PLEASE RECOGNIZE FASCISM'S DISGUISES
Earlier today I sent the the following email message to several respected journalists who write about faith and justice from the perspective of the religion of Jesus.
Friends, in case you haven't read it, I am pasting yesterday's guest column by Linda Greenhouse that was in the New York Times.
OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
We Will Regret Not Standing Up to This Venomous Cruelty
July 14, 2025
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Ms. Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008.
“Fifteen years ago, when Arizona enacted a notorious anti-immigrant “show me your papers” law, I wrote an essay in The Times that began: “I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon. Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Governor Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.”
The essay provoked a variety of reactions, most supportive but some vituperatively negative. One angry reader, noting that the newspaper identified me as teaching at Yale Law School, wrote to the school’s dean to demand that he fire me. The dean and I had a good laugh over that letter. But rather than dismiss it as the product of an eccentric crank, I realize now that I should have understood the letter as a window on the toxic brew of anti-immigrant sentiment that led a state to pass such a law.
The Obama administration challenged Arizona’s law, and after the Supreme Court invalidated most of it in 2012, the harsh anti-immigrant wave subsided. But now my letter writer and like-minded people have a friend in the White House — or friends, actually — among them, Stephen Miller. The deputy chief of staff appears to be giving President Trump his marching orders for the arrests and deportations now shredding the civic fabric of communities across the country.
I have a home in the Los Angeles area, and my recent weeks there encompassed the deployment of the Marines and the federalization of California’s National Guard. I steeled myself every morning to read the granular reporting in The Los Angeles Times of scenes that I could never have imagined just months ago: people snatched up while waiting at a bus stop in peaceful Pasadena; the undocumented father of three Marines taken at his landscaping job, pinned down and punched by masked federal agents before being thrown into detention. People whose quiet presence among us was tolerated for decades as they paid their taxes and raised their American children are now hunted down like animals, so fearful of even going grocery shopping that Los Angeles nonprofits have mobilized to deliver food to their doors.
I was taking an early morning walk in my neighborhood when a black S.U.V. with tinted windows slowed to a stop a half block ahead. I considered: If this is ICE coming to take someone, should I intervene? Start filming? Make sure the victims know their rights? Or just keep walking, secure in the knowledge that no one was coming for me? The car turned out to be an airport limo picking up a passenger, and I was left to ponder how bizarre it was to feel obliged to run through such a mental triage on a summer morning on an American city street.
Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are “the other” — people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of connection that defines human society. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, refers to undocumented immigrants as “the gotaways,” the ones we didn’t catch.
In a lecture at Loyola University Chicago in April, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso observed that the current immigration crisis “is driven by the deeper crisis of public and social life.” He continued: “On a fundamental level, these are signs that we are losing the story of who we are as a country. This is a crisis of narrative. Are we no longer a country of immigrants? Are we no longer a country that values the dignity of the human person, individual liberties and with a healthy regard for checks and balances?”
An adaptation of Bishop Seitz’s powerful lecture was published by the Catholic magazine Commonweal, which is where I read it. Another bishop, Alberto Rojas of San Bernardino, Calif., 60 miles east of Los Angeles, took the rare step last week of informing the 1.6 million worshipers in the diocese by letter that they were excused from attending Mass if they were afraid of immigration enforcement if they came to church. The Catholic Church has distinguished itself by the moral clarity of its critique of the president’s deportation obsession.
I wish I saw the same powerful advocacy from major Jewish organizations, which I’d argue have a particular responsibility and interest in addressing this issue. Aren’t antisemitism and anti-immigrant cruelty two sides of the same coin? Both spring from viewing members of a group as “the other.” The focus of these organizations, naturally enough, is antisemitism, and the Trump administration’s exploitation of the real problem of antisemitism for its own purposes seems to have thrown some of them off-kilter.
I’ve been wondering when the moment will come when ICE will go far enough to persuade more people outside Los Angeles that it must be reined in. Maybe it will look something like the military invasion of the city’s MacArthur Park the other day, when soldiers and federal agents on horseback and in armored vehicles swept in for no obvious purpose other than to sow terror. “It’s the way a city looks before a coup,” Mayor Karen Bass, who rushed to the park, said later.
Can New Yorkers envision such a scene in Central Park? Is anywhere safe now for someone who can’t show the right papers?
People of a certain age might remember the songwriter Jimmy Webb’s weirdly compelling “MacArthur Park,” with its refrain that begins: “MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark.” Growing up in the East, I had never heard of MacArthur Park when the song hit the charts in 1968, and I wasn’t sure it was a real place. All these years later, something real is melting for sure. It is the glue that holds civil society together.”
