The Bulwark Podcast - Jeff Sharlet: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

In the parts of the country where Ashli Babbitt is a martyr, pastors glorify guns, and conspiracies thrive, the anticipation of some kind of civil war animates the far right. Author and journalist Jeff Sharlet sees an America that is unraveling. He joins Charlie Sykes today. Show Notes: Jeff's book, "The Undertow"  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is April 6, 2023. And just in case you think we've been too bright and cheery lately, we're going to turn the dial a little bit. Jeff Charlotte is a journalist, author, and a Dartmouth professor whose latest book is The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War.

Jeff, thanks for joining me on the podcast today. Thanks for having reason, I was thinking about whether or not we've already entered into a cold civil war or a slow civil war. That's an interesting phrase that you use here. You've spent a lot of time on the road interviewing people. And you gave an interview last year and you said you felt like you were watching the United States fray and unravel as you traveled the country over the past decade. So let's talk about this fraying and unraveling of America. A lot of us are trying to figure out how to put this in the context of other fractures this country has gone through. So give me a sense of this fraying and unraveling of America that you see when you talk to people. I've been reporting on right-wing movements for more than 20 years, from establishment to far right to what I think now, with caution, we can fairly call fascist. And there are those who sort of say, yes, but this has always

been there. And I think I would have held that position once too. I would have said, look, this has always been a part of the fabric of American life. Something has been changing. And I think Trump opened a door and I think January 6th, 2021 tore it off the hinges. I'd been sort of watching this transformation, but it was after that that I saw a group of academic historians debating how close the United States might be to civil war. I'm married to an academic historian. I know how rightly cautious they are, that they know that history moves slowly, except when it doesn't. And for the first time, these cautious historians were saying civil war is on the table. It's not inevitability. It's not even civil war, the question was really more

whether they looked forward to it or whether they were sad about it, but believed it had to happen. I still don't believe it has to happen, but I think we are in the slow civil war. The violence is already simmering. People say, could violence happen? It is happening. Okay. So let's talk about the phraseology here. When you say civil war, what do you mean? I mean, are we talking about an actual shooting war? We're not talking about North versus South. What is the form of this civil war? I mean, obviously, we've broken into red and blue, and it sometimes seems like it's county by county. But what form does it take? What are we talking about here? I think all kinds of possibilities. You know, as funny as I was, the penultimate chapter of the book is in Wisconsin. And as I was driving around Wisconsin, I was listening to an audio book of a political scientist, Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start. And she was sort of looking at, you know, these global wars. I think we've had her on this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Terrific, very valuable book. And frighteningly, I'm sure she mentioned

that at the end of the book, she sort of says, and maybe it'll begin in Wisconsin, maybe. But I think the one thing that sort of curtails the imagination of some of the political scientists is trying to put this slow civil war in classical terms.

And at the same time, reassuring ourselves, I hear all the time, well, wait till these militias get a load of an F-16, right? And of course, I don't think all the militias that went to militia churches and militia meetups and so on, no, they're not going to form an army that divides the war. I do think that any one of them, at any point, there are potentials for sparks. And whether that's a spark that moves us from this slow civil war into a Northern Ireland kind of trouble

situation, or, and I think this is what's really frightening, gets us to the point where we have, say, base commanders, senior officers, wondering about the chain of command. And we've already been there. General Milley made a point on January 6th to remind everybody what the chain of command was and to frankly, somewhat subvert it. He's like, don't take any orders but from me. One of the most overlooked pieces of journalism in recent times, and here I am, I buy my book, but pay attention to this other stuff. But that's so it is. The Washington Post had an op-ed by three retired senior generals who said, look, these are all people who believe in following orders, but they're not sure whose orders to follow. And I know from my own reporting, I've reported for other books on a kind of militant

fundamentalism amongst some of the senior officer corps. There's much more room for fault lines there. So whether it's like this, skirmishes here, casualties by any other name, whether we enter into a phase of political bombings, which we've been in before and survived, or whether something is a spark for one rogue base commander, or whether Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott, thinking to make a name for themselves, decides to do something that dares Biden to send federal troops. And that's a sort of a win-win for them, I think. Either the troops come and they're a martyr or the troops don't come and they stare them down. So I've been thinking in terms of the more near term, you talk about the slow civil war, which is a hot civil war, I've been thinking of a slow, cold civil war where you do have a number

of states who are taking positions that do seem to at least flirt with nullification, not actual secession, but this rhetoric about rejecting federal authority. You have the sheriff's movement saying we're not going to enforce any of these federal laws, the rejection of the rest of the country, that kind of rhetoric, that you do wonder at some point, do we have political manifestations of this where you have the rejection of Washington morphing into a rejection of the federal government and the norms that we've taken for granted? Because, I mean, there's a long tradition here of states' rights, of federalism. There is a point at which someone like Iran DeSantis might push it over the line. And I'm not there yet. I'm talking about actual shooting and guns, but a step that would reject the authority of the federal government or that would take a punitive approach to other states.

And we see this on a variety of issues. Is this something you're concerned about? Yeah, I think it's already happening, as you say, in the county level. I start the title essay, The Undertow, first in Sacramento, California, at a rally for Ashley Babbitt. And then from there, I'm invited to a church of glad tidings

in Yuba City, California, which has gotten something of a national profile because it never closed its doors during COVID. That area has what's called a constitutional sheriff, which is in fact kind of an unconstitutional sheriff, but a movement subscribed to by 40% of sheriffs in the United States right now that maintains that the sheriff is the highest authority. 40%? Yeah. Well, by one study, apparently. I don't know if it's that high. No, no, no. That's alarming. Yeah.

