Jeff Sharlet – The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

Jeff Sharlet – The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

Episode 150

Sun, Mar 26, 2023 1:32PM • 51:17

Jeff Sharlet 00:00

A lot of people on the left imagine fascism is monolithic and lockstep. The good news is, it’s not; there’s a lot of fault lines. The bad news is a convergence of many different tendencies, many different strands, and when it’s strong, it’s because they are kind of flowing together. This is a dream politics. Fascism is always a dream politics. Make America Great Again is a myth politics. They are utopian. Let’s pay attention to that fact. Utopia is nowhere. They are imagining their vision of a golden land. It is white supremacist. Whiteness runs like a roaring river through this whole thing. Fascism will not mourn. It will not acknowledge its loss. That’s why Trump says we’re going to win forever.

Sam Goldman 00:59

Welcome to Episode 150 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. Episode 150! Thank you for listening and being part of refusing fascism in the name of humanity. Thanks for being on this journey with us as we engage, dialogue and debate with a broad array of writers, scholars, legal experts, and people from different walks of life on the roots, nature and trajectory of fascism in this country. We are proud to bring you the stories of people rising up as well.

From just this year, check out our interview with Adam Tritt, on defying DeSantis’s book bans and the fascist state of Florida and student resistance. Together, we are working on changing the way people think that prevents them from taking necessary action, helping people to look straight on at uncomfortable truths and act with daring. Together, we are forging understanding and relationships aimed at preventing the consolidation of fascism. Thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and reads and reviews on Apple podcasts, shares and comments on social media or YouTube. It helps us reach more listeners, and of course, we read every one.

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Sam Goldman 03:20

In today’s episode, we welcome back Jeff Sharlet to discuss his latest book, The Undertow, Scenes of a Slow Civil War. But before we get into it, we have to talk about Waco yesterday. We can’t talk about scenes of a slow civil war without talking about Trump’s first 2024 campaign rally held in Waco, Texas yesterday. Waco, while forgotten by many, its symbolism is not lost on the true believers. A symbol of violent government overreach and/or the beginning of the end times. Whether this site selection was intentional or not does not actually matter. I

n an ominous setting to a rally thats keynote was martyrdom, that decried victimization, celebrated violence, and promised, promised retribution, thousands of Texans lining up early in the morning, gathered to hear their dear leader, holding signs reading Stop the Witchhunt. .One holding a sign emblazoned with the words: Remember the Alamo, remember Waco, remember Mar-a-Lago; not ironically. People wore shirts with the words “God Guns and Trump.” They waved Trump or Death flags and incantations of the delusional lost cause of a stolen election were on loop. Trump’s speech began with the glorification of those that stormed the Capitol with all the trappings of liturgy. Footage from the January 6, 2021 violent coup attempt at the US Capitol was displayed. Trump stood hand on heart while the song Justice for All played. Justice for All, a choir of about 20 men imprisoned for their participation in the violent attack on the US Capitol, singing the national anthem interposed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Covering this, or perceiving this as “just another campaign rally and this whole campaign is just the horse race” is to normalize the ascension of fascism — to erase from memory four years of a fascist in power, and to all the advances made towards its consolidation for generations to come — choosing to believe that we’ve derailed this train when we barely made a dent. Last night, he told his followers that the choices are World War III or retribution against political enemies. The front-runner for one of the two major political parties in the most powerful country in the world, accusing the current president of the opposing party of orchestrating his criminal prosecution to keep him out of power — evidence be damned — is nothing to shirk off.

Just consider Trump’s words from yesterday delivered to a people that are literally gunning up for a battle: “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you and I’ll stand in their way, because in 2024 we’ll have the greatest victory of them all.” “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.” “I am your warrior, I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” “Our enemies are desperate to stop us because they know we are the only ones who can stop them. There’s never been a movement like this in the history of the US or probably in the history of the world.” “Our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will. But they failed. They’ve only made us stronger and 2024 is the final battle. It’s going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.” “When this election is over, I will be the President of the United States. You will be vindicated and proud and the thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”

Police barricades were raised in New York and Florida this week, as Donald Trump threatened catastrophic “death and destruction” in response to a Manhattan grand jury deliberating charges against him. Starting last week, Trump has attempted to both incite violence and create a baseless narrative creating a false expectation of his arrest this past Tuesday, and then claiming the lack of an arrest on that date was a victory. Trump has claimed the Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, is a degenerate psychopath who truly hates the USA, is doing the work of anarchists and the devil. In a pitch perfect version of the anti-semitic trope of people of color simple-mindedly following the orders of their Jewish masters, Trump has called Bragg a “Soros backed animal.” In the midst of this, Bragg’s office has received at least one envelope containing a white powder-laced death threat, as well as protests by Trump’s thugs. The grand jury is set to reconvene this Monday, March 27.

Things are continuing to heat up, and right now it’s headed someplace super dark. The normal way things have been is rapidly being ripped apart and it’s becoming clearer and clearer there won’t be a pendulum swing or some magic gorilla glue that re-coheres things back to the status quo. But I am not without hope. More and more people are questioning and being forced to question the way things are, have been, and whether they have to stay that way. This is where the light lives, and where I believe that seeds for a better future germinate. With that, here is my interview with Jeff Sharlet.

