#792: Chatting With Jeff Sharlet
Today, Jordan sits down to have a chat with author (and past Infowars guest) Jeff Sharlet. Check out Jeff's new book The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War, available everywhere now.
April 5, 2023 - Knowledge Fight
01:09:52
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unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| and enjoy knowledge fight. | ||
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unidentified
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Need money. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
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unidentified
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Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
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unidentified
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Andy in Kansas. | |
| You're on the air. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| Unfortunately, I am here by myself without my co-host, Dan. | ||
| Luckily, I have a guest with me. | ||
| Please welcome to the show Jeff Charlotte. | ||
| Jeff, my first question, of course, is what's your bright spot today? | ||
| My bright spot was the look of delight on my 13-year-old and my 9-year-old's faces. | ||
| When they heard that Trump had been indicted and they had this sense, they learned of it from their mother who yelled, "Yes, motherfucker!" Oh, that's a good day. | ||
| And it was licensed for them to curse, which I think is, I mean, that's what cursing is actually for, right? | ||
| Like, we're trying to teach them, like, cursing is real. | ||
| So, like, you want to curse Trump, you can. | ||
| And just to get the sense that even though, look, we know this arrest may end up helping him, it may amount to nothing, whatever. | ||
| But in this little moment, my kids have grown up with this vile, vile creature, had a sense that perhaps sometimes the bullies get theirs. | ||
| Yeah, it is very much a feeling. | ||
| Something that I don't think many people have had for a long time, which is the sense that it is possible to hold someone in power accountable. | ||
| I don't think this is the feeling of holding them accountable, but it is a feeling of possibility. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| This isn't a bit like, hey, maybe we should try. | ||
| Like, oh, you know. | ||
| Hey, why not? | ||
| We've tried not doing it. | ||
| Yeah, so much of the Democratic Party has been, you know, going on the principles of one of my favorite lines from The Simpsons when Homer says, you know, I think it's Homer, says, I tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas. | ||
| You know, I mean, that's a little unfair, but like, what if we tried to stop this criminal behavior? | ||
| By prosecuting criminal behavior. | ||
| Maybe, just maybe, it's a crazy idea, but maybe it'll work. | ||
| And it might not, but let's try. | ||
| I mean, that argument was always a wonderful smokescreen of like, listen, okay, we love you normal people, but if we start prosecuting people who are on our station, then that opens us to possibly being prosecuted. | ||
| So we'd rather let Trump do whatever it is he wants so I can steal money from you also. | ||
| That's always good. | ||
| And they know, look, there's going to be retaliatory prosecutions. | ||
| And you signed up for that job in the public square, then you put yourself, I mean, in the same way those of us who do media, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's a way in which I hate trolls and everything else, but sometimes I hear young journalists sort of like saying, this is so unfair that I have to endure this. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| This is the job we signed up for. | ||
| No one is saying, hey, you know what? | ||
| This world is not going to be complete until Charlotte speaks in public, right? | ||
| It doesn't mean I deserve death threats or something like that, but I can't be stunned when they come. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I recognize that. | ||
| At a certain point, it's part of the gig. | ||
| As a comic, if I was ever furious about bombing, that wouldn't make much sense at all. | ||
| It's going to happen over and over and over again. | ||
| Make your peace with it now. | ||
| That kind of feeling. | ||
| Well, I mean, let's get into it. | ||
| I don't want to waste all of your time today. | ||
| First things first, the most important thing to our listeners is that you have been on InfoWars. | ||
| I have. | ||
| And I confessed this right before this, and I was like, oh, God, I've got to tell you. | ||
| And then I was like, I don't want to tell anybody. | ||
| I don't want anyone to know. | ||
| But this is not like I'm a convert or anything. | ||
| And my views on this have changed, actually. | ||
| You might know. | ||
| Did you look it up? | ||
| So you might know when it was? | ||
| It was 2009? | ||
| It was 2003. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Or at least that's when we covered it. | ||
| It was not... | ||
| You hadn't written the book The Family yet. | ||
| No. | ||
| You just published the article about The Family. | ||
| An article, yeah. | ||
| So at that time, he was trying to be above the left-right paradigm. | ||
| He was doing that whole thing. | ||
| Well, he was nasty and crazy then, too. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| I didn't know too much about him. | ||
| I knew what I knew. | ||
| And that's not really an excuse, because even knowing him back then, I would have done it. | ||
| But Alex Jones is... | ||
| Featured in that Richard Linklater sort of animated movie, right? | ||
| That's what I knew about him. | ||
| And I was like, this is a kook and he's sort of an interesting character. | ||
| He's a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| I was also on a radio show called Coast to Coast AM. | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| Late night conspiracy theories. | ||
| And my principle back then, and it still applies now, but I want all kinds of people to talk to me, oftentimes against their best interests. | ||
| When fascists talk to me, it's not... | ||
| I'm up front. | ||
| No, they're going to win. | ||
| They're going to defeat you. | ||
| You're going to come over to their side. | ||
| Everybody's going to understand. | ||
| Or I'm going to write this book and it's going to make them furious, right? | ||
| But I want them to talk to me. | ||
| So on that principle, then I should be willing to talk to anybody, right? | ||
| That was my old principle. | ||
| I don't hold it anymore, actually. | ||
| I think the times... | ||
| I also partly I don't hold it because I think back then I would not have said we... | ||
| I would say there are spots of fascism in America, but I wouldn't say there is a... | ||
| And, you know, there's more than one kind of bad under the sun, right? | ||
| And this is the sort of thing, like, whenever we describe, you know, of course, Trump is fascist, Bush was fascist, Clinton was fascist, Reagan was fascist. | ||
| Now, there's more than one kind of bad under the sun. | ||
| And, in fact, those presidents committed incredible harm. | ||
| But this is fascism and no now. | ||
| I mean, like, if, not that it would, but if Alex Jones asked me on now. | ||
| I would not do it. | ||
| I think that was the case for most people. | ||
| It wasn't really until they became us, or they became all of us, so to speak, until Alex Jones' ideas became Fox News' ideas, and it was everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, and it became powerful. | ||
| We can't talk to these people anymore. | ||
| This has got to stop. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I don't want, yeah, you don't want to contribute to that momentum. | ||
| You don't want to, like, when he was a fringe character back in 2003, maybe I didn't know. | ||
| At the time, I did give an interview once a couple years later, like, why did you do that? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Michelle Goldberg. | ||
| And I was like, you know, on the one hand, I had that free speech thing going. | ||
| On the other hand, I can't remember which Linklater movie it was. | ||
| I thought that'll be interesting. | ||
| I like Eccentrics. | ||
| No, you're fine. | ||
| I remember what he talked about. | ||
| He wanted to talk about, what's that thing where people think, it's a real thing, the camp in Northern California where elites go and Alex Jones. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Everybody knows it's the Bohemian Grove. | ||
| Bohemian Grove. | ||
| That's it, right. | ||
| And I had written about this. | ||
| Organization that is real. | ||
| It's not a conspiracy, but they are weirdly secretive. | ||
| The fellowship or the family that run the National Prayer Breakfast. | ||
| And so that was, you know, that was just bait for him. | ||
| And he wanted to do that. | ||
| And he kept on wanting to say, and they also do this. | ||
| And I'm like, no, they don't do that. | ||
