1). “Scenes From A Slow Civil War w/ Jeff Sharlet | MR LIVE - 3/27/23”, March 27, 2023, Sam Ceder and Emma interview Jeff Sharlet concerning his recent book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, total duration of video 1:29:35, the actual interview runs for about 44 minutes, from about 20:15 - 1:04:12, The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6xE55lPwqg >
Note: This is a video of an interview. There is no transcript, no direct text.
2). “Exploring the crowds that gather for Trump — and dream of civil war: In ‘The Undertow,’ Jeff Sharlet examines the anger powering American politics today”, March 21, 2023, Book Review by Adam Fleming Petty, Washington Post, at <https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/03/21/undertow-slow-civil-war-jeff-sharlet-review/>
3). “Civil War Is ‘on the Table’: Jeff Sharlet on the Martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt and What’s to Come”, July 8, 2022, Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan, Vanity Fair, at <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/jeff-sharlet-on-the-martyrdom-of-ashli-babbitt-and-whats-to-come>
4). Archive of Articles by Jeff Sharlet from Vanity Fair, From Jeff Sharlet, Archive, Vanity Fair, at < https://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/jeff-sharlet >
Introduction by dmorista: Jeff Sharlet has been watching the religious far-right in America for several years now. He has recently been making the rounds of the media venues where authors appear on talk shows to discuss their newest book. His new book is The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. It is mostly a compilation of his ongoing series of articles that have appeared in Vanity Fair over the past few years. That basic material is supplemented by new material. Sharlet has traveled widely across the U.S. and talked with many adherents of the various far-right belief systems and organizations. He has been disturbed by the increasing brandishing of guns and the development of phenomena like armed militias, that are now frequently based in evangelical churches. He has talked with many people who fervently believe that a Civil War is coming to the U.S. and who are organizing and arming up to prepare for the opportunities that such chaos would provide them. Sharlet is trying to warn the great majority of Americans, who do not support a fascist takeover of our society, of the increasing danger of such a development.
Sharlet stresses the importance of racism in the growth of the number of violently oriented rightwingers. Clearly racism plays a role but the most important factor, here in the U.S. just as it was in Germany and Italy; is the collapse of the types of industries and businesses that made it possible for working people to buy homes, pay for reasonably priced education, health care and other social services, and to be able to retire with an adequate pension and enjoy their grandchildren and other facets of life when they grow older. These attributes, of a once viable American Social Democracy, have all been totally or partially destroyed by the Finance Capitalist offensive over the past 40 years. Clearly we face a real chance of seeing an American-style Fascism take over our society. In somewhat less that totality this already is partially implemented in several of the more retrograde American States (Texas, Florida, Alabama, Idaho and so on).
I found and posted one interview from The Majority Report, a book review from the Washington Post, and a short article from Vanity Fair. I also posted, at the end of this material, an Archive of 18 articles that Sharlet has had published in Vanity Fair in the period from June of 2020 to March of 2023.
1). “Scenes From A Slow Civil War w/ Jeff Sharlet | MR LIVE - 3/27/23”, March 27, 2023, Sam Ceder and Emma interview Jeff Sharlet concerning his recent book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, total duration of video 1:29:35, the actual interview runs for about 44 minutes, from about 20:15 - 1:04:12, The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6xE55lPwqg >
“Jeff Sharlet then dives right into how his work reviews the United States’ failing relationship with fascism, and how he views his own relationship to it, as a long-time journalist covering the Right Wing, walking through the complete refusal to even use the term “fascist” to describe the right until Trump’s rise to power, and how his ascendency saw a marked shift of Christian Nationalism towards a cult of personality. After a brief definition of fascism, Jeff, Sam, and Emma parse through what role the cult of personality plays in fascism, and how the Christian Theocrats see Trump as more of an avatar, a tool of god to unite the right, before stepping back to look at the evolution of fascism over the last 80 years, looking at the global rise of fascism today, and its continued connection to cultures of aggrievement. Next, Sharlet looks to the 2020 election and end of Trump’s reign as a particular spark under the far-right, igniting their theocratic attacks on abortion and trans people, also touching on how the far right, and everyone else, view this “slow civil war.” Wrapping up, they explore the concept of the “rabbit hole” of the far right, the absurdity of appealing to a politics of irrationalism with rationalism, and why the strongest measure in the fight against fascism is stepping up and building beautiful things that people want to be a part of.”
Note: This is a video of an interview. There is no transcript, no direct text.
2). “Exploring the crowds that gather for Trump — and dream of civil war: In ‘The Undertow,’ Jeff Sharlet examines the anger powering American politics today”, March 21, 2023, Book Review by Adam Fleming Petty, Washington Post, at <https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/03/21/undertow-slow-civil-war-jeff-sharlet-review/>
7–9 minutes
{Caption: Attendees at a rally in Latrobe, Pa.,on Nov. 5, 2022, three days before the midterm elections. (Shuran Huang for The Washington Post) }
“The future belongs to crowds,” Don DeLillo wrote in his 1991 novel, “Mao II.” Massive crowds of faceless people banding together to heave their collective shoulder against the wheel of history. In DeLillo’s telling, those crowds existed elsewhere — in the Mideast, in Southeast Asia. Places where American individualism found less purchase. Decades later, in an irony DeLillo might appreciate, they’re coming home.
