Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
You can’t really experience the deep bone-chill of police-state fascism until it reaches your neighborhood. This stunning, court-defying immigration purge, with armed, masked thugs authorized to abuse and kidnap anyone who looks Hispanic, has come to central North Carolina. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have terrorized the Charlotte metropolis and moved on to Raleigh and to Durham, just 10 miles down the road from where I live. Hundreds have been arrested and detained, agents have smashed car windows and thrown women to the ground, whole Latino communities have stayed home from work and from school to avoid the masked bullies. Individual stories are hard to believe, harder yet for a hopeful American to swallow. This is not one of those third-world dictatorships where fear rules, no one is safe, and what we think of as civilization is a fragile experiment. This is the United States of America, and in more decades than I care to admit I’ve never seen anything so disgusting take place on our streets.
In Charlotte, a woman who saw the Border Patrol truck honked her car horn to register alarm. So an agent pulled her over, smashed her car window with an assault rifle and dragged her and her passenger out of the vehicle at gunpoint. Then they were abducted and detained for hours, while their desperate husbands tried to find them. In the same neighborhood, agents approached Willy Aceitano’s truck in a parking lot, smashed his window with an assault rifle and pinned him to the ground. No charges were filed against any of these victims — all three turned out to be American citizens. Imagine your reaction if your own government turned on you so violently, so irrationally. Their only crime was that they had darker complexions than the Border agents? They looked too brown? A Native American woman, Leticia Jacobo of the Pima tribe in Arizona, was arrested in Iowa for a traffic violation and failed to pass the complexion test, so ICE agents scheduled her for deportation. (“A silly mistake,” said the sheriff.)
What’s next, a purge of people who are unusually short, or homely? These are terrible times. One of my great disappointments is that when a cruel, stupid leader like President Trump is calling the shots, so many ordinary soldiers are ready to answer the call. I had never heard that Border Patrol officers were known for brutality, but North Carolina’s Latino community is ready to testify against them. One positive counterplot during the Tar Heel immigration raids was the response of the victims’ neighbors. More than a thousand protesters gathered at Moore Square in Raleigh, and in Durham scores of people volunteered to home-deliver food from the Emanuel Food Pantry to Hispanic families — 60% of the Pantry’s regular customers — who were afraid to show themselves in public. Local newspapers ran pages of instructions for avoiding agents and dealing with them if they detained you. Neighbors volunteered to walk the children of frightened immigrants to school.
One of the attorneys working to protect this targeted population described our situation as “a dystopian nightmare.” Another referred to the immigration raids as “the militarization of American cities.” ICE, Border Patrol a thousand miles from any border, National Guardsmen patrolling the streets of the nation’s capital? If the resistance and the rule of law should fail and a constitutional democracy collapses into some kind of fear-ravaged police state, the autumn of 2025 will be remembered as the moment when our dam broke. These aren’t just civil rights but human rights that have been flagrantly violated. The shameless lie that the federal storm troopers are only pursuing “the worst of the worst” is contradicted by every reported statistic. Of the 600-plus immigrants arrested in Chicago, only 16 had any criminal records, and two of those were for drunk driving. If law enforcement was truly focused on “the worst of the worst,” it could find most of them on that huge list of thugs and insurrectionists Trump has pardoned since he was sworn into office.
In some cozy corner of Hell, Adolf Hitler is smiling. “Those damn Americans destroyed me,” the Führer is thinking, “but now they’re admitting that I was right.” He might even note that the Trump administration has requested a list, including contact information, of Jewish students, faculty members and employees of the University of Pennsylvania — ostensibly to “protect” them from left-wing anti-semitism. Penn, the president’s alma mater, has refused to comply, citing the grim history of “cataloguing Jews.” At the same time the Anti-Defamation League reports an unprecedented surge in anti-semitism last year, with more than 9,000 incidents of assault, vandalism and harassment, the most since the ADL began its surveys in 1979. “Antisemitic conspiracy theories and hate that were once fringe have been wholly normalized,” according to the head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
Welcome to the Fourth Reich. The situation in Gaza, which might legitimately be called a genocide, has complicated this ancient curse of anti-semitism. An unfortunately large number of “woke” liberals can’t seem to separate their contempt for the Netanyahu government from a clear understanding that most Jews, in every country, will support the legitimacy of the state of Israel. But the anti-Semitism of the MAGA Far Right is reaching a critical level, a spooky cult level where all the world’s evil can be traced to George Soros, where unabashed neo-Nazis like Nick Fuentes, Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec are embraced as insiders. Tucker Carlson has interviewed the Hitler fan-boy Fuentes sympathetically, and unlike you or me he’s been a guest at Mar-a-Lago. Loomer, who has the president’s ear and engineers his loyalty purges, recently received a full-length profile in The New Yorker.
