Nothing will stop Republicans from lining up behind Trump. But the left? It's in crisis. Fragmented. Perhaps in times of great flux fascists reflexively double-down while progressives slide into a cloud of self-doubt. There, strange bedfellows are sometimes found in the dark.
To help us understand this territory—what it is and how to navigate it—we're joined by journalist, professor, and documentarian, Jeff Sharlet. His books, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War and The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power are field guides for understanding modern America.
Show Notes
Losing the Plot: The “Leftists” Who Turn Right
The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
The Family on Netflix
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What I was surprised at about this is imagination.
What's easy for you to say as a white man, but if I go or my friend goes as a person of color, you know, their lives will be in danger.
And I'm like, well, you know what?
I've got even worse news than that.
There are a lot of people of color.
At those Trump rallies.
They are majority white.
It's a white supremacist movement, but it draws, has a gravitational force that can pull in other people.
So I think beyond horseshoe, beyond diagonal, think of it like a black hole.
Think about an exhilarating movement.
Think about the power of spectacle to draw people in and for people to find their own interpretation or their own
meaning within this really vast ugliness
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and
spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. I'm
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Julian Walker.
And I'm Jeff Sharlet.
Wonderful, Jeff.
Huge fans.
Can't wait to get into this with you.
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Leftists who turn right with Jeff Charlotte.
So far, nothing will stop Republicans from lining up in unity behind Trump.
Court cases, coup attempts, dead cops, the big lie, still our guy, they say.
But the left?
The left is in crisis.
Fragmented.
Perhaps it's definitional.
Maybe in times of great flux, fascists reflexively double down, while progressives slide into a cloud of self-doubt.
There, strange bedfellows are sometimes found in the dark.
Anti-vax yogis and MAGA lightworkers stumble into the evangelical QAnon carnival.
Then there are the lefty influencers who follow their hipster irony and the money into becoming new right media voices.
Now, whether we explain this via horseshoe theory or the more nuanced heuristic of diagonalism, journalist, author, professor, and documentarian Jeff Charlotte is here today to help us understand.
Jeff, welcome.
Hi, thanks for having me.
We've been neck deep in your work lately and really appreciating your immersive journalistic process and your fantastic writing.
Thank you so much.
You're perhaps most well-known for your 2008 book turned 2019 miniseries, The Family, which reveals the decades-long pervasive influence of cult-like conservative Christian organization on DC politics.
We're going to come back around to that a little later, because in 2023, you published an extraordinary collection of essays called The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
And you also published an article co-written with Catherine Joyce for the leftist magazine, In These Times, called Losing the Plot, The Leftists Who Turn Right.
What led to writing that piece?
Calvin Joyce and I have been working together for many, many years.
The first thing we collaborated on was years ago was a piece in Mother Jones.
This was maybe 2008 when Hillary Clinton was running against Barack Obama.
And we had noticed in Hillary Clinton's memoir at the time that she wrote very effusively about these kind of elite Christian nationalists that I had written about called the Fellowship of the Family.
And she described one of them as her spiritual mentor.
And we thought, well, this is an interesting clue into understanding the ways in which Clinton's politics depart from traditional liberalism.
And so we collaborated on that.
And at the time, it was a sort of the same thing.
How dare you say The Hillary Clinton is anything but an across-the-board, virtuous liberal in every regard.
Well, we're not saying.
She's saying.
We've always been kind of interested in those slippery topics.
Now, here we are in this moment.
Where I think a lot of us journalists who are lefty writers or writers who are affiliated with the left, you know, there's a kind of a gossip going around.
Like, did you see what Matt Taibbi, this very prominent one-time Rolling Stone writer, who's one of the guys we write about, did you see what Glenn Greenwald said?
We thought, you know, this shouldn't be gossip, partly because there's grifters like RFK Jr.
coming along who are, in essence, commodifying not just that movement of those guys like Tyee Bean Greenwald, but of all the hundreds of thousands or millions of people who are earnest readers, listeners, Say, hey, this is a person who's brought meaning to my life and I'm going to follow them, right?
So we realized this had to go beyond media gossip and into let's look at this as a formulation of a strange political movement of the moment.
One thing you wrote in that piece was horseshoe theory.
I noticed that in these times included it in the URL, which is probably for SEO purposes,
but it is a more well-known term than what you also referenced, which is diagonalism.
You referenced our episode on that, so thank you.
It is something we've actually internally debated for years about the validity of horseshoe
theory.
I've actually fallen closest to actually thinking it has some merit, but when diagonalism came in, I'm like, yeah, this does really give a more comprehensive overview.
So, what are your feelings?
Where did you land on these two concepts and how they play into our current political landscape?
Well, I have to say, it was Catherine Joyce, actually, who clued me into the episode of yours.
One of the great side effects of collaboration is we each are following different things, and so that made me a listener of the show as I learned about it.
What you're doing is something that I've been interested in a long time, and now here at the show, giving it voice and exploring it.
The horseshoe theory, I'm not sure why it's part of the URL.
That's above my pay grade.
To be honest, we sort of want to include both those ideas.
I'm not persuaded by either.
Horseshoe theory, it does actually describe some people.
You know, I remember this years ago when I was writing about Occupy Wall Street.
And I really loved Occupy Wall Street.
I love the political imagination of it.
But it was also clear at that moment, oh, that some of these people are not left at all.
They think they are.
And they have found their way in advance to the Trumpism that some of them would come to embrace.
