New Yorker Editor: (Right-Wing) Political Violence Should Be Considered a ‘Public Health Threat’

The medical/scientific intelligentsia and the political Left seemingly want every political controversy and cultural problem transformed into a public-health threat. Let us count them: Climate change, racism, gun control, a dearth of left-wing economics policies, even war.

Now, a column by Michael Luo, an executive editor at the New Yorker, urges that political violence be categorized in the same way. From, “Should Political Violence be Addressed Like a Threat to Public Health?”:

The principal aim of public health is prevention. It takes its scientific cues primarily from epidemiology, which studies the prevalence of diseases and their determinants to shape control strategies. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, public-health practitioners began to incorporate these methods into a nascent discipline known as injury science, taking on problems such as children falling from windows, residential fires, childhood drug poisonings, and, beginning in earnest in the nineteen-nineties, gun violence.

The data don’t lie!

As with any public-health problem, the first task was to collect reliable data. Wintemute’s team conducted their first broad-based survey in 2022 and found that nearly a third of the population believed that violence was usually or always justified to advance at least one of seventeen political objectives—a list that included curbing voter fraud, stopping illegal immigration, and returning Donald Trump to the Presidency. Nearly one in five agreed strongly or very strongly with the statement that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.”

Of course, the political Right is the main threat.

The willingness to justify violence was greater among people who identified as “strong Republicans” than those who identified as “strong Democrats.” Another study by Wintemute’s team found that nearly half of a cohort that they labelled “MAGA Republicans”—self-identified Republicans who voted for Trump in 2020 and believed the election was stolen—strongly or very strongly agreed with the statement “Our American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

Never mind the attempted mass assassination of Republican congressmen and senators in 2017 by a Bernie Sanders supporter that almost killed Representative Steve Scalise, the attempted assassination on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and more recently, the material threats against six unnamed Supreme Court Justices.

Yes, the two attempts on Trump’s life are referenced, but not the political BLM riots that burned cities, took lives, and cost billions of dollars.

No, the real threat comes from the Proud Boys!

Wintemute also examined the threat posed by right-wing extremists who endorse racist beliefs and the use of violence to effect social change, and who express approval of certain militia groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Within this small subset—Wintemute estimates it to be less than two per cent of the population—he found strong association with support for political violence and the willingness to engage in such violence.

Is Antifa mentioned? Of course not, Wesley. Don’t you know that name stands for anti-fascist? What about the threat from radical antisemite demonstrators? Nah. But you bet January 6 is, as the threat of a repeat, we are warned, “remains omnipresent.”

The answer to the peril? Treat these (soto voce “right wing”) threats like a public-health crisis:

The promise of public health is that it rests on scientific data and offers pragmatic solutions. Treating political violence like a contagion could help safeguard the future of American democracy. And yet the same fractures that potentially drive political violence can imperil the collaboration needed to address public-health crises. They can also lead to the most dangerous symptom of all: a sense of helplessness. But, if we simply wait for the disease to strike, it may already be too late.

Just what we need: an Anthony Fauci in charge.

No. Jurisdiction over preventing and combatting political violence belongs properly with law enforcement and national-security agencies, which have the tools necessary to deal with it. The problem does not belong in the HHS.

So, why this repeated focus on public health? Transforming threats of political violence — and climate change, racism, etc. — into “public health crises” stacks the policy decks in favor of the opinions of “experts” and health bureaucrats who plow the fields of the CDC, NIH, WHO, and/or, who are published in ideological professional journals such as Nature, Science, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine.

And, as we saw during COVID, public-health threats are more likely to open the door to technocratic impositions and the curtailment of First Amendment freedoms. Indeed, Lao notes:

Political scientists, applying their theoretical frameworks, have long made clear the reasons for concern, including the way the country’s deepest cleavages, over race, ethnicity, religion, geography, and culture, are now embedded in people’s politics; the weakening of democracy’s guardrails during the Trump era; and the spread of misinformation.

Of course. See what I mean?