Jeff Sharlet has been studying and reporting on far-right movements in the US for decades, but something feels different now. From Waco and Ruby Ridge in the ‘90s to the 2014 Bundy family standoff with the federal government in Nevada, from the rise of Donald Trump to the “martyrdom” of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed raiding the Capitol on Jan. 6, from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to COVID-19, from the Q-Anon conspiracy to the veneration of vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse, new and long-brewing currents of rightwing rage and resentment are converging to change the American political landscape in ways that we will have to contend with for years, if not decades, to come. In the latest installment of our ongoing “Rise of the Right” series on The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Sharlet about his new book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, the volatile moment America is in right now, and what we need to do to confront the far right today.
Jeff Sharlet is the New York Times best-selling author and editor of eight books, including The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, adapted into a Netflix documentary series, and This Brilliant Darkness. His reporting on LGBTIQ+ rights around the world has received the National Magazine Award, the Molly Ivins Prize, and Outright International’s Outspoken Award. His writing and photography have appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, for which he is a contributing editor; the New York Times Magazine; GQ; Esquire; Harper’s; and VQR, for which he is an editor at large. He is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, where he lives in the woods with many animals.
Studio/Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. Great to have you all with us once again. As many of you know who listen regularly, our Rise to the Right series is at the heart of our work. This book we’re about to explore today, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet, is at the heart of it. It was given to me by Max Alvarez, our editor-in-chief here. He knows what I like, and I got into it deeply.
He gets to the heart of what we face and into the soul of the evangelical right, those preparing for a new civil war, the journey that Jeff took across this nation into the lives of the right, into their humanness, into their churches, into their homes, while carrying his stepmother’s ashes. The bookends of this work start with Harry Belafonte and they end with Lee Hays and the Almanac Singers. It’s a warning. It’s a portrait. It’s something we need to pay attention to.
So today, as I said, we talk with Jeff Sharlet, who wrote Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. He’s a New York Times bestselling author, a book that he wrote, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, was made into an incredible documentary series on Netflix. He’s a Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth where he is at this moment. Welcome, Jeff. Good to have you with us.
Jeff Sharlet:
Good to be with you, Marc. Thanks for having me.
Marc Steiner:
It’s funny. I said to you before we started that it’s clear that you’re not just writer, but a professor of the art of creative writing, because this is written like a poem. It’s a poem to America. It’s a poem to those evangelicals. It’s a poem to all of us.
Jeff Sharlet:
Yeah. I think it’s also, to me, I mean it’s a mourning song. I think as I try and contend, I’ve been writing about right-wing movements for 20 years and the history going further back. I’ve seen the transformations, and I can confidently say something is happening now that, at the very least, has not happened in a long time. We are contending with a threat that I hadn’t seen in my lifetime. With that means it comes a loss, a loss of a certain kind of optimism, a kind of hope, but also it comes out of a loss.
I think so much at the moment of what I do, I use the F-word, fascism. The ascendancy of fascism now comes from a kind of broad grief in the American spectrum, but grief unprocessed, grief that is left to sit still, to curdle, to curdle into rage, which then it becomes rage, but the feeler’s like, “At last I’m feeling something intense,” and they understand it as love.
So what is succor for the rage that grows from grief? It’s mourning. It’s recognizing the loss. Mourning, I believe, is actually kind of a hopeful act because we contend with what is not there anymore and we imagine and build a future without it. So, to do that, I couldn’t just go out and do person-on-the-street interviews and do the straight news. I had to write from a place of radical but transparent subjectivity.
I’ll go further to argue that because there’s an element of implicit media criticism in the book, the subtitle’s Scenes from a Slow Civil War, but could also … I think of it as how to write stories about fascism, but not in the prescriptive sense like I’ve got the answer, but rather in the sense that none of us have quite figured it out or we wouldn’t be in this moment. But we’ve got to be experimenting with narrative modes and thinking about how do we contend with this thing because the old means of reporting aren’t working.
Maybe listeners saw that CNN Town Hall with Trump where they tried to fact check him in real time. It was a absolute disaster for journalism and an astonishing crowing victory for Trumpism. The old methods of journalism, they do not meet the moment. So I think that’s what I’m seeking in the language of this book is possibilities that might.
Marc Steiner:
It’s interesting how you start this book, to me, A) on how you started it, but then when I finished the book, it was how you ended it. Because as I said in the beginning here, you have these bookends. You start with this conversation you had with Harry Belafonte, who was one of the most brilliant figures you’ve had in this country who was deeply dedicated to a socially just nation and world, and you end it with Lee Hays and the Almanac Singers.
And then you take us through this journey all across America into the heart of the evangelical right. I’m curious why you chose to do it in that way, why you chose to begin with Harry Belafonte, end with Hays and, in the middle, take us to this incredibly deep journey into the right.