They'd say, this is that kind of anger politics.
And you know, for students of history, that's not surprising.
We know that Mussolini's movement began as an anarchist movement and an avant-garde art movement.
And diagonalism, I'm also indebted to Catherine Joyce for saying take a look at that.
I think diagonalism is a more effective frame, but I have to say we wanted to introduce those two ideas.
Horseshoe theory is the one that I think most people embrace and I think isn't quite adequate because there is hard left that doesn't come around right.
And not only that, a lot of the people we're talking about were never really hard left, right?
Well, yeah, that's right.
Matt Taibbi was never hard left.
He was always a kind of popular liberal left, and now he's a right winger.
So it's not that he was just so far left, he somehow wound up there.
Diagonalism, with this description of a distrust of power and authority, maybe comes closer.
I feel like each of these is a little bit missing the elephant in the room, which is Fascism.
And that fascism has a really big gravity.
And I think this is one of the things that, part of why we are interested in, because we're worried, we're worried.
I don't know, I guess we're concern trolls.
We think the left is not stepping up to the moment of fighting fascism.
Part of the way it's not doing that is sort of recognizing that, you know, if you think the only people in the Trumpist movement, we can talk about the F word and why I understand some people object to fascism.
I'm using it historically, but you know, we can argue on that, but.
Some people, you know, they think, oh, it's just old folks who watch too much Fox and so on.
Or more common, I just saw this yesterday in a social media pile-on.
A writer for The Atlantic, McKay Coppins, has suggested that people attend a Trump rally to see what it's like for themselves.
And immediately this sort of leftist response of, McKay Coppins is a white supremacist recruiting for Trump.
McKay Coppins is not a A Trumper.
And he is saying something that, as a writer, I'm like, yes.
I mean, yeah, sure, buy my book, but go see with your own eyes.
What I was surprised at about this is imagination.
What's easy for you to say as a white man, but if I go or my friend goes as a person of color, you know, their lives will be in danger.
And I'm like, well, you know what?
I've got even worse news than that.
There are a lot of people of color Those Trump rallies.
They are majority white.
It's a white supremacist movement, but it draws, has a gravitational force that can pull in other people.
So I think beyond horseshoe, beyond diagonal, think of it like a black hole.
Think about an exhilarating movement.
Think about the power of spectacle to draw people in and for people to find their own interpretation or their own Meaning within this really vast ugliness.
And that's why the illustration of the piece that they chose is this kind of like portal with a black hole with a hand reaching out and pulling people in.
Given how much personal risk and ink you've devoted to chronicling what's happening on
the right, it was really fascinating to get your analysis of this piece of what's happening
on the left.
In the article, as you were just saying, you referenced Matt Taibbi and Naomi Wolf and
how their left to right arc is perhaps explainable via personal and professional midlife crisis,
right?
It's sort of this thing of like, I got canceled and then the only people who would talk to
me were on the right.
And so these are my new friends, right?
But you mentioned to this more youthful, rebellious, you referred to dime square, which I'd never
heard of, giving rise to things like the Red Scare podcast.
And in addition to this kind of gravity that you're describing, this black hole that perhaps sucks Everything in.
It does seem like there must be some common features.
Is there anything you've identified amongst these cultural liberals that makes them susceptible to this rightward trend toward fascism?
Well, I think one thing that's there, and I'm a little bit wary of common denominators because we're talking about a vast movement, and I think, well, in this piece, we talk about some of the elites, the writers and journalists and so on, who are well known, versus go to an RFK rally and talk to the everyday folks who are there and find the countless reasons.
But one refrain that you hear a lot of the time is, most leftist writers don't really acknowledge it.
They say, like, I'm the same as I always was.
You know, that old line, I didn't leave the left, the left left me.
Yeah.
Which is a very oddly conservative way to describe your leftism.
I refuse to change my ideas.
At the same time, we have a contemporary left that wants to deny that, to say, oh, well, they were never really left to begin with.
Within these times, you know, a bunch of the people that we talked about, there was young editors who said none of these people were ever left.
And so we had to go through the In These Times archive and say, here are the times you have published or praised every one of these people.
Wow.
You know, it's like, nobody ever thought of Dave Chappelle as left.
And I'm like, oh, they sure did.
You see that kind of rigidity if you're sticking in this moment where you're defining your leftism as the imperative value is a kind of idea of free speech, which I share.
I think that is an imperative value, right?
But if you're not learning from a movement A leftism that's constantly changing, that is moving, that young people are coming in with different priorities in response to different circumstances.
Yeah, you'll take the same trajectory that Ronald Reagan, who first used that line, I didn't leave the left, the left left me, a long time ago.
He'd been a liberal Democrat.
He didn't see himself as turning rightward.
He saw them as going extreme.
So that kind of picking one issue, that kind of rigidity, which you can experience, and I think the appeal of this, I'm a person of integrity.
I've got virtue.
I stand on free speech.
And now you get into defining free speech as like Elon Musk does, as somehow that means I guess you have to celebrate and peddle hate speech just to show how much you support free speech, right?
That's his thinking.
But you've got now the double pleasure of feeling transgressive.
I'm open minded.
Look, I'm trying out new things.
And that kind of conservatism.
I stand on principle.
I'm not shaped by trends.
I find that showing up, and all of them, and more important than the grifting that people talk about.
I actually don't think that that's that important.
These are folks who can make money either way.
The embarrassment phenomenon, whoa, And Matt Taibbi.
That doesn't apply to Glenn Greenwald.