Sam Goldman 08:48

Armed standoffs outside libraries, Q-Anon killers, women dying for lack of abortion, queer kids terrorized. These are, to today’s guest, some of the examples of the violence we’re already seeing today; casualties of a slow civil war. Today we’re talking about the millions, marshaled, the fanatical thugs that you might call them, people unleashed, gunned up and immune to reality. I am so honored to welcome back to the show Jeff Sharlet to discuss his brilliant new book that just came out this week, ‘The Undertone, Scenes of a Slow Civil War’.

Jeff has been in the trenches covering Christian fascism back when it was called the Religious Right for the better half of two decades. Jeff is a journalist, an essayist, New York Times bestselling author or editor of eight books, including The Family, the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power — you probably watched it on Netflix — and ‘This Brilliant Darkness’. You’ve seen his writing. You’ve looked at his photographs all sorts of places, including Vanity Fair, for which he is a contributing editor. He’s also a professor of writing at Dartmouth College.

Jeff, to me, stands out in his ability to take seriously, without a whiff of romanticism, the people he studies. He writes beautifully, artfully, taking us to where many dare not to go, where, to be honest, I don’t want to go — asking questions that too many are afraid to ask. From hipster churches to incel gatherings, to backwoods tent revivals and the home of insurrectionists, we got a 360 view of this slow civil war.

His latest book, The Undertow, as some have talked about in reviews, excavates the Trumpist scene, digging beneath the surface to the darkest fascist delusions held by millions here in the so-called shining city on the hill. His analysis, in my opinion, is indispensable in helping us understand what we’re up against and threatens to take us all under, and most importantly, the fault lines on which we may wrench opportunity to build a better world. So, I’m so excited to welcome Jeff. Thanks for coming on.

Jeff Sharlet 09:44

Thanks, Samantha. It’s wonderful to get to talk with you again, even in dire times. I like the name of the show, because it always cheers me up. It’s the imperative: Refuse Fascism! Not like, will we succumb, but: No, we won’t. I’m glad to be here. Thanks.

Sam Goldman 11:08

Let’s start big: civil war. It’s on the lips of many of the people you spoke to, and something that many in the fascist base are preparing for. You mentioned in your book, the work of Barbara Walter and the rise of the militia; the second coming of the Confederacy, this simmering but not starting civil war. It’s infected military ranks as we’ve talked about on this show. It’s not limited to one region; you traveled across the country. Right now, I feel that this would be a one-sided civil war, otherwise known as a genocide. I wanted to get a little bit more into how is the real life prospect of civil war related to the deranged visions of civil war, or even holy war, in the minds of the people you spoke to?

Jeff Sharlet 11:59

This book, The Undertow, I began sort of assembling — some of it predates that and then — the larger part is actually post-Trump. I suppose you might say it began on January 6, 2021, when I saw the insurrectionist, Ashli Babbitt, who was crawling through a broken window in the Capitol and she was killed by a Capitol police officer, and we see just his hands. It turns out to be a Black man, Lieutenant Michael Byrd. As soon as I saw it’s a Black man killed a white woman, well, that’s the oldest American story; that’s the lynching story. That, as I write in the book, that’s the origins of Hollywood. A lot of people don’t realize the movie called The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith, right there at the beginning of Hollywood, based on a novel called The Klansmen — and they mean it in a good way.

I was sort of curious there, and then I saw a survey of historians — my wife’s an American historian, and I know that historians very deliberately don’t move fast, because they know that history actually usually moves slowly — for the first time, they were talking about, oh, some of the conditions for a civil war are here. If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I would have said there’s all kinds of bad under the sun, but that’s not our kind of bad. So I started driving across the country, kind of following the martyr myth of Ashli Babbitt, but also talking to people about civil war. Pretty quickly, I realized I didn’t have to explain it. I mean, really, all I had to do was, say: civil war? And then there was two kinds of answers, which were: Yeah, or: ‘Fraid so.

Everyone saw it was coming, or believed it was coming. But what is the shape of it? I think that’s really important. I went to militia churches and militias, and just people with guns. I’m not afraid of guns — I mean, I’m afraid of guns as we all should be, but I’m a gun owner. I mean, I live in Vermont, and they are not intrinsically terrifying to me, but there’s more guns than I’ve seen in the United States in 20 years reporting on the right. I think a lot of liberals dismiss the prospect of gun civil war, although less and less. Marjorie Taylor Greene, two years ago was a marginal character, now she is the center of the party. I think people — and the left does this too, they love to make fun of militia guys, a lot of fat shaming of militia guys; Oh, they’re just big heavy guys.

First of all, I’ve been surrounded by Proud Boys in armor. Every one of them could beat the shit out of me. There’s also a lot of jacked-up steroidal guys out there. But the reality is, they’re not really the threat. So when people say: Well, wait until these see one F16. The threat is not a January 6 times 1000. The threat is a spark. Whether the spark occurs at an armed standoff on a drag show, or a governor like Ron DeSantis forces it in an attempt to raise his profile. You don’t have to be a leftist to say this, there’s a group of former generals who are saying the military is at risk of splitting. If you get a situation where a military commander isn’t sure whose president, whose orders do I take? That’s suddenly where you see the civil war.

