Jeff Sharlet returns to dissect how right-wing movements mythologize figures like Ashley Babbitt, whose 2021 Capitol riot shooting was framed as martyrdom despite her cause’s flaws. He argues Trumpism exploits systemic failures—homelessness, predatory banking, and misogyny—while the left’s incrementalism clashes with fascism’s accelerating global threat, from Bolsonaro’s Brazil to Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide. Accelerationism, embraced by fascist thinkers since 2013, risks ignoring democracy’s deeper stakes, but Sharlet insists resistance must focus on frontline struggles, like teachers in New Hampshire or Omaha protesters facing armed violence. Hope, he concludes, lies in active defiance and unity, not passive acceptance of liberal collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
And I'm coming to you directly from a meeting with a student.
And I got to tell you, it is thrilling to me, not just as a teacher, but as a person and these frightening times when you see a student.
It's nonfiction.
I teach the same kind of writing that I try to do.
When you see a student.
writing about connections and the connections suddenly starting to make.
This is a person trying to write about sex trafficking in our region where we are, right?
And talking about the stories that we tell ourselves in order to live, like that famous Joan Didion line and the scary narratives and the Christian nationalists who come in with stories about that too and putting all this together.
And that's a lot of ugliness for a bright spot.
But when you see a young person discovering that they have the power...
To put these things together, to juxtapose them on the page and to make a story that brings clarity to someone else and that this is what they want to do and they're going to keep going with this.
You're like, oh, thank God, right?
It's always thrilling when you encounter someone else learning to tell stories because it's cheesy, but you feel less alone, right?
Because my story alone is not going to do it, but we have this great cacophony choir, and good.
Come into the choir, and when you see someone coming into the choir and joining this sort of storytelling world, you have some faith that, you know what, if I miss it, if I screw it up, that's all right.
You know, we went through a lot of the content of the book on our last interview.
So I think the one thing that I really want to start with is, well, I mean, kind of what we were just talking about.
Ashley Babbitt as martyr.
When I read the book, I feel a certain ambivalence about Ashley Babbitt as martyr because, to a certain extent, Their martyrdom of her is completely fictional, right?
But there is also a very real martyrdom that she went through.
So I'd like you to kind of talk about your feelings on that.
It's not the ideal democracy, but we're getting there.
And then look at these assholes, and they're talking about someone rising from the dead.
Now, that's absolutely ridiculous.
That's not a martyr.
That's delusional, right?
Martyr, of course, and you know this, means witness.
And Ashley Babbitt did die a witness to her cause.
She's a martyr.
I mean, she's a martyr by any definition.
Her cause is false and fake makes it no less true.
And if we want to do that, then we basically get rid of the word martyr altogether.
The problem is when we assume that martyr is a good thing, right?
Sure.
Martyr is a politically agnostic term.
It is what you make of it.
And what I was fascinated by, Ashley, You know, when you say the completely sort of fictional martyrdom, and I'm like, what's the non-fictional martyrdom?
Yeah, and I think that's actually the key point, right, for understanding what's, to me, the key point to understand what's going on in the Trump scene.
So I think last time we talked about, like, there's the prosperity gospel of 2016, the bastardized Gnostic gospel of 2020.
Yeah, and then January 6, 2021, we enter this age of martyrs, and Ashley becomes the first martyr, and she's an ideal martyr for that movement, partly because she's a white woman and a vet.
So she's gendered both, right?
The veteran is stabbed in the back, a male, but she's a white woman who they instantly start aging backwards.
And the man who shoots her is an ever larger black.
Right.
And so this is the old lynching story, the old white, innocent white woman.
And this goes all the way back to Virginia Dare, the first white girl born in North America, who gives her name, the Dare, to an alley prominent right wing site.
So there's that element of martyrdom.
And I think the fiction versus nonfiction, because what's fascinating to me is that opens the door for martyrdom.
And I think of her as essentially a placeholder on the cross until Trump could, you know.
push her aside and take his place.
Just what you know, once these indictments started coming down, he starts sending out emails.