| But they're pretty bad on their own. | ||
| He wasn't so interested in actually the bad things. | ||
| That they did, like reporting, you know, dictators around the world. | ||
| He was more interested in, you know, I don't know, do they dance naked around a fire in Northern California, which to me would be like, great, if those guys would stop with the dictatoring and all that and have more naked dances. | ||
| Better world. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's essentially why he does that, is that it's useful for him to present the idea that these people are dancing around naked, as opposed to these people who share the ideology that you do are actively trying to kill you. | ||
| You know, that kind of thing. | ||
| It's a lot easier to go one way or the other. | ||
| There's a lot of that on, you know, you've joined a group of... | ||
| Well-respected people who have accidentally gone on Infowars. | ||
| Bill Ayers has accidentally gone on Infowars. | ||
| It's one of those things where you think, oh, well, I can talk to anybody, and then you get blindsided by that. | ||
| So that was fun. | ||
| What's it like in 2003? | ||
| You were on to the tip of these people while you might call them a conspiracy. | ||
| It's not the conspiracy that you think you're talking about. | ||
| It's not the drinking blood conspiracy. | ||
| It's just regular old kind of fascism. | ||
| Well, even then, so when I wrote that, I mean, and so this book, The Undertow, is sort of coming out of this 20 years of writing about right-wing movements. | ||
| And for a lot of that time, I wrote this book called The Family, a Netflix series, people can see, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And that was about a kind of Christian fundamentalism. | ||
| They're the oldest. | ||
| Christian conservative political organization Washington dating back to 1935 when they were formed as businessmen who hated the New Deal and saw it as satanic and they wanted to work against organized labor. | ||
| And they weren't a conspiracy. | ||
| And this is really important, partly because they didn't so much break the laws. | ||
| I mean, there is a prominent... | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| It's a neutral term, right? | ||
| It's not in itself a good thing. | ||
| And they were sort of an elite social movement. | ||
| And then the undertow, it's almost like they always had this idea of trickle-down fundamentalism. | ||
| And when Trump came down that golden escalator in 2015, I looked at him and I said, this is the kind of leader that this group... | ||
| group, this group of congressmen and businessmen have really supported around the world. | ||
| But they've always had a little bit of a line. | ||
| They wouldn't go quite for that strong man figure back in the United States. | ||
| And really, I mean, just sort of coming down from the dark heaven of Trump Tower, there he was. | ||
| And I was like, oh, this will be a contender because there's so Yeah. | ||
| Grassley was close friends with a dictator in Somalia and arranged for armed support for him, Saad Bahre, you know? | ||
| Before this, Chuck Grassley, Chuck Grassley was always a right winger, but he actually had this weird kind of integrity. | ||
| But you knew that he could be come over to Trump because he'd done it for those around the world. | ||
| And here it came. | ||
| And so that was a sort of their trickle down fundamentals and their ideas becoming mainstream. | ||
| I wouldn't have said at the time I said, in fact, they're not fascist. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah, they're bad, but they're not fascist. | ||
| Fascism is a word that means something. | ||
| And they didn't have a cult of personality, partly because Jesus occupied that space. | ||
| And while this kind of American power always sort of supported violence, there's always been a paradox of it. | ||
| You know, we declare ourselves a city on a hill. | ||
| We don't openly fetishize the violence to the point of pleasure. | ||
| Trump changed that. | ||
| He brought those two elements of classical fascism. | ||
| Now I think it is a fair descriptor. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds about right. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| So, I think, essentially, you've got a giant barrel of I told you so's that you carry around with you, right? | ||
| And you give those out to anybody who's like, oh, we should... | ||
| Everybody who ever said, when they go low, we go high, you get to hand out a little, eh, you know, screw you. | ||
| That kind of... | ||
| I mean, there's so many of us, though, right? | ||
| I mean, like, you guys have been focusing on this for a long, long time. | ||
| It is true. | ||
| I'll tell you this, right? | ||
| When I published that book in 2008, The Family, and then Obama was elected, I can't tell you how many producers or interviewers would say, is this really matter anymore? | ||
| Isn't fundamentalism dead in America? | ||
| And I had done the history, and I was like, look, you can literally go through the media history of America and find that same declaration every five years going back to 1925 in the Scopes Monkey Trial. | ||
| This time, I was, you know, I published this book and it's scenes from a slow civil war as a subtitle and I was sort of scared. | ||
| I'm like, oh God, the reviews, I'm just going to go to that thing. | ||
| He's an alarmist. | ||
| So the good news for me is reviews are great. | ||
| They like it. | ||
| They say, this is scary. | ||
| The bad news for the world is the very people who once would have said this is alarmist are like, Joseph O 'Neill writing the New York Times sort of says, yeah, this guy spends a lot of time. | ||
| Around militia guys and right-wingers and so on. | ||
| To paraphrase, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. | ||
| But the problem is, there's a whole lot of nails right now. | ||
| So, yeah, good news. | ||
| Bad news. | ||
| I think the way that you start your book is quite well. | ||
| I mean, you bookend your, literally, your first and last chapter are both about American music, essentially. | ||
| And it opens with Harry Belafonte. | ||
| And I think you draw maybe a parallel, I don't know if you made it explicit, but to that being another undertow. | ||
| Another era of civil war, wherein it is all happening beneath the surface, and it draws some people and tears them all the way down. | ||
| And a long struggle, too, right? | ||
| This is not the first time we've been here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I wanted to ask you some questions about that. | ||
| As far as Harry Belafonte goes, I had no idea. | ||
| I mean, I wasn't alive. | ||
| But I had no idea quite the extent of his popularity and his fame. | ||
| And there's some amazing stories that you tell about that if you've got some time. | ||
| So, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I started with Belafonte and end with an even lesser-known guy now named Lee Hayes. | ||
| But people probably know some of Lee Hayes' songs, like If I Had a... | ||
| Maybe you've heard Peter, Paul and Mary sing it. | ||
| And so, you know, if I had a hammer, I'd build a treehouse. | ||
| Now, if I had a hammer... | ||
| I mean, it was a radical song. | ||
| If I had a hammer, I would smash capitalism, is what he meant. | ||
| And Harry Belfonte, everyone knows the Banana Boat song. | ||
| I can't sing, but you know it. | ||
| It's in your head. | ||
| Daylight Come, We Want to Go Home. | ||
| Also a radical song. | ||
| Learned it on the docks in Jamaica. | ||
| And I started with these guys because I think they're remarkable human beings. | ||
| They were in a struggle. | ||
| They overlapped a little bit, mainly at different times. | ||
| Lee Hayes is in the 30s, 40s, and Harry is still alive, but he was instrumental to the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s. | ||
| And to show that the struggle is long, they're both defeated. | ||
| They don't win, right? | ||
| Which we know. | ||
| The Civil Rights Movement did not achieve all that it wanted or nearly enough. | ||
| And he knows that. | ||
| And in his 90s, he's an angry man. | ||
| Angry all his life. | ||
| But it's not a matter of where your anger comes from. | ||
| It's a matter of what you do with it. | ||
| And what he did with it, when he, in 1956, he was the first guy to sell a million records. | ||
| Not Elvis. | ||
| Which, you know, he points out. | ||
| It was me. | ||
| It was a black man. | ||
| It was a black immigrant, was the first person to sell a million records. | ||
| It's so weird we don't celebrate that in America. | ||
| That seems so uncommon for us to not celebrate a black man who did it first. | ||
| And so many firsts of Harry Belfont. | ||
| And what was interesting to me about that, not just his... | ||
| The firstness of it, right? | ||
| Famous first and so on. | ||
| But part of the reason I don't know that is that so many of these icons get smoothed down. | ||