It doesn't apply to Roseanne Barr, who had already begun that rightward journey before she started spewing right-wing things that then got her cancelled.
And it doesn't apply, of course, to the many, many, many people who are their fans and listeners who slide through one issue or another.
And this is sort of where I use the metaphor from the book of the undertow, sort of like you're swimming against the current for a long time trying to be a decent person.
What if I just lean back and let it carry me?
What a relief.
Yeah, well, we've been really reveling in your March 2023 collection of essays, The Undertow.
It's told in the first person via your on-the-ground reporting and reflections.
And a big chunk of the book covers the intersection of insurrectionist politics, QAnon conspiracism, and evangelical fervor.
And I realized while reading that kind of it's a far cry from the staid and pious conservatism of the National Prayer Breakfast.
The world that you're taking us into as a sort of very brave tour guide, it reminds me a lot of actually going to Grateful Dead concerts.
It's carnivalesque.
It's a wild ragtag caravan of outcasts and rebels.
These are not your grandparents' conservatives, right?
True believers, street brawlers, legit Nazis, they're shady street preachers.
But woven through it all seems to be this yearning to participate in a mythic quest.
To risk everything in a heroic way to bring forth the realization of political prophecy.
And it just makes me wonder.
I'm curious what you think this is.
Is it how new is it?
And how do we name what Trump has somehow been able to tap into?
I'm so glad you make that observation, the distinction between the National Prayer Breakfast, which, you know, I've written before.
And the work with the National Prayer Breakfast is it presents itself as so bland, so banal.
It is powerful.
It is influential.
It is a kind of a right-wing movement, but it's almost unnoticeable because it's just so dull.
And having spent a long time in their archives trying to read what's really going on beneath this surface of dullness, here it's the flip side.
I don't want to say that's new as an unprecedented in American history, but we haven't had that on the right for a long time.
And I think the Tea Party obviously was a precedent for it.
And even that, the media would try and say, well, the Tea Party is really about taxes.
And then you go to a Tea Party rally.
And it's like, no, it's about getting high in public and cursing and saying, you know what, I'm going to say all the racist thoughts in, you know, I'm going to let my id speak.
Right.
That was sort of what was happening there.
And I think there's a newness.
The first Trump rally I went to was in 2016.
an editor I had originally worked with on the National Prayer Breakfast, and knew I had this
sort of interest in paying attention to places where religion might be a force but wasn't the
headline. At the time, everyone was thinking of Trump as like this impious man, you know,
thrice married, etc.
And so I went out to Youngstown, Ohio.
What I remember, again, Grateful Dead is exactly it.
You listen to the soundtrack.
Some people dance.
They're incredibly patient.
They're really open to talking to other people around them and saying violent, transgressive things that they might not normally say.
They're given license by this weird playlist that people sort of giggled at.
Elton John and Billy Joel and Pavarotti, the grandiosity of it.
And before every rally, I noticed there was a preacher.
And having covered right-wing religion a long time, I'm like, oh, these guys, they weren't A-list.
They weren't big time.
In fact, they were too extreme, too hardcore.
They were not going to be on TV.
The crowd loved it.
But you talk to people.
None of these people are churchgoers.
And I think that's a misunderstood thing on the left about Christian nationalism.
It's not about being pious.
That's the part of nationalism.
It's about mythological kind of Christian identity.
I realized also when I was sitting there talking to an older couple, it looks like old hippies, a lot of turquoise jewelry on the woman, grandma and grandpa, so sweet.
And the old guy, Gene, says, you know, I want to get a hold of a protester, beat the shit out of them, and then get on CNN.
You know, they hate the media, but wouldn't it be awesome if you could be on TV?
The wife looks at him a little bit, you know, and I'm like, oh, this is across the line.
And then she leans into him and she says, oh, Gene, And then she leans over to me, and she whispers, I don't know for sure.
I'm guessing this wasn't her kind of normal language.
She whispers, because it's transgressive.
Apropos of nothing, about Hillary Clinton, she says, don't she look like she been rode hard and put up wet?
And I was so shocked.
I originally wrote that for the New York Times Magazine, and they said, you can't put that in there.
That's inappropriate.
In the end, they let me use it, because they decided that it referred to horse tackle.
I guess in a very literal sense.
Here was this person who was like, I have these bad thoughts and now I can say them.
And that refrain you hear, Trump says what we all want to say.
Politics has traditionally spoken to a limited range of human emotions.
So the freedom you're feeling is like, oh.
This is the everything.
This is rock and roll.
This is not just aspiration and virtue.
This is anger.
This is lust.
This is vengeance.
The full spectrum of human emotion.
And it feels more authentic.
It's not.
That should be said.
You know, because I know that some listeners out there say, I get this all the time.
Well, it is not.
I'm like, I know, I know.
But we're talking about how they imagine it, how they experience it.
And we have to contend with that if we're going to confront it.
Speaking of music, Julian just mentioned Grateful Dead.
You actually frame The Undertow with three songs for each of the sections, and also by the end, I was going back into the Woody Guthrie archives to listen along as I was reading.
But I have to say, the whole time, there's a song by Tool called Undertow.
Yes!
And that was in my head because it fit perfectly into the dynamic.
Was the Trump rally why you framed it with songs, or is that just for your own personal tastes?
I'm embarrassed to say I only learned about the Tool song after I published the book.
I'm like, I wonder what people are saying about it online.
And I guess Tool fans really love that song because They're still talking about that nonstop.