Jeff Sharlet:
The Undertow was not originally called The Undertow, and it was originally going to be a songbook because I had become fascinated by songs, like If I had Hammer and Harry Belafonte’s Day-O, songs that come down, to me at least, as these innocent, fun songs. I’m a white guy that grew up in a mostly white working-class town, and we sang those in music class in elementary school. Nobody told us that they were radical songs, that they were liberation songs. They were freedom songs.
I come to understand that and that deep resource to understand the long struggle. So I was originally going to write a songbook about the secret history of songs, but then comes Trump. And then comes Trump. This is the story of so many of our lives now. Because I have kids and because I am fearful for their future and because I have been writing about right-wing movements for a long time, it’s something I know how to do.
I was like, “Well, this is a very small thing.” But I know how to go and I talk to these folks and understand their stories and bring back these stories and maybe contend with it that way. But I couldn’t let go of those songs because they were the thing that gives me hope. I wanted to give my kids some hope, but not some cheap grace, not like, “Don’t worry. It’s going to work out.” Harry Belafonte and Lee Hays, the Almanac singers, The Weavers, if people don’t know them, they know If I had a Hammer, they know Good Night, Irene.
They know Kisses Sweeter Than Wine and On Top of Old Smokey, all songs in the American songbook because of Lee Hays, a man broken by the Red Scare. The title of that chapter is The Good Fight is the One You Lose. That’s the long struggle. He fought the good fight. He lost it. But I always knew the last line of this book. I knew right from the beginning, this is what I’m writing toward. It’s a line uttered by Lee Hays. He’s driving through the Arkansas night with a bunch of union organizers, and there’s gun thugs on his trail.
It’s the 1950s, and they’re terrified. They’re afraid they’re going to be killed. They’re singing. They’re singers. They’re singing hymns and sing hymns that they made into labor songs, into freedom songs. He says, “For a while, it was possible not to be scared, even. For a while, it was possible not to be scared, even.” To me, that is the hope. It’s not the cheap grace, not the optimism. It’s not even the safe space.
I think of an activist who, Suzanne Pharr created kind of a lesbian separatist commune in rural Arkansas. And then local women started coming to them for help fleeing their abusive partners. So they took them in. And then the abusive partners came, and they decided to stand their ground. I remember a younger activist saying, “That’s so wonderful. You made a safe space.” And Suzanne, who has the demeanor of a southern grandmother says … I don’t think I can say this on your show, but she says-
Marc Steiner:
Yes, you can.
Jeff Sharlet:
Okay. “Oh, honey, there is no fucking safe space.” Just we were all so stunned to hear her curse. But there isn’t. She’s right. She had stood her ground in a wonderful way to protect people. That wasn’t a safe space. It was a safe moment. Harry Belafonte. Songs, that’s what a song is. It’s a safe moment when you listen to that song, when you get courage and for a while it’s possible not to be scared, even.
You build your energy to go back into the struggle, which there’s a long struggle ahead of us. I am optimistic, but not in any kind of like, “Oh, in 2024, we’ll take care of this and nip it in the bud.” No.
Marc Steiner:
You’re not Pollyanna-ish about it. That’s for sure.
Jeff Sharlet:
No. No.
Marc Steiner:
But it’s interesting, before we jump into the heart of the book, that the way you began in terms of the songs, it was also the defiance of the people you focused on who were in these songs, whether it was Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier taking the money to the South, taking $50,000 in cash to the civil rights workers, risking their lives, or the battles that took place from the Paul Robeson concert and the attack from the right wing when they had those concerts and how they stood up and fought back.
It’s also deeply intertwined. To me, it also spoke to the creative spirit and the power of song, but also the power of that creative spirit to stand up to oppression and not be frightened enough by it not to stand up to it.
Jeff Sharlet:
Yeah. I think because we lost Harry Belafonte just a few weeks ago at age 96, a man long in the struggle. Because I’d written about Harry Belafonte, I was going to do some interviews. They’d say, “What was Harry Belafonte like in his later years?” He was angry. That man was angry every one of his days. People were disappointed like, “No, wait a minute.” He was angry. He hated the Hollywoodization of the civil rights movement, as he put it, and he knew the struggle was ongoing.
He was angry and joyous. He was not broken by rage. What he said was, “Where your anger comes from doesn’t matter so much as what you do with it.” What he did with it was make these songs. Yes, they are defiant songs, even the joyous ones, Day-O. Daylight come and we want to go home. That’s a work song.
Marc Steiner:
A work song, right.
Jeff Sharlet:
He learned that in the Jamaica docks.
Marc Steiner:
Right, exactly. Right.
Jeff Sharlet:
He’s like, “I’m tired of working. I don’t like this job.” Come, Mr. Tally Man. Tally me banana. That’s the boss who’s weighing your work and saying, “Here’s how much you get.” No love for the tally man. That defiance, too, was something. That’s part of the hope that I think we need. There’s got to be some defiance. This is a long struggle. I think that is important because people like to say, “Unprecedented moment,” the Trump scene, Trumpism.