I mean, if it's any, it's alarming. I mean, that's always been there, too. Think of the sheriffs who once ruled their rural counties like feudal lords, right? But this is now more not just about local power, but about ideology. This sheriff refused to shut down this church. This sheriff knows that that church has militia training every Tuesday and isn't going to interfere. The church is very confident that they can do what they want. And now they've got national right-wing figures like

Candace Owens and General Michael Flynn making a beeline to make appearances there. So I think that's already happening at that level. And then I think a lot of people were saying, is there. So I think that's already happening at that level. And then I think a lot of people were saying, is there going to be a January 6th-like violence this week after Trump is arrested? I don't think so for any number of reasons, having spoken to so many January 6ers, but also because some of that violence has been institutionalized. Look at the state of Tennessee expelling three Democratic state legislators for protesting gun violence. That's what the January Sixers wanted to do. They wanted to get them out. Now they're doing it by institutional takeover. So what's interesting about your work is that you deal with the intellectual basis of this,

but also with the difficult people doing terrible things. So at one point you write, right-wing intellectuals have actively rejected democracy now. Trump's emails are getting scarier, talking about how this is the final battle. Our job is to hold on as long as we can, but we're going forward into the desert. The terror is about how much hurt and how much pain happens, which is scary. So let's just talk about your dark travelogue, because you go out into the world, and I should mention you're a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and some of these stories that have been published. And Esquire wrote about you that you've made a career out of writing about bad people. Is that because it gives you a sense of control or rationality or just because you're curious? I mean, most of us want to avoid the

crazy and the bad. You seek them out. I'm just trying to figure that out. It is a number of things. Every right-wing movement I've ever been to, except one, and that's in the bad, you seek them out. I'm just trying to figure that out. It is a number of things. Look, every right-wing movement I've ever been to, except one, and that's in the book, has always more complex and has this whole worldview more complex than the character of it. And that's fascinating to me. As a writer, I like to understand how other people see the world, and especially people see it very differently than me. Not out of simple curiosity, but yes, also, you know, I'm a Jew with a queer kid. I need to know where the guns are aimed. And that's something I've understood my whole life growing up.

The only Jew in my small town where, you know, don't tell me we're past anti-Semitism. I grew up fighting just for being a Jew. And I'm not even particularly Jewish. I'm a secular Jew. But I think that that violence that you see across there and that kind of going and looking at those folks, it does give you a certain sense of agency. The big title essay, the book, The Undertow, was the first travel I took. I was very careful and still am, but even more careful during the earlier part of the pandemic.

And I decided to travel across the country in this summer of 21, sort of following the ghost of Ashley Babbitt, as it were, watching this martyr myth in formation. And I was sad like everybody else. I think there's so much grief in this country for things that we're losing. And I think grief, it isn't processed. It isn't mourned. It curdles. It curdles into anger and rigidity. It can curdle into fascism. And I didn't want to do that. So I said, okay, by talking to these people, not discovering that we're really just the same. No, we're not. We've made different choices in our lives. But by understanding that story, that's what I can do. That's what I can do for my kids. My kids are scared for the future.

What do I know how to do? I know how to tell stories. Which can be scary. If we understand this, we might be able to resist it. So you write about the Trump faithful, men's rights activists, gun fanatics, the modern televangelists, the QAnon folks, the people who are lost in conspiracy, and the Times did a review and said that the result is a riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America. So let's start with this Ashley Babbitt thing, because I think this is a lot of the things that you're writing

about, I think are incredibly frightening, but also we need to pay attention. I think that there is a belief out there by some people that if we just don't talk about it, if we avert our eyes, maybe it'll go away. But these things simmer under the surface. And the transformation of Ashley Babbitt into a martyr is underappreciated as a dangerous phenomenon because all fanatical movements need that martyr. So let's start with that dispatch you wrote from California. You went to an Ashley Babbitt rally and you quote this former TV host saying that January 6th was one of the most beautiful days I've ever seen in America. Who shows up at this? Who is Ashley Babbitt to them? So Ashley Babbitt, we watched her die as I write almost in real time. That video came out on that day. Look,

as someone who's been writing about the far right for a long time, there's ways in which January 6 wasn't surprising and the ways that there is no preparation for that. It was heartbreaking. And there are some who look at that Ashley Babbitt's death and say, good, she deserved it. I just don't feel that way about killing people, right? I don't have any sympathy for her. I think domestic terrorist is the right term for her. She was an insurrectionist. She was not unarmed. The knife on the cover of the book is the knife she was carrying.

I hear some of her defenders, Tucker Carlson and the like saying, you know, well, it's a small knife. Well, try carrying that knife onto an airplane and tell me how small it is. But I saw that and we could see in the video, there's a number of videos, but there was one that made it onto TV, the hands of the Capitol police officer shot her. And you could see they were the hands of a black man. And because I'm a student of American mythology and American history, I had a strong suspicion of what was going to be made of that story. And within hours, it was. It was the old lynching story. So many lynchings in

American history would revolve around this idea of an innocent white womanhood somehow threatened by black men. And sure enough, that's the story they started telling. Right away, it was fascinating. They started aging her backwards. Here's a 35-year-old woman. They started saying, I think she was in her 20s. No, I think she was 16, a girl. They start making her weight lighter. They are aging her into the sort of innocence of white girlhood, right? It's the same thing when we hear this hashtag, say, the children of QAnon, which Ashley herself believed in. So I needed to understand that. I was going to become the big theological shift, that we were going from one kind of theological rite to now an

age of martyrdom. And I went to Sacramento, where her family was holding a Justice for Ashley rally. It devolved into a brawl between Proud Boys and Antifa. But so many of the people there, they experienced January 6th, as you say, as a beautiful day, as a liberation. And we could write that off as kind of a fringe attitude, except that's what Donald Trump has been doing rather unsubtly. The January 6th choir. I mean, by that point, when I went, he had not actually yet said Ashley Babbitt's name. He didn't say it for six months. The movement had adopted the hashtag SayHerName, which was developed for black women killed by police violence, and they adapted it to