It's like, undertow.
I'm like, wow, there's so much.
Oh, no, no, it's about this song.
I had originally, this book began, it was going to be a songbook.
And I was interested in, you know, it opens and closes with, opens with a chapter about Harry Belafonte, who we lost this year at 96 and many don't realize was a great radical activist his whole life.
And as you mentioned, Woody Guthrie, it was sort of a songwriting part of Woody Guthrie, Lee Hayes, part of the Weavers, and If I Had a Hammer is a song he wrote and so on.
And I was intrigued by the ways these songs that I sang in elementary school, all smoothed over, sanded down, we didn't know it was radical at all.
The Banana Boat song, Daylight Come, were in fact Imagined as radical songs, not only imagined as radical songs, they were understood at the time.
The first performance of If I Had a Hammer was met with a riot of thousands backed up by New York State Police air power on the side of the rioters.
There were burning crosses, there was rocks, it was like this was a threat.
Harry Belafonte You know, long FBI file.
They understood him as a danger.
And I thought, hey, look at these resources that are within us that we don't know about.
And those songs, I like them.
They're not my songs any more than Tool is.
You know, like if I don't go straight to Harry Belafonte or Tool.
This struggle is long.
And I thought it could give us some hope, too, in the sense of everything feels climactic, catastrophic right now.
Harry Belafonte and Lee Hayes struggled their whole lives.
And Harry, at least I know, he didn't die thinking, well, Guess we won.
He died mourning Martin Luther King to the end of his days.
He died lamenting the Hollywoodization of the civil rights movement.
And you can say, well, that's depressing.
Or you can say the struggle is long.
I'm going to get in it.
I'm going to get in the struggle for freedom with the understanding.
Next election doesn't go my way.
That doesn't mean, well, flip into cynicism like these left to right sliders in a way.
It's The Struggle Is Long.
So I always knew it was going to be a songbook, but then other things happened.
And I felt like I really didn't want to do another right wing book.
I kind of felt like I have these skills.
I know how to talk to these people.
My kids are terrified.
This is what I can do.
It also humanizes it.
I'll just say that my first published piece of writing in 1993 as an 18-year-old Rutgers student was a Tool concert review, so it has a long history in my life.
So that always kind of plays through my mind.
I'm going to show off a kind of incuriosity, because upon seeing that, you would think, oh, well, I'll go listen to that song.
I still haven't listened to it.
Is it good?
Oh, it's one of their best songs, absolutely.
All right.
Okay.
All right.
Well, at least I borrowed a good title from a good song.
You did, but it also, the lyrics fit.
You're writing perfectly.
So that's also why I think Tool fans resonate with that, because it absolutely encapsulates what you're writing about.
All right.
You brought up, and you did write about it in the book, about Hillary Clinton and that line.
You also write about going to Lord of Hosts in Omaha, led by Pastor Hank Kunneman, and He called you out from the pulpit because you announced you were a journalist.
You're doing actual beat reporting.
I started my professional career doing that.
I know one of the hardest things was walking up to politicians' houses after they lost elections in suburban New Jersey.
It was very challenging.
You actually write about those challenges.
I'm wondering, given what you've seen, and given the fact that you had to basically fight to have the New York Times publish something that is real and going on here, how much impact does this sort of investigative journalism have in our society right now?
I mean, I think a long time ago, I sort of decided, as a writer, I love going into strange places that are difficult for me.
Maybe I'm counterphobic, and I love lingering in them.
I don't want to do the hard-hitting interview with, you know, an important figure.
I'll leave that to another reporter.
I'd rather be in a room where something interesting that I don't understand is happening.
And so I'm going to do that no matter what, whether it works or not.
And I told myself, you know what, I'm not going to fall into that trap, the muckraking trap, which I think can lead to cynicism of my story's got to change the world.
What if it doesn't?
Then what?
I'm like, you tell these stories, stories They flow away from you.
They're not your own after you put them out in the world.
People are going to do with them what they want.
I wouldn't flatter myself into thinking that any of this reporting has really slowed down what I see as a fascist dissent.
I've seen some things that have worked, writing about a Christian nationalist effort, a US-backed effort in Uganda.
To pass something called the Kill the Gays Bill.
Well, that was nice.
The author of the bill blamed me for its defeat 10 years ago, but blamed me and Rachel Maddow, who would have me on the show.
And he'd say the gay couple, Jeff Charlotte and Rachel Maddow.
And there was a sort of this window into the different understanding of what these things were.
But that law passed last year.
Yeah, we had an effect, but the struggle is long.
I used to think when I was young, those protesters who would do things like beat swords in the plowshares, you know, that sort of movement where there's a woman up here in Vermont where I live, Martha Hennessey, the granddaughter of the great Dorothy Day, legendary activist, became radicalized, Martha, later in life, and went down with a group and they splattered red paint over nuclear submarines.
And when I was younger, I thought that was just the biggest waste of time, this symbolic protest.
I'm like, what is that doing?
And I've become more persuaded as a storyteller that you tell these stories, you keep this thread going.
I think we are going through a fascist moment.
I think it's going to get worse.
I want those stories to exist.
I don't know how somebody will use them.
Harry Belvani doesn't know how somebody might use the banana boat song.
Or Lee Hayes, how, if I had a hammer.
You can't even be sure that anybody will.
But you know, you sort of, as Harry Belafonte says, you sing your song and you give it away.