| You know, I sang Banana Boat's song, and if I had a hammer in elementary school, you know, they're safe songs. | ||
| That's part of how we forget. | ||
| We forget these resources we have for struggle that were there, these freedom songs. | ||
| And Harry Belafonte knows that because he was studying the songs that slave people sang that had code in them. | ||
| And he says, all my songs are code songs. | ||
| And he has a blistering critique of American life, too. | ||
| He says, it's a minstrel act, you know, corked up blackface. | ||
| The whole country is a minstrel act. | ||
| He says, even I'm in the minstrel act. | ||
| This is how America, this is the struggle that we are in. | ||
| And then the third and last part, I guess, would be just, you know, there's a scene, Harry Belafonte, Freedom Summer in Mississippi. | ||
| It's about to wind up the program. | ||
| 1963 is this? | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| 64. And three civil rights workers, Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney. | ||
| Horrifically murdered. | ||
| I mean, there's no non-horrific murder, but mutilated, tortured. | ||
| And so they all decide to stay down there, but they need money. | ||
| Harry's the guy who has the money. | ||
| He's got enough money, but he can't wire $50,000 to Mississippi. | ||
| It's like sending a death warrant. | ||
| He's got to bring it himself. | ||
| He goes and he gets Sidney Poitier, the famous actor, first black man to win an academy as actor. | ||
| And he says, you know, Klan might be scared of killing two big, I'm not going to use the word. | ||
| He can use the word. | ||
| I can't use the word. | ||
| Black men. | ||
| And the Klan was not. | ||
| They landed on the plane. | ||
| The Klan was waiting. | ||
| It's a car chase. | ||
| It's a car chase to town. | ||
| And they get there. | ||
| And I'm like, these struggles, these Oath Keepers, these Proud Boys, these Three Percenters, there's more of them now. | ||
| There really are. | ||
| But we fought them before. | ||
| And we've got to remember that. | ||
| You know, that story really was... | ||
| There were two stories about Harry Belafonte that were mind-blowing to me. | ||
| Obviously, that story wherein it is entirely possible that we lose Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier to a Klan murder. | ||
| I mean, that is a near miss. | ||
| A driver named Willie Blue, who was... | ||
| And they were getting rammed. | ||
| I mean, they were surrounded. | ||
| And at one point, Sidney Poitier says, Let's stop. | ||
| And the sheriff will stop. | ||
| And, you know, Willie Blue says, who do you think is chasing us and trying to ram into us? | ||
| The sheriff is part of the Klan. | ||
| The Sundown Town does not watch movies with Sidney Poitier. | ||
| They don't fucking care. | ||
| No, they're like, oh, shit, man, we're going to kill you. | ||
| But oh, man, the sheriff would love. | ||
| That was really, that was a performance. | ||
| That was fucking great. | ||
| No, and the other story about Harry Belafonte that was such a soft power... | ||
| Such a soft exercise of power that is revolutionary on its own is the quote from the prisoner of, like, I love Mr. B. He made the clock stop. | ||
| Wherein you're telling the story of how recess or the length of time that they were allowed to be where they were was always strictly set. | ||
| And Harry Belifonte said, we'll stay another 15 minutes. | ||
| And the prison just goes, yeah, I guess you will. | ||
| I guess that's what's going to happen. | ||
| The first thing you're like, no, no, no. | ||
| And Harry Belfont says again, I said, we'll stay another 15 minutes. | ||
| He knew what he had. | ||
| He knew his voice. | ||
| He knew this kind of preternatural sense of timing he had. | ||
| He's a person of incredible charisma and incredible command. | ||
| And he never wavered for a second of knowing what he wanted to use it for, which was freedom, which was not just for himself, but for others. | ||
| And he sees... | ||
| These guys, these prisoners, he stopped the clock in prison. | ||
| And I think, you know, look, Harry Belafonte, the interesting thing, too, is I was doing another interview the other day. | ||
| It's like, what kind of leaders do we need now? | ||
| I don't think of Harry Belafonte as a leader. | ||
| I think of Harry Belafonte in the tradition of another great civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. | ||
| Strong people, she says, don't need strong leaders. | ||
| Harry Belafonte was thinking, you know. | ||
| I want to bring you into this space with me. | ||
| We are going to do this thing together. | ||
| I'm not going to direct you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| It doesn't work. | ||
| He's on a solidarity model. | ||
| This only works if we're in solidarity with one another. | ||
| Thank you for opening with that because this book is pretty dark and that's sort of why... | ||
| Look, I knew putting that up front. | ||
| Yeah, we're about to get real fucking dark, so I thought it would be nice to open with a hero. | ||
| That's the idea of the book. | ||
| That's the idea of the book. | ||
| I didn't have the stomach just to, like, I'm going to take you just into the depths. | ||
| But I want you to be a little bit fortified, to have something and say, wait a minute, here's an imagination of another way. | ||
| And I'm sure, you know, I'm grateful to Norton for letting me do that because probably we could calculate somewhere how many book sales I'm going to lose because people are like, oh yeah, great, I want to hear a book about the threat of fascism. | ||
| Damn, what? | ||
| That's not what I was here for, but that's okay. | ||
| Those who get through it are going to be, I think, are going to be glad it was there. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what struck me so hard about that, what struck me so hard about those stories is the element of agency for so few people. | ||
| And that's kind of the thing, like, I was reminded of Audre Lorde whenever I was reading that Harry Belafonte story, like, the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house. | ||
| And that's where I kept going back to financiers. | ||
| It is so strange to me that in order to continue this revolution, you need a financier to drive down with 50 grand in cash. | ||
| In that case, there's such a logjam where you can kill the whole operation. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| So as far as these revolutions go, you look at that and you see the failures that result from it. | ||
| It says to me that this cannot be the way that it's done. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's right. | ||
| I think Harry would say that, too. | ||
| I mean, Harry's like, this is the moment. | ||
| The money is needed. | ||
| I'm going to get it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But this is not what we are working toward, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think the clarity of that and the fact that Harry Belafonte or Lee Hayes and the Weavers... | ||
| Lee Hayes, you would know because he's Pete Seeger's songwriting partner. | ||
| I would know him for that. | ||
| Well, people would know... | ||
| No, you know what I mean. | ||
| I know, I know, I know. | ||
| I'm enjoying... | ||
| I'm having a little fun. | ||
| And Pete, who's really actually kind of... | ||
| This is sagrilegious to say. | ||
| I found kind of a dull character. | ||
| He was just like this saint. | ||
| He had on his banjo and said, this machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. | ||
| Pete, by the way, had a horrible temper that he would never show, but then he would sometimes quietly go back into a back room and smash a banjo and then come out and says, I'm all right now. | ||
| Woody Guthrie. | ||
| Part of that band, too, had on his guitar, famously sort of drawn around the hips of the guitar. | ||
| This machine kills fascists, right? | ||
| And I'm a nonviolent person myself, but I like the clarity of that, right? | ||
| The clarity is this is a which side are you on, another old song, a which side are you on moment. | ||
| Which, you know, speaks to, like, as we get into the book and we encounter these really dark characters, people sometimes ask, how do you talk sense into them? | ||
| You don't. | ||
| Interact. | ||
| How long have you been doing this show? | ||
| Six years? | ||
| You don't even want to ask us how many episodes we've done. | ||
| How many episodes have you done? | ||
| Ten shy of 800. | ||
| Ten shy of 800. | ||
| So, by now, Alex Jones has probably got the point, and he's saying, thanks, guys. | ||
| You know, I... | ||
| I went off on a flyer there. | ||
| How do we reach out? | ||
| And there's an arrogance to that too, right? | ||
| In the same way you've watched a lot of Alex Jones and somehow it has not yet convinced you, right? | ||
| True. | ||
| I hope. | ||
| You know, if someone comes to me, I have a, you know, I have a queer kid. | ||
| No one's going to come to me and say, like, Charlotte, how do we just find the common ground which we can convey to you why homosexuality is wrong? | ||