Ashley. Donald Trump didn't for six months until the day the Trump organization was indicted. And he puts out a press release, one line, SayHerName. And then he starts making the rounds saying who shot Ashley Babbitt. Didn't matter that he knew it worked better if it was a conspiracy. Said they shot her in the head. Didn't matter that they didn't, they shot her in the shoulder. But it worked better. And of course, Fox News hosts wouldn't contradict him because you can't fact check the myth. They're making a story that works for them. And now we get to this point where we have Trump singing along with the so-called January 6th choir. In Waco, Texas. Yeah, yeah. And the mythology of that martyrdom, I kind of see Ashley Babbitt, nonetheless,

as something of a placeholder. She was a placeholder in the new martyr mythology of Trumpism. She was keeping the cross warm until the right moment came and he could shove her aside and heave himself up there, which is what I think happened on Tuesday. In this other dispatch, this time from Florida, you write about a Trump follower that you met, Trump follower with platinum hair, dark tan, ice blue eyes, who tells you that God put Trump there to fight against the wickedness of America, which had been led astray by evildoers like the Clintons. She really loved Trump coming down the escalator and all of his strength. And she's dancing at one of these rallies. And you're right. The woman wants to tell you more, but she says it's too terrible to speak of. And you're right. I'm going to say it, she decided,

but she couldn't. She walks off. Her friends were worried. She came back. What did she tell you? They eat people. And we know this now. They eat the children, right? The children. Who eats the children? They. The Clintons? She means the Clintons in particular, but even the Clintons. The Clintons to them are like Ashley Babbitt. I would meet people who would speak of the crime of Arkanside, people who would explain death in their family because apparently somehow the Clintons had orchestrated one woman. Her uncle was a conservative lawyer in a small town in Arkansas. Sadly, he died choking at a steakhouse. Or did he? In other words, you've got a boogeyman

evil. And then up on the stage, Trump is singing that same sort of boogeyman blues, except he's putting it in almost explicitly racist terms. A bad hombre, a brown man, climbs in through the window of an innocent sleeping woman while her husband, a traveling salesman, is away. And I would listen to this story, and that was in Sunrise, Florida, and there I am amongst 20,000 people. First of all, I'm like, traveling salesman? It sounds like maybe some pornography he read when he was a boy. 1957, yeah. And of course, it's a rape story. And the crowd is thrilled by this. It doesn't matter that we're not talking about real things, because what we are talking about are real fears. The fear

is real. I think about what one sheriff years ago taught me. I had gone to interview him about something. He wasn't too fond of it. He pulls a gun on me. Well, it's not really a gun. It's a toy gun, but it scares the hell out of me. He says, see now, if you pulled that on me, I would have shot you. And that just goes to show you that things that aren't real can still hurt you. So all these figures with their fever dreams, it's so easy to dismiss them. And I think that's missing the point. The fascism always has been a dream politics. It's a nightmare to those of us who weren't part of it, but it's not about facts. And we don't push it back by simply saying,

well, that's actually not true. The Clintons don't eat children. And that woman's not going to say, oh, thank you for the correction. I've had an error. This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark Podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make sense of the political world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I'm sure you're going to find my free Morning Shots newsletter, a great companion for understanding what is happening to us. And every morning as I prepare for this show, I share with my readers what's trending and what to pay attention to, including my latest writing and essays on the events of the day. To sign up for my free Morning Shots newsletter, go to thebullwork.com slash morningshots.

That's thebullwork.com slash morningshots. And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon. You go to these Trump rallies, you don't have a press pass, so you buy a ticket and you wait in line for six hours. You stand around on concrete and you told Esquire, I need to be jostled around. This is the experience. And then you tell a rather intimate detail. You mentioned that you've survived two heart attacks.

You have high blood pressure. And this personal health history can be a way to bond with Trump supporters. I mean, I'm reading that going, that personal health history would be why you shouldn't be bonding with these people. You should not be hanging around with these people. But I mean, how does that work? I mean, you say, hey, you know, I'm like one of you. I've had these things as well. Is this an icebreaker with these folks? It's not quite an icebreaker, but a broken heart can open some doors. And I was just sort of surprised by a number of times, usually after you've been talking to someone for a while, and then they mentioned

that. And then you can say, oh yeah, I understand that. And it has to do, it's true with living, I hit the genetic lottery to unexpected heart attacks at 44. And I'm healthy now. I don't actually have high blood pressure, thank God, but only because I take these steps. But it means living with that kind of mortality, there is a bit of a dark cloud that's always there and you're aware of it. And again, this is, I think, becomes a metaphor for the kind of loss that a lot of these people really are living with. And I don't dismiss that as a reality. We're all living with loss now. After COVID, we're living with loss. In a fractured country, we're living with the loss of, do we believe

democracy is sustainable? One thing that I think is fascinating, we're living with climate change as loss, even people who don't believe in it. I would go to so many churches and they would preach on drought and how God has sent a season of drought. And this would be in the West where fire was very literally in the sky. And there's talking about climate change. They're putting it in theological terms, but they're scared. They're scared of the water drying up. So for me, yeah, the heart pass became not a tool, but just a simple fact that I shared with some of these people that once you've experienced that, you have to contend that. If you've had a heart attack, people always tell you, your heart will grow back stronger than ever. And it's true,