And that kind of trust in each other is, to me, the kind of solidarity and democratic culture that is the true opposite of fascism.
The opposite of fascism isn't anti-fascism, it's a vibrant democratic culture.
But it means trusting on others to carry the struggle forward.
Because I don't have all the answers.
I mean, if I did, we wouldn't be talking because we'd just be living in our nice, happy world.
Speaking of storytelling, at the heart of The Undertow is your incredible writing about Ashley Babbitt, who, as we know, was shot dead by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to forcibly enter a hallway, which would have then given her and the writers access to the besieged legislators they were hunting.
You write about her becoming idealized by the MAGA faithful as the first martyr of the so-called Second American Revolution alongside Kyle Rittenhouse, who's lionized for firing the first shot in that revolution.
You talk about going to a Sacramento rally in her honor, and then afterwards finding yourself at the Glad Tidings Church.
Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?
Yeah, the Sacramento rally, on the sidelines, I was talking to a man.
He said, if you really want to know what all this is about, you've got to come to Glad Tidings Church in Yuba City, California, which is north of Sacramento.
There was a street pastor there.
I should say, while this is happening, we're standing a few feet away from a brawl between Proud Boys and Antifa activists as the cops sort of look passively on.
The street pastor says, you're the fourth person today who's told me to go to this church in this world.
Well, obviously this is fated.
So I drive up there into sort of orange-growing country, and it's a small megachurch, which is to say, by most people's standards, a big church, but not the massive one.
It had gotten sort of a national profile We're never shutting during the pandemic.
And then a video that went viral for a little while, they presented on, at the pulpit, a customized AR-15 to General Mike Flynn from Trump's, the QAnon conspiracist from Trump's first administration.
The church is fascinating.
They don't have any crosses.
Not that they're opposed to the cross, but this is wartime and that's kind of weak tea theology for the moment.
The pulpit is made Like, you know, like Game of Thrones.
That AR-15 wasn't the only one.
There was also one given to the pastor emblazoned with the evangelical battle verse, Joshua 1-9.
Now, everyone sort of knows, like, Jericho, you know, around the city seven times.
Not everyone knows that the day before January 6th was the Jericho March around the capital.
And maybe people who didn't go to Sunday school don't know.
It's a genocidal story.
In the story, God says to Joshua, go into Jericho and kill everything and everybody.
So when someone's having a Jericho march, you should get nervous.
And when someone's got an AR-15 with a Jericho quotation, that's scary.
And this church was backing it up.
It was one of a couple churches that I went to that had their own militias.
Monday night is Women's group night and Wednesday as teens and Tuesday's militia new recruit training night and the sermon was a three-hour sermon on a Saturday night was bloody and violent and hallucinatory in a way that would encourage people to dismiss it.
For instance, the news that Hillary Clinton has already been killed.
Amen!
Hoorays for that, right?
And that what you've seen since then is just technological trickery.
Or the news that Trump was not the 45th president, he was the 19th, because all the others since then were illegal.
And you know, and I write about this sort of like, you can see people like, well now wait a minute, it does say 45 on his hat.
But there's a way of being in the word, of meaning making that isn't logic making, that allows folks to hold these kind of contradictory ideas at once.
That can be ecstatic and loving.
It can also be violent.
It licenses a kind of extreme feeling.
Look, I've been going to right-wing churches for many, many years.
For this book, Traveling Around the Country, I've never seen so many guns in churches.
I'm not afraid of guns.
I live in Vermont.
It's the second-best armed state or something like that.
I'm a gun owner.
But I'm afraid of them when there's people walking around in a church.
I'm afraid of them when there's militia guys.
I'm afraid of them when they're just sitting there and they're not being fired.
That's important.
We know from drama You know, a gun on the wall in the first act.
It'll be quite a miracle if these get put away without any further harm.
In the prelude to The Undertow, you note that you capitalize the W in white for visibility.
You quote Princeton historian Neil Irvin Painter as a justification.
And you also write that it's not to honor the term, but acts as more of a mirror.
So in your estimation, what type of visibility do whites in America need?
Well, I think we need to not take whiteness for granted as the norm.
And Nell Irvin Painter in her great book, I think it's called The History of White People.
She's also won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Sojourner Truth.
You know, in thinking long and hard about race and the way that whiteness,
which is a completely manufactured category, gets naturalized into a nationalism, right?
So you can have white nationalism for all sorts of people who, in fact,
might have different interests, different sort of senses of the world,
different cultures, different traditions.
Whiteness becomes the great flattening of it.
I decided that I was going to follow her lead and capitalize white, and also as a reminder to myself and any room that I'm in, to be thinking about race, and that includes thinking about whiteness and sort of the lies whiteness tells, and what another great historian, Anthea Butler at the University of Pennsylvania, in her book, White Evangelical Racism, calls the promise of whiteness.
And Thea, who's a historian of Black churches, is writing about how do people of color get drawn into the white supremacist movement that is Trumpism at numbers that are Again, the left isn't contending with this.
These are bigger numbers than any Republicans ever seen.
They're real numbers.
They're not, everyone says, well, there's a few fools here.
No, this is, this is, this is real number.
It doesn't mean the movement's not white supremacist, but how is whiteness getting constructed?
Now we know that a little bit from history, the ways in which people become, you know, how the Irish became white.
Irish were not originally listed as white.
Jewish immigrants were not originally listed as white.
Good book this came out this year called 70 times 7 by the writer Alex Marr and she's writing I think it is Youngstown, Ohio, about the Serbian workers and the black workers in this part early 20th century when Serbs were learning English from the black workers.