There are a lot of ways in which it is. But the idea of struggle, that’s not unprecedented. Some of us have been given reprieve for some part of our lives from it, but the struggle has always been there. So that’s why any book, I think, right now about fascism, to me, has to have some acknowledgment in it of the long struggle. It’s not just World War II and the greatest generation. There are so many other ways that struggle has been fought and can be fought.
Because fascism has a lie. The lie of fascism is inevitability. It’s the tidal wave that can’t be stopped. Well, that’s not true. So we need to constantly be looking for those moments, those songs that help us surpass that.
Marc Steiner:
So given that, before we get into specifics about your journey because you took this journey across the country, stopping at churches, going into people’s homes unannounced because of the flags you saw out front or signs you saw out front and really putting your-
Jeff Sharlet:
Well, I would knock on the door. I wouldn’t-
Marc Steiner:
Right, right, right.
Jeff Sharlet:
“Anybody home?” No, no. I’m not brave enough for that or weird enough, I hope.
Marc Steiner:
No, no, no. I’m glad you clarified that. I’m sorry. Right. But you did-
Jeff Sharlet:
But just showing up, yeah. Just showing up.
Marc Steiner:
Just showing up. Just showing up. Just showing up. I’m curious how you started, how you ended, what changed for you? What changed in you? Because one of the things that struck me about how you approach this was that while you got into the politics of it and the power of whiteness, which we’re going to talk about in a bit, you also approach people with a humanness, and you saw the humanness in them and not just as a clear-cut enemy, “You’re a racist white dog. You’re a fascist.”
No, there was something else you were bringing out to find out about who these people were in a different way than most would do it.
Jeff Sharlet:
As I was traveling across the country, I was thinking about some writing advice I was given once, and which I always hold onto, which is to remember the bodies. Remember the bodies of the people that you write about. Oftentimes, we abstract people into characters that we have constructed using the stories that we have learned from television and movies and so on. Remember the actual body.
When you do that, this question of should I humanize someone or … It’s not there. I can’t humanize anybody. They are human. They are living in this world. They are subject to physical pain and aging and fear and desire just like I am. That does not mean we are all the same. I don’t want to make that mistake. I’m interested in the human. I’m not interested in failing to recognize the radically different choices that we make and the consequences of those choices.
But when we look at some white supremacist and we say, “That guy is nothing like me,” well, isn’t that reassuring? Now, as a white guy, I definitely can’t do that. As a human, you can’t do that. Fascism is a human disease. It’s funny that after going through the pandemic and seeing that COVID can inflict anyone, although it will inflict people differently and according to circumstances and so on, the idea that we would imagine some of us somehow just constitutionally immune from fascism.
If we are immune from fascism, it’s because of choices that we made and choices that people around us made for us. There is no natural immunity, not to COVID, not to hate. So you’ve got to be on that spectrum with people. You’ve got to sit with people. You’ve got to see how their bodies inhabit space. That, I think, is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, all you’re doing is telling tales that reassure you, but do nothing to prepare you for the threat in front of you.
Marc Steiner:
You used the word, bodies. Part of me, the subtext of your book, a lot had to do with the tearing apart of the body and what-
Jeff Sharlet:
The body comes apart. The body comes apart. I think, how it changes, in some ways, there’s some stuff that happens before Trump, and that’s sort of the undertow, the currents that were drawing us out, that I’m drawing from my long-time reporting on the right. But in 2015, he comes down his golden escalator in Trump Tower. Because I’ve been writing about the ways in which Christian nationalism in the United States exports a certain kind of authoritarianism, a certain kind of love for a strong man figure into other governments around the world, I say, “Here he is.”
He’s coming back to us, coming down that golden escalator, and he’s bringing with him a fascist aesthetic. We can talk more about what fascism means because we can’t use the term loosely. But he’s bringing him with a fascist aesthetic. So I start to say immediately, “I want to write about this. This is what’s happening. Will he find a movement? Will he find reception beyond the small number that were always there?” He did, and it grew. It grew in surprising ways.
So what changes for me across this is that it keeps growing. Even watching this for so long, January 6, 2021, I had to reboot the book when Trump showed up. And then I had to reboot it on January 6, 2021. I said, “I need to make much more space for the so-called post-Trump years, which are not post at all, and to see more and more how much this comes to define us.” I think coming to this term that I borrow from a friend of mine, Jeff Ruoff, a filmmaker here at Dartmouth College, he calls it the Trumpocene, the age of Trump.
What that means is it doesn’t matter whether Trump is in power or not, Trump is replaced by another or not. Now American politics takes place in a vernacular of Trumpism. We have one party that speaks Trump-ish and another party that defines itself by speaking against Trump-ish, but that constrains our imagination. At the beginning of the book, I wasn’t sure that we would really come into the Trumpocene, and now here we are. We’re going to have to go through it. There’s no turning away. We’re going to have to go through it.