| You don't. | ||
| We're on opposite sides. | ||
| And let's contend with that. | ||
| And I think that is the best way to enter into your book. | ||
| I mean, into the larger portion past the fun. | ||
| This is a book about religion. | ||
| And while it is going to constantly be called Christian, it's going to be called conservative Christianity, all of those things, in order to continue on this conversation, our listeners have a conception of me as a raving lunatic atheist. | ||
| But that's only because the only time I discuss religion is in the context of a raving lunatic zealot. | ||
| So, you know, I mirror that energy. | ||
| In this situation, I get very, very frustrated with the use of the word Christian, because to me, I think what we're talking about is what I would describe as a biblical selectivist. | ||
| There are, you know, for whatever fundamentalist Christianity we want to describe, they don't adhere to the text. | ||
| Which is my problem. | ||
| And it always has been. | ||
| Because I was raised a very zealotous person, you know? | ||
| I was raised in a conservative Christian family of biblical literalists. | ||
| And a lot of people assume that that means that I rejected the church. | ||
| Well, I mean, let's get into it a little bit. | ||
| I was born in a cult. | ||
| And my family was in a non-denominational biblical literalist cult. | ||
| And, you know, when you do that, it gets out of control. | ||
| It's pretty quick. | ||
| Because, for obvious reasons, you know. | ||
| And to me, whenever people start talking about religion, I have no interest in talking about my religion or belief systems or anything along those lines. | ||
| I am only interested in your fundamental book and whether or not you are adhering to the text. | ||
| That's all that matters to me. | ||
| If you believe it and you adhere to the text, I really can't argue with you and I will never change your mind on anything. | ||
| It's only whenever people pick and choose that is, I mean, pathetic. | ||
| And I'm saying that because that's what's in the book. | ||
|
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What's in the book is that that is wrong. | |
| But I would say this. | ||
| So one of the undertow, the long, the essay that is at the heart of the book is after Ashley Babbitt, 35-year-old white woman, leads a charge in the Capitol on January 6th and gets shot by a cop who happens to be black, and that plays right into the sort of the American mythology of the lynching story. | ||
| And I knew she was going to be a martyr, so I kind of... | ||
| Decided to drive across the country just kind of following the ghost of Ashley Babbitt. | ||
| And first night, I ended up at a militia church in Yuba City, California. | ||
| And yeah, there's a lot. | ||
| Well, here's how much they don't adhere to the book. | ||
| They got rid of the cross because they thought it was kind of sissy. | ||
| The altar was made of three swords. | ||
| At the same time, I would say this, right? | ||
| I hear from people all the time, it says, doesn't Christ, wasn't he always teach love and compassion? | ||
| And the cherry picking, you know, they can come right back at you and say, I come not to bring peace but the sword, right? | ||
| Or as that pastor did, he had a customized AR-15 he was given by his church with Joshua 1.9 inscribed on it, which has now become this popular so-called battle verse. | ||
| For certain conservative evangelicals. | ||
| The verse itself is, you know, be brave, take heart, right? | ||
| You know, it's non-objection. | ||
| But you got another, and I suspect you do know the rest of the Joshua story. | ||
| What is God telling him to be brave to do? | ||
| To go into Jericho and kill every man, woman, and child in it. | ||
| To kill everybody. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| What, are we going to complain about a genocide in the Bible? | ||
| Pick one. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, like, and there I will say, like, you can say, look, if you adhere to the book, I won't argue with you. | ||
| If you, like, I hear the book and I got to kill everybody. | ||
| I'm going to... | ||
| I'm not going to try... | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| I don't agree with you. | ||
| By no means. | ||
| Let me try and give you an example that I think makes it a little bit clearer. | ||
| When my sister was married, my little sister was married in a church with the pastor that we grew up with to her... | ||
| with... | ||
| Bible verses as their vows, right? | ||
| And one of the vows was 1 Timothy 2.11. | ||
| And I don't know if you are familiar with that one, but it's essentially, let a woman learn in all submissiveness. | ||
| I permit no woman to have authority over man because Adam was before Eve, right? | ||
| Now, what I love about that is, unlike the shades of gray Bible part where everybody's like, oh, what is God? | ||
| You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I like that because that's yes or no. | ||
| Do or don't. | ||
| Now, she had that Bible verse. | ||
| She had it read at a church by the pastor before God, right? | ||
| And when that happened, I laughed out loud in the church because I know that that is not going to be how she lives her life, even in a slight bit. | ||
| She rejects that completely, right? | ||
| I don't have any problem with that. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
|
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But then don't care about the book or cut it out of the book. | |
| If you don't care about the book, then stop caring about the book! | ||
| That's my frustration. | ||
| The good news for you is actually, you know, do you think Trump cares about the book? | ||
| Not much. | ||
| Again, biblical selectivists. | ||
| And the Christian national... | ||
| Well, they're not even selectivists. | ||
| The Christian nationalism of the moment. | ||
| And I think this is... | ||
| In 2013, I reported in Russia on... | ||
| This is just when Putin was beginning to use queer folks, LGBTQ plus folks, as the enemy within. | ||
| Which he'd actually been quite progressive before that, but he's like, I need to organize an enemy within. | ||
| You gotta have one. | ||
| And so, And he appealed, as he has ever since, to this kind of sense of a holy Christian mission of Russia. | ||
| And Russians loved it. | ||
| So there's people who sort of think, gosh, I don't hate the Russian people. | ||
| I hate Putin. | ||
| Well, bad news. | ||
| A lot of Russian people really like Putin. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| But not because they went to church. | ||
| The church attendance is like single digits. | ||
| Same with the larger movement around Trump right now. | ||
| Except for the people I meet in churches, Most of the other people in this book, militiamen, guys with guns, angry folks, they want a Christian nation. | ||
| They don't go to church. | ||
| They don't know what that is. | ||
| What they mean by Christianity is a kind of vision of whiteness. | ||
| And, you know, you could say, like, you reject the word Christian. | ||
| A phrase I used in another book I hoped would catch on and didn't, I said, I think we should call it American Fundamentalism. | ||
| It's not Christian fundamentalism. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| Because it is all wrapped up in mythology. | ||
| It's wrapped up in movies. | ||
| I write a lot about movies in this book. | ||
| It's not an academic study. | ||
| It's because I meet a January 6th insurrectionist named George Riley. | ||
| He's angry because... | ||
| Richard Barnett, I think, who put his shoes up on Nancy Pelosi's desk gets all the credit. | ||
| He says, just because no one got a picture of me, I pulled down my pants and rubbed my ass on her desk. | ||
| How come I don't get the credit? | ||
| He is getting prosecuted, but he says, how to understand who he is? | ||
| He said, did you see the movie 300? | ||
| The Zack Snyder blood fest, 300 Spartans against Persian hordes. | ||
| He says, I'm like that guy. | ||
| One man survives. | ||
| And I'm like, actually, most of you survived January 6th? | ||
| He says, I'm the last man standing to tell Ashley Babbitt's story. | ||
| He doesn't even write down to the Civil War. | ||
| When they say Civil War, all of us as Americans, unless we were born somewhere else or have done some war reporting, we're talking about a metaphor. | ||
| We have Civil War movies. | ||
| We have Glory and things like that. | ||
| And then we have the militia guys, and they're playing reels of Red Dawn over and over in their head. | ||
| You're a little younger. | ||
| You may not remember Red Dawn. | ||
| Oh, I remember Red Dawn. | ||
| Wolverines! | ||
| Wolverines, right, right. | ||
| Patrick Swayze up in the mountains and, you know, going to fight for freedom, which is not how it's going to be, although some people will do some damage on the way, pretending it is. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, any time you're talking to somebody about a civil war, at no point in time are they like, now how do we secure supply lines across 2,000 fucking miles of this dumb country? | ||
