Editor's Notes: Your Local Fascists

In January of this year, there were rumblings that the administration would be pivoting from its occupation of Minneapolis, which was going poorly politically, to the smaller and redder city of Springfield in Ohio. They ended up waiting for the courts to give them the go-ahead on terminating Haitian immigrants' Temporary Protected Status, which Samuel Alito was all too happy to do in June.

If Minneapolis showed us ordinary Americans at their best, Springfield by and large has not. The Bulwark crew went to Springfield to do a benefits event for the Haitian community there. This is what Jonathan V. Last had to say about it:

I was only on the ground for a short period of time and it was obvious that there are plenty of people who are happy to see Haitians being criminalized, arrested, and deported.

I picked this up from conversations with people who were polite about it, and from remarks made by people who were less polite about it, including people who were unhappy with us doing a show to benefit the Haitian community.

And in general, the level of support for the Haitian community has been nothing like the mobilization in Minnesota. There are brave and generous volunteers working to help, but they seem to be the minority.

The first step to defeating fascism in this country is to throw the fascists out of office and thereby remove the instruments of power they use to oppress people like the Haitian community in Springfield. But there is a longer, harder struggle ahead, that cannot be solved with power alone.

That is the struggle of living in a society and a liberal democracy that would elect the "mass deportation" candidate in the first place.