I think some of the political scientists like Barbara Walter does some very important work, still is thinking in terms of low intensity conflict. One Air Force Base is enough to make it a major war. One rogue Commander. I think that’s where we’re simmering. But I want to say one thing is really important: Inevitability is the lie of of fascism. None of this is inevitable. I say it’s coming, but it’s not too late to turn away. This is not doom scrolling. This is preparing. Not preparing for war, that’s their side. We’re preparing to avoid a war. And I do think it can be done.

Sam Goldman 15:27

I appreciate that perspective. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about is how decent folks can look at what might be the signs of a brewing civil war, a civil war that’s in the early stages or not, depending on the day and what we see. You see, January 6, you see the storming of the Capitol, you see the Proud Boys and other stormtroopers outside drag performances and hospitals that perform gender affirming care, mass shootings, where you know you have

Jeff Sharlet 15:59

Wolves, and I put it in air quotes, because I read all their manifestos. Each lone wolf is copying the last manifesto — the last one and building on it. Not like a copycat killer, but saying I was called to arms. [SG: Right] Called to action, and I took action, and I know there’s a community of people on the internet who are excited to see what I’m doing. I’m not alone. I am speaking for many. And they are.

Sam Goldman 16:21

Also thinking about the death threats against anyone who Fox News chooses to target at any moment. So I can see those signs, and I know that a lot of decent folks look at it and they’re like: Ooh, this is deeply concerning that this is a growing pattern and a metastasizing base. What are the signs that the folks that you spent time with on this trip, what are the signs that are telling them that it’s on? What would tell them it’s “go time”? Or what are they looking at that’s saying: Oh, yeah, this is a civil war brewing.

Jeff Sharlet 16:58

I think there’s as many answers to that as the many, many people that I encountered, and that was what was fascinating to me. And also frightening, because I think a lot of people on the left imagine fascism is monolithic and lockstep. The good news is it’s not. There’s a lot of fault lines. The bad news is a convergence of many different tendencies, many different strands, and when it’s strong, it’s because they are kind of flowing together.

I started the main essay of the book, Undertow, I flew out to this rally for Ashli Babbitt in Sacramento, California. Right there we can start, this is Sacramento in California, this is not a red state. It is actually right on the border of the proposed free state of Jefferson, which is the right wing secessionist movement of Northern California. Free State Proud Boys were there. They decided to not wear their colors. The interesting thing is they can’t stop videoing each other and streaming it, and so if you really go digging, you can find them. They put video online talking about how they’re not going to wear their colors so nobody knows its them. And then they design new T-shirts and a new gang name called the Saviors with an even scarier T-shirt — Proud Boys is black and yellow, the Saviors has a statue of liberty with a bleeding flag.

They were there, not so much for the rally, that was fine, they called the rally, but really what they were waiting for and what they got was a brawl with Antifa. Antifa came marching around, and they were there to brawl too. I’m not going to romanticize any violence. I’m not a strategist. It’s not my job to say what to do. They had fought before and they were looking forward to fighting again. Then there’s about 500 cops just standing by and watching and occasionally grabbing an Antifa.

I went from there to a church in Yuba City, California, and it was a militia church — a church has its own militia. Tuesday nights are militia new recruit night. And there the civil war is something that’s already going on. Not only is it already going on, they believe it’s already going on and they are winning. It was a three hour sermon and it started with good news; Hillary Clinton, the congregation didn’t know has already been executed. You’ve seen her since? No, it’s illusion, it’s trickery — green screens. Journalists are being rounded up. Trump is still president. Well, that’s one answer of where the civil war is.

I go to Rifle, Colorado, home of Congresswoman Lauren Boebert and her recently closed — there’s some good news, there’s little victories here and there — Shooters Grill which is like Hooters, but the waitresses, they wear cut-offs, but they have guns; everybody open carries. I met a militia man there and he recommended that I have a Glock 9 hamburger, or you could get a glock-amole, this is the schtick. A very paranoid guy, and he said it’s going down the hole, it’s happening, we’re gonna march. I said: So, wait, when? He says: Well, Joe Biden, you know, they’re stealing the children. All these horrible things, and they’re still not out in the streets. That to me is very good news. I do think they don’t have an “in the streets” tradition. He says: When they come for our guns. Well, the federal government is not coming for the guns.

Another militia leader in Wisconsin says: When the Feds knock on my door. That, they may do, and in fact, I’m wondering why they haven’t; he was at January 6 — he has looping on his TV the footage he filmed. He says: I’ve got lots of footage, and they aren’t asking me. He’s got a table full of heavy firepower. I said, can I take a picture of it? And he says: Oh, sure, the stuff you can see, it’s all legal. What about the stuff we can’t see? So there’s all these different answers about where it is in the civil war. Some think it’s coming, some think it’s happening, some think they won.