Maybe not entirely faceless, though. One face, sporting a pale forelock, looms large. One name, deployed as a verb, whips and snaps. You know it, I know it: Trump. I’m writing this in rural Indiana, where I’m visiting family. Out the window I can see the neighbor’s house, where a TRUMP flag flies at full-staff. Even a house on a country road can become part of a crowd.
(Caption: W.W. Norton)
That’s the phenomenon Jeff Sharlet captures in his new book, “The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War.” Sharlet has spent much of his career covering the intersections of religion and right-wing politics, most famously in “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” A look at the Christian organization that hosts the National Prayer Breakfast, among other activities both domestic and international, “The Family” found new life during the early Trump administration, when a documentary based on the book aired on Netflix.
Trump, and Trumpism, benefited more than anyone could have guessed from this fusion of personal faith and political action. Sharlet has chronicled that rise in his dispatches for Vanity Fair, traversing the country to visit the faithful. “The Undertow” gathers that writing, along with some new material, to form a travelogue that tarries with furious people in forgotten places, all of them convinced that civil war of some sort is in the offing. This marks a difference between his earlier work on “The Family,” which involved deep dives into the organization’s history and hierarchy, and “The Undertow.” To put it in religious terms, one could say he’s turned his attention from the pulpit to the congregation. Less the leaders and more the crowds, whether physical or virtual, sitting in pews or staring into screens.
It’s almost too easy to mock those who join such gatherings. I know I’m guilty of that. But Sharlet urges the reader to take their fantasies seriously, as they have produced consequences that are all too real. The realest, of course, arrived on Jan. 6, 2021. At the time, the storming of the U.S. Capitol felt unbelievable. Reading “The Undertow,” it feels inevitable.
A hipster megachurch in Miami fills the sanctuary to capacity with a message of prosperity, and nothing else. A men’s rights conference held outside Detroit draws a host of men, and a surprisingly formidable contingent of women, to discuss the supposed dangers of feminists entrapping men with false accusations of sexual assault. The women’s presence highlights a running theme of the book: Look at these crowds, and you will see faces you never expected to find there. A bravura sequence finds Sharlet in Sacramento at a rally for Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot and killed by Capitol police on Jan. 6. He then journeys across the country, from churches to American Legion posts to Shooters, the now-defunct “open-carry” restaurant owned by Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado. Everywhere, from everyone, he hears talk of civil war, the term never quite achieving definition. “When I asked, civil war, when the believers answered, civil war, we were speaking in metaphors we could barely comprehend. We were describing a feeling that frightened or exhilarated us: a body coming apart.”
But if a war is coming, even a metaphorical one, what are its terms? What are the grievances these crowds seek to address? Based on the signs waved at rallies and the hashtags gone viral on social media, their complaints include, but are not limited to, immigration, mask mandates, gun rights, gender identity, abortion. But there’s not even consensus on which of these issues matters most or in what way. One darkly funny scene finds a Trump-flag-waving homeowner in Wisconsin incensed with the Democrats for overturning Roe v. Wade. Anger searching not for a target but a pretext.
Yet Sharlet believes there is a deeper fear, a deeper grievance, roiling beneath the copy-pasted outrage. The underlying cause of this potential civil war is not so different from that of the actual civil war of the not-so-distant past: race.
{Caption: Author Jeff Sharlet. (Jeff Goodlin) }
“They are angry about their own bodies, about how other people’s bodies make them feel,” Sharlet writes about these mostly White crowds. And how do other bodies make them feel? In a word, uninnocent. The very awkwardness of that term suggests the mental gymnastics these crowds struggle to perform. The crowds revere innocence, purity, blamelessness. Ashli Babbitt is transformed from a troubled young woman into a flawless saint, a martyr for the cause of freedom. “Be proud White Americans!” Babbitt’s mother exhorts the crowd at a rally for her daughter. Proud they are innocent of racism, prejudice, guilt. Yet even the presence of non-White people is a reminder of the bloody, guilt-ridden history of the land they live on. None can escape it, no matter how hard they might try, no matter how much of the past they forget.
If “The Undertow” lacks anything, it’s a sense of the grim economic landscape. Prices are going up everywhere while wages are going down. Many of the people at these crowds — the “beautiful ‘boaters,’” as Trump so appositely calls them — are quite prosperous, yet they live in the least-prosperous areas, the exurbs and the small towns of flyover states. Such proximity to immiseration probably contributes to the sense of desperation on display at these gatherings. The blight is at the door, and they raise their flags to keep it at bay.