Marc Steiner:
You’ve covered this area in some ways before. I mean this is what you write about in many ways and about religion as well. But I wonder what you came away with that you didn’t expect, what you found, because you really walked into the lives of people. You listened to them. Sometimes they were a little hostile. Sometimes they weren’t. But you were there to hear what they had to say. One word that underlies this for me in some of your writing is grief.
Jeff Sharlet:
Yeah. Well, would this be a good point? I’ve got a paragraph marked that sort of speaks to that grief.
Marc Steiner:
Go ahead, please.
Jeff Sharlet:
Can I share that? Would that make sense?
Marc Steiner:
Absolutely. Wonderful. Jump into it.
Jeff Sharlet:
I’m writing here about the ways in which people who have given into the undertow of white supremacy, and what’s complicated is they’re not only white people. As we saw in Allen, Texas, there can be people of color who are seduced by what my friend, Anthea Butler, in her great book, White Evangelical Racism, calls the promise of whiteness.
“They see themselves as victims. Such victims feel themselves drawn together not by whiteness, but by that of which it is made, by their belief in a strongman and their desire for an iron-fisted God and their love of the way guns make them feel inside and their grief over COVID-19 and their denial of COVID-19 and their loathing of systemic as descriptive of that which they can’t see, can’t hold in their hands and weigh, and their certainty that countless children are being taken, stolen, and raped or if, not in body, then in spirit, indoctrinated to hate themselves.
“They’re angry about their own bodies, about how other people’s bodies make them feel about eating too much because they’re afraid they won’t have enough, about not having enough, about others having more. They are drawn together by their love of fairness, which is how it used to be. They’re certain they remember or, if they’re too young, they’ve been told. Or maybe they’ve just seen it in a movie, a western or a space opera or a revenge fantasy, the forever frontier that is equal parts Little House on the Prairie and The Punisher.
“Make America great again, the solace of tautology, a loop, a return, a story the end of which has already been written in the past.” I think that is one of my attempts in the book to name the grief that they have. They feel that they have lost something. We can say, “Well, you should have lost. You should have lost your white privilege,” and so on. Or, “You didn’t lose as much as you think you did,” and so on. It doesn’t change the fact that they feel it and that they’re grieving it instead of mourning it.
Mourning might allow them to say, “Hey, wait a minute. That Little House on the Prairie myth, that’s not worth holding on to. That wasn’t helping me. That was hurting me.” But instead, I want it back. I want back the thing that never was.
Marc Steiner:
What it made me think of as I was reading this, and if I’m digressing too much here, you can say, “Steiner, come back.” But one of the things I thought about, because I spent a lot of time as an organizer in my life, both in unions and community. In a number of those situations, it had to do with whiteness. It had to do with the grief and loss. It had to do with bridging this line. It happened to me in Mississippi with the timber workers in the ’60s in the Alabama/Mississippi border with Black and white workers.
It happened in Chicago with Ujoin and the Appalachian whites teaming up with the Black Panthers in our work with the Poor People’s campaign. It happened here in Baltimore. We organized a tenants’ union against landlords and brought this really racist white neighborhood together with a Black neighborhood across one street to fight together. So I’m saying that to say that what I felt reading this book was that, in some ways, is what we’re missing is the ability to bridge this divide that can be bridged.
Your book, in a sense, really allowed the pain and grief objectively to come through with these mostly white folks you talked to. It didn’t leave us with a lack of hope, but it also talked about the root of why we’re not there.
Jeff Sharlet:
Yeah. I think another answer to that question, what did I find that was surprising to me? This is going to be an alarming word, is imagination. In some ways, when I think back to the history of European fascism, which is rooted in an avant-garde artistic movement called futurism, an intellectual movement, I shouldn’t be surprised. Fascism is a kind of lucid dreaming. It’s a kind of dream politic, and it’s utopian.
Utopia, of course, doesn’t mean the perfect place. It means no place, a place that never was. But it is this imagination that’s part of the colorblindness of white supremacy. They imagine a place where either they’ve erased all other color or they can’t see color. They can’t see difference. They don’t have to sit with difference and make up difference of strength, but they can just forget it.
And yet, they do this with they’re imagining a world. They are building this sort of movement that is having a gravitational force. So that, for instance, I go to a Trump rally in Sunrise, Florida, which is a very blue part of Florida in Broward County. I don’t know. I would say probably it’s less than half white. Now, people know about conservative Cuban Americans, but also flying in the dozens are Venezuelan flags and Nicaraguan flags of Nicaraguan Americans and Venezuelan Americans, and also pride flags at a Trump rally.