Friends, this may be the last time I talk to you for some time.
Well, I mean, let me ask you to follow up on that.
I think it's suddenly far less impressive to become a martyr if everybody else you know is also a martyr.
Do you know what I mean?
So is that not lessening the power of your Ashley Babbitt, who was actually, you know, if everybody's taking some sort of stolen valor of martyrdom from her death, doesn't that make her death far less meaningful?
It's so nice to talk to folks to whom I don't have to explain conspiracy theories.
Nope.
Or Waco, obviously.
And of course, now I think everyone knows Waco now because Trump put it back into the national consciousness.
And, you know, there's other folks.
And what's interesting to me is actually traveling around is there are regional variations of this.
You'll find, like, somebody who was killed by cops in a standoff maybe because they didn't pay their taxes or something and there was a foreclosure and so on.
This doesn't become national news.
But in this region...
You got Crispus Addicts, you got Ashley Babby, you got Vicki Weaver and Joe X, who's our local martyr, right?
And normally Joe X goes the way of Vicki Weaver, which is to say, and Vicki Weaver, you could argue, pretty legitimate martyr.
They create a fictionalized version of a real martyr, and I think almost part of that is to avoid from actually having to deal with the real reason that the martyr was created.
But let me just sort of say about that, I mean, there's a section in this book that I think, and I'm so glad that people aren't attacking me for it, but I thought they would.
One, I thought people would say, you're humanizing Ashley Babbitt.
I can't.
She's human.
You can't humanize anybody.
She is human, and so am I. And so I want to understand how she comes to this place, not as some kind of common ground bullshit, but because...
Because, look, that's her knife on the cover and she was there in the Capitol.
But then there's the killing.
And I have done a lot of reporting on police killings and have helped bring some to light and have learned a lot about where that law is, why that law is fucked up.
You know, with Kyle Rittenhouse, people say it's a travesty that he was acquitted.
It's not a travesty that he was acquitted.
It's a travesty that the law was written such that there was nothing to do but acquit him, right?
I said, Stoughton, I said, are you saying she's not a domestic terrorist?
And he says, no, yeah, she's a domestic terrorist.
And so people say, don't we get to shoot domestic terrorists?
No!
No!
We arrest them!
We arrest them and try them.
And if there's nothing else and it's the last incident and someone is about to be harmed, then we currently, under our law, say the police have the right to use violent force.
This guy would have been indicted if it had happened anywhere but in the Capitol.
Which is this very weird gray area of law.
And it's almost sort of like this gray area where criminal law doesn't quite apply, right?
So he was found not guilty.
He was just found like, we can't be sure that he wasn't afraid for his life.
And so we can't be sure that he had malice based on a civil rights violation.
If you had passed the George Floyd police reform law, that guy would have been indicted.
The same logic that leads some liberals to say, I wish they had just opened fire on Ashley Babbitt and all of them, is the same logic by which, oh, that's true.
But I think that I'll stop there because that that suddenly jogged my memory about something that I wanted to talk to you about is you recently did a salon interview and there the the interviewer.
Yeah, knowledge by listeners would like Chauncey DeVega, and I feel like the conversation is a little bit like the conversation I've had with you, and Chauncey is like one of those journalists out there who is not bullshitting about it.
Well, one thing he said was that Trump and Republican fascists are doing exactly what I would do if I were in their situation, and then he's talking about liberals and the like, and he's saying they're lucky I'm not on the other side.
Now, your...
Your response to that is, when you boil it down, is that America is going to have to experience and go through fascism.
Well, I mean, I feel like when we talk about that.
That's an important thing to put in a historical context.
So if you say to me, we're going through fascism, we're in this place where we don't have a fascist regime yet, are you telling me that we're the German commies and the liberals unable to get together to vote out the Nazis?
And unlike so many of the German radicals at that time, he was a real student of religious studies.
And so he was always looking at In ways that some of which seems obvious to us now, fascism's mobilization of the mythological and so on.
And some of it, when I read this book, it's astonishing to me because partly it's also granular detail.
