Gregory Bovino is exactly who E.B. White — author of 'Charlotte's Web' — warned us about

DHS named its North Carolina anti-immigrant effort "Operation Charlotte's Web." In 1940, White wrote of the "smell" that "rises" from those who "adjust to fascism" over freedom.

Gregory Bovino, as seen in a video he posted on X on November 16, 2025.

The Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security decided to terrorize another city this weekend, with Gregory Bovino heading to Charlotte, North Carolina, to engage in the very type of racial profiling authorized by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bovino, the Border Patrol official who has appeared eager to become the face of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian anti-immigrant efforts — and whose actions in Chicago led a federal judge to get him to agree to use a body-worn camera — is unsurprisingly at the center of the Charlotte story.

On Sunday morning, he all but admitted this was nothing more than a weekend of Kavanaugh stops.

First, I do think this effort is going to have diminishing returns, because people have now seen what he and his subordinates and colleagues (and bosses) do — and there are responses, in courthouses and within communities.

That’s not to say there will not be — and has not already been — more harm caused. Because there has. It does not mean there will not be more trauma resulting from this. Because there will be.

But, the people of Charlotte have seen what happens. In Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. And they already are responding — and will continue to respond.

It is, of course, a horrifying reality to have to discuss how the people of a city must respond to the racist, nihilistic tyranny of the federal government. But, here we are. And so, respond they will. The Charlotte Observer has been covering the news with a liveblog.

I would like to just focus a minute on one discrete aspect of all of this that exemplifies how the Trump administration is little more than a combination of trolling and ignorance pushing hate into action. As DHS announced on Saturday, this tyranny is being called “Operation Charlotte’s Web.”

I am certain that someone thought this was particularly witty when they came up with the name, but it’s honestly one of the more offensive possibilities these hateful authoritarians could have used.

Even on its face, using the name of a beloved children’s book as the name of your anti-immigrant, mass-arrest operation is appalling.

But, to use a book authored by E.B. White as your name is an offense to history. White was a leading voice for American democracy and freedom and against fascism and tyranny. Abusing his life’s work like this cannot stand without a response.

On Sunday evening, Bovino went so far as to quote from Charlotte’s Web in a post showing a video of him and others arresting people — suggesting the 1952 book is somehow in fitting with his hateful operation.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather than my explaining to you the offense committed here against White and history by Bovino — and the entire DHS operation — allow me to let White speak.

Eighty-five years ago, before the United States had entered World War II, White was looking across the ocean — and, closer to home, the way people in America were reacting to the rise of Nazism.

In Harper’s Magazine, he wrote an essay titled simply “Freedom” in July 1940 (essay reprinted here):

I feel sick when I find anyone adjusting his mind to the new tyranny which is succeeding abroad. Because of its fundamental strictures, fascism does not seem to me to admit of any compromise or any rationalization, and I resent the patronizing air of persons who find in my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then I’ll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up.

He saw what was happening clearly, but what he saw from others was alarming. “Where I expected to find indignation, I found paralysis, or a sort of dim acquiescence, as in a child who is duly swallowing a distasteful pill,” he continued.

What then, was the answer, in the mind of the man who brought us Charlotte’s Web?

The least a man can do at such a time is to declare himself and tell where he stands. I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than a century and a half ago. … I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.

It is clear, then, where White would stand today. Further, it is abundantly clear what he would think of a man like Bovino. As he wrote:

[A] man’s free condition is of two parts: the instinctive freeness he experiences as an animal dweller on a planet, and the practical liberties he enjoys as a privileged member of human society. The latter is, of the two, more generally understood, more widely admired, more violently challenged and discussed. It is the practical and apparent side of freedom. …

To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be free, in a social sense, is to feel at home in a democratic framework. In Adolph Hitler, although he is a freely flowering individual, we do not detect either type of sensibility. From reading his book I gather that his feeling for earth is not a sense of communion but a driving urge to prevail. His feeling for men is not that they co-exist, but that they are capable of being arranged and standardized by a superior intellect—that their existence suggests not a fulfillment of their personalities but a submersion of their personalities in the common racial destiny.

In Bovino, too, I do not detect either type of sensibility.

It will, instead, be up to others — those protesting and litigating and reporting and filming in Charlotte and, more broadly, all of those not giving in to acquiescence — to keep freedom going.

That’s not all.

One final note about White — a writer.

Noting Hitler’s view of the importance of spoken word over written word — that, as White summarized it, Hitler believed spoken word “moves great masses of people to noble or ignoble action” while written words, which Hitler dismissed as coming from “the goose quill,“ act more “theoretically” — White had a bit to say about his role as a writer in the fight for freedom and against fascism.

“I know that the free spirit of man is persistent in nature; it recurs, and has never successfully been wiped out, by fire or flood. I set down the above remarks merely (in the words of Mr. Hitler) to motivate that spirit, theoretically,” he wrote. “I am inordinately proud these days of the quill, for it has shown itself, historically, to be the hypodermic which inoculates men and keeps the germ of freedom always in circulation ….“

Write on, I will.