Did you notice that Greenhouse refused to use the F word - fascism? She is not an outlier among journalists. How many times have you used that word to describe the political ideology that now dominates U.S. society?
When did you last use it?
Why do you refrain from using it? I've been trying for years to convince you to write and warn your readers about it.
Surely you know that fascism is the authoritarian and nationalistic right wing political ideology and form of government characterized by intolerant or oppressive policies and practices. What more evidence do you need to know that fascism is actively working the levers of power in this country?
All three branches of the U.S. government now are driven by a fascist mindset. President Donald Trump’s vicious sociopathic behavior is typical of how fascist autocrats act. Speaker Mike Johnson's pseudo-Christian political rhetoric typifies the idea of a religious agenda that sacralizes fascist authoritarian elites. Chief Justice John Roberts heads a right wing super-majority on the Supreme Court that officially validated fascist authoritarianism by its July 1, 2024, decision in Donald Trump v. United States. Incidentally, fascism was not mentioned even by Justice Ketanji Jackson's stirring dissenting opinion.
Instead of calling fascism out, journalists (including religious journalists) are focused on antisemitism, anti-immigration sentiment, Christian nationalism, and opposition to "wokeness," DEI, and critical studies. Although those are real problems, they do not (singly nor collectively) accurately describe the real and present threat posed by fascism. None of those issues approaches the militant political danger that fascism always poses.
As observers of human behavior and systems, we share responsibility for identifying and naming threats to love, justice, and peace. Please recognize that fascism is threatening immigrants, public health, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts to combat and remedy historical oppression based on bigotry focused on racial, sexual, gender, religious, and ability differences.
Please see that fascism is what the Project 2025 agenda envisioned. Please see that fascism and its tyranny are the evils about which we must speak, write, and help people resist.
Respectfully,
I do not know if, when, or how when any of the people to whom I addressed that email message will react to it. However, you and I have a moral obligation to call the cruel, greedy, ruthless, behavior and policies that are enacted and carried out by the Trump administration at the behest of its Project 2025 Heritage Foundation funders and operatives what they are - fascism.
The fact that Trump and members of Congress were elected does not prevent their policies and practices from being fascist.
Congress never created a “Department” of Governmental Efficiency” (DOGE). Trump did so by executive fiat.
Trump did not receive Congressional authorization to engage in war against Iran by bombing Iranian nuclear facilities. Trump did it unilaterally.
Neither the War Powers Act nor the U.S. Constitution grants authority to the U.S. President to unilaterally wage war against another sovereign entity, whether the entity be Iran, California, or any other state.
Trump has no constitutional power to have Homeland Security operatives to search, seize, detain, and deport anyone without due process of law.
Trump has no constitutional power to shut down congressionally established and appropriated federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Education.
Yet, Congress, led by Trump sycophant House Speaker Mike Johnson, recently enacted a law that treats Trump’s presidential office as if the United States is a dictatorship, not a democratic republic.
The Supreme Court, led by the feckless Chief Justice John Roberts, has issued rulings that treat presidential power as absolute.
As I write these words, the largest city in California, Los Angeles, is terrorized by Homeland Security agents and U.S. Marines. Undocumented immigrants are unable to live without fear. At various locations across the United States, Trump administration operatives have seized permanent residents and naturalized citizens, including parents of U.S. military personnel.
These actions are the products of fascism, not democracy. We must boldly say so.
Then we must organize and do the hard work of resisting MAGA fascism. Our resistance will require civil disobedience. That resistance will be violently mischaracterized and mistreated by MAGA fascist leaders and sycophants. We must develop strategies and tactics for protecting one another from and responding to that violence.
And we must recognize and accept two other unpleasant lessons from history. No fascist regime takes and holds political power over people who love liberty and justice without resorting to violence. No fascist regime leaves power without resorting to violence to hold onto it. The January 6, 2021 insurrection demonstrated that Trump’s MAGA brand of fascism bears out these unpleasant lessons.
It is past time for people in the United States to admit that this nation is not exceptional. The U.S. is not “fascism proof.” Instead, our nation has become the latest and biggest fascist-led society in the world. We will not become better unless we admit this reality and treat it as a clear and present danger to liberty, justice, and peace.
The rest of the world recognizes, despises, and is pondering how to overcome U.S. fascism. They are also wondering whether and when we will.
It’s time for us to act like we aren’t afraid to face fascism, fight it, and overcome it. Our future depends on whether we have the courage and will to do so.