Jeff Sharlet reflects on his kids’ fleeting justice at Trump’s indictment, calling him "vile," while dismissing 2003’s InfoWars appearance as naive—Jones’ fascist movement has since gone mainstream. In The Undertow, he contrasts Belafonte’s civil rights solidarity with right-wing myth-making, like QAnon’s apocalyptic "Age of Martyrs" and Ashley Babbitt’s exploited Capitol riot death. Grief fuels denial but never excuses violence, Sharlet insists, as fascism thrives on anger mislabeled as love. Supporting independent bookstores becomes an act of resistance against authoritarianism’s cultural erosion. [Automatically generated summary]
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
unidentified
He comes out and says, I have such respect for your films, Ken, your sense of the visual.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.