This is the gravitational pull of this movement, which is the bridging is happening over there, and it’s happening with lies. But it is very effective. I think one way of illustrating that imagination is as I’m driving across the country, I start documenting all the flags that I see, the false flags of fascism, which is to say, you’ve seen the Trump flags. You’ve seen the Fuck Joe Biden flags, maybe the Gadsden flag, the coiled snake on yellow, the don’t tread on me flag.
There’s also flags with skulls. There’s flags with AR-15s. There’s the American flag. The stripes are made of long guns. The stars are handguns. There’s all the thin blue line flags, the police flags, which some people say it’s just about respecting the police. I interviewed the man who made the flag. He said, “It’s an anti-Black Lives Matter flag.” It is what it appears to be. Scariest of all, the black flag, if you see this flag, a neighbor flying, you want to steer clear. This is a flag that means no quarter, no prisoners.
In the civil war they believe is coming, you kill everybody. It’s a genocidal flag. Now, I see all those flags. And then I come into Baltimore or Milwaukee or wherever. You know what? There’s just as many progressive flags, pride flags primarily, all the same flag. You buy it for $14.99 on Amazon. It’s the same flag. Out there, they’re carving trees into the likeness of Trump and painting silos with murals of their imagined fashioned Utopia.
What do we got? $14.99 polyester pride flag, weather-durable. It’s good. Put that flag up. You’re good. Look, I have that flag, and I want everyone to have that flag.That bridging that has happened, that you have seen happen, it comes from this place of people being able to imagine something that wasn’t there before. Let us imagine this community coming together. It takes a lot of political work, but it takes a lot of political imagination, too.
I do think implicit in this book I want people to contend with the real force of imagination that is on the right, right now. If people come away from that and say, “Well, I know here in this little pocket and that little pocket,” but if anyone’s looking at the Democratic Party in America saying, “Wow, what a force of imagination,” well, as they say, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. We’re coasting. They’re surging.
Marc Steiner:
Yes, exactly right. Democrats are coasting, and they’re surging. After all of this and all the writing you’ve done in this book especially, what do you think about this slow tilt towards a civil war? How do you think we’re sliding towards it? What does this journey you took teach you about that? Where do you think we’re headed?
Jeff Sharlet:
Well, I think in some ways I describe the Trumpocene as having three big theological movements. First, you got the prosperity gospel. That’s the 2016 campaign. We’re going to win, win, win. I’m a rich guy, and don’t you want to be rich, too? Then we’ve got 2020, much darker, QAnon, conspiratorial, dark forces, as Trump puts it. But in January 6, 2021, we have the central figure of the book is this white woman, Ashli Babbitt, 35-year-old Air Force veteran-
Marc Steiner:
Which I want to get to. Yes, yes.
Jeff Sharlet:
… leads a mob into the capitol and gets killed by a Black police officer. I mentioned the fact that he’s Black because looking at that very day, I’m like, “Oh, okay, there’s going to be a big change. Now they’ve got their full-force martyr.” It’s interesting because you’d go to Trump rallies before that, and he was trying to get martyrs in the air, talking about people who had been killed by undocumented folks. But no one really remembered their names.
Ashli Babbitt is the martyr. Now we’re in the age of martyrs, and that is a huge escalation, what the Germans called blood witnesses. It goes further than that because then once you get into the age of martyrs, well, now you don’t actually have to die for the cause anymore. The January 6th prisoners, martyrs. You at your workplace and you think your coworker frowns on you because of your MAGA hat. “I have suffered for my faith. I, too, am a martyr.”
Of course, Trump, the greatest martyr of all. Ashli Babbitt’s just keeping the cross warm till Trump can push her aside and climb up there himself before the indictment. Before each one of these court cases, he sends out emails that says, “Friend, this may be the last time I get to speak to you.” Give me a break. But he loves the role, and he plays the role. I think they’re surging. I think it is a reality.
I think the slow civil war, which in January 6th and right after that, I started hearing historians use the term, civil war. I’m married to a historian. They’re very cautious. They don’t move fast. They’re not flippant or glib. Even then, I would go in the same way that in January 5, 2021, I can tell you as one who was saying, “This is a slow coup.” There were plenty of colleagues in the press who were saying, “That’s hysterical. There’s no coup attempt.”Well, next day.
Spring of 2021, civil war, talking to editors, “Now, that’s a bit much.” Well, now here we are. Trump openly uses civil war language. One of the pastors I visit in the church in Omaha, Nebraska, runs a militia church, openly civil war church. Trump was just on the same pro-civil war show that he was on. Marjorie Taylor Greene uses civil war. I hear liberals saying, “Maybe we should just break up the union.” And yet, that’s all future.
Some people say, “Do you think there will be violence?” I’m like, “What do you mean, will be?” There’s violence every day right now when pregnant people are dying for lack of reproductive rights. We hear about only the few biggest cases. But every journalist knows for every one we hear, there’s 100. those are casualties of the slow civil war. The waves of queer kids, trans kids, the suicide wave, not all of them, but they’re all being exacerbated. That death toll is rising because of the slow civil war.