And a lot of the black workers had learned some Serbian.
They were organizing together.
And management said, in so many words, the way we break up this budding union movement is we'll make the Serbs white.
The Serbs had been banned from parks and pools.
Well, you're white.
You can come in.
And suddenly enough of these Serbs say, well, isn't this nice to accept this privilege?
And they become part of that myth of whiteness.
And I think you have to be constantly thinking about whiteness, but without doing it in a way that for all the time I've been writing about the right, I'll go to a rally or an event or someone, and I'll say, well, I bet they were just a bunch of Klansmen, right?
I mentioned before the Ugandan Kill the Gays Bill.
The Ugandan Parliament?
Definitely not a bunch of Ku Klux Klansmen.
Trump rallies?
Sunrise, Florida.
I write about one.
I think it's about a third Latinx.
And it's not Cubans.
People say, oh yeah, Florida Cubans.
It's Venezuelans and Nicaraguans.
There's people flying pride flags at Trump flags.
This is the threat of fascism is it can absorb everything.
It's not really quite an ideology.
And that's ongoing work for me.
You know, I mean, you can see it happening in the book because as I'm going through it, I realize like I'm on land.
Land citations, you know, like, oh, I should go and I should look up.
This is not ancient history.
This land is hot.
It was stolen recently.
And something that I had always, until that point, thought of was like, well, that's a nice thing.
We should do that, you know, at the beginning of events and say, like, whatever.
I'm like, no, no, this is a, this is a matter of accuracy.
This is a matter of reporting.
But I didn't know that going into the book.
So capitalizing whiteness is not just tell you what's what, it's a way for me to say, Part of what's going on in the whiteness in this room includes me.
Speaking of fascism, actually, this will serve as a good transition to talking a little bit about the family because in The Undertow, you write that when you were writing the family, you thought it was just a different sort of authoritarianism.
You now state that I was wrong, meaning, no, this is a fascist movement.
I know we've unpacked this a little bit, but that footnote was one of the most powerful parts of the book, because it is your process and your acknowledgement that I've been covering this beat for a long time, and I didn't see this coming, and now here it is.
Can you explain what changed in your thinking to write that?
Yeah, Youngstown, Ohio, 2016, Trump rally.
I came out of it so shook.
And I had written, I mean, there's a chapter in my book, The Family, called The F-Word.
The F-Word being fascism.
And it's about, that's an older movement, goes back to 1935.
In World War II, their big bright idea was, look, we can recruit a lot of talent from former Nazi war criminals.
And some they would bring to the United States.
Werner Von Braun, the rocket scientist, they participated in that.
Others, they couldn't even get into the United States, so they would arrange for U.S.
Congressmen to go over to Germany to take counsel with them.
But they'd say, we don't want you as Nazis, only if you can switch out, you know, the Fuhrer for the father, right?
When I said that wasn't fascism, I wasn't saying it was less bad than fascism.
That kind of imperial politics has led to countless numbers of Of the dead, right?
But there's more than one kind of bad under the sun, and that the particular formation of fascism I thought wasn't possible in the United States on full scale.
Obviously, some people say, well, you know, this community has already been living in fascism, but on full scale, partly because of fundamentalism.
Because a key factor of fascism is a cult of personality.
The strong man who alone can fix it.
And the United States have been supporting that abroad but never quite fully brought it home.
The leader for whom law means nothing.
And I thought, well the reason they're not going to do that is not out of any virtue but because...
American Fundamentals love Jesus too much.
And Trump comes down that golden escalator, bringing with him an aesthetic of fascism.
Would it be received?
And I go to Youngstown, Ohio, and I remember coming out of that just so shaken.
I'm like, oh, this is it.
This is the real deal.
It's a movement.
And I think people get confused, too.
They say, well, this isn't like Germany 1936.
I'm like, First of all, that's right.
Very perceptive.
It's the United States in 2024.
You're right on the ball.
But fascism changes over time.
That was a fascist regime.
We have a fascist movement aiming to become a regime.
Fascism suggests inevitability.
That's a lie.
We can stop it.
But all the elements, a cult of personality, the kind of nationalism that we're familiar with, misogyny as a kind of, not just a default, but an identity.
and a kind of eroticized identity.
But another factor that was new and that wasn't there in the family was a kind of ecstatic violence.
Now, the United States, as an imperial power, we've been involved in a lot of wars.
There's always been violence and so on.
But it was violence of the sort of like even the worst wars.
Well, we don't want to have to do it, but we may have to, you know, destroy the village in order to save it.
You go to a Trump rally, and remember I talked about that man saying, I can't wait to beat the shit out of a protester.
And his wife is just looking at him like, this is the most exciting thing Gene has ever said.
And you would hear that from the Trump rally too, and that joy.
It was like going to a wrestling event, except The double consciousness of like, oh, look at the violence, but it's also just a spectacle.
This wasn't just a spectacle.
It was high stakes, wrestling, ecstatic.
I find myself in my violence.
Violence is fun.
Hurting others, as Adam Serwer is writing, you know, the cruelty is the point.
It is a pleasure.
That, I think, I hadn't fully recognized as part of the spectrum.
I don't think it was.
I think it was there late, and I do think we are in a new phase.
But I was wrong about saying it couldn't happen here because it has.
You know, for anyone who hasn't seen the family, the Netflix docuseries made based on your book,
you know, you wrote the book in 2008 and then the docuseries comes out in 2019.
