Vicious political disagreement is seeping into every corner of life
By now, the stories are familiar. Most, though not all, start on social media: a post on Facebook or Twitter identifies a name, and then the threats begin. Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, conspiracy theorists focused on a video of a voting-machine technician at work in Gwinnett County, Georgia. One Twitter user published the young man’s name, declaring him “guilty of treason,” along with, according to the Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling, an animation of a swaying noose. Around that same time, Ruby Freeman, another Georgia election worker, received a flood of menacing emails, texts, and phone calls from people convinced that she had worked to steal the election from Donald Trump, leading her to leave her home and spend months fleeing from house to house. Health-care workers, too, have faced threats. In the fall of 2021, Allison Berry, a local health officer in Washington State, stopped going into the office out of caution following a wave of harassment—including a protest at her former home address—over mask and vaccination requirements imposed in her county.
The federal government appears to be paying attention. In June 2021, the Department of Justice announced the launch of a task force responsible for investigating the sharp increase in threats against election workers. Just four months later, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed federal law-enforcement officials to work with state and local authorities in addressing violent harassment of school-board members and public-school employees. And two weeks after that, an association of nearly 3,000 public-health departments wrote to Garland asking him to turn the department’s attention toward a comparable surge in threats against health-care workers.
This new focus by the Justice Department on harassment around the country—and the plea by health departments for the federal government to direct even more resources toward the problem—reflects how the ties of basic decency holding American civic life together have become seriously frayed. [Continue reading…]