American history has no shortage of leaders who substituted authority for a costume. In the case of Gregory Bovino, performance has clearly replaced restraint.
Noted Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer also abandoned regulation uniforms for personal spectacle, and wrapped himself in a myth of invincibility. Designing his own flamboyant uniforms, Custer announced that rules did not apply to him. At the Little Bighorn, he was no longer commanding troops. He was acting out a fantasy with grand dreams of legitimacy. Reality ended it.
Bovino is doing the same thing with fascist cosplay instead of cavalry braid. When accused by California Gov. Newsom of looking and acting like a Nazi, instead of denying his costume is SS-inspired, he insists he receives “nothing but compliments” on it. He wears this get-up to intimidate us, signal the menace of his extrajudicial police, and to reinforce the idea that ICE is not interested in consent, accountability, or actually seeing your papers. In a democracy, the look isn’t neutral. It’s a threat.
The New York Times reported on Bovino’s coat Thursday, calling it “a flashpoint in the online conversation about ICE, in part because its historical antecedents are also impossible to ignore.” Online discourse has echoed Newsom’s remarks, comparing the coat to attire worn by uniformed Nazi officers under Adolf Hitler’s reign less than a century ago.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin reiterated some of Bovino’s remarks to the Times, saying the coat is part of “standard-issue Border Patrol winter dress uniform.”
Authority isn’t something designed by Hugo Boss. It is a binding responsibility. When men decide the costume is the point, restraint becomes optional, and violence becomes proof.
Bovino is nothing but costumed puffery tossing gas at protestors. History has already written the ending for men like this.
Well, if it looks like a NAZI, and acts like a NAZI.....
Christ, what a tiny man.