He's talking about what's happening in one smaller German city because these are essays that are written in the moment before the regime is fully in power.
You see so many resonances and you realize, I mean, it's from reading that book that I realized like, oh, the Trump rallies certainly never ended.
And how did I miss this?
I remember in 2016, I wrote a little essay trying to encourage my lefty friends.
All right, let's vote for Hillary.
And the problem isn't just Trump.
It's the million little Trumps that are going to be unleashed.
Well, now we have Trump rallies.
We just had one in New Hampshire.
You want to go to a Trump rally?
No problem.
Go to your school board meeting.
Go to many city hall meetings.
You've got a million little Trumps.
Not all the same charisma, but the same rhetoric.
The Montana state legislature, that's a Trump rally.
The Tennessee state legislature, that's a Trump rally.
And when I say it's a rally, it means that they're no longer interested in, you know, even the veneer of governing.
It's the performative rejection.
Of the other.
The black legislators in Tennessee, the trans legislators in Montana.
And I think there's another one in Iowa has been silenced.
I think a mother of a trans person, I think it's in Iowa, has been silenced.
And I want to say also, we hear about those national stories.
He hated the Hollywoodization of the civil rights movement.
He spoke to Martin Luther King, who was his, you know, he was really, many people don't realize how close they were and how instrumental they were to each other.
He speaks to him, when I was spending time with him, in the present tense.
And he's haunted by him.
And he's not saying, oh, MLK, what a great American.
Like he, he, uh, uh, well, I'm going to push back real quick on that.
I think that it's going to be easy to assume that when I'm talking about in or out time, action time, or anything like that, that I'm instantly talking about violence.
I'm talking more about something that needs to be done.
That we can't say in or out time without then taking an action.
But I'm also, I mean, another lesson we can draw from the 1930s and the fact that the United States didn't get a fascist regime and people don't realize that it was much closer to that potential.
And that was the popular front, which was communist-led because it was a different time in the 1930s.
But they were working with Democrats.
They were working with people of conscience and all these kinds of things.
So, yeah, it's all in.
It's all in for me, which is sort of why I'm writing this book.
I've been writing about right-wing movements for 20 years.
I thought I was done.
I've done a bunch of books and so on, but I had other projects I want to do.
This is what...
I can do.
There's kids in the book that we meet in Wisconsin, these wonderful kids.
Black River Falls, Wisconsin, which is not hipster Wisconsin.
It's not Madison.
It's not Milwaukee.
It's a small little town.
And I pull in right after Dobbs, the fall of Roe, and there's this woman, very small, under five feet tall, standing on the bridge by herself, holding a sign that says, your misogyny is showing.
And I circle around, and now there's a couple other kids.
They're high school kids, young college kids, not...
The town radicals.
These are the student body presidents.
There's a cheerleader named Peyton holding a sign that says, fuck off.
And I ask what it means, right?
And she's like, it means fuck off.
It means, I'm quoting her.
I mean, you ain't getting no pussy.
You ain't getting anything.
If you're going to do this, it means rage.
She means...
Sex strike.
She means I'm not being part of this world in which there's a gender expectation of me if my rights are not going to be protected by those who are older, right?
You know, it's either we fight against them, we possibly get killed in a civil war, or we suffer like this, a right stripped away from us minute by minute.
And that their imagination of civil war is just that, an imagination shaped by movies, right?
And so as it is...
For the militiamen in Marinette, Wisconsin, who, his imagination of civil war, and he's got plenty of guns and so on, is shaped by Red Dawn movies, or 300 movies, right?
These stories that people are telling themselves about the world.
The difference is, though, what I took heart from those kids, and why they're a bright spot, even though I do not want them shooting anybody, and I don't think that will win.
And has, in the Trump years, sort of emerged as a surprising kind of left ally, partly because so many Trumpists assume that, like, 80s metal was all in for them.
Sure.
A fair amount of it turned out to be, but not Dean Snyder.
Until yesterday, when Paul Stanley of KISS puts out a thing, says like, look, I love dressing up and so on, and adults should be allowed to transition.