you can make a great recovery, but there's dead tissue that doesn't grow back. That's lost. That's gone. I think that's where we are in the Trumpocene now too. People say, can we ever get back to normal? No, no, we're not going back. The only choice for us is to go forward. Well, these people with their dark dreams, they have one path and we're not going to forge another path by saying, let's just swim against the undertow and make it back to shore to the way things used to be. Well, you used two themes there that seem so important. They're scared and there's a sense of loss. There's a sense that things are falling apart, that things are not in control, that they're being displaced and they're trying to understand why, right? I mean, who is doing this

to us? And these various movements give them the answer, right? Focus is the anger. It's not your fault. You are the victim. These people, in fact, are targeting you. They hate you. They look down on you. They are taking your jobs. They are raping your women. I guess the question is, why is this happening now? Because we are living in an era with all the problems that we have, just extraordinary prosperity generally. I'm not trying to be Pollyannish here, but we're in an era where we have supercomputers in our hands all the time. And that's working out great for all of us. Well, exactly. So, I mean, you've given so much thought to all of this. What has made this? Is it, you know, economic dislocation? Is it social dislocation? Is it a racial transformation of our country? Is it an educational gap? Or is it that supercomputer in our hand, you know,

making us all crazy? What do you think? I think my answer is yes. I think my answer is yes in the sense that so many people debate, you know, is the Trump-a-scene. And by the Trump-a-scene, by the way, I mean, there's a preacher in Omaha, Nebraska says, you know, Trump is coming back, whether the man himself or the spirit clothed in the flesh of another, right? Oh, Jesus. Oh, no. Oh, man. Really? If we think of the age of Reagan, and I think a lot of political scientists and historians the age of Reagan goes from 1980 to 2016, which is to say we have Democrats, but we still have a structure of government that was really fundamentally changed by those Reagan years.

We're in the Trump-a-scene now, right? And how do we get there? That's one question. Why are we still there? That's another. And I really believe that the answer is yes. And the people who are debating, is this about race or is it about class? Yes. Is it about misogyny and gender? Oh, my God. Yes. Is it about climate? Yes. Those on the left speak of intersectionality. Fascism has its own intersectionality, too. So I went back and I follow Ashley Babbitt, sort of ghost across the country, talking to everyday people, people who dream they see Ashley Babbitt, people believe that they met her like a folk hero. But I'm also looking at Ashley Babbitt's actual life, its disintegration, and the way that

she found in Donald Trump, a man who licensed her to give into a kind of hate, which she had in her life made attempts to resist. She had sought her better angels. And then Trump comes along and says, the way to win is to stop fighting the current and just go back with it. And then everything starts pouring in, not just race, not just a hatred of an educational system, not just a sense of the things that are stacked against her. Misogyny, a woman who in fact has been held back by being a woman, nonetheless coming to hate all the women she sees as snowflakes. It all starts to converging. And I think that's an intersectionality to the right. I still think, we'll never know for sure, I think the pandemic seals it in. It's kind of a sealant.

A million plus dead, right? And so many other lives broken. And yet we barely speak of it. It's as if it didn't happen. And I think that grief unprocessed curdles. It curdles. It goes rotten. It goes rancid.

I think that is part of what has happened. There's many undertoes in the book, and one of them is a sort of question of grief, how much of this is a pre-existing condition, how much of this was lying latent, and how much of this was opened by Trump, the spark that he had. And I've argued in the past that obviously a lot of this stuff was out there, it was a recessive gene, but that there had been a sense of at least some responsibility among thought leaders to appeal to the better angels. And then Trump comes along and he gives permission to all kinds of impulses and thoughts that might have been suppressed in the past. So he didn't create it, but you can't describe what's happening now without that image of the spark, the permission, you know, pouring the kerosene on it all, or creating some sort of a mystical belief in America first to bring all of this out. I mean, people wrote it back in the 60s

about the paranoid style in American politics, but Trump has done something with it that we haven't seen before at this scale. I wrote about this in this chapter called Heavy with Gold, which comes from a phrase in 2016 when I was sort of going around to rallies. And again, only time I've ever gotten a press pass in my life was to go to the National Prayer Breakfast. I don't like to go with a press pass because I'm not interested in getting the story that everybody else has. I want to get the experience. So I was there in Youngstown, Ohio, and they were so excited about Trump Force One, his airplane coming. And we've been waiting for hours and they're talking with each other about all the gold on that plane. That plane is heavy with gold. They like that. And I think of the significance of that and what he brought to it

and the mood of those rallies was ecstatic. It was joy. It's paranoia plus pleasure. Even in the darker rallies of 2020, which I describe as influenced by a kind of American Gnostic gospel of conspiracy and secrecy and so on, even there, that section's name for an Aerosmith song, Dream On, that Trump would play at his rallies. It's a great song and people would spin in circles, you know, to Steven Tyler singing Dream On. I admit I did it myself at the rally. I have a video on my phone of me sort of spinning, panoraming this giant thing, trying to understand what this was. So Trump did that. He's not unique. And I think we have to understand that part of this is happening in a global fascist moment, right? Erdogan is the Trump of Turkey. Bolsonaro was the Trump of Brazil. There's a Buddhist monk in Myanmar who calls himself the Trump of Myanmar.