But that’s a minor quibble. I deeply appreciate Sharlet’s mythic-religious approach and how it enables him to capture what other journalists miss. Data can tell only half the story, and usually the half that’s less interesting. Add to that the book’s welcome ambition, both as journalism and literature. This is no mere compilation of bullet points. This is journalism-as-art, attempting to capture the mood of the nation at this fraught moment, so that others in the future may know how it felt to live through the present. Hopefully there will still be readers then.
Adam Fleming Petty is a writer in Grand Rapids, Mich.
The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
By Jeff Sharlet, W.W. Norton. 337 pp. $28.95
3). “Civil War Is ‘on the Table’: Jeff Sharlet on the Martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt and What’s to Come”, July 8, 2022, Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan, Vanity Fair, at <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/jeff-sharlet-on-the-martyrdom-of-ashli-babbitt-and-whats-to-come>
The Vanity Fair contributing editor discusses his journey among the Jan. 6 cultists, …
By Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan July 8, 2022
(Caption: by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/Getty Images.)
This week Vanity Fair contributing editor Jeff Sharlet joins Inside the Hive to talk about his journey into the far-right world of January 6 insurrectionists, QAnon-ers, and Trump cultists—who they are, what they’re saying, what they believe, and what their still-growing movement might portend (including the specter of civil war in America). Such a prospect, says Sharlet, is “scarier than it’s ever been.”
(This above is a Graphical Image of the Link to the Discussion by Jeff Sharlet of “The Martyrdom of Ashli Babbit and What’s to Come”. To listen to the actual audio go to <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/jeff-sharlet-on-the-martyrdom-of-ashli-babbitt-and-whats-to-come>)
A condensed and edited version of the conversation with Sharlet follows.
THE HIVE NEWSLETTER
Vanity Fair: As somebody on the front lines of [the far-right movement], how frightening to you is the prospect of civil war?
Jeff Sharlet: Scarier than it’s ever been. I mean, the young son of a friend, when I stopped on the way to meet a militia commander, says, “Why would you talk to a Nazi?” It’s kind of a good, sensible question. But I think I’m driven by a certain counterphobia. Ten years ago the idea of civil war in the United States was absurd. I still think it’s not inevitable or maybe even likely, but it’s definitely on the table and there’s definitely people preparing for it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, almost a little more comfortable to go and see it. Until you get too close! There’s the church I mentioned in Omaha. When they saw that I was speaking to some of the members of the church, a man in full tactical gear, armed, came out with a church usher, and the church usher says, “You’re not allowed to talk to our members.” [I said], “You don’t actually control them and we’re not on your property.” It didn’t matter to him. And I said, “You brought a man with a gun. I've got a notebook, and you brought a man with a gun.” And he just leans in and he says, “I didn’t bring a man with a gun. How do you know I don’t have a gun?”
There were no honest reporters; I was the enemy and I was in trouble. And that was terrifying. I have to say, I had never been threatened with guns at a church before in my years reporting. [Being threatened with a gun] is uncommon, but it happens.
Can we even call the proliferation of far-right groups and QAnon believers a “fringe” at this point?
The fringe has become the center. And I think that’s sort of why it matters to me to keep looking at this stuff. And I think there’s people who say, the thing that every journalist says is, “Why don’t you tell stories about people who are doing good things?” But there’s also people who say, you know, “I know everything I need to know about these guys. I don’t need to know anything about them.” And I don’t think that’s true. I think what’s happening right now and this kind of global fascist moment is a great broad convergence of many tributaries, many strands. It’s not a monolith. That’s part of what makes it so dangerous—there are so many pieces of it, and to resist it, we have to map it.
After January 6, I knew on the surface about the martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt but didn’t realize the depth of it. She really is a key figure now.
Yeah, Ashli Babbitt, this 34-year-old white woman from Southern California, had not been a particularly political person most of her life. Voted for Obama twice, was in the Air Force, and then had a pool-cleaning business and became radicalized. Something about Trump clicked for her. In 2016 she wrote her first tweet, and it was “#LoveDonaldTrump.” And she kept going deeper from there and was all the way to the Capitol where she was shot. The Capitol Hill police officer who shot her, Lieutenant Michael Byrd, was a Black man. And even before his name was known, you could see the photo of him. And as soon as I saw that, that day, I said, “I think I know what they’re going to do with this.” Because this is a very old American story. It’s the lynching story, the idea of “innocent white womanhood” and “the dangerous Black man,” and that’s exactly, exactly what they started doing. So it wasn’t so much that they had to create a martyr story; they just had to plug her into a very old, racist martyr story and take it from there.
4). Archive of Articles by Jeff Sharlet from Vanity Fair,
From Jeff Sharlet, Archive, Vanity Fair, at < https://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/jeff-sharlet >
These are graphical images from the Vanity Fair website, to actually access them go to
< https://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/jeff-sharlet >. Vanity Fair has, I think, a one free article per month policy. Subscribers can download unlimited quantities of course.
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