These mass shootings in which one … I read all the manifestos. One manifesto builds on another, and they speak directly to the ideas that are coming from the Republican Party. These are not lone wolves. This is part of the slow civil war. We’re in it now. It’s not coming. We’re in a slow civil war right now. We have the power. We have to go through fascism, but we do not have to go through the full conflict, I think.
But we do have to recognize that it’s at risk because if we just sit there and say, “Well, the center will hold, it always has,” no, it’s already gone. We don’t have a center anymore. What are we going to build in its place?
Marc Steiner:
There’s a lot of things you just said. I was just thinking about this. A couple of people, for me, in the book that really stand out, one are the Wilkersons. The other is, and I do apologize, the interviewer blows it. I forgot the name, but the guy who you visited towards the end of the journey whose father was Jewish, but he was raised Lutheran.
Jeff Sharlet:
Rob Brumm.
Marc Steiner:
Right, yes. Yes, right.
Jeff Sharlet:
Rob Brumm, militia leader in Marinette, Wisconsin. Not his father, though. He would love to have heard you say that. He would love to say, “Marc Steiner and Sharlet, look at those Jews recognizing my Jewishness.” No, he’s about six generations removed from his Jewishness. He found it at 23andMe or something and discovered he was Jewish and wouldn’t that be cool? And went out and bought himself a Israeli cycling team jersey and then starts sprinkling Yiddish into his militia commands.
I say, “Aren’t your men anti-Semitic?” And he says, “Yes, of course, but I’m the alpha wolf. If they sense weakness, they’ll displace me, but I’m still strongest.” His daughter, meanwhile, is a Nazi. I don’t mean figuratively. I mean she has a big Nazi tattoo. She is very clear, “I’m not Jewish.” But interesting. Those figures loom for me. How do you see them in conversation or in concert? How do you they go together in your mind?
Marc Steiner:
Because one is the evangelical surge, which is maybe now half the Republican Party, whatever that number is. People say it’s 10 million or it’s 40 million, whatever number that is in this country. The Nazis were a minority party as well, and they seized at the heart. On the other side, you have militias, whether he’s, as he said, 7,500 strong or 6,500 strong, whatever the reality is. They are there, and they are armed and ready to fight. They’re both ready to take over the country from different ends, and they’re connected because the people-
Jeff Sharlet:
No, that’s it. That’s it exactly right there. The Wilkersons, this is a guy named Rich Wilkerson, and he’s got a hipster church in Miami called VOUS Church. He’s the guy who performed the wedding ceremony for Kanye West, before he was Ye, and Kim Kardashian. He’s Justin Bieber’s pastor. He’s a beautiful man. Looks like Leonardo DiCaprio, never lets you forget it.
Marc Steiner:
He is handsome. Yes, he is. Yes.
Jeff Sharlet:
Has a million followers on his Instagram where he posts bare-chested selfies and so on. He’s the scion of a evangelical dynasty and so on. He’s a really beautiful person. Rob Brumm, the militia leader in Wisconsin, where I stopped, I take a picture of his Fuck Trudeau flag, and his wife comes out because it turns out I’ve tripped their security program. They’ve actually got a rule. They’re sizing me up. Is it a fed? Should we shoot?
You can be a fed or a fool, and I aced it. I’m a fool. They end up inviting me in. There on their table, they’re preparing for an operation, is just an arsenal of weapons. There’s a picture in the book. It’s interesting how I said, “Can I take a picture of your cat?” Because he has a cat winding its way through the AR-15s and the ammo and the long guns.
Marc Steiner:
I love that picture.
Jeff Sharlet:
He turns on the light so I can do it. He says, “All the guns you see, these are the legal ones.” Rob, you’ll see a picture of him in the book. He’s not one of the beautiful people like the Wilkersons. And yet, you have these rich, beautiful people living in Miami penthouses and hanging out with celebrities. You got this rural Wisconsinite with all his guns. Here they are on the same side. That’s what a social movement is.
I think a lot of people on the left think that social movement is a term that belongs to us, but there are social movements of the right, too. What they’re marked by is, and this is what I mean by the undertow, it’s sort of drawing many currents together. What makes it threatening is the convergence of many forces. So you’ve got pious churchgoers, and then you’ve got Proud Boys, thrilled by their transgressive politics.
You’ve got the Mike Pences of the world. Who cares about Mike Pence running against Trump? He’s part of the movement. And then you got the Stormy Daniels and the people who love Trump, not despite Stormy Daniels, but because of Stormy Daniels, because he is setting the id free. This is what we need to be alarmed at is this convergence. But we also take some hope there because, I think you know this history, social movements collapse when unlikely allies come together for a while.