You see where this is going.
It's the turf lawn, right?
But young people, you know, parents making a game or just acting as if transitioning is just fun and games and so on.
And Dean Snyder breaks my heart.
He says, you know, when I was young, I felt pretty too.
The point of it was, I'm looking at this, I'm like, here's a guy, Snyder, who has actually become this weird kind of prominent ally in the way so many of these old celebrities like George Takei have, right?
And then he split off.
And I look at the way fascism works, which is it finds a story that can sort of sliver liberals like that and say, like, well...
I'm certainly not against trans people, but...
And now here you are.
And now this movement...
And so then you get some 16-year-old trans kids saying, fuck off Dee Snider, just the way he would have when he was 16, and being more extreme, right?
And we can say, hey, some of those kids are going to cross the line.
Like, you know...
There's people who are going to say stupid things.
16-year-olds saying stupid things?
Amazing.
How could it happen, right?
And then the right then takes those stupid things and feeds them to people like Dee Snider and says, you know what?
The trans movement is entirely people who want to cut off their dicks for fun and games.
Sure.
Which is just false.
But Snider says, that sounds horrible!
Well, you know.
I mean, have you ever met a trans person who was, like, just in this for fun and games?
I think I will go through this incredibly difficult medical procedure and make myself visible as part of the most targeted community in the United States right now so that the guns will be aimed at me.
But that's that slivering, and I see, I mean, this is happening in a very sort of accelerating way right now, and that's why I talk about all hands on deck.
That's why I talk about the popular front, right?
The answer to that is the old labor song, and I write about it in the book, Which Side Are You On?
People don't realize that one of the very first uses of air power in the United States, by the United States, was strafing striking miners.
Air power in the United States develops with planes flying over Tulsa, Oklahoma, strafing black folks, bombing black folks, and strafing miners in Kentucky.
And there's a mine widow, Florence Reese, who sings the song, Which Side Are You On?
And I think, but that's also, part of the which side are you on thing, and I think it's very tempting to the left, is this kind of essentialism to assume, like, well, if that person's chosen, that's what they always were.
If only it was that simple and that safe.
The reality is, he looked at this situation, and he was sort of standing in the middle.
He figured out that it was untenable.
And he chose that side.
And that's the story of Ashley Babbitt.
Ashley Babbitt was not always a fascist.
A lot of the people who celebrate her killing just like, you know, and usually in very misogynistic terms say she was always that.
Ashley Babbitt, and that's why I'm sort of interested in this.
So we want to pay attention to the movement, right?
Undertow is a movement metaphor.
It's pulling us out to sea, right?
But it's also, what do you choose to do with that undertone?
I think for so many people like Ashley Babbitt, they're sort of resisting it their whole lives.
They're trying to be a good person.
You know, she's like a liberal Democrat, very proud of Obama, loves Obama, second favorite president after Trump.
And some people say, well, that just means she's stupid.
Well, no, it means...
There's emotional affect that's going in all sorts of different ways.
After she died 14 years in the Air Force, a lot of people mocked the fact that she had not gotten very far and said, that just goes to show you the kind of person who invades the Capitol.
An idiot was so bad that they can't.
Why did she not get very far in the Air Force?
Because time and time again, she was a person who would stand up.
She's like, you know, a little person, but not afraid.
An officer, there's plenty of officers who are assholes, would be berating somebody, and Ashley would get in the middle.
She would choose which side she was on, right?
She's like, I'm on the side, like, I don't care about chain of command.
I'm like, that's wrong what you're saying to that person.
So she'd just get, you know, bump down and rank again and again and again.
She was the person who she literally did.
There was a, I think it was a purse snatcher.
Ashley sprints down the street and Right.
And she tries to be a good person.
And I think of this sort of turning point, I think, and of course she's not alive, so we can't know, but it comes up in some of her writing and videos.
And so at this point, she lives in Southern California, very blue Southern California.
She's gone in for Trump.
No one's really followed her, her husband and her girlfriend, because she's both.
They are a throuple.
They're kind of a queer throuple.