I think of it as a slow civil war, and I think about, as you said, in the beginning, the casualties that are already happening. I’m a Jew with a queer trans kid who is being criminalized. In so many states right now, women and AFAB people are dying for lack of reproductive health care. The war is on. And I would just say the other thing is — this being Refuse Fascism, I know I have a very smart, lefty audience, one of the arguments I hear from the left is — Oh, big deal, it’s always been like this. This I do not find persuasive and I want to say: Look, I’ve been out here reporting for 20 years.

I’ll tell you one thing, way more guns — I’ve been out there — a harder right turn. Folks who would never cross over to fascism 10 years ago. They were authoritarian, they were neoliberal, which is its own kind of bad, but they wouldn’t give up Jesus for a cult of personality. They were violent, but they wouldn’t explicitly enshrine violence. Now they do. And yes, there’s been spots of fascism, always in American life. That’s different than a full force government. People saying: Oh, they’re already gunning down Black men in the streets. They are, but not on any kind of scale.

And in the same way, you hear Antifa sometimes say: We’ve already gone toe to toe with the cops, we went toe to toe with them in Portland. Tell me about the time the whole Portland police force open fire, because that’s when that happens. So the left argument that were already in the shit, this is as bad as it gets — naive, it’s American exceptionalist. It’s the language of someone who has never been in a war-torn country. It can get worse. It is getting worse. We have to recognize that if we’re going to turn that around.

Sam Goldman 22:15

I really, really appreciate that, and I think that American Exceptionalism is at the heart of a lot of why we haven’t fought — and I mean, politically, for those listening I know Jeff knows it’s politically, but politically fought — the way that we need it to. Because if it’s always been this way, then you don’t need to do anything different than you’ve always done. [JS: Yes] I think that this is something that people are continuing to struggle with.

When I was reading your book, there was a lot that stood out to me when you were talking about the intersectionality of fascism and that pluralism in fascism [JS: Yeah], and you spoke to it in answering a previous question. Given that, yes, it’s not monolithic, but is there anything overall that we should understand as what are they fighting for in this war? Liberals will be like, they have no agenda. They mistake the fact that they don’t have a positive program for not having an agenda. They don’t have a positive vision for the world, that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have an agenda, or they don’t have a plan. So all caveats aside, is there anything that you would say to help people understand what they’re fighting for in this war?

Jeff Sharlet 23:27

The book is organized into three sections, and each one is named after a song and it starts and ends with a little bit of very hard won hope; no cheap grace here. Harry Belafonte in the song Day O, which is actually a radical work song, Goodnight Irene — today, it’s a lullaby — it’s actually a radical song, but in between is a section that I call Dream On after the Aerosmith song — which I love, by the way, I grew up on that song — and that section is called On Vanity. I named it that because of all the Trump rallies I went to where Dream On would be on the playlist and people would spin in a circle.

What I want folks to understand with this book, and why I spend a lot of time, why I think it matters not just enough to say the only thing I need to know about a Nazi is you know where his nose is so I can punch it. No. You need to know this is a dream politics. Fascism is always a dream politics. Make America Great Again is a myth politics. What is the agenda? It’s not good enough to say they just want to go back to some mythic 1950s America, or a mythic old west. They are utopian. Let’s pay attention to that fact. Utopia is nowhere. They are imagining their vision — a golden land. It is white supremacist. Whiteness runs like a roaring river through this whole thing.

But it’s not all white. I think of a friend of mine, Anthea Butler wrote a great important book on White Evangelical Racism and she calls it the promise of whiteness. The promise of whiteness can explain why I go to a Trump rally in Florida and it’s like about one-third white and the other two-thirds are varieties of Latins; Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans. It’s why at the Ashli Babbitt rally, it’s about 50/50, white/non-white. Most of the speakers were non-white. It was a white supremacist rally. This is part of what I think is also fascinating about, it’s the American contribution to fascism — and that’s an old contribution.

Some people will say: But didn’t we invent fascism? Yeah, the Nazis were actually studying American race laws, but now, you’re not going to build a full movement. Nick Fuentes can’t do his whole thing with Groypers on white, racial purity alone. This is what, as I say, Anthea Butler calls the promise of whiteness, which can bring anybody in to this white supremacist movement. There’s room for Black folks; there’s room for Latinx folks. Anybody can be white in this imaginary. So what are they fighting for? What do they want? It is shifting all the time. When Trump came in, the main enemy was Muslims. Then it was undocumented people. Now it’s trans kids.

Each time liberals say: Oh, isn’t it terrible what’s happening to those people? And each time many of us on the left say: We think those are the folks on the front line, and everyone else has it easy. No, it’s coming for everybody. Fascism comes for everybody. It comes for fascists. No fascist is safe from fascism. It will come for them too. It will change. It won’t drop any of its enemies; it adds. I feel positive that two years from now, trans kids are not going to be the focus. That doesn’t mean it’s gonna be safe for them. There will be new enemies. Increasingly, what’s interesting to me is — I get Trump’s emails every day, and maybe you do too, a professional hazard since I started writing about him in 2015, it’s very Hotel California: you can check in but you can never leave, you can’t opt out and they come a lot —

I would say in the past month or so the trickle of Soros stuff has just become thundering. They’re going all in on the anti-semitism. Even as — just like they can pull in Black folks — they can pull in Jewish folks. We’re in a global fascist moment. Israel, always a right wing state, is now switching over. And those people say: But Israel has always been problematic. And then this.

