of in-person violence has always been there,”
said Leah Russin, vaccine advocate and frequent target of anti-vaccination
activists. “But I think the reality of it has escalated.” She’s right to worry.
In recent months, “anti-vaxxer” agitation has jumped off
your Facebook timeline and transformed into an aggressive and menacingly
effective movement. Last December, vaccination opponents launched a campaign of
intimidation and harassment against Nevada-based restaurants that planned to
host vaccine awareness events, scuttling the program entirely. That same month,
attempts to limit religious exemptions to vaccination laws in New Jersey failed
when protesters laid siege to the state senate. In September, California
Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove had a cup of what appeared to be blood
thrown at her by an anti-vaccine activist. Another irate demonstrator
physically assaulted California state Sen. Richard Pan. Across the country,
anti-vaccination groups are targeting physicians, advocates, and lawmakers in
the effort to intimidate them into complacency.
These appalling (and occasionally criminal) displays of
contempt for common standards of civic engagement are, to some observers,
utterly inexplicable. How did these fringe activists come to adopt these guerrilla
tactics? Vaccine advocates who spoke with NBC News speculated that this
behavior was modeled after the Westboro Baptist church—a peripheral religious
group that achieved infamy in the mid-2000s for picketing the funerals of U.S.
soldiers and deploying grotesque anti-gay rhetoric. To the journalism advocacy
organization Poynter, however, these maneuvers were too “similar to how
anti-abortion protesters will stake out women’s health clinics” to be a
coincidence.
It’s revealing that these primarily Democratic victims of
the new normal must reach into the annals of history to find parallels that
approximate their ordeals. It’s even more telling that the examples that leap
to mind are only those committed by their political adversaries. The
intellectual energy it must take to avoid acknowledging the obvious—that these
tactics have recently been routinized by progressive activists—can’t be worth
the effort.
There are few prominent Trump administration officials
who would fail to recognize the familiar assaults and indignities anti-vaxxers
have visited on vaccine advocates. For the sin of overturning a barely
two-year-old Internet service provider regulation in 2017, Federal
Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s home was picketed, his children
harassed, his neighbors hounded, and his work targeted with bomb threats.
Former Department of Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen was run out of a
local restaurant by a screaming mob—a semi-spontaneous event that soon
transformed into an around-the-clock siege of her home. These and other efforts
to make sure Trump officials knew they were “not welcome anymore, anywhere,” as
Rep. Maxine Waters averred, was not reserved only for White House officials.
Conservatives of virtually every ideological stripe are intimately familiar
with this kind of treatment.
“Your daddy is a horrible person,” screamed British
protesters who picketed the home of conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. “Maybe I
do wanna go to jail,” one demonstrator confessed amid a blockade of Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell’s residence. “Just stab the motherf****r in the heart,
please,” another fantasized. “Tucker Carlson. We will fight. We know where you
sleep at night,” demonstrators chanted as they surrounded the Fox News Channel
host’s home, breaking its oak door and forcing his terrified wife to lock
herself in the pantry. The philosophical divergence among these targets—a
conservative ideologue, an establishmentarian legislator, and a populist
entertainer respectively—couldn’t be greater. What they share is opposition to
the progressive program. That alone is why their enemies rationalized
themselves into total political warfare against them, their associates, and
their families.
These tactics are not even limited to public figures. In
2018, a New York University adjunct professor created and disseminated a
database with the information posted to LinkedIn by over 1,500 Immigration and
Customs Enforcement employees. “As ICE continues to ramp up its inhumane
surveillance and detention efforts,” he wrote, “I believe it’s important to
document what’s happening, and by whom, in any way we can.” Though veiled, his
intention was clear, and his ideological allies got the message. ICE facilities
were surrounded by protesters. One was attacked by a man throwing “incendiary
objects.” ICE employees were targeted and harassed in their homes. As recently
as September of last year, for the second time in as many weeks, ICE officials
in Tacoma, Washington, made desperate appeals to the public. ICE regional director Nathalie Asher warned
demonstrators that their efforts to disrupt their activities risked
“encouraging violence.” Her pleas have fallen on deaf ears.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. Political protesters have
been busily erasing the boundaries between the private and professional for
years predating the Trump administration. These reckless and counterproductive
assaults on the civic compact deserve nothing but scorn from responsible
Americans. Even a self-serving prudential calculation should have led those who
are sympathetic to these political insurgents to condemn them, and not just for
the sake of appearances. Nihilism knows no sense of propriety, so it was
inevitable that these tactics would one day be turned against those who excused
them as well-intentioned. That day, it seems, is today.
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