And of course, there's Putin and there's Xi. There's something going on globally that is allowing this to happen. But Trump does open that door. And I think partly through a weird kind of joy and ecstasy, and I want to say this too, he's funny. He's one of the two best orders I've ever seen. The other being Obama, very different. One way to understand Trump is to watch a speech when he's on. He's not always on. Turn off the sound. And if you've ever seen Jackie Mason or a Borscht Belt comedian, that's what he's doing. He's got comic timing. The words don't so much matter. The facts don't so much matter. And it's why the press misses it all

along. I read a lot in the book about his performances, this kind of sketch comedy he does that almost never shows up. The skits that he has, where he does multiple voices going back and forth on the stage. They're dark. They're very scary. The crowd finds them funny and thrilling. And much of the press says, well, that's just theater. All fascism is, is just theater. It's performance. The dopamine hit is, here's this guy who comes down. He's got his own jet. He's married to a supermodel. He has gold everywhere. And he can can say shit and he can give a middle finger to all the people they hate. It seems to be one of the things that people really like. They like the transgressiveness of it, the insult. This is a

point that I think a lot of people have made that the insult dog character, this theater you're describing is not something where they think, well, we like him in spite of that. I mean, that's really one of the things that bonds his people to him, isn't it? It is that gigantic golden middle finger with the supermodel and the jet, you know, flanking him on either side. They love that stuff. That's the metaphor. You know, at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, there's a, I believe they're 60 feet tall, gold praying hands. If Trump University was real, it would have a 60 foot tall golden middle finger. It also wouldn't be real gold, but we would insist that it was. Yes, I think that liberation, that transgressiveness, I think about a wonderful elderly couple I met at one rally, and they just look kind of like old grandparent hippies, lots of turquoise

jewelry. And they just looked like if you were a kid lost on the street, you would go up to these people, right? And they would seem safe. And the man says to me, first, I want to get ahold of a protester and beat the shit out of him and get on CNN. And his wife looks at him and says, oh, Jean. And I think she's disapproving. And then she smiles. And then she leans into me and she wants to say something about Hillary. And it's the kind of thing, I don't know if this woman has really said a whole lot in her life. She says, don't she look like she'd been rode hard and put up wet?

Jesus. And she was so thrilled with her vulgarity, right? Vulgarity is thrilling, right? Comedians know this. And I think Trump knows this. Transcending piety is thrilling. And I think Trump and those who follow him in their different ways, DeSantis isn't funny. So he knows he has to work harder in different ways to be transgressive. Nikki Haley is neither

funny nor anything else. But then we see her saying 90% of schoolchildren, kindergartners are under the control of critical race theory. And such an absurd, factually false statement. That's the Trumpocene, that that is the language. You can think of the Trumpocene or the age of Reagan as giving us a vernacular, a language with which at least one party conducts politics, whether it's Trump himself or those who follow. So this also flourishes at a time when the dominant culture, which tends to be more left wing, it seems to be increasingly humorless. You know, that's not funny. All the things you can't say, the words you can't use. So when Trump is transgressive like this, he's transgressive like a lot of comedians are. Is it a coincidence that we're starting to see this from, you know, the Dave Chappelle's who are also mocking the pieties of the age? And again, when you do that, you kind of have the thrill that, you know, you're the bad boys out there, that you're fighting the power, that you're fighting the people who are holding you down, who look down on you. I mean, you're at Dartmouth.

You know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about left-wing humorlessness, right? I do. Although for that very reason, I also know that the right has been very successful at talking about this crisis on the campus. And every now and then I have a student who ventured, believe it or not, some 18-year-olds say stupid things. I mean, certainly not you or I, Charlie. We never said anything dumb. Oh, God, I don't know about you. They say things, they go overboard, they try out an idea. It's not particularly threatening. There are ways in which language changes. And so when I hear folks say, you know, I didn't move right, the Democrats left me. Well, yes, times change.

Language changes. Language evolves. But I do think, yes, there is a kind of humorlessness that they've taken advantage of. And there's ways in which the left has ceded the First Amendment to the right. And the right has made of it what it will, which is no longer about freedom of speech. But by instead of saying, and I know that you're longer about freedom of speech, but by instead of saying, and I know that you're not coming from the left, but the First Amendment used to be an ACLU thing, right? Yes. Now, that to me doesn't mean we have to say, oh, Dave Chappelle is just joking. I look at someone like Dave Chappelle and I say, look, I get it that you're joking. I understand why you're joking.

It's not a very good joke. But at the same time, the right has put us in a moment that I think is best understood with an old 1930s labor song, which side are you on? And this is the slow civil war. We are a state now where almost weekly, if you pay attention, somewhere around the country, you have armed men, Oath Keepers or Proud Boys or Three Percenters, Patriot Front, whatever it is, with AR-15s, and they're standing outside places where there are families, hospitals even, libraries, schools, sometimes a bar that's doing a brunch. You can say, hey, these issues are complicated and they're difficult and so on. I'm with you.

We can fight for nuance. But if there's some men over here with guns, that's a which side are you on moment. Are you inside the library with the family trying to have story time? Or are you out there with guns? And if you say, no, I'm standing in the middle, good luck standing in the middle there. I wouldn't stand in front of the men with guns. So you told another interviewer of all of these people that are, you know, these crazies, the eccentrics, whatever, that you told another interview, the worst people that you've met are these men's movement activists. And you were, they were the only ones worse than their caricature and their caricature is dumb. They really are a bunch of sniveling guys pissed off at their wives, ex-wives or girlfriends.

