It Did Happen Here

A reminder of our fragile rights

Gregory Bovino, the hype-man of the ICE brute squads.

No really, this is not a Halloween costume. Gregory Bovino actually dresses like this as he leads the assaults on cities like Chicago.

Dressing for the job he wants… .and already has.

Happy Friday. Note to readers:

Keeping track of Trump’s corruption is, unfortunately, a full-time job. So is chronicling his attacks on American values and institutions. That’s why I do this, and why independent media has become so important. This is the challenge of our time and the fight of our generation. But we can’t do it without your help.

I’m not promising you a safe space. At times I’m going to push you to get out of your bubbles. But I can promise to tell you what I think, and provide straight, sober, sane, and occasionally snarky commentary. Plus, dogs.

A short history of an American nightmare

The Atlantic called him, “The Hype Man of Trump’s Mass Deportations”. And Gregory Bovino relishes the role of being the face of the brute squads, as he cosplays as an uber-mensch of the New Cruelty. And, as a throw-back to another era from which Americans thought themselves immune. Lest you think the photos above are one-offs, Bovino has a long career as a poseur.

In his social media posts, the border sector chief shows how he wants to be seen.

Most of the others conform to a pretty standard formula: wearing a crisp green uniform in front of Old Glory and the black-and-green Border Patrol flag.

Bovino’s photo is more like a movie poster, or an AI-generated image of a comic-book character. He stands wearing a bulletproof vest against a black background, holding a tricked-out M4 rifle with a scope in his hands. He isn’t holding the weapon so much as cradling it affectionately, like a cellist getting ready to play. Bovino’s jaw is stiff, and his gaze is distant.

Several Customs and Border Protection veterans with whom I spoke—who value the quiet strength of professional modesty—think the photo is ridiculous.

But it is exactly this kind of dress-up that has “landed him a starring role in the promotion of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign.”

I’m not going rehearse all of the details of what that looks like: the teargassing of children; early morning helicopter raids; smashed windows; moms arrested in school pickup lines; priests shot in the head with pepper balls. Bovino’s thuggery has been so outrageous that a federal judge has ordered him to report to her daily to monitor the abuses.

In recent days, Trump has suggested he plans to deploy the active military on city streets; and the National Guard has been ordered to create “quick reaction forces” trained in civil unrest. All of this suggests that we are about to enter a new, and dangerous chapter of American history.

But we have been there before. Americans have prided themselves on the notion that “It Didn’t Happen Here.”

But it did.

I’m reading Max Eastman’s autobiography, Love and Revolution, and was struck by his discussion of the massive crackdown on dissent that accompanied the beginning of WWI. What he describes was just the beginning of a massive assault on Constitutional rights that would later include the “Red Scare” and the infamous Palmer raids. (All conducted by under Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat.)

At the time, Eastman was editor of the Masses magazine, which was a leading critic of American intervention. “Better for us,” he wrote, “if we had been alone in opposing the war policy.” But there was widespread opposition to the war, which triggered the crackdown.

For this immense opposition, this nation-wide conflict of passionate opinion, created a state of mind in which laws were unable to protect the liberties or lives of the citizens. In nations as well as individuals, hysteria is caused by inner conflict, and the United States on entering the First World War suffered a violent attack of this disease.

No other such event in our history is comparable to the nationwide witch hunt of those mad days.

Constitutional rights that had been taken for granted were quickly shredded, and draconian new laws were passed.

In spite of a ruling by the Attorney General that “the constitutional right of free speech, free assembly, and petition exist in wartime as in peacetime” nearly two thousand men and women were jailed for their opinions during the First World War, their sentences running as high as thirty years.

The Espionage Act, signed by Wilson one month after our entrance into the war, although it contained no press censorship clause, and was ostensibly designed to protect the nation against foreign agents, established three new crimes which made it dangerous to criticize the war policy and impossible to voice the faintest objection to conscription.

A subsequent amendment known as the Sedition Act, defined as seditious, and made punishable, all disloyal language and attacks on the government, the army, the navy, or the cause of the United States in the war.

Under this act it became a crime to write a “disloyal” letter, or an antiwar article which might reach a training camp, or express antiwar sentiments to an audience which included men of draft age, or where the expression might be heard by ship-builders or munition-makers.

Postmaster General Burleson suppressed an issue of the Nation because it criticized the labor leader Samuel Gompers; he barred other periodicals for attacking the British Empire, for stating that French culture was materialistic, and for reprinting Thomas Jefferson’s opinion that Ireland should be a republic.