For a while, it was possible not to be scared, even. But those tenants’ unions you made in Baltimore in the racist white neighborhood and the Black neighborhood, pretty sure Baltimore is still working on that issue.
Marc Steiner:
Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
Jeff Sharlet:
It comes together for a while. It achieves something. We don’t take away that achievement, but it does split, and this can happen to fascism, too. So then our job becomes like, “Hey, how can we give you guys a nudge? You guys don’t get along. Let us encourage those fault lines.”
Marc Steiner:
So I’m going to come back to that, but I want to come back a moment to Ashli Babbitt and to her mother.
Jeff Sharlet:
Yeah, Micki.
Marc Steiner:
Micki. “Be proud, white Americans, of who you are and of Ashli Babbitt,” she says. But what’s interesting to me is that most people, unless they are on the right, which is a lot of people, don’t even think of her anymore. What you’re describing here in this book is how she’s a centerpiece. She is a battle cry for an entire movement and a plethora of movements around the country.
Jeff Sharlet:
Well, right. That was sort of interesting to me, going to Trump rallies during his term in the beginning and throughout it is these people, mostly women, who were killed by undocumented folks. I had not heard of these people before, but the crowd had. The crowd of 20,000 people would shout the name in the same way that if I was to go to an evangelical church now, I might go to a youth group and I might say, “Cassie Bernall.” I know what they’d say. They’d say, “She said yes.”
Cassie Bernall was in Columbine. She was one of the victims of the Columbine shooting way back. A myth rose up. It’s not true. It didn’t happen, that the young killers asked her, pointing a gun at her, “Do you believe in God?” She said, “Yes.” There’s a arena rock song, She Said Yes. Well, they didn’t ask. She didn’t say it. In some ways, the desecration is here’s a person who was killed and we can’t honor her for who she was. We have to make her into a martyr.
Martyrdom, as I write in the book, is a kind of magic trick, a sleight of hand by which the dead serve the needs of the living. So Ashli Babbitt does that. But you and I don’t need Ashli Babbitt, so she’s not serving our needs. We don’t talk about her. Tucker Carlson who, rest in peace, Tucker. I mean really rest. Stay back. But he had had three or four million people watching the show, but a reach of about 70 million. Once a week, he was talking about Ashli Babbitt as this martyr, as does Trump, still talks about her at every rally, in the CNN Town Hall, talks about Ashli Babbitt, always making of her this white woman killed by a Black man.
So this is the old lynching story, white women vulnerable to these Black predators in this racist imagination. They start aging her backwards. She’s 35. No, she’s in her 20s. No, she’s 16. She’s 125 pounds, no, 115, 110. She’s just a little white girl. At the same time, she’s an Air Force veteran. And who kills her? A fellow law enforcement officer. On the left, we make a big deal of the fact that Ashli Babbitt, once a part of the Capitol Guardians, her job had once been to protect the Capitol.
On the right, they also make a big deal of it. Another protector of the Capitol shot her in the back, stabbed her in the back. That’s the World War I fascist myth that Hitler used. We would have won, but we were stabbed in the back. She is both. To make this work, she has to be an innocent, which means she’s unarmed, which is why on the cover of my book is a photograph, the evidence photograph marked 01/06/2021 of the knife she was carrying. She wasn’t unarmed.
It’s not a huge knife. Some people say, “Well, that’s a small knife.” To them, I say, “Try and take it on a plane. When TSA tries to take it away, try and hold onto that knife, calling it a small knife, and see how far you get. Send me a note.” No. She was very clear. She was there to storm the Capitol. She was there to be, in her words, boots on the ground. She was part of a mob that was chanting and smashing and seeking to do harm.
She was right up there with some of the other scary figures we’ve seen. The guy with a Camp Auschwitz hoodie was right there. She was there to do harm. She was there maybe to kill. We’ll never know. But, instead, she got killed and, in doing so, became of much greater use to fascism than she was alive.
Marc Steiner:
As we conclude, two quick things I’m going to try to jump into here. One is that the way you wrote about the people who you met across this country, either evangelicals or militia folks and you got into who they were as human beings. It’s a difficult divide because on one level it felt like you actually, and I understand this completely, you actually liked some of the people you met. You enjoyed their company.
On the other hand, there was a danger that you were signaling that’s in these people who you liked as human beings. That’s kind of this contradiction of what we face at this moment in this country.
Jeff Sharlet:
Yeah. I think that’s always the contradiction. The risk of that contradiction is the myth of common ground, which I don’t believe in.
Marc Steiner:
Did you ever?
Jeff Sharlet:
Not since I thought deeply about it. I think in American history, common ground is the plantation. The plantation is common ground because it is a way of erasing the power dynamics instead of saying, “Look, we coexist here. There are some inequalities, and we need to work on that. We do not yet meet as equals. We aspire to do so.” That’s sort of the democracy that we have not yet achieved.