Sam Goldman 27:05

There is a difference between what is happening today in Israel [JS: Yeah] and what is and can only be seen as an open fascist movement.

Jeff Sharlet 27:14

Rightwing Israeli members of the military are threatening mutiny because even they’re afraid. The other part of American exceptionalism that sometimes afflicts the left is thinking that this is a particularly American problem. It is a particularly American problem, as it is a Russian problem, as it is a Chinese problem, as it is a Brazilian problem, as it is a Filipino problem, as it is a Ugandan problem. Uganda, the story I’ve been following for a long time, we thought we beat them way back in 2009, they just passed a genocidal anti-LGBTQ bill; death penalty for being queer — with plenty of support within the United States.

So it’s a global fascist moment and you’ve got to think about that. That also complicates what do they want, because, well, what they want in Turkey is not exactly the same thing as what they want in the United States, as in Brazil, as in Myanmar, as in Kenya, as in Russia. What they want is an end to liberalism. I’m a lefty, I’m not crazy about it myself. They want an end to institutions. They want chaos. They want the pleasure. This is where I come in: Empathy for the devil, but no sympathy [SG: mmhmm] here, right. I, too, have wanted to burn it down. I, too, have looked at: Ah, to hell with it all. We might differ on this because I have become more sympathetic to institutions at this point. They’re not enough — we need to imagine beyond them — but I’m not in that place.

I’m an all hands on deck in refusing fascism. I don’t like to overstate parallels, but you can look at Weimar. [SG: Yeah] Look at liberals and leftists fighting each other — fools! [SG: Doing the work of the fascists.] It’s why I started the book. I mean, I don’t want the book to be a doom scroll. It started with Harry Belafonte and I think a lot of people are gonna pick it up and say: What? [SG: I didn’t understand what was happening.] But he’s nice, anyway. I was gonna start with the men’s rights movement, which is the worst movement I’ve ever written about, and I was like: Too ugly, I can’t do it. [Sam: And it’s also kind of one note.] They’re not that important. They were just sort of chronologically. They’re the dumbest in the sense I’ve written about.

I’ve gone to so many right-wing movements. Part of why reason I do it — in the same way I’m interested in religion — is it’s always more complicated than its caricature. Every right-wing movement has intellectuals. It has imagination. A lot of us on the left think imagination is necessarily a virtue. It depends on what you do with it. Except for the men’s rights guys. They are actually dumber than their caricature and their caricature is as dumb as it gets. And it’s too bad, because they could have some issues. They can talk about custody, they can talk about suicide, they can talk about incarceration, but instead they sit around and they talk about their ex-wives and their ex-girlfriends and the girlfriends they never had.

But when I was talking to them — that was 2014 — they were the only ones out there who were talking about the red pill. Now, we see Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump red pilling. This little small segment of guys who seemed ridiculous and fun to make fun of, now they are the ethos of the Republican Party. The margin moves inward and I think that’s important. But Harry Belafonte is at the beginning, because he is a longtime radical and because — and I say this with great love for the man — the last chapter of the book is called The Good Fight Is the One You Lose, and that’s the one he’s fought his whole life. He knows this as an old man. The Civil Rights Movement, which he bankrolled. He turned all his stardom, all his fortune, put his life on the line multiple times to do this, deliberately worked subversive music into the American mainstream, and it got broken. Here we are, and he knows that, and I think we need to know too; that the struggle is long, things change.

Harry Belafonte is a better, stronger and much better looking man than me. If he couldn’t win, well, how do I win? Well, I understand that the struggle is long, and I take hope and heart from him and pay attention to the way he looks for the codes, looks for the subversive, radical force within, and also his critique. I think hopefully, this became clear: This America is a minstrel show; the minstrel act. This is the whiteness, this is the poison and the toxicity of whiteness that runs — that becomes then a sort of a main theme of the book as I go through this country.

Sam Goldman 31:15

One of the things that I really valued is that you explicitly wrestle with this phenomena of the press just going to some small diner and valorizing and legitimizing the most reactionary grievance they can find. What you’ve done in this book isn’t just saying something like: They’re just like us. And it’s also not painting some cartoonish villain. If anything, it’s much scarier than that. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about who you met that stood out to you the most; some of the representative characters you met. How you view what I would call the fascist base. And what you think that too many people get wrong when they refuse to take this space seriously.

Jeff Sharlet 32:01

The main thing they get wrong is that they forget that fascists have bodies, just like us. And if you have a body, you have desires, you have wants, you have things that you love and things that you hate, and you’re not pure in either because there is no purity. The purity is another fascist lie. All purity is a fascist lie, right. So, I was fascinated all the time by that. I’m thinking of a church in Omaha, Nebraska, the Lord of Hosts church in Omaha. I was just driving through Omaha, pulled into an old shopping mall. All the big box stores had been gutted, and they’ve all been turned into mega churches. And I go to this very diverse church. That’s another thing people don’t realize. A lot of liberal churches are fairly segregated. Rightwing churches are not.