There's videos they make of Ashley watching Trump rallies.
They just think it's her weird thing, right?
They're like, let's go to the beach, Ashley.
And, you know, we don't really follow that.
But there's a point, houselessness is a huge problem in Southern California.
And it's growing, right?
And that has all kinds of structural issues, right?
Ashley tries to remember that and tries to be compassionate.
And one day a guy shits on her lawn and she just gives up, goes, leans back into the undertow.
You know, I'm not paddling.
I'm not trying to be the better person.
I'm not trying to see the larger problem.
I just want to fucking hate this dude who shat in my lawn.
And Trump comes along and he tells me it's okay.
And not only am I not a bad person for hating that.
Chris Zununu, he has governed as a moderate, in fact, until now, was actually sort of pushing back against our very...
Occasionally far-right legislature in New Hampshire.
Not anymore.
All that's stopping.
He's choosing a side.
We've got to pay attention to that strategically because that means powerful people who aren't stupid but are selfish are saying, huh, which side am I on?
And I sort of write in the book about, like, what is it?
And, like, to name any one thing, like, is it, she gives into her racism, too.
And the racism has always been there, and it's always been there, right?
Is this race, or is this class, or is this misogyny?
Yes.
Yes, yes.
That's called intersectionality.
And it's a million other little things.
It is the disappointments of life.
It's a marriage that didn't work.
It's the shame she feels.
So many people made this a lot of the fact that she, I think in 2016, the man she ended up marrying, Aaron Babbitt.
It was a complicated transition.
Who knows if there was some cheating or whatever involved.
And Ashley Babbitt loses her temper and allegedly, although is found not guilty later, rams the other woman's car.
That's fucking horrible.
What a fucking horrible thing to do.
This is also...
She's not proud of that!
You know, people are like, look at that.
That's the way that person is.
Well, we on the left, on the liberation side, we are the ones who are supposed to own the idea that you are not defined by your worst act, right?
This is why we oppose the carceral state, which is why we oppose the essentialism of American caste, right?
And yet she is.
And I think, why does she choose Trump?
You're right.
There's an absence.
There's an absence.
It's there on the left, but you have to go looking.
It's not as visible.
Trump is more visible.
I think about this in a previous book of mine, Sweet Hand When I Die.
I wrote about a movement called Battle Cry.
And what Battle Cry would do in the early 2000s is they would have these three-day rock festivals for evangelical teens, 70,000 folks.
They would go out there, and I remember there was one schtick they would have.
They would have a cattle hide, and they would talk about, and they'd be projecting on the screen.
They said, you know what corporations are doing to you?
They're branding you.
They would brand the hide, and they would put up on the screen Oakley or Coca-Cola.
They're branding you.
They're branding you.
They're branding you, right?
This could be ad busters.
This is a leftist critique.
And yet then they swoop them up.
And Battlecry, you can hear it in the name, Some of the other stage, the one thing they did is they'd bring a mannequin on, and each part of the mannequin would be labeled like pornography or some other thing that they didn't.
And then they would take this biblical story about a concubine who was given by a figure to the mob to be torn up, and that this is somehow the good thing.
And sometimes he talks online about Black Lives Matter and so on.
So they conclude that he is doing this for Black Lives Matter.
In fact, this man lacks any ideological principle.
He is a domestic violence guy and he's fleeing from the cops.
And he's just like, he is the absolute narcissism.
People are my way.
I'm driving through them and he kills them, right?
Waukesha is also, and I think even maybe more important, where In 2014, we have the Slender Man attempted murder.
And this is a sort of looming story, too.
This is great, by the way.
People want to go and look for it.
Alex Marr in a magazine called VQR writes a piece called Out Came the Girls.
And it's so relevant, actually, to understanding the martyrdom cults and innocence of girlhood, the alleged innocence of girlhood.
Two 12-year-old girls lure their third friend into the woods to kill her.
For Slenderman, who they have read about online.
I mean, this is Alex Jones' territory, right?
And it's swirling around.