There’s a temptation when you see, oh, but I can share pizza with Rob Brumm, the militiaman, as I did, or Dave Gee, a militiaman in aptly named Rifle, Colorado, where I go to visit the bar and grill of Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, which is called Shooters, but it’s like Hooters with guns, the waitresses in cutoffs and packing heat and all the burgers. I had a guac nine. I chose a guac nine over the Swiss and Wesson.
Look, they think it’s funny, too. I mean it’s awful, but it’s funny. I can sort of see the humanness. But this is where I do come back to another old song, which is Which Side Are You On, a labor song from the 1930s from the coal-mining strikes. I understand the temptation away from it to say, “Hey, we don’t think in terms of sides.” But I do think we have to contend if the right has created a moment, like when you have on a weekly basis, guys with AR-15s lining up outside. People who follow this know this is happening somewhere around the country.
This weekend, coming to you will be Proud Boys with guns or Oath Keepers with guns or Patriot Front with guns outside a school or library or hospital or a bar doing a drag show. This is to say, speak of the states where being trans isn’t already illegal. So if you’ve got kids on one side for a story hour and you got men with guns over here, it’s real easy then. Which side are you on? Well, I’d like to stand in the middle. Really? Really? You can’t commit to those kids in there? You can’t say, “I’m going to be over there with them?”
This is where this is. I’m not going to say these guys with guns are not guys with guns. They’re people holding guns. They are fools. They have been diluted. They had turned their grief into rage and hate, but they are still holding guns. I think that’s what we need to do is hold those simultaneities in our head at once.
Marc Steiner:
To conclude here, I mean one of the things that goes through this book for me is your own personal sense of urgency that kind of fuels an urgency politically about what we face that is all wrapped up in whiteness in America and how that underlies the entire danger that we have faced and we do face.
Jeff Sharlet:
I do think whiteness is essential to it. To friends in the left who say, “What about class? What about gender?” I say, “Yes.” Is it race? Is it class? Is it gender? Yes. This is where there’s a term. Leftist academics and activists use this term, intersectionality, the way things inform one another, race, class, and gender inform one another. Well, intersectionality, we’re talking here about the intersectionality of the right.
But essential to that is this idea of whiteness. Now, I don’t mean just white people like you and me. I think as Jews, in fact, we are increasingly suspect in that category. I have a neighbor, Nazi Ralph. It’s not a figure of speech. His hand’s covered with swastikas. We talk. He talks to me. My father’s Jewish. My mother was not. So he says, “I’ll talk to you because you’re half white.”
Marc Steiner:
Whoa.
Jeff Sharlet:
Yeah. But he sits there holding his loaded Glock when he does just in case, I guess, I try to Jew him with my Jew powers, if only I could, if only I had those powers. It’s the same thing with people talking about Soros funding all these things. I keep seeing people making jokes. Where can I get my Soros check? I’m ready. Give me my woke check. I will take it.
But I think that just to wrap up is to say that underneath all that is that whiteness. I think we can contend with it. I write a lot about movies and stories, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live, as the great Joan Didion put it. Those stories are so wrapped up in whiteness. Maybe I’ll end on this. The first movie shown in the White House in 1915 was DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, in which a white woman leaps to her death to escape a Black man, thus setting in motion, justifying in the imagination of the movie, the ride of the Klan.
The first movie shown in the White House, Woodrow Wilson’s White House, was a movie based on a novel called The Klansman, and the Klansman is the hero. It’s there from the beginning, 1619. We know The 1619 project. Let us contend with it. Let us contend with whiteness and class, whiteness as class, whiteness and gender, whiteness as gender, the ways in which these things come.
Take someone like Ashli Babbitt, who all her life is actually struggling to be a decent person. Favorite president after Trump was Obama. She stood up for little folks. And then there was a day she just stopped trying, and she gave in. She was tired. She was tired of being a woman in the military. She was tired of dealing with predatory loans. She was tired of capitalism.
Whiteness came and said, “Hey, this will explain it all.” And she just leaned back and laid back in the undertow. Let’s pull Ashli back to shore before she gets to the Capitol, the next Ashli. I don’t want to give up more lives.
Marc Steiner:
Amen to that. Jeff Sharlet, I want to thank you for taking your time today. I thank you for this book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. It’s really worth the read. It’s really written well. It’s as if a prose poet tells the story of where America could be going and why it’s here. Once again, thank you, Jeff. It’s really been a pleasure to have you.
Jeff Sharlet:
Thank you, Marc. Thanks for good questions. Thanks for reading and chatting with me.
Marc Steiner:
Great book, great book. I want to thank you all for joining us today. Let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com. I will write you right back. While you’re there, take a second. Go to therealnews.com/support. Become a monthly donor. Become part of the future with us.
So for David Hebden and Kayla Rivara and the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Remember Jeff Sharlet, The Undertoe. Check it out. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