Jeff Sharlet 32:41

And they’re not puny is another thing. Some of these when I was reading, I was like: Wow, there’s that many people!

Jeff Sharlet 32:47

When I go reporting, I don’t say: Alright, I’m gonna go right to the heart of the thing. I wander. People say: Well, why did you talk to those folks? Because they were there. They have energy, imagination. This church, the music was fantastic. It was great. It was this energetic service, but you just said: Well, really, we’re all the same. In the main essay, The Undertow, there is literally an undertow of footnotes; not because I want to be academic — they’re not citations — but because I wanted to actually challenge the story that I’m telling in the body, and think of: Well, here are the forms, right?

I’m telling you about this amazing church and this amazing music and everything else, and how excited everybody is, and then I say, footnote: Why go on about barely sublimated eroticism and ecstasy of a congregation. I’ve already let you know it’s in denial of death, embracing the virus; they see COVID-19 as a good thing — they believe in it and think it was good. It’s God culling, stoking the return of a fascism not really gone — this is also an open war church. Is it they too have feelings: Like we’re really all the same underneath? No, we really are not. We’ve made different choices. We’re on different timelines.

The current year or 1776 — which has, by the way, replaced the Holy Ghost in the Christian Trinity. It used to be Father, Son, the Holy Ghost. Now its Father, Son and the Spirit of 1776. The Forever election of 2020 or 1619, backwards or beyond past 2030. Last chance, say some scientists to keep the temperature down into an age of elegy in which this congregation’s tears or yours, or mine will all be equal; Liquid milliliters added to the deepening ocean. We are not the same. They don’t think we’re the same. But we are in the same place. It’s why I kind of reject crisis language. Crisis, I think, is another fascist word — it’s a crisis of democracy.

We’ve got to preserve democracy? What, we should put it in a jam jar? We’ve never had democracy. Democracy is not something you have, it’s something you do, and we still haven’t learned to do it. The climate crisis: We’re not in a climate crisis. If there’s a climate crisis, that suggests that there could be a big finale — you know, Bruce Willis is gonna fly a spaceship into an asteroid or something and save us. This is our condition. That’s where we are. This is why I say: Their tears or mine. I also would say the other thing that people don’t know about fascism — this is particular to American fascism, I think — might be there in other countries — it’s grief stricken.

It is filled with grief. I’m not saying this like: Oh, gosh, it’s just economic hardship. It is for some. There’s this silly thing, like we have to choose economic or race as if neoliberalism did not predate on both directions, right? It is grief stricken, and it’s the failure to mourn. This is where I’ll call to mourning. Mourning is an imaginative act to account for our losses, to understand that which is lost, and that which can still be made. Fascism will not mourn, will not acknowledge its loss. That’s why Trump says we’re going to win forever.

Sam Goldman 35:47

What you’re saying makes me think a lot. I struggle with: There’s no crisis. What you’re saying about it being a slow Civil War definitely makes sense. I do think that there’s times where things do cleave. And the way that time works — I don’t mean this in some hokey metaphorical sense but — you can go through a whole generation of change in a really short period of time. We’ve seen certain aspects of that in my lifetime, but not really. I think [Jeff: I think really, absolutely, I mean]. But here’s moments of time where the whole Trump fascist movement — there’s been acceleration, really, really quick, and not that long of a time period.

But I also think that can go in a positive direction too. Progress can be made and it not be some slow long march. Things can happen and people can do what previously seemed to be unimaginable. Through their daring, they make it possible — not through some willful: We willed it into being, but people do make that happen. And it’s not all just set at boil.

Jeff Sharlet 36:56

Oh, I agree. When I reject the word crisis, it’s not that I reject the idea. The penultimate chapter of the book is called The Great Acceleration, which is what we’re in, and I would like to talk more about that, and that’s a term that sort of originates on the left and is migrated to the right. I feel like it was like slow pitch softball, like we just teed them up for that. It’s not to say that there aren’t moments of very quick and rapid change. I do mean in the hokey metaphorical sense. I’m all for that.

I think we need to pay attention to the metaphors, right? Because that’s what the Christian right churches’, the Christian nationalist churches’ concept called spiritual war — sounds real scary, it’s like jihad. Jihad is not scary; spiritual war is not scary. It can mean a person trying to become a better person — until the metaphor becomes concrete. That’s when a church starts arming up as these churches do, right. But crisis is a metaphor, I think, of the right. It’s a narrative structure. I mean, it’s storytelling, right? This is Aristotle. He has this this model — we all know the story — sympathetic character encounters conflict, achieves resolution. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending, but that’s it. And we are teed up for that story. That’s a an eschatological story. That is an apocalyptic story. That’s Donald Trump sending out emails now say: It’s the final battle! It wasn’t the final battle for Harry Belafonte. Civil War sure wasn’t the final battle. There is no final battle. There is the long struggle.