| What are you talking about, a civil war? | ||
| Yeah, none of these militia guys are saying like, oh yeah, it's cool, Bob, you get the AR-15. | ||
| What I'm really going to work on is blankets. | ||
| That's going to be my part of the fascist. | ||
| How many battlefield medics do you have? | ||
| That said, this is a way that liberals reassure themselves, right? | ||
| They look at these militia guys. | ||
| And in the book, I go, I meet a militia commander in Wisconsin. | ||
| I go to a militia church in Nebraska, militia church in California. | ||
| I go to Lauren Boebert's Shooters Restaurant in Colorado. | ||
| It's called Shooters. | ||
| It's Hooters with guns. | ||
| That's the theme. | ||
| Militia guys. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Guac 45? | ||
| Guac 45? | ||
| Guac 9. Guac 9 is the burger I had. | ||
|
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That's it. | |
| I don't know guns. | ||
| You can also get guacamole, a side of guacamole with anything. | ||
| You can't use the same pun twice. | ||
| That's a foul. | ||
| No, it's different. | ||
| Guac 9, guacamole. | ||
| They're using it in different ways. | ||
| Refuse. | ||
| Wait, are you telling me that Lauren Boebert is not as smart as I thought she was? | ||
| I don't think the far right is that creative. | ||
| I'm going to go out on a limb here. | ||
| Oh, I do. | ||
| That's actually an argument of the book, except, you know, it's stories, so I'm not, like, coming out. | ||
| And I think one of the things that frightens me, and the reason I go back to those imaginative moments of the past with Harry Belafonte, is as I'm driving around the country, I... | ||
| Photographer too. | ||
| I've photographed maybe two or three different hundred variations of fascist flags. | ||
| There are just as many progressive flags, pride flags in particular. | ||
| It's all the same flag. | ||
| I have one. | ||
| I bought it from, I hate to say, Amazon. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Most people do. | ||
| Cost $14.99. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But these people are stitching their own flags. | ||
| They are painting silos. | ||
| I've seen trees carved into totems, right? | ||
| There is, it's fascist American Americana. | ||
| And I have a friend who's a Smithsonian curator and is collecting this stuff because this is the folk art of America right now. | ||
| That's scary. | ||
| That shows you the energy of that movement. | ||
| I mean, it's dumb imagination. | ||
| So you're telling me that Ken Burns is going to make a documentary about fucking memes. | ||
| The memes are the least of it. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| The memes. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| It would be his best movie. | ||
| We had Ken Burns here at Dartmouth. | ||
| I teach at Dartmouth College. | ||
| We had Ken Burns. | ||
| Whoa, whoa, whoa, name dropper. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Good job, man. | ||
| Ken Burns and Werner Herzog came and did a thing. | ||
| And to me, these are two very unlike filmmakers. | ||
| And I was kind of excited because I thought Werner Herzog was going to come out and just sort of crunch and gobble up Ken Burns with his bowl cut, you know? | ||
| And he sort of does. | ||
| He comes out and says, I have such respect for your films, Ken, your sense of the visual. | ||
| Of course we know that your words don't matter. | ||
| And Ken Burns sort of nods and it's sort of like, it was like this wink. | ||
| Ken Burns is doing like... | ||
| And now an American story! | ||
| But really, it's this sort of subversive thing going on underneath. | ||
| And I'm digressing a little bit, but I do think that sensibility is how we have to understand the creativity of fascism, right? | ||
| The words are dumb. | ||
| That's also why I don't think you're digressing, because the next part of that is the connection I see to Trump rallies, to then the reality TV show influencer, Pastor Rich Vu Church nonsense, which the moment you said that that was Ye's pastor, I was like, oh shit, yeah, of course he's a fucking Nazi. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| Why are we waiting on this one? | ||
| But yeah, so... | ||
| When you get into that connection of that creativity, I'm speaking more of like this style, which is about 10 years behind. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like a Christian rock song is about 10 years behind a good rock song. | ||
| That kind of feeling. | ||
| So this Christian reality TV show influencer, I want you to kind of talk way more about him because that guy is insane. | ||
| Yeah, that's part of it. | ||
| So the undertow of the title, right, is this idea that even before what I call the Trumpocene, this age of Trump, right? | ||
| And I should clarify for those out there saying, well, I don't think Trump's going to last. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| I met a prophetic pastor in Omaha, a fairly prominent figure in that world, says, Trump is coming back, whether the man himself or his spirit, you know, in the body of another. | ||
| And I think that's a good way of understanding how fascist movements work, right? | ||
| But the undertow, this didn't... | ||
| Start on 2016, of course. | ||
| I mean, this is why I've been reporting on right-wing movements. | ||
| You saw these currents, and one of them was this church called VU in Miami, which I originally went to write about for GQ magazine, and they were so disappointed when I showed up, because I, you know, listeners can't hear, but... | ||
| This is maybe my most fashionable shirt. | ||
| They wanted you to be, like, men's health. | ||
| No, they're beautiful. | ||
| They're gorgeous. | ||
| Oh, they wanted you to be gorgeous. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Voo people are gorgeous and super... | ||
| I mean, this is Kanye's pastor, Justin Bieber's pastor. | ||
| That's who they hang out with. | ||
| You know, they wear $1,000 sneakers. | ||
| They are... | ||
| Like the book says to do. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Reality show called Rich in Faith. | ||
| Kanye designed the cover years ago of Pastor Rich's book. | ||
| And part of what they preach is, very explicitly, something called the prosperity gospel, which I know you know, is this idea that what God really wants is for health and wealth, for you to be rich. | ||
| And the way for that to happen is to you kick up. | ||
| To your pastor. | ||
| The more Rolls Royces your pastors have, the more somehow that's going to make your life better. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| They've got that, but they've got it also about being beautiful. | ||
| And they openly speak this and sort of say, Pastor Rich is like, nothing bad has ever happened to me in my life. | ||
| He was never lost. | ||
| Always found. | ||
| Always blessed. | ||
| Born rich. | ||
| Lives rich. | ||
| That's the way to go. | ||
| Has a Bible study. | ||
| But nobody brings their Bible because they just read Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. | ||
| That's a better religion. | ||
|
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Well, it is. | |
| And it's a prelude to Trump. | ||
| It's a prelude to Trump in that sense, because I think the religiosity of Trump also gets misunderstood. | ||
| He's obviously not pious. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But Norman Vincent Peale, the mid-century predecessor to this crap, a businessman's religion. | ||
| Trump has three mentors. | ||
| His father, from whom he learned strength. | ||
| And by strength, I mean, you know, assholery. | ||
| But like, be a brute. | ||
| The mafia Red Scare lawyer Roy Cohn, from whom he learns cunning. | ||
| And Norman Vincent Peale, from whom he learns positivity. | ||
| Norman Vincent Peale, one of the bestsellers of all time, The Power of Positive Thinking. | ||
| And you're like, Trump? | ||
| Positivity? | ||
| Yes, Trump? | ||
| Believes he can do anything and combines that with cunning and brutality. | ||
| In fact, look what he did. | ||
| You know, he is able to sort of put that into action. | ||
| And what it is, is a stripped down. | ||
| Talk about selectivist. | ||
| I mean, it is the banality of evil. | ||
| You take this scripture and you just strip it down into so it's nothing but a power guide. | ||
| So that was there, and the church is rippling long before Trump, and that was part of pulling us out to sea, out to this fascist place. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's the other thing I want to talk about, is that when you describe this as American fundamentalism, I love that term. | ||
| Because this is not 100 years old. | ||
| This is not 200 years old. | ||
| This goes back to the slave Bible. | ||
| You know, this is 500 years old. | ||
| That type of connection that we have to this. | ||