So obviously there's some things that happen in between.
It reveals the decades-long pervasive influence of this cult-like conservative Christian organization that you've flagged called The Fellowship or The Family on DC politics.
But there's more, right?
You also show how what you call, via what you call non-consensual diplomacy, The Family engages in messianic visits to pray with dictators to support far-right anti-abortion and anti-gay initiatives around the world.
And that also they may have collaborated with Putin loyalists in the run up to Trump coming to power.
And the miniseries kind of unfolds in the shadow of the coming of Trump and the reckless bet that the Christian right was willing to make on him as this imperfect servant of God.
So I know that we're talking about your work here, but I assume there's a sort of thread that you're following intuitively.
Do you see the family and what you were covering in terms of their actions in the world as a kind of prelude and them actually playing a role in getting us into this historic crisis that we're staring down this year?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, the National Prayer Breakfast, which goes back to 1953, and it's such a normal, boring thing that no one thinks twice about it.
Except that Eisenhower, when it was proposed to him, said, are you crazy?
We have this thing called the First Amendment.
You can't sanctify the nation to Jesus.
There's a sort of a political story about how they kind of wrangled Eisenhower and going, he said, all right, I'll go.
No media.
But they understood that once they got this as an institution, it becomes a given.
And now what would be outrageous would be for a president to skip the National Prayer Breakfast The assumption is that it's a federal event.
Wait a minute.
How does that square with the first one?
It's not a federal event.
It's run by a private sectarian organization that, until I wrote a book about it, denied that it existed.
Then they're like, okay, yeah, you got us.
I got you because you have 600 pages of documents.
They were really hiding in plain sight, but partly because it wasn't a conspiracy, right?
I mean, they're allowed to do that.
And the media was complicit not in a conspiracy, but in the normalization of a kind of conflation of God and country.
gave license to the support for a messianic understanding of the United States.
Look, they didn't invent this.
They're one factor.
I always want to say they're not the puppet masters behind anything.
They're just a sector of power that was underexamined.
But they were key in a lot of dictators overseas who were absolute fascists.
Suharto in Indonesia presided over killing about a million of his fellow countrymen.
Saad Barre and Somalia, weighed absolute waste to his country, any number of Central American
death squad leaders.
And it wasn't just like they loved everybody and, you know, there's some bad apples in
the batch.
Those were the ones they went to.
They went for those strongman characters.
And I think there's an element, I resist the word inevitability, but the strongman came
And I know there's folks out there saying, well, America's always been fascist.
And I disagree.
Again, neoliberalism is bad.
It's a different kind of bad.
Reagan had more power than a president should, but it wasn't unchecked.
I think when Trump came down that golden escalator, I remember looking at it and saying, oh, this is it.
That's Suharto from Indonesia.
That's Duterte from Philippines.
That's Barry from Somalia.
And here he is coming down into the American picture.
And will he be received?
And I was still naive.
I had to say enough at the time to say, like, I wonder if the family might actually be a check on his power, because they do love establishment power.
There was some an element of that.
There was some disruption within it.
But the way things settled out is the family's quite a Trumpy organization now.
Trump's the blob.
He's absorbed everything he's encountered.
And there may be some Leonard Leo hot sauce in that particular recipe, too.
Oh, God, you're making me sick.
You mentioned a 600-page document.
I want to start to land this plane with a 920-page document.
Our first episode of this year was on Project 2025.
Julian and I are actually doing a bunch of bonus series where we break down chapter by chapter what it says.
And part of the reason is that since I discovered it, so few people that I know on the left, even though it exists... It's driving me crazy.
And I saw you on Blue Sky yesterday talking about it, and you've actually done some work informing people about this.
Have you seen anything of this Voltron nature of 450 authors?
I think 80 organizations have signed on to this across the religious spectrum, across the conservative spectrum.
presented through the Heritage Foundation, but it extends beyond that.
So I would just love to hear your thoughts on what you perceive as the dangers of this project.
I feel like the Voltron metaphor.
Voltron, of course, is sort of assembled from parts, right?
And I think that what people don't understand is that the reason fascism is potent right now is because you have a convergence of all these different strands.
And some of those organizations looking at Project 2025 are not traditionally friendly.
Libertarians and Christian nationalists are not natural allies.
Proud Boys do not Rest easy in the halls of the Heritage Foundation, right?
And when social movements work is when they're in flux, or when they're coming together and converging.
The good news is that's always a more fragile coalition than it appears.
And I think part of the work we can be doing and what you're doing by paying attention to Project 25 is like, what are those fault lines?
What are those spaces we can crack open for a real democratic world?
But I share your frustration that the left isn't paying attention to it.
As that document notes, the Heritage Foundation back in 1980 did the same thing for Ronald Reagan.
Sixty percent of that legislation was passed within the first year.
Here we are, and I find any number of liberals and leftists still resting easy on the idea of Trumpian incompetence, which I think is a profound misreading.
It's imagining that Trump wants to do the kind of things that we might want to do.
Yes, he's no good at that, but he's very good at doing the things he wants to do, and we don't want him to do those things.
It's true, he didn't really build the wall.
He doesn't give a damn about the wall.
The wall is a piece of political technology for recruiting his movement.
But what's there is, of course, Trump is only the figurehead of a movement, and there's a million little Trumps, and a whole lot of them have contributed to that document.
And that's going to give them license going down from the federal government right down to your local school board, to your local town council, setting the terms of vengeance.