Crisis suggests that this story is going to come to an end. It does suggest that it’s a savior narrative too, right. Nah, noh. When I say “our condition”, our condition is the world we live in. It’s not a climate crisis, for instance, because there is no ending. There will be a climate with or without us. Climate’s not having a crisis at all climate is just going along. Whatever you all want to do, that’s up to you. How you’re going to live with this. How are you going to show that daring that you speak of? This is what I tried to do in this — this is another sort of undercurrent of this book, to study the metaphors of the right.

There’s so many people, mostly on the right, but also on the left, who think the Civil War is gonna be like Red Dawn, it’s gonna be like Patrick Swayze running around in the woods. I’m of the 80s, Red Dawn is a group of high school kids who take to the woods to fight a Soviet invasion. I guess they did a remake and made it a Chinese invasion, but then they wanted to sell the movie in China, so they made it: Suddenly North Korea has a big enough land army to invade the United States, whatever, high schoolers go and fight in the woods. It’s very romantic. There’s all kinds of romances [SG: Oh, absolutely, yeah.] of they’re just like us, and then there’s the romance of we can resist, there’s the romance of the John Brown Gun Club, which I don’t fully condemn, though, because if you have a drag show, and there’s someone showing up with guns.

Sam Goldman 37:41

There’s a difference between a right to defend yourself and this is our strategy. [JS: Yes, thank you.] People have a right to defend themselves. LGBTQ folks who, their lives are threatened just for existing. If folks self organize and defend themselves at events, I get that. [JS: Yeah, yeah, yeah] People should have their back. My understanding of that particular club and others like it is that they’re not aren’t easily provoked, and they are not going out to go to town.

Jeff Sharlet 39:33

If you’d like to stand in public with your AR-15, you’ve lost me. I’m not gonna say against you, because if there’s another guy standing across the street, but I’m saying this is not a winning strategy.

Sam Goldman 40:13

It’s not a winning strategy, right. That is where I’m saying, we’re not going to war right now here. This is not how you’re gonna win.

Jeff Sharlet 40:21

People forget that the real Civil War was a slow civil war for a long time before it became a hot one. John Brown did a lot of stuff before Harpers Ferry. [SG: Oh yeah, totally.] And, he wasn’t the only one. There was a lot of stuff going on. I think that’s a really good point. I think there’s a group toward the end of the book, and I love them, they’re sort of the the heroes of [SG: Oh, the Wisconsin kids, right?] The Wisconsin kids, yeah. They all have guns. This is Black River Falls, Wisconsin, little small town in Wisconsin. I was in Wisconsin after Roe fell and Wisconsin became — this stupid red state/blue state, but it is a blue state, blue governor and so on — reverted to 1849 law; abortion illegal, no exceptions, and a completely gerrymandered legislature, no chance of changing and even though it’s a fairly blue state.

So I just decided to drive around. I had a I had a friend who was in the process of IVF, literally in the examination room when the decision came down, and the nurse comes in crying and says we’re not legally allowed to do this anymore. The downfall of Roe was stopping them from having a baby. I drove around, talking to people, and that meant talking to a lot of fascists, but I pull into Black River Falls, Wisconsin, little town, sort of centrally in Wisconsin, and on the bridge over the Black River are these young women and queer folks. They’re standing there, and my favorite — maybe this will show up, the book has pictures too — I love this kid, and she’s a cheerleader. These are not hipster radical kids. These are not Antifa. They’re student body presidents, they’re cheerleaders, they are very nice children in a small town.

After their protest, we went to Perkins for waffles and pancakes, which is what you do in a small town, that’s where I grew up. It was 2022 but it could have been 1980, it could have been any time. But anyway, here’s the sign that Payton made — I don’t know if you can see it — Fuck Off. This is what Payton was saying, was a cheerleader for the Black River Falls Tigers named Peyton arrived with her Fuck Off sign; meaning if you don’t believe in women’s rights, you can just literally go fuck off. You ain’t gettin’ no pussy. You ain’t gettin’ nothing and then she said: Rage. These kids had such heart. There was a local preacher brought his whole family out; his poor little kids. They had been promised soft serve ice cream if they held up giant signs of bloody fetuses. They kept saying: Can we get ice cream now? No, because dad is busy towering over these young women, screaming at them that they’re whores and going to hell.

We go to Perkins, I raised the question of civil war. I think in this small town, these kids aren’t going to know anything about this, this and so on. They get hung, and they say, one of them is young woman joining the Navy to get skills, rural Wisconsin, they’ll have guns, they all know how to shoot except one. She’s the archer. She’s their Katniss, they say, you know, Hunger Games. She’s their leader, and they had huge heart and they’re like: We’re ready to fight. They’re not waiting for us to save them. The guns are misplaced — it’s not gonna be Red Dawn, their guns aren’t going to do any good. But the courage and the understanding that this is where the struggle is. That, to me, that’s what I mean by hard won hope. The hope is not like it’s gonna work out. The hope is that I can struggle [SG: Yeah] and I might be able to do this.