| And, I mean, going straight from... | ||
| I suppose let me put it this way. | ||
| To me, there is a direct line from the Slave Bible to Elam and the men's rights activist monsters that you talk about. | ||
| And one of the lines that fucking stuck with me from those assholes was, oh shit, I gotta find it. | ||
| It was something along the lines of, oh, oh, the thing you wrote was, they couldn't decide on the age of consent. | ||
| Business having any input on the age of consent. | ||
| These assholes should be as far away from anyone, let alone someone below the age of 18, as humanly possible. | ||
| So when you tell that kind of story, that is to me that rewriting of this bullshit nonsense in order to accommodate your monstrosity. | ||
| I see Elam as a monster. | ||
| Yes, and I think that's a big part of what Trumpism does, is it gave people a license to be their worst selves, and there's something incredibly relaxing about that. | ||
| Something like, you know, someone like Ashley Babbitt, Obama voter, Democrat her whole life, someone who stood up for people and... | ||
| Some things in her life were starting to go wrong, starting to get into debt. | ||
| Things hadn't worked out. | ||
| And it's not just she could keep trying to be a good person. | ||
| But then Trump came and she looks at the homeless people around. | ||
| She lives in Southern California, a lot of homelessness. | ||
|
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Sometimes... | |
| Some guy craps in her yard and she could try to be compassionate or she could just give in. | ||
| And then comes this very, very successful man. | ||
| And he says, yes. | ||
| And that's not just about racism. | ||
| It's also, I think, about misogyny. | ||
| So the men's rights movement. | ||
| I've reported on so many right-wing movements over the years. | ||
| They're always more interesting than the caricature, except for these guys. | ||
| These guys are actually dumber than their caricature and their caricature is idiotic. | ||
| These guys, there are real issues that they could raise, like suicide is wildly higher amongst men, and we could talk about incarceration. | ||
| We could talk about poverty draft and all these kinds of things. | ||
| Instead, they get together, and these are the people that we now know as incels, and they talk about their ex-wives and ex-girlfriends and the girlfriends they never had. | ||
| I was out there with them shortly after Elliot Rodger. | ||
| He called himself the Supreme Gentleman and was so indignant that the women of the world had not recognized this and rewarded him with a tall, blonde girlfriend. | ||
| It's not just a girlfriend they want. | ||
| It has to be a certain type. | ||
| No, it has to be a servant. | ||
| Yes, it has to be a servant and it must be a Barbie doll. | ||
| It must be a Barbie doll, right. | ||
| So he killed six people. | ||
| So I go out to this convention these guys have in Detroit. | ||
| And this is now we all know the term red pill. | ||
| These guys were red pilling. | ||
| The essay is called Whole Bottle of Red Pills. | ||
| They were borrowing that from the Matrix. | ||
| They're also really inspired by American Beauty, that Sam Mendes movie with Kevin Spacey. | ||
| Yeah, he jerks off in the shower. | ||
| We all remember that. | ||
| I didn't remember that part, but thank you. | ||
| Now you fucking do. | ||
| You know, now different parts of the movie hit each of us in different ways. | ||
| That's a very funny thing to say to me. | ||
| These guys, their misogyny at the time, though, this was 2014, was a little bit... | ||
| I mean, misogyny is a big part of American life, but their extreme misogyny, like, let's lean into it. | ||
| National Beat a Bitch Day is one of the things. | ||
| Let's not try at all to be decent. | ||
| But also, let's be victims. | ||
| We're the ones. | ||
| You know, white man is the hardest thing to be in America. | ||
| This kind of crap, right? | ||
| Rudyard Kipling would disagree. | ||
| It was way back when that it was hard to be a white man. | ||
| Rudyard Kipling would have thought these guys are too much and are assholes. | ||
| They're kind of, now they're kind of antique, right? | ||
| Because that misogyny became the ethos of the Republican Party. | ||
| Not just the sexism that had always been there. | ||
| But I look at, there's a chapter in the book traveling around Wisconsin after Dobbs, after the downfall of Roe. | ||
| And talking, Wisconsin became the only blue state where abortion was completely illegal, reverted to 1849 law. | ||
| And it also happens to be kind of a malicious state. | ||
| A lot of folks out there, it's a well-armed state, as is Vermont, where I live. | ||
| I'm not casting aspersions. | ||
| But what was interesting when I would talk to these men about abortion, and they saw it as a great victory, these were not pious dudes at all. | ||
| It's almost like outlawing abortion was not really about saving the babies. | ||
| It was about saving the babies in their mind. | ||
| But also, we know it's about controlling women. | ||
| And to them, I think they experience it as almost sort of sexually exciting. | ||
| There was a guy named Brian Bushman. | ||
| He was celebrating the day I met him. | ||
| His much younger wife was sort of... | ||
| She's sitting down, an old woman. | ||
| The old woman and his younger girlfriend stand up so he and his buddy can sit down to talk, right? | ||
| You know, the man spread, sits there with his beverage. | ||
| I don't know what's in it. | ||
| He's pretty tipsy, I think, and talking about this. | ||
| And his girl there, I'm calling her a girl. | ||
| She's a woman, but this is what she's being... | ||
| She has to stand submissively behind him and giggle at the most vulgar things that these guys are saying. | ||
| And I think that's, it's a little bit like sometimes on the left we argue, like, is Trumpism and fascism, is it race or class or gender? | ||
| And yes, this is the intersectionality of fascism. | ||
| Fascism presses on all fronts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, to me, it is very much original sin in the sense that the original sin is... | ||
| The Bible insists that man gave birth to woman instead of the other way around, and that that is the fundament of all of the things that we're dealing with, is that fight over who was first. | ||
| I've never heard a quite phrase like that, but you're right. | ||
| Yeah, nobody has. | ||
| That's kind of, I mean, in so many ways, and the way that whiteness works in America, too, and I'm sort of writing about this, is, you know... | ||
| That white grievance sort of claims as its own every pain that it inflicts on others. | ||
| The men's rights guys who are saying it's actually us who are the victims of oppression. | ||
| And, you know, that's right. | ||
| That's sort of built right there in the Bible. | ||
| The dude was the first mom. | ||
| Yes, you're right. | ||
| It's from the start. | ||
| No, and I've had a lot of conversations with, funnily enough, with other comedians that are along similar lines of trying to figure out why it is that white men have a need to be victims while attacking others. | ||
| And it is a sublimation, realistically, of their admittance that they have it coming. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, here's what you're saying. | ||
| When you're a white man claiming to be a victim, you're saying that, I admit, if these things were done, then this is a reasonable response, right? | ||
| So what you're saying is, if I did those things, it is reasonable for black people to murder me the way that I am saying I have the right to for them. | ||
| They're telling on themselves. | ||
| Now, the problem there is, nobody really wants to murder them. | ||
| And that's the issue, you know? | ||
| But that's one of the things that I wanted to get into. | ||
| I don't know how much time you have left, but what I would like to combine with that is your discussion of Gnosticism and the way that that somehow, of all things, influences these lunatics, if that makes sense. | ||
| So get into the kind of Gnostic Gospels that they inexplicably respect. | ||
| So, you know, the book is organized in threes, just because that's the magic number. | ||
| To tell a soul. | ||
| There's three songs. | ||
| Harry Bell, Valente Deo, and Hope, Dream On, Aerosmith, it's a great song, and On Vanity. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I grew up on it. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| And I used it because at Trump rallies it was part of the playlist. | ||
| And when it was on, some people would spin around. | ||
| And I did too. | ||
| I have a video of people standing in the middle of the stadium and just spinning, listening to the song. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The ecstasy of joining the group. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And of dreaming and the dream politics of fascism, which is, I think, important to understand. | ||
| You don't argue, right. | ||