Eastman catalogued the abuses:

A movie producer got a ten-year jail sentence for producing a picture called The Spirit of 1776. which dealt exclusively with the Revolutionary War, but showed scenes unflattering to the British army. Rose Pastor Stokes was sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary for stating in a letter to a newspaper editor: “I am for the people and the government is for the profiteers”.

A man named Wallace was sentenced to twenty years for saying that “when a soldier went away he was a hero and when he came back he was a bum.” D. T. Blodgett got the same sentence for circulating a pamphlet urging the voters of lowa not to re-elect a congressman who had voted for conscription.

Twenty-seven South Dakota farmers were convicted for sending a petition to the governor objecting to the draft quota for their county and calling the war a capitalist war.

It became a crime to advocate heavier taxation instead of bond issues, to criticize the Allies, to say that a referendum should have preceded the war, or hold that war was contrary to Christ’s teaching. German music was banned, German editors and orchestra leaders were mobbed, German fried potatoes were swept from the table or renamed.

A rabid organization of private citizens named The American Protective League acted as an auxiliary of the Department of Justice. Its membership and that of similar organizations ran into the hundreds of thousands. One such organization carried a full-page advertisement in newspapers from coast to coast, guaranteeing to make every man a spy-hunter on payment of a fee of one dollar.

This elemental hysteria was whipped up by public officials and prominent citizens as well as the press. The country was advised to mob, whip, shoot and kill all dissenters. An ex-governor of Maryland offered his services to the Baltimore police to prevent the famous German director, Karl Muck, from conducting a symphony in that city: “I would gladly lead the mob to prevent this insult to my country and my flag,” he cried. A well-known New York clergyman declared publicly: “I would hang everyone who lifts his voice against America entering the war.”

The Reverend Herbert S. Bigelow, a noted liberal preacher of Toledo, who spoke for the war but against hating the Germans, was kidnapped and horsewhipped “in the name of the women and children of Belgium”; My friend Fred Boyd was beaten up in Rector’s restaurant in New York City for not standing up when the national anthem was played.

Women in charge of the Emergency Peace Federation headquarters in Washington were ordered by militiamen to close the office and “beat it”; or they would be “raided and raped.”

Six farmers in Texas were horsewhipped because they would not subscribe to the Red Cross. Gus Lindin, a Socialist of Duluth, was tarred and feathered by the “Knights of Liberty”; Elmer White of Yerington, Nevada, was beaten with an iron cat-o-nine-tails for alleged disloyal remarks.

George Maynard of Medford, Oregon, a member of the International Bible Students’ Association, had an iron cross painted on his chest and was driven out of town. Robert Prager, accused of pro-Germanism, was lynched in Collinsville, Illinois; the mob leaders were tried and acquitted. Meetings of the People’s Council, the Socialist Party, the IWW, the Nonpartisan League, the International Bible Students Association, were attacked and broken up by mobs from one end of the country to the other.

Out of an estimated forty-five hundred to five thousand persons prosecuted in cases involving freedom of speech, press or assemblage, not one was proved to be a spy, or to be acting for a foreign government.

Unfortunately, this was just the beginning. Eastman himself was indicted twice (resulting in two hung juries; and the repression continued even after the War was over. As Adam Hochschild chronicles in American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, the Wilson-era “red scare” resulted in the arrest and deportation of thousands of dissidents.

Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.

This all happened here. (In WWII, Japanese-Americans were interred in mass prison camps, an act that was upheld by the Supreme Court in the notorious Korematsu decision.)

Exit take: This is a reminder that many of the rights we have taken for granted are actually more fragile that we sometimes imagine.

Heritage welcomes the antisemites

The Epstein scandal humbles the British monarchy

Via Nick Cohen:

Not one of the powerful American men who flattered Jeffrey Epstein has been punished by the U.S. authorities – which, considering that Donald Trump was prominent among them, is no great surprise.

But tonight, the Epstein scandal has humiliated Prince Andrew and forced the British monarchy to face up to the charges against him.

Under pressure from public opinion and I suspect the government, King Charles has just stripped him of all his royal titles. He is no longer “Prince Andrew” but merely Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. In the unlikely event of bumping into him you can now call him “Mr Windsor.”

He’s no better than a mere commoner. Indeed, he has already proved that he is considerably worse than most mere commoners will ever be.

Yes, another podcast

A Third Presidential Term, Sou… - The Bulletin - Apple Podcasts

Friday dogs

(I like this so much, I’m going to use it again today.)