You don't like your isolation and incel status? No better way to keep that going than to join them. So tell me if these men's rights activists, because this seems to be a huge thing online, you know, and the Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro and his followers and, you know, all of those folks, even Tucker Carlson, who was, you know, advocating irradiating people's testicles to make you more manly. What is with this? What's going on here? Yeah, or Andrew Tate. Oh my god, yeah. An alleged sex trafficker, the hero of millions of young men and boys, right? Jordan Peterson, with his very strange ideas. That chapter on the men's rights movement, so-called,

called whole bottle red pills, That phrase has become popular now, taking the red pill. Ivanka and Elon Musk joked together about taking the red pill. Well, Chalice is one of the maker of the Matrix movies from where that metaphor comes, told them both to go to hell. But the men's rights, that's sort of one of the earlier chapters. That's back in 2014. They had a convention in Detroit. And of course, there's always been sexism. There's always been misogyny. But these guys took it a whole other level, right? Yes. incarceration. Custody is a real issue. Boys in schools, these are real issues. They don't really care about that. They care about, in their vernacular, once you hang out with them, the bitches who left them or the women who were supposed to be their girlfriends and never were,

right? They're small men. But they were a fringe at that time. Fast forward just a few years, that's now, that's the center of right-wing thought. There was something holding that back for a long time, which was actually evangelicalism, which had its own sexism, but it wasn't going to embrace that transgressive pleasure and hate and grotesque sexual vulgarity that the men's rights guys brought to the movement so that I still get asked this question, how did evangelicals embrace Trump with his sordid past? Was it that they forgive him for it, or they don't acknowledge it? And I said, what if they like it? What if they like it?

Not so secretly anymore. I mean, Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, who's a complicated figure, but the celebration of Andrew Tate, who is celebrated for the horrible way that he treats women. Ivanka and Elon Musk are taking their red pills. It's gone mainstream. That's part of the undertow is how these sort of fringe right-wing movements that I think the establishment right would have really looked down on once kind of came into the center. Do you have a reaction to that? First of all, you have, you know, 6,000 years of civilization that has been built around trying to domesticate men, make them less feral, to, you know, sublimate some of those instincts that now has been reversed. And the second is that there have always been guys who can't get laid or who are mad at girls that won't date them.

But up until very, very recently, they didn't advertise that. There was not a community of people who said, I am a virgin because girls will not sleep with me or date me. You generally kept that to yourself. You didn't go on social media. You didn't create a community. And this is one of the things where, okay, this feels kind of new.

We need to acknowledge this, this incel movement and this group of people who feel the resentment. Now they have people who are going to validate that, you know, these terrible bitches, they won't do it. It's their fault. Why aren't they more like me? Again, these people have always been around. They used to hang out at the bars together, and people would kind of roll their eyes at them. Now they're a thing, and they have cable TV hosts, and they have podcasters, and they have people on talk radio who validate them. That's new, right? And now there are people who want to be that, who want to be incels. No, nobody wants to be an incel, do they? Oh, they do. They're called the MGTOWs,

the men who go their own way, which indeed also is, and I don't want to shame anybody, but that means they will have nothing to do with women. If you're going off in the corner to handle yourself sexually, that didn't seem like the kind of thing you would want to brag about, but MGTOWs are quite proud of themselves. Think about someone like Peter Thiel, one of the big financiers. Peter Thiel, despite all his money, was a fringe figure years ago. Some of the figures around him, the so-called thinkers, Curtis Yarvin, who used to go by the name Mencius Moldbug. Completely normal. Now Mencius Moldbug is at the heart of the downtown hipster art scene in New York City, right?

Which has also embraced this transgressiveness amongst certain circles. It's become attractive to express these kind of violent feelings and this hate and this kind of misogyny. Again, I think of this like Ashley Babbitt. Instead of trying to be this better person, wouldn't it just be easier and just say, these are the kind of thoughts I got. These are the dark thoughts I have. World's going to hell. I think about those guys who outfit their trucks. I would see them as I was driving around, coal rolling, where you outfit your truck to have two big pipes. And so you're not just doing normal exhaust, you're spewing black clouds, right? And how obnoxious. I make no excuses for these men. Their trucks roar and they want you to see them and so on. This is a weird analogy. Years ago, I learned about something called the Yiddish anarchist ball. Yiddish was the language of the Eastern European Jews, who in the 1930s and 20s, a number of them became radicals, anarchists. They didn't believe in God at all. They were complete atheists. And on Yom Kippur, the high holy day, you're supposed to fast. They would have the most unkosher meal of all, a pig. They would have a pig roast. That's a heck of a way of saying,

see God, see how much I don't believe in you. The coal rollers, see how much I don't believe in climate change. If you really didn't believe in climate change, you would just be going on as normal. But they're going out of their way. The incels, celebrating people like Elliot Roger, killed six people, called himself the Supreme Gentleman, and was outraged that the world had not rewarded him with tall, thin, blonde girlfriends. Because it's not enough for them to get a girlfriend. They have to get a Barbie doll. If the world does not reward them with a Barbie doll, then they just might have to start shooting. And to elevate this man, that's a turn. I mean, there's obviously an

inherent contradiction of some things that are going on in the right. And I know that Jane Koston wrote about the sort of the paradox of conservatives embracing the horny bros, you know, people like you're describing. At the same time that we're having this sort of, you know, new Puritanism that we need to ban pornography, which would be very bad for the group that you're describing, I'm thinking. And so you have this kind of very, you know, social conservative base, but also they've made this kind of weird alliance with the horny bros and the incels. I mean, I don't know, I'm not an expert in this, but it seems like this might be an unstable coalition. Yes. That's one of the reasons why I say, look, we need to pay attention to this.