If you read it, you might agree that Loomer is the most simple-minded, twisted and underwhelming American the magazine ever featured in its coveted pages. Add Candace Owens, the popular podcaster who claims the USA has “a Zionist occupied government” and the Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper — also a Carlson guest — and you have a Dream Team of influential Jew-haters who would have filled the Führer with pride. As American Jews battle bigots from both sides and Latinos hide in their homes, many concerned observers have been quoting the poem by the ex-Nazi theologian Martin Niemoller, the one that begins “First they came for the communists…”
Niemoller’s haunting words have never been more appropriate in the so-called “land of the free.” We’re experiencing a national nightmare, the true meaning of “pandemonium” — when all hell breaks loose, when all the little devils run wild. Of course immigration should be handled better in the future than it has been in the past, and I’m sure there are humane, reasonable conservatives who are as horrified as I am by the current disaster. But none of them are welcome in the MAGA cult or the shamed and shrunken Republican Party. And it all comes down to the demented buffoon in the Oval Office, whose resurrection in last year’s election brought an end to sane government in our venerable republic. Stung when all the competent officials in his first administration wrote books calling him “unhinged” and a moron, Trump has staffed his second administration with sycophants, ideologues and cranks, none of them with the status or character to rein him in. Government by bewildered hacks like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Kash Patel is scarcely better than outright anarchy, and in this vacuum of competence the mad King Donald runs amuck.
It’s not just our laws and constitution that Trump vandalizes, but our codes of civil decency and acceptable behavior. Anyone who still pretends that the president isn’t crazy is ignoring his outburst at a White House reporter who was trying to question the Saudi prince — “Quiet. Quiet, Piggy.”? In one deranged social media post, triggered by his obsession with ex-president Biden’s autopen, he derides “Sleepy Joe Biden,” “Crooked Joe Biden” and “The Radical Left Lunatics.” Most of his disjointed public statements read like this, like messages from the locked wards. When his ravings make any sense at all — when he panders to the delusional 40% who still support him — the foul smell of White Christian nationalism, White supremacy, is overwhelming. He swears to deport all foreigners he deems “incompatible with Western Civilization,” as if he himself is not. “Atomic crazy” was his own nephew’s verdict on Uncle Don.
Victims of dementia deserve our indulgence and sympathy — but not when they live in the White House. There’s nothing sad or harmless about a president who declares “war” on immigrants, drugs, Venezuela and anyone who opposes or criticizes him, or one who directs the Navy to incinerate alleged drug runners without arrests or trials. Or the one who lobbies for a Nobel Peace Prize while he renames the Defense Department the Department of War? (Total deafness to irony is one sure sign of mental illness.) Trump’s brand of crazy is lethal, and the final word should come from another corner of hell, from a lost soul who ought to know. Jeffrey Epstein’s emails have just been released by Congress, and one of them calls Donald Trump “evil beyond belief.”
For those of us who suspected that he was a Russian agent all along, here’s a foreign policy update, too. A United Nations resolution that condemned Russia for the war in Ukraine, drafted by the European Union, was rejected by only 18 of 176 nations. The negative bloc included Russia, Belarus, North Korea — and the United States?
In a Walmart parking lot recently I saw a big window sticker that read “Grown in America With Mexican Roots,” a sign that signaled pride and defiance. If the choice is between this president and our immigrants, legal or illegal, choose the immigrants every time. The path to a clear conscience is well marked. Learn to speak better Spanish, volunteer to thwart these agents whenever and wherever you can. Think about walking those Lopez children to school, and delivering food to their parents in hiding. People wearing masks and government uniforms have stooped to serving injustice and pure evil, and this is the moment of mass resistance or surrender.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays, with a fifth collection of essays, “Bible Belt Blues,” published in November 2025. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