Sam Goldman 40:21

That story stood out to me, the pro-abortion protest in Wisconsin, because on one level, simply that this small group of teenagers were talking seriously about fundamental change and not about things going back to normal, [JS: Yeah] but a different kind of future.

Jeff Sharlet 41:46

They totally understood. That’s again why I reject crisis. Part of the why and way I’m traveling through this in writing, and I think about this all the time at a young age of 44 — lucky me, genetic lottery, I get two heart attacks, right. The funny thing is, when you’ve had a heart attack — it also did become lucky because it’s such a nice icebreaker with so many fascists who also have heart conditions. Then we’re like sitting there talking about: Oh, are you running? Are you vegetarian? What do you do? Oh, that’s a great recipe. You know. And now tell me about your fascist plans. After you’ve had a heart attack, people say: Oh, you’re healthy, you’re gonna get all better. Your heart’s gonna be stronger than ever. And the truth is, no, it never will. That’s lost. There’s scar, there’s scar tissue — scar tissue doesn’t grow back.

You know, the Supreme Court’s broken. It was pretty horrible to begin with, but now it’s really broken. These kids aren’t saying: Hey, can we just get back to the Rehnquist Court? It’s why I love Wisconsin, their motto, they have a socialist motto: Forward. That is the only actual factual timeline we can engage in is forward. I think these kids understand the losses, but they understand the losses open your eyes to other possibilities. You should write something about this, about the difference between the right to defend yourself and strategy. I don’t know if you hear this, I hear this all the time, people saying: Well, I’m buying a gun or I have a gun, they can come for me.

Sam Goldman 44:54

There’s certain sections of people, they’re usually younger than me. I get why you’re coming of age and this is your fucking future. I get that it’s go time. [JS: But go where?] Exactly [JS: Go where and go how?] Go where and with what? And most essentially: For what? That is the most paramount question. Because if you don’t have your ends in mind, your means are gonna get you in a lot of trouble. I just want to thank you so much for talking with me for as long as we’ve been talking [JS: Oh, it’s a pleasure.] and for sharing your book with us, and the world, and your insight and perspective. I really appreciate it. One of the things that I wanted to mention that I didn’t mention earlier in the conversation, is that your book is quite personal in ways that other things that you’ve written haven’t been. That is a scary thing to do and I’m sure it wasn’t an easy thing to do, and as a parent, it is a wow thing to do.

Jeff Sharlet 45:50

It’s a parent’s book, though. That’s also why, you know, I put in my time. I’ve written my books, there’s other things I want to write about. But as I said, they’re attacking my kid’s school. The old labor song: Which Side Are You On. For its reasons, a mining labor song. A lot of people sort of resist, actually, that idea. And I will say, though, the Right, they have forced to which side are you on moment? Now it is which side are you on? Someone tells me like: Yes, but. Uh-uh. It’s improv time. The only answer is: Yes and. And if you say: Well, yes, but you know, I don’t like the things that some of these young trans activists are saying.

Well, yeah, but which side are you on? You can be on the side of the people who are calling to eradicate them, or you can be on the side of human existence and recognize that trans people are not a monolith either. It’s all kinds of people with different ideas. That is where we’re at. Thank you for the work you guys do at Refuse Fascism, because that makes it clear, right? It’s right there in the name. If someone says: Well, yes, but… [chuckles] Okay, you don’t refuse fascism. Which is it? Yes or no? And I do think it is that. That part is that simple. Everything else is pretty complicated. But that part’s simple. Thank God for that.

Jeff Sharlet 45:53

We’re gonna put a link in the show notes to your book. We’ll link to your Twitter. Is there anything else you want to share with folks that you want to make sure folks get to see.

Jeff Sharlet 47:10

Instagram. The book is partly photographic driven, so there were more photographs than are in the book. I think there’s a whole other story; how do we tell stories about fascism? Like the narrative art of it. I do think part of that is recognizing that Fascism is deeply visual. So we need to respond with our own aesthetic 100%, and develop our aesthetic. So Instagram; come to my corporate square, Instagram, and let us break free of these social medias and communicate more human ways.

Sam Goldman 47:46

Thanks again, Jeff. Really appreciate it.

Jeff Sharlet 47:48

Thanks, Sam. Take care.

Sam Goldman 47:50

Hope can mean a lot of things. There’s a lot of hope that I share with Jeff, but our conversation and the book itself has me thinking about a different kind of hope. Jeff begins the book speaking in depth with Harry Belafonte, and ends writing about communist folk singers in the 30s, 40s and 50s. He titles that last chapter: The Good Fight Is the One You Lose. For a lot of folks, the way to maintain hope for a better future in dark times is to accept that our struggle is long, and maybe we’ll lose now, but one day we’ll win. I don’t see it that way. I think we need to go deeper and look at the contradictions driving our society. The dynamic contradictions at the heart of capitalism/imperialism that lay the basis for its destruction. That make it possible not to just imagine and dream of a better world, not just to blindly work towards it in some distant future, but make it real in this moment, when the potential exists for either incalculable horrors or a truly liberating future. We’ll come back to this in future episodes. And again, that is just my opinion.

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