The new fascism in the house

Donald Trump’s newest, most violent and thuggish henchman, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, announced (on Nov. 16): “We are really taking it to them today here in Charlotte.” Some statesman. Who would have guessed such words would ever come from our national government?  

It’s hard, I concede, to see your home country — your chosen and permanently attached commonwealth — under malicious and apparently much-relished, much-anticipated, assault. The Trump administration’s traveling, terrorizing (clown) show has come to North Carolina. Raleigh, Durham and others have now joined the brutal and dehumanizing cascade. Every Democratic stronghold should expect its turn in the barbarous well. Welcome to the new American fascism. (“A governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition, regimenting all industry, emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and racism.”) Hark the sound.  

I know I am understood to be a “firebrand.” I admit I don’t warm to the term. It suggests an ungrounded and perhaps overpowering passion. Hardly a virtue. But I’m an old man. And as Frank Graham once put it: “I have paid the cost of having taken sides.” So, in my case, then, the designation is perhaps deserved.  

I will, as a result, temporarily place my own words, along with their too potent predilections, aside. I turn, instead to statements about the raids by two folks I much admire who are widely understood to be anything but firebrands.  

Joy Vermillion Heinsohn, executive director of the famed Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, is one of the leading philanthropic voices of North Carolina. She felt compelled, in recent days, to write to ZSR’s broad network of grantees, donors, employees, friends and beneficiaries, saying:  “Dear North Carolinians: Right now, in our state, federal immigration agents are raiding churches and after school sites, smashing car windows of U.S. citizens, and harassing people at their jobs and in their own neighborhoods. Businesses are closed, and tens of thousands of kids are missing school.  It is not reasonable – or humane – for masked, armed federal agents to racially profile North Carolina residents and have everyone living in a state of panic.”  

And then, Governor Josh Stein, bi-partisan and grounded in temperament and tenor, ever cautious with language that he knows will be much parsed, and often twisted, said:  “We’ve seen masked, heavily armed agents in military garb driving unmarked cars, targeting American citizens based on their skin color, racially profiling and picking up random people in parking lots and off of our sidewalks. This is not making us safer. It is stoking fear and dividing our community.”

North Carolina Republicans have broadly become moral ghosts in the Trump age. They ignore, or openly embrace, monstrous words and acts wildly contrary to their previously declared, and boasted upon, creeds, oaths, constitutional commitments and pledges of allegiance. Previous advocates of law and order become astonishingly lawless, stated conservatives happily salute created chaos, and most stunningly, purported evangelical Christians mock and ruthlessly reject the teachings of Jesus. Every day. They are embarrassed perhaps. But they remain utterly, permanently and completely submissive. Only a clinging to unfettered power, and unrelenting cruelty, adheres.  

Still, all who pay attention know the stark and understated truth of the words of folks like Heinsohn and Stein. The Bovino-applauding sentiments of Republican leaders like Phil Berger and Tim Moore literally sicken. The new American fascism is inside the house. We see it in the terrified eyes and broken hearts of our sisters and brothers.  

Gene Nichol is a professor of law teaching courses in the constitution and federal courts at the University of North Carolina School of Law.