It's swirling around both the conspiracy myth of Slenderman and then the conspiracy myth of sort of liberal anxiety, which is that the internet is, in fact, Slenderman, the boogeyman that's going to take our kids.
And it will happen sometimes.
That's the thing.
That happened there.
Weirdly, most kids on the internet have not...
Attempted to sacrifice anyone to Slenderman, right?
You know, you get off the highway and where there's normally like, you know, the champion baseball team signs, there's just this, and I can't show it on here, but there's just like this photograph in the book.
The entire hillside is covered with fascist billboards.
Some of them make sense.
Some of them don't.
Some of them are about Obama.
Some of them...
Some are about Biden.
Some of them are about COVID.
Here I'm reading one that says, group morality goes to orgy giving you, and then the rest is cut off by grass.
Tony the taxer, the Democratic governor.
It's just, I mean, literally dozens and dozens of boards.
And it's, I think about it in this terms of sort of this overflow of...
Of all the signs I've been seeing around the country, the Let's Go Brandon signs, the Fuck Joe Biden signs, the AR-15 signs, people making totem poles to celebrate Trump, painting silos, the vast outburst of very dark and frightening creativity, but it is creativity, right?
But I'm starting to look at these sort of killings, and if there's a killing that has already faded, Bobby Crimo III, who kills a bunch of people in Highland Park, Illinois, Chicago, right?
Seven people who once attended a Trump rally dressed as Waldo of Where's Waldo fame, and who may or may not have been truly aware of politics.
And that's got to be in quotes.
As such at all, in the same way that we're talking about Jack Teixeira, the airman, and it's blowing my mind, the New York Times to say, well, he posted a lot of memes about hating the deep state and about Jews and racists and about he called Ukrainians pigs, but I guess we'll just never know why he did what he did, you know?
Yes, he may be a 21-year-old fool, but this is sort of the poison that's in the air, and so it was for Bobby Crimo, right?
His online life rippled with right-wing hatreds, but he dedicated the panicked days before his crime to a sped-up aesthetic of images and ideologies crashing into one another, sometimes called schizo-wave.
It's a vile term, a grotesque romanticization of mental illness.
An awful metaphor for the quickening of our fragmentation, the great acceleration, a simultaneous explosion and collapse of meaning, right?
So like schizowave in its verb form, schizoposting, accelerationism is a relatively recent term allegedly coined or at least brought into contemporary use in 2013 by two Marxist political scientists via the influence of a two-volume work of 1970s French theory called Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
And this wonky audience might even know Deleuze and Guattari, right?
While crisis gathers force and speed, politics withers and retreats.
The political scientist's hashtag Accelerate Manifesto for an acceleration is politics announced.
And the overwhelming privileging of democracy as process needs to be left behind.
It was a rejection of the slow, small work of solidarity in favor of a, quote, future more modern.
Yes, said the fascist intellectuals.
Adapting the concept to their own ends.
Yes, let's leave democracy behind.
The new fascists like the idea of hastening the end of a liberal order, right?
Well, I mean, I feel like what you just explained was the...
Non-ideological nature of accelerationism.
It's not owned by an ideology.
Like, let me ask you a question.
What do you say to somebody who is 16 about slow incremental change as they're looking down the barrel of climate change?
Like, nobody's done anything.
You know, when we talk about slow incremental progress, we were like, okay, well, we can't elect Bernie Sanders because that would make rich people mad.
So we'll get Joe Biden in there, and he's going to help us with the climate, and then he sells more land to oil.
You know, like, what do you say to them as far as slow incremental change go?
You make the biggest push you can, and it will only go so far.
That's Harry Belfont.
He put his life on the line, literally on the line, chased by the Klan again and again and again.
Oh, well, and the civil rights movement was a great success, right?
Hell no.
He doesn't think so.
You put everything, you put your life on the line, and you accept that the movement will be slow because revolution, the idea of the overnight, which is right now the Trumpist idea, is...
That's a romance.
The Romance of American Communists, Vivian Gornick's great book, coming out of that world.
But I think that you said, right, accelerationism depends on what you do with it.