| You can't fact check a myth I write. | ||
| There's no argument with Alex Jones. | ||
| They're in a dream space. | ||
| It's a nightmare space. | ||
| But there's also three theological movements in the beginning. | ||
| I think Trump in 2016 opened the door of fascism, of full fascism, with a prosperity like gospel, right? | ||
| And by 2020, it had turned darker because of QAnon, because of the death of COVID and so much more. | ||
| And I started going to his rallies and people were telling me that... | ||
| And I never go with press. | ||
| Press stays in a pen. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| No, you're going to get hit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, no, it's not that I'm afraid of getting hit. | ||
| In fact, the only hitting I've ever been around... | ||
| Hit is a metaphorical term. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It just means, you know, you're going to... | ||
| There are going to be consequences for doing that that you have to avoid in order to achieve your job. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I did actually hit an old lady at a... | ||
| Trump rally broke out near me and I fell backwards and I was like, oh, I wasn't in the fight. | ||
| And then I'm like, oh, my God, I'm it. | ||
| I'm and I am the secret Jew journalist amongst them, causing violence. | ||
| And which is by 2020 what they were at. | ||
| They were at Gnosticism. | ||
| They're at secrets that Trump's tweets matters. | ||
| These people were in T-shirts to Trump's tweets matters. | ||
| And they believe. | ||
| Every misspelling, every weird capitalization is code. | ||
| Oh, it's numerology and Kabbalah and you name it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then Trump himself starts alluding to it. | ||
| The chapter after that, TikTok is a QAnon term, when Trump started to cross over into his own con. | ||
| He started believing his own con. | ||
| Lord Ingram is trying to rope him back. | ||
| And he's saying, there are dark shadows, dark forces. | ||
| And she's like, oh, you mean like Obama's people? | ||
| And he goes, no. | ||
| Above them? | ||
| You don't even know their names. | ||
| And she's like, you can see. | ||
| She's like, uh-oh. | ||
| No, we're supposed to be peddling this. | ||
| We're using our own supply. | ||
| We're not selling this stuff. | ||
| But he's crossed over. | ||
| And it is a kind of Gnosticism. | ||
| And the Gnosticism as a parallel, as a metaphor, which some of the QAnon people embrace. | ||
| It makes a lot of sense. | ||
| Gnosticism believes that the official apparatus of the church, right? | ||
| This is ancient Christian heresy. | ||
| The Dead Sea Scrolls, for people who don't know, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, of course. | |
| For sure. | ||
| The path of Christianity didn't take. | ||
| In fact, it didn't take, partly because it's anti-institutional. | ||
| Well, there was that, and also Jesus killed a bunch of dragons one time, and then one time Jesus murdered another kid when he was a kid, and then just brought him back, and everybody was like, no big deal. | ||
| So there were a lot of weirdo things in the Dead Sea Scrolls. | ||
| Yeah, it just didn't catch on, man. | ||
| It didn't catch on. | ||
| But now there's second chances. | ||
| America's a second chance place. | ||
| And it would describe as bishops, the bishops and bureaucrats as waterless canals, empty. | ||
| So what is the deep state? | ||
| What are the rhinos? | ||
| Waterless canals. | ||
| And so I thought that was the sort of thing. | ||
| Now, that was phase two. | ||
| Each phase, it doesn't leave behind the prosperity, it just adds. | ||
| When Ashley Babbitt was killed and why she's so central to the book on January 6th, we entered theologically into the Trump scene's Age of Martyrs. | ||
| Although I would argue that Ashley Babbitt was always going to be a placeholder until Trump could climb up on the cross himself. | ||
| And now here he is, about to be arrested right before Easter. | ||
| And, you know, you probably, I don't know, in your line of work, you sign up for Trump emails. | ||
| I do. | ||
| And once you sign up, you can never stop them. | ||
| Oh, fuck no. | ||
| I haven't signed up for Trump. | ||
| I don't, I've never, I honestly, the last time I listened to Trump was when Dan played it on the show, a clip of a speech. | ||
| I haven't listened to him since he became president. | ||
| I don't need it. | ||
| I don't need it, and it doesn't help. | ||
| And clearly, my opinions have not changed over that time period in any way that they would have been affected by Trump. | ||
| I think, so the reason I do it, and the reason I think it helps is that a lot of the political class dismisses much of what Trump does as just theater. | ||
| To me, the answer is, what do you mean just? | ||
| What do you mean just theater? | ||
| Theater is quite powerful. | ||
| I mean, the whole thing is theater. | ||
| The whole thing is theater. | ||
| That's the power of it. | ||
| If you're a political congressman of some sort, and you say that all he does is theater, then you have to acknowledge every time that you hold a vote to try and get people on the record for some shit, you're just playing theater. | ||
| It's all theater. | ||
| But that in itself is not a bad thing. | ||
| Harry Belfonte is just theater, too. | ||
| Performance is powerful. | ||
| Myth-making is powerful. | ||
| What kind of story, what kind of myth are you going to tell? | ||
| So if you go to a Trump rally and say, is he really going to build the wall? | ||
| You're missing the point. | ||
| If you say, who's going to win, DeSantis or Trump? | ||
| You're missing the point. | ||
| Fascism is going to win. | ||
| It's telling a story about who we are. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's a story that... | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| It came off like I was denigrating that. | ||
| Actually, what I was trying to say is that that is the power. | ||
| The theater is the power. | ||
| That's why Alex Jones partly was able to gain so much power because so many of traditional political analysts thought, well, that's just crazy and absurd and it's just theater. | ||
| It's just for show. | ||
| People want a show? | ||
| People want a show. | ||
| And I want a show too. | ||
| You know, Joan Didion, the writer, famously says, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. | ||
| And sometimes it gets taken as like, oh, isn't that wonderful? | ||
| The never-ending story. | ||
| Well, Joan Didion had a pretty dark sensibility. | ||
| Depends on what kind of stories you tell. | ||
| I have a very specific... | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| I have a very, very specific and personal story about Joe Didion's that line. | ||
| When I was in high school, my English teacher was ill-advised in teaching me. | ||
| It was a terrible idea. | ||
| He shouldn't have done that. | ||
| But what he did was he translated that into what he called the life lie. | ||
| You know, the thing that you tell yourself in order to get through the day. | ||
| And his story of that was, one day... | ||
| When I was 19, I had the courage after a fight with my father to tell him what I knew was his life lie. | ||
| And he obviously didn't tell me that story. | ||
| But the next thing he said was, he took a swing at me and we haven't spoken since. | ||
| To him, that was what Joan Didion was saying, is that there is something along your life that if someone really challenges, it's either you change or you die. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| I'm not saying he was a great Joan Didion scholar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, Joan Didion was not a good source for self-help advice. | ||
| I mean, look, I love Joan Didion. | ||
| I'm thrilled with this book, the first couple of reviews compared to Joan Didion. | ||
| And one of them says, Charlotte's as much of a mess as Joan Didion. | ||
| It's true, because when I was young, you know, when I was just getting started writing, a lot of dudes wanted to be Hunter Thompson, and that wasn't my thing. | ||
| Joan Didion, though, was like, I wanted to get big, giant sunglasses and develop migraines so I could be like her. | ||
| I still want to do a publicity photo. | ||
| I'm going to recreate her famous, you know, for those who haven't seen her, she's a tiny elf and very glamorous, beautiful woman, and there's a famous photo of her in front of a Corvette, and I want to reproduce it with the exact same outfit. | ||
| And I'm bald and not. | ||
| But the point of that is also I think that it is significant. | ||
| And not to say that my writing is like Joan Didion. | ||
| I wish, but it's not. | ||
| I don't wish. | ||
| I don't try and write like Joan Didion. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say. | ||
| I think what they were identifying, though, was Hunter Thompson was a mess, too. | ||
| But he wrote with great, great bravado. | ||
| And Joan Didion was a mess. | ||
