Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas became the latest victim of liberal activism targeting political figures personally when protesters shrouded his Washington, D.C., home in a giant foil blanket this week.
A left-leaning group that took credit for the stunt said it aimed to protest the continuation of certain Trump-era immigration policies under President Joe Biden.
While the group acknowledged the aggressive nature of the attack on Mayorkas’s home, it claimed on social media that circumstances demanded the breach of long-standing political norms that typically place a politician’s family out of bounds, reflecting a recent pattern of liberal activists going after the personal lives of their perceived political enemies.
“I do think that it’s a very disturbing element of the breakdown of our sense of limits within democratic politics,” said Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.
“And I think the reason that we’ve lost all sense of limits is that more and more, we understand political opponents not as the loyal opposition, but as enemies,” he added. “Against enemies, almost anything is permissible, up to and including violence.”
Public harassment of political figures briefly became a feature of activism during the Trump administration, when several top aides found themselves the focus of angry patrons at restaurants where they were attempting to dine.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then the White House press secretary, was ejected from a Virginia restaurant in 2018 alongside her husband and friends over what the restaurant owner claimed was a principled stand against the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and top White House aide Stephen Miller were both heckled aggressively at separate Mexican restaurants in incidents just days earlier.
David Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College, said movements in the past have relied on confrontational tactics to push their agendas.
“I think that, going all the way back in history, there have been times when citizens who are outraged about something decide to show up,” Hopkins said. “Even in the American Revolution, they would show up in front of the royal governor’s house and shout their demands, so I don’t think it’s unprecedented.”
Hopkins said social media has likely driven the trend in personally focused protests, in part by elevating the profiles of aides and officials behind controversial policies.
“It’s easier these days to organize something like this,” he said. “Because of social media, you can get the word out more easily to people about where it is that the targets of their rage live and when they should show up to give them a hard time.”
Even political figures with young children at home, or present at the time of public confrontations, have not been spared the leftist protests.
Pro-abortion activists showed up at the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week with signs and speeches despite the fact that Kavanaugh has two young daughters.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson was harassed by a left-leaning patron at a bar in 2018 in front of his children, including his 19-year-old daughter.
Protesters have even targeted the homes of politicians far outside the nation’s capital.
Last year, activists gathered outside the Kentucky house of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to demonstrate against Trump’s expected announcement of a Supreme Court nominee to fill the vacancy caused by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.
The protests have not always been confined to Republican figures.
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Portland’s Democratic Mayor, Ted Wheeler, was driven from his condominium last September after protesters repeatedly targeted his building over their concerns about police reform. Activists broke windows and even set a fire at the complex.
Polling suggests the country’s deep divides have driven more people to embrace the idea of using extreme tactics to promote their side.
A poll published in February by the Survey Center on American Life found that more than one in three people agreed with the idea that they “may have to use force” to save the country.
