the attitude with arnie arnesen the tues edition noon to 1pm Nov 18
Arnie Arnesen
The Attitude with arnie arnesen
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. https://www.lawdork.com/p/gregory-bovino-is-exactly-who-eb-white-warned-of
part one: Trump says he will help ‘Dilbert’ creator get cancer drug Scott Adams pleaded on social media Sunday for help accessing the drug https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/02/scott-adams-prostate-cancer-pluvicto/
the reaction that drew me to this story: written by Dan Barlow and posted on facebook
I wish Adams the best. I hope he gets his medicine and more time in this world. But I also hope every single American sees this story for what it is — a perfect, sickening snapshot of our healthcare system at its most corrupt and unequal. One man gets to leap the line because he’s a public Trump supporter. The rest of us are told to wait, to argue with the insurance company, to die quietly.
That’s not a healthcare system. That’s a loyalty program.
This is what happens when power and access replace fairness and policy. The same administration that can summon a miracle for a famous cartoonist spent the last year hacking away at the very programs that keep ordinary people alive.
Trump’s budget plans would cut hundreds of billions from Medicaid — about one-third of total federal support — at a time when more than 80 million Americans depend on it. The National Institutes of Health has seen billions in research funding eliminated or stalled under this government. Those dollars are not abstractions; they are the difference between future cures and empty hospital beds. You can’t brag about saving one man’s life while defunding the science that might save millions.
And let’s be clear: the cracks are showing everywhere. Here in Vermont, where I run a free clinic, health insurance premiums are exploding. If federal subsidies under the Affordable Care Act vanish, a family of four could see their monthly premiums jump from around $900 to more than $3,600 next year. That’s not an outlier — that’s the trajectory of a system that treats healthcare as a speculative market, not a human right.
People come to my clinic with infections they’ve ignored, cancers they couldn’t afford to monitor, diabetes they can’t afford to treat. They ration pills, skip appointments, and hope nothing bad happens until the next paycheck. They are no less deserving of care than Scott Adams. They just lack a platform and a President’s phone number.
That’s the moral obscenity of the American political system. It rewards fame and obedience, and punishes poverty and silence. It’s not just broken — it’s rigged. And while Trump parades his “compassion” for one of his supporters, his policies are choking the rest of the system dry.
We don’t need presidential favors - We need a healthcare system that doesn’t require them. Every person in this country should have access to the same drugs, the same treatments, the same chance to live — without begging on social media or pledging allegiance to a politician.
That’s what a single-payer system would do. It would cover everyone. It would drive down costs through public negotiation and end the grotesque spectacle of healthcare by favoritism.
So yes, I hope Scott Adams gets well. I hope Pluvicto buys him time. But I also hope the rest of us remember how obscene it is that one man’s plea gets the President’s attention while millions of others suffer in silence.
The President shouldn’t be “on it” for one man. He should be on it for everyone.
D. ARNIE ARNESEN
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Host of "The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen"