Recommended: Tim Snyder on the Trump regime’s upcoming mass atrocity.

After the temporary protected status of many Haitians in the US expires in two days following a Trump decree, ICE is expected to move into one particular city [Springfield, Ohio] that was at the heart of the racist Big Lie that JD Vance (and then Trump) promoted before the last election about supposed Haitian atrocities against pets. Neo-Nazis have since taken up the Vance baton in Springfield and no doubt Stephen Miller — who shows every sign of being Naziphile — has plotted from his White House cave ICE’s descent onto Springfield.

Will backlash re ICE in Minnesota and ICE’s funding being blocked in Congress put the brakes on the even more grotesque planned for Ohio? Will the hapless Democrats in Congress go beyond getting some basic rule of law victories in exchange for an ICE budget (basic like prohibiting ICE wearing masks, like requiring proper arrest warrants for specific individuals rather than free-for-all grabbing of people, like ending deportation of foreign nationals who are also American citizens, like ending the recruitment of ICE agents with ads that are shrill with with white supremacist dog whistling, and so on) and insist on serious protections for these Haitians whose deportation will be either to a Haiti that is in life-endangering turmoil on a grand scale or to one of the third party states kissing up to Trump (or pocketing cash) by taking deportees who are not even their nationals? Watching Dems Schumer and Jeffries in action to date, I have serious doubts they will seize this moral and strategic moment.

It seems more likely we will see Trump and ICE go hardcore whack-a-mole — by slinking away from Minneapolis and popping up next in Springfield. If that does happen, and masked storm troopers do move into Springfield, will Americans rise up as they have begun to do in reaction to ICE?

This is a long essay by Snyder but it is worth the time. Snyder is in the very top tier of historians of fascism. As with all his efforts to date to wake Americans up to what started as the prospect of fascism but us now fascism in full flight, he speaks from a place of deep knowledge — with the added dimension here that he grew up in Ohio and knows Springfield (and the truth about it) well.