And I think there's others who say, you know, the only thing I need to know about a Nazi is, you know, where's noses so I can give it a punch, right? No, we need to know how these movements are because they want us to see them as monolithic, but they're not. They are every social movement, whether it's a fascist one or a civil rights movement, it's always a coalition. It's a convergence. It's taking all these forces that normally might be at odds and suddenly they're flowing together. But that means that they have fault lines. And that's why I kind of pay attention. I think about the embrace of the horny bros, as you put it, traveling around Wisconsin in the aftermath of the downfall of Roe and really just sort of talking to men who were flying flags with

AR-15s on them and F Joe Biden and so on. And so many of them, of course, they're embracing this, but their anti-abortion stance is not, these were not particularly pious men. These weren't churchgoers. It was not rooted in some deep Catholicism. And they would tell the most vulgar stories about women. One man, I mean, I can't even say it on the podcast, the sort of the gestures he was doing. They loved telling stories about those whom they thought of as sluts. In other words, they're experiencing this new Puritanism as sexually titillating, right? It's an expression of male power. I mean, we know this from the history too of fascist

movements and again i'm using that term advisedly if you'd talked to me 10 years ago i would have said this kind of fascism is impossible in america i don't mean anything to the right is fascist george w bush who i didn't support was not a fascist there are definitions and i this is not an academic book so i'm not talking about that but But yes, I've read the history. I've read Robert Paxton and Friedrich O. Finkelstein, and there's a lot of great historians. This is that kind of fascism, which enjoys a sadism, right? Not just the pain of others, but you find your pleasure in the pain of others. Think about how many Trump rallies and the joy and ecstasy they experience when Trump talks about beating up a protester. No, the brutality has become really central to it, is that it's not simply enough to hurt your

opponents. You have to come up with some really brutal way of inflicting pain on them. And that's clearly now become kind of central. He's talking about, you know, the immediate execution of drug dealers, you know, shooting Muslims in the head with bullets dipped in pig's blood. I mean, this is exciting stuff for him. It is. And, of course, I mean, you know, the immediate execution of drug dealers, he's borrowing that from the Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte, who's now been replaced by an even more corrupt Filipino strongman,

young Marcos, son of the last Marcos. Right. That's also, that's sort of fascinating because you have these, you know, I see a farmer in Wisconsin and he's talking with glee about sort of the punishment that women he considers promiscuous are going to experience. And at the same time, I think of the sort of the elite far-right intellectuals. And when I say the ones who are going beyond democracy, again, I'm not throwing rocks. I'm talking about the ones who are saying like, yeah, wait a minute, maybe we don't need democracy. And they're looking at Viktor Orban

in Hungary. They're looking at Poland. They're looking at Putin. Ideas, that's part of social media too, right? Ideas are flowing very rapidly around the globe right now. And there is this real interchange. So I take someone like a conservative like Rod Dreher, who 20 years ago, I published Rod Dreher. I knew he was a conservative, and I'm not, but I thought his ideas were interesting. He called himself a crunchy conservative. And now we see him really openly embracing explicitly anti-democratic politics of Viktor Orban. He's moved to Hungary. Yeah. That's a slide. That's a change. And I say this, this is important too,

because I think maybe the bulwark is interesting to me because the never Trumpers are actually, I think, much more clear-eyed about this threat than a lot of folks on the left are because you've been closer to it and you can see that something has changed. And other folks on the left say, well, I didn't like George W. Bush and I don't like this. So this is just the way it's always been. Yeah. Nah, this is worse

and it can get worse if we don't do something about it. And this is genuinely dangerous. Okay. So one of the things that, you know, you talk about is the excitement about the idea of civil war. You know, this anticipation of civil war excites people. You write, 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. And this talk of civil war has been picking up since January 6th. But I thought it was really interesting that you say in your travels, you've never seen so many guns as you did when you were reporting on this book, not just guns where you'd expect them,

but guns at churches, including this pastor who explained to you, that was what thy rod and thy staff means. Oh, good grief. Yeah. You know, the word gun. I mean, look, I should say I live in Vermont, which a lot of people don't realize is one of the best armed states in the nation. And we have people from Libertarian New Hampshire cross over the border to buy guns here, right? And I'm a gun owner myself and have been most of my life. So when I say I've seen more guns, I'm not coming from Brooklyn and saying, oh my goodness, there's a 22. I mean, big guns

and guns in places that I hadn't seen them before. A pastor with an AR-15 with Joshua 1-9 inscribed on a battle verse that I encountered all across the country. Shooters, Lauren Boebert's grill in aptly named Rifle, Colorado, which is Hooters with Guns. That's the new American dream, Hooters with Guns. It is. Talk about how transgressive that is, you know, sex and violence. And look, you know, think about when you go to the movies, you only go, I only go to movies where there are long, thoughtful discussions. No, we like action movies. I mean, it's not like this isn't in us. It's what we do with it, right? But yeah, this church in Omaha, Nebraska, and earlier you said, you know, you would think if you had a heart condition, maybe you wouldn't be going to these

places. That was where I figured that out. Omaha, Nebraska. In my 20 years of reporting on right-wing movements, I've always been welcomed everywhere. People know who I am. I don't go undercover. They know who I am, but they're always sure either that one, that I'll be converted. It's no accident you came here, or they say, well, look, you're going to tell your story, but my words are going to come through and they're going to express my thought. Or for that matter, a lot of people really just believed, hey, free speech. But this church in Omaha, Nebraska, Hank Kuhneman, who is a kind of a rising star figure on what's called the prophetic right. You can see him on TV with Warren Boebert and that kind of thing. He had armed men around the church. Psalm 23. Probably most listeners