So if he says, I'm the retribution, you can count on someone in your community thinking the same way.
And what will that look like?
Well, we get a picture in this document.
I went to do a sort of teach-in for Radical.
Pretty serious left organizers and activists in New York City.
I think it was about 150 of them, about Project 2025.
And it was some old ACT UP, the organization ACT UP Activists, who said, yeah, we've got to pay attention to this, because they knew their colleagues and peers were not.
And indeed, they had no clue.
They weren't actually all that interested, I gotta say.
Partly because Project 25 didn't fit the bill of, well, these are just a bunch of dumb old folks watching Fox News and so on.
And then you're like, oh shit, they got 5,000 lawyers lined up and like, oh, this is a plan.
This is a real plan, step-by-step, for creating secret police, for taking away rights.
It's a bureaucratic plan that has as one of its aims destruction of bureaucracy.
It's incredible.
Well, and that's the definition of fascism.
Fascism is always anti-bureaucratic, right?
What it does is it tells a story that is anti-bureaucratic.
But it licenses a kind of brutal bureaucracy beneath it, a bureaucracy not of transparency and access and democracy, but of redistribution upwards of power.
And, you know, you've read the document, you see them talking openly about them.
It's fascinating, too, because you see them talking openly about things that are at odds with what Trump supporters believe he's all about.
Like, let's restore more power to management.
They're right up front about that.
And yet we see this erosion of labor, of union supporters, and not just, well, it's just old white guys from the Midwest.
No, it's not.
It's more than that.
Who think that Trump is somehow for labor.
We see the foreign policy, which is horrific and terrifying.
And yet we see, and I've been encountering on social media, a lot of people are sort of falling for the idea.
They're so brokenhearted, understandably, about what's happening in Gaza.
Well, that's happening under Biden.
And they're falling for this con that Trump is anti-war.
And we read that document and we know he's not.
You know, I applaud you for doing this work because it's dull going.
I mean, part of that's the other thing is it's like it's not it's not fun reading.
It's a little bit more like the prayer breakfast.
You have to translate this because this is it's a dystopian vision.
It doesn't have the Grateful Dead fun.
The fact of the matter is, though, they've got the Grateful Dead rallies and over here they've got this bureaucratic plan.
And when those things coexist, we're in trouble. And we are in trouble. I, you
know, I think you mentioned in email before that I think toward the end I was supposed to come
up with proposals about what we should do.
That is our last question.
I mean, I do think that it really does mean wrestling with the fact that we're in trouble.
And whenever I say this, I always hear from some people like, well, everybody knows that.
And I'm like, no, they really, really don't.
At this gathering of radical activists, the ones who took Project 2025 seriously have been so tuned out of that stuff.
And so focus on the good work they're doing.
They had as an action item from one of their affinity groups, we should find out who the other GOP candidates are.
Because they didn't know.
And, you know, we were talking earlier about diagonalism and the suspicion of all media, which has come into play.
I mean, how frustrating is the New York Times and the Washington Post and the failures to step up to this moment?
But some then say, well, therefore, anything I learned there isn't real.
And that's how I'm going to stick it to Trump.
I'm going to never learn.
These are all reassurance narratives.
They're all ways of pretending you have more agency than you do.
Instead of saying, OK, here we are.
We're in the undertow.
It has swept us out to sea.
We are not paddling along by the shore.
We're in deep trouble.
We've got to confront that.
That's as far as I can get in terms of what to do.
I think I'm an all-hands-on-deck person.
I would like more people to embrace this.
I'm not terribly prescriptive.
My prescription is do whatever you think is right.
I can't stand that we're wasting so much time arguing amongst ourselves when none of us knows how to beat fascism.
And I have proof of that, because if we did, it'd be done.
We don't know what the right way is.
So if you feel called to make this podcast, that's it.
If someone else feels called to brawl on the street with Proud Boys, it's not my thing, but I'm not going to tell them not to do it.
If someone else says, I'm going to go and work for the election of Ryan Busey, who is sort of a centrist Democrat, former gun executive in Montana, trying to challenge, and he's by the way, not afraid of the F word, but he's not, he's no lefty.
I'm going to work for him.
And traditional electoral ways.
I'm not going to tell them not to do it.
We don't know.
It's all hands on deck.
If your thing is to go and get involved with the local arts movement, do that.
If your thing is to work for your library, libraries are a front line.
Do that.
Also recognize the work that we are doing.
A lot of us are engaged in creating democratic culture.
It's not just electoral politics.
That's why I say the arts.
You might be involved in that.
Whenever I go to a book festival, I'm like, people say, well, we're not doing anything.
And I said, are you kidding?
The fascists I talk to hate the existence of this book festival.
You're doing something.
And people did a lot of work to organize that.
And that's good stuff.
That's fun stuff.
It's not enough, but that's my non-prescriptive prescription.
It's a good one.
It's a good one.
You know, speaking of libraries, I said to you before we started recording, I've been so immersed in the skill and the artistry of your work.
That it's sort of hitting me in a delayed way, what a dire portrait it is that you're painting.
But from talking to you today, I'm really struck by the power of storytelling and that the artistry that I feel you're bringing to the world in terms of what we were just talking about is to put these stories out there that are evocative and emotionally arresting and that make a stand for human dignity.
And thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me and for the work you do.
And may we talk again sometime in a better future.
Thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
Join us here next Thursday when Kat Bohannon joins to discuss her recent book, Eve, How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.