| Her body was sort of taking the temperature constantly of the distress and decay around her. | ||
| And as I'm driving back and forth the country, I happen to live with a pretty serious heart condition, so my travels are limited by how many heart pills I have with me. | ||
| You know, there's a scary moment at a militia church in Nebraska. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Goddamn, you're bringing it up before I was about to... | ||
| I was literally about to get into... | ||
| Do you want to know what this section of my questioning was called? | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| The Chronicle of Indiana Jones. | ||
| So this is where we get into your story. | ||
| You've had a gun pulled on you. | ||
| This book reads similarly to... | ||
| Let me try and describe what I would describe how this book reads. | ||
| It reads like somebody is watching a person LARP. | ||
| The Da Vinci Code. | ||
| Who accidentally gets caught up in a different Da Vinci Code. | ||
| Like, it is fascinating to me to watch you because you're following along with all these conspiracy theorists and all these people who think all of this crazy shit is going to happen at any given point in time. | ||
| And then you go to a church and somebody pulls a gun on you. | ||
| You know, like, you're living more of that story that they think they're living. | ||
| Than they are. | ||
| You've got a heart condition. | ||
| You're going around. | ||
| You're meeting people who are, I mean, it's a fantastic story. | ||
| And I'm wondering if you feel like, well, clearly from your reaction, you do not feel like that at all. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| No, I thought that was very funny, LARPing Da Vinci Code. | ||
| I mean, but because it's what's there. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| I don't, as a reporter, sort of say, okay, I'm going to make appointments with all the key players. | ||
| I've done that in my life, and this is not... | ||
| And I respect that. | ||
| I actually probably... | ||
| A lot of people hate Maggie Haberman. | ||
| I find things she brings us some valuable news. | ||
| She does access journalism, absolutely, and New York Times, and finds out stuff, right? | ||
| And people hate her for it, because she does access journalism. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Access to the powerful. | ||
| I, you know, for the long, I just drove. | ||
| I just drove. | ||
| And like, you know, it's a road trip story, which is a very traditional story. | ||
| Instead of going west, I went east. | ||
| Nothing like Hunter S. Thompson. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I certainly, you know, the only drugs I was taking was, you know, a statin from my cholesterol. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| Whatever you got to take to get you through the day, man. | ||
| I'm not going to judge you for taking controlled substances, okay? | ||
| You got to do what you got to do. | ||
| But Hunter Thompson, look, there's great things he did, but there's a lot of machismo in his work. | ||
| If he gets a gun pointed at him, he's going to point a gun back at you. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| I get his gun pointed at me, and I'm like, God damn, what am I doing here? | ||
| It's 90 degrees. | ||
| I know my blood pressure is high. | ||
| I have been around these situations enough to understand that, you know, when a dude puffs up his chest and sticks out his chin, you're probably okay. | ||
| Because the one who's sticking out his chin is not going to hit you. | ||
| The one who's like volunteering their chin, when he kind of curls in... | ||
| I was like, this is a bad situation. | ||
| And these people are not afraid to hit me. | ||
| They're not afraid to call the cops because the cops are going to be on their side. | ||
| You're the Harry Belafonte in this cop scenario. | ||
| If I was Hunter Thompson, I'd be like, this is fantastic. | ||
| They're going to throw me in jail. | ||
| It's going to make my book a bestseller. | ||
| And I'm just like, I have a heart condition. | ||
| I have kids. | ||
| I got to go. | ||
| And I got out of there. | ||
| And not only that, I also had in my car... | ||
| As I'm traveling, my stepmother died in 2021. | ||
| And she was living in Colorado with her son. | ||
| And they saved a portion of the ashes for me to take home for my kids and I. So, you know, I was driving. | ||
| I had those ashes in the car. | ||
| Like, I can't go to jail. | ||
| I've got those ashes. | ||
| And it made me think of, you know what Hunter Thompson was not attuned to? | ||
| Grief. | ||
| And I think this is the undercurrent. | ||
| There are so many answers, but I like grief. | ||
| Grief is a good one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then I think in a lot of—grief is the undercurrent of this book. | ||
| I can't think of how many of these churches I've been to where they don't believe in climate crisis, so they talk about God and drought, right? | ||
| But they're feeling the loss, as we all are. | ||
| They're feeling all these losses, but grief that is not processed. | ||
| Process is a bad word. | ||
| Grief that is not mourned. | ||
| It curdles and it turns inward and it turns sour and it turns rotten and it drives Ashley Babbitt out of her beautiful Southern California home where she has avocado trees and lemon trees. | ||
| She goes to the beach and instead she's in the cold. | ||
| Walking to the Capitol with a knife. | ||
| People say she's unarmed. | ||
| The cover of the book, that's her knife. | ||
| That's the evidence photo. | ||
| If you look closely, it says 1-6-21. | ||
| It was taken that day. | ||
| It's a real knife that she had. | ||
| This is not who she had been. | ||
| She was grieving a lot of losses. | ||
| And that doesn't defend her. | ||
| Some people say, oh, you're just saying, no, man. | ||
| The one who passes, we all have pain. | ||
| The one who passes their pain onto another, that's when we turn, that's the evil part. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When I talked to Mike Rothschild just a short bit ago, we got into the concept of QAnon not starting with a conspiracy theory and starting with a medical bill. | ||
| And that can be sometimes too reductive because one thing that you go into a book is there's a fuck ton of medical bills. | ||
| These are people who choose this flavor of response to it. | ||
| It's not as though they're just... | ||
| Funneled into monstrosity, this is the flavor of response that they appreciate, that they feel good about. | ||
| Anger feels good. | ||
| It feels, as it did for Ashley, it felt like love, right? | ||
| You would see her in some of her videos that she would make. | ||
| She'd be driving around, ranting, furious, and then she would describe herself as just so filled with joy, like she'd never been, right? | ||
| And if you've been around mania, you can recognize some of that, but that's not to pathologize. | ||
| I'm bipolar type 1, so I have no idea what you're talking about. | ||
| Okay, so you know, right, right. | ||
| But I think that's another temptation. | ||
| People say, well, these people, this is national psychosis. | ||
| No, it's not, right? | ||
| Anyone who's dealt with real mental illness knows, no. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| These are people, you don't choose. | ||
| If you're bipolar, you don't choose a manic episode. | ||
| Oh, absolutely not. | ||
| These people do choose. | ||
| They do make choices. | ||
| They say, this feels good. | ||
| I'm going to embrace that. | ||
| Jeff, I would love to keep talking to you more. | ||
| I know that you have to go. | ||
| So would it be possible for us to do a part two to this interview? | ||
| Is that okay? | ||
| I would appreciate that. | ||
| I feel like I've got some more to learn from you. | ||
| And we've got to talk more about LARPing the Da Vinci Code. | ||
| Wonderful. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| We will talk again soon. | ||
| Your book is The Undertow. | ||
| Now, it's already out, right? | ||
| It's out, yeah. | ||
| Okay, so it's out, so people can't pre-order. | ||
| Is there a way for people to find it that supports you directly? | ||
| Because our audience is very, very specific about that kind of thing. | ||
| No, the best place to find it is your local independent bookstore, if you've got one, or if you don't, bookshop.org, sort of as a coalition of independent bookstores, or your library. | ||
| Ask your library to get a copy. | ||
| And if you must, there's that big company named after a river, but, you know, Part of building a democratic culture is bookstores and libraries. | ||
| It's no accident that they're under attack right now, so give them your support. | ||
| You ain't lying. | ||
| Well, sir, thank you so much for hanging out. | ||
| I'll say that I'm neither Neo Leo nor DZX Clark. | ||
| I'm not Daryl Rundis, and I'm not the juiciest ice cube. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |
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