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. (Chris Geidner, Nov 16, 2025, Law Dork)
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.