know Psalm 23. It's a very gentle Psalm. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. And he says, thy rod. And he says it like that, thy rod. The sexual innuendo is absolutely intentional here. It's not my ears. He says, that's firm. That's your gun. Afterwards, they won't talk to me, which is new. So I'm talking to some folks in the parking lot. It's not their property. It's a parking lot for a shopping plaza. Three women who, like me, had driven there to be at the church. And one of these guys in full tackle gear, body armor, all black, guns, magazines, and a church usher come. And they tell me to go. And I

say, well, I'm just here with a pencil and you brought a man with a gun. And the usher kind of leans in this scary way. And he says, how do you know I don't have a gun? And that's it to me right now. That's the American question. Concealed carry, open carry. We're arming up 393 million guns in civilian hands. That's a volatile situation. Now, I'm not talking about your hunting rifles. I'm not talking about the pistol you keep in a safe because you feel like you need it for home defense. I'm talking about a couple I met in Wisconsin. They'd always been gun owners and into it, but suddenly they decided they needed a lot more guns they're up to 36 and they're not stopping they're building an arsenal 36 so when they see or they hear about a school massacre where children have been gunned down this is not

something that would shock them into sobriety or thinking that perhaps they ought to rethink this they think we need to stock up with more guns yeah Yeah. I mean, and they're not alone. And so too did today's Republican party after the last shooting in Nashville. How about we get more guns in the schools? Let's get guns everywhere. And I think, or that, that, that wonderful congressman says, well, it's not a problem for me because my, my kids homeschooled. Keep in mind, of course, this goes in line with the sort of the dissolution of public education, but it goes deeper than that. It goes back into that fever dream. I couldn't talk to him rationally about guns because what he wanted to talk about, he'd always been pro-life in a more conventional way and always pro-gun in a more conventional way, but that had changed. Now he liked to imagine in really bloody,

visceral detail that I could only stand to put so much of in the book, what is happening in abortion. He doesn't know. He does not understand the biology at all, but he has what he's been told. And then he likes to imagine in just as visceral and bloody and violent, the executions that he's going to do of abortion providers. And I said, what about abortion in the case of rape? Oh no, we'll solve that too. What's the solution? Executions. Why he himself was ready to do it. They've gone into a revenge fantasy. It's why you see Punisher skulls everywhere. When they speak of civil war, they're not thinking of the real thing. They're thinking of Red Dawn. They imagine themselves like Patrick Swayze in the hills shouting Wolverines. That doesn't make them

less dangerous. That makes them more. All right. Give me a dose of optimism here. You do try to find some optimism with the opening and closing essays in your book, the former on Harry Belafonte and the latter on Lee Hayes, the co-founder of the Weavers, the Folk Pam. So you hold up as political and moral examples, but how is this a counter to this dystopian picture that you have just painted here? Well, they're the counter in the sense because, look, and that's not my music. I like Cary Belafonte's music, but I learned about these songs, Deo, the banana boat song, or If I Had a Hammer, which you may have heard through Peter, Paul, and Mary.

And I learned that these had once been radical songs, imaginary songs, and they've been sort of sanded smooth by consumerism. I sang them in elementary school, and I was interested in that history. I got to know Harry. Lee Hayes is dead, but I got to know his life. Their movements did not succeed, right? The civil rights movement, which Harry Belafonte was, in many ways, the main bank roller of. He was Martin Luther King's right-hand man. People don't realize that about him. He's still alive at 90. He's mad as hell now. He says, I'm still angry. But where your anger comes from doesn't matter as much as what you do with it. He knows, and he's clear

that the movement he fought for did not succeed, but the struggle is long. Here he is at 90. He's still thinking about it. The struggle is long. So when the right comes to us, the far right, and I'm sorry, I got to distinguish because I have a lot of respect for never Trumpers and for true conservatives. But when these, I'll say fascists come to us and they say, this is a crisis, or Trump says, this is the final battle. That's apocalyptic talk. The struggle is long. We've been through this for a long time. The hope is in remembering that there is another tradition that we have fought these fights before and that we have survived. Lee Hayes, I got interested in him when I learned I grew up in upstate New York,

Peekskill, New York, 1949, a baritone, then very famous, named Paul Robeson, who was a radical. Woody Guthrie and Lee Hayes and Pete Seeger are going to do a concert. It ended up being a riot of thousands of townspeople who'd been told that they were communists, that Paul Robeson was black, supported by air power from the state police. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Lee Hayes, they escaped with their lives. We've been there. January 6th wasn't the first time. The hope is in that long struggle. It's the last line of the book, which is the first line in my mind as I was writing. I always knew I was going to get there. It's from Lee Hayes, driving through the Arkansas night, the group of labor organizers, and there's gun thugs coming after them, and they start singing hymns. And

they all grew up in the church, and they're singingmns and he says there, you know, and that just rump sprung car bumping through the night. He said it was possible for a while not to be scared even. It was possible for a while not to be scared even. That to me is the hope, not the cheap grace, not the, oh, it's going to work out. Don't worry, this will pass or we can look away. I don't know the solution. I'm not a strategist. I'm a storyteller, but I do know that it's possible not to be scared. Not because we're so fearless, but because we know the fear is real and that we choose bravery. It's not something that just happens. We choose it and we embrace it and we pursue it. Jeff Charlotte is a journalist, author, Dartmouth professor. His latest book is The Undertow,

Scenes from a Slow Civil War. He's a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, has been reporting on American international right-wing movements for 20 years. And his other books include The Family, The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, which was adapted into a Netflix documentary series. Jeff, thank you so much for spending so much time with us today on the podcast. I appreciate it very much. Thank you very much, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.

We will be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.