This is what the left has failed to understand.
It's all politically agnostic, right?
Solidarity?
I love solidarity.
Not so much when it's between Proud Boys and megachurches.
We'll probably get reproductive rights back tomorrow.
No.
That commitment.
It's necessary, and now that's going to be the long struggle.
Let's look at how they took Roe down, right?
Roe, which was always inadequate to begin with, but let's see how they took it.
They organized for 50 years, and they killed a lot of people along the way, and they bombed a lot of things along the way, and they hurt a lot of things along the way, and it took them 50 years, and they stayed in their struggle, and they won.
And at no point did the Susan B. Anthony List or any of these other right-wing groups Say, to the army of God, well, you blew up your 200th abortion clinic, and we still have it, so what's the point?
They're like, nope, we're just going to keep fighting.
Now, I'm not saying that's the model, because I'm not into blowing things up.
Well, I mean, in a certain way, you've described all of the different ways that the left has failed, and then you described the way that the right succeeded.
No, the last chapter of the book is called The Good Fight is the One You Lose.
The Good Fight is the One You Lose.
And I'm writing about Lee Hayes, and nobody knows who Lee Hayes is.
But even the last line of the book is, I always knew it was going to be the first line, for a while it was possible not to be scared even.
And this is Lee Hayes.
Lee Hayes who wrote If I Had a Hammer.
And I got interested in If I Had a Hammer because I grew up in this little all-white town in our elementary school in our music class.
We sing, If I Had a Hammer, a hammer in the morning.
And this is a sweet little song.
And then you go and you discover Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Singing it.
It's like, if I had a hammer, it's like, I'd build a treehouse and we'd make love and be sweet and everything.
But the first performance of If I Had a Hammer in 1949, first public performance, is at a concert in Peekskill, New York, where Pete Seeger lived.
Peekskill, New York.
Paul Robeson is the headliner, the so-called Russia-loving Negro baritone, as the local newspaper puts it.
They try to have it.
The concert twice.
First time, the townspeople shut it down because they think these are communists.
And why do they think they're communists?
Because they're communists.
But they don't want any communists.
And they shut it down and they burn crosses.
The second time, they come prepared.
3,000 union members come as security.
They managed to sing the song, time to get the hell out.
But the town has organized as well.
5,000 people organized with piles of rocks and strategic places with air power from the New York State Police, not keeping the peace, protecting the attack on Lee Hayes and Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and so on, right?
Lee Hayes.
That's a guy who put his life on the line.
I mean, don't go and say, don't call Lee Hayes a liberal, right?
And that wasn't the first or the last time he would do it.
In the end, he was broken.
He was called before the House Un-American Affairs Committee.
So if the idea is that you look at Lee getting broken and you say, well, I might as well just take up my arms or some of their equivalent thereof, as opposed to saying, like, what can I learn from this man who was brave in the struggle, who put himself on the line more than most of us have?
It's that line.
For a while, it was possible not to be scared even.
And Lee is describing he's in Arkansas, where he's from.
And he's riding with a group of union organizers in what he calls a rump sprung car, a beat up old car.
And gun thugs are on their tail.
And they are singing.
And what they would do back then is they would take, they were all raised in the church.
They would sing hymns, but they would turn them into labor songs.
But that night, he says, we sang the old hymns, right?
Not because they're going back to conservative, but they're drawing on the deep struggle, right?
And he says, for a while, it was possible not to be scared even.
For a while, it was possible not to be scared even.
Now, let me put this in the context of why the good fight is the one you lose, the struggle that he fought.
That's the fight to be in.
Years ago, and I'm going to do this from memory, and I'm probably going to get a little bit wrong.
I met an amazing activist, also from Arkansas, named Suzanne Farr.
And we were doing a thing where we were talking to young journalists and activists.
And Suzanne Farr had been part of a queer women's commune in rural, I think, rural Arkansas in the 70s and 80s.
And they just wanted to live by themselves.
But pretty soon, local women...
And cishet women in need of help fleeing violent relationships come to them, right?
And so they decide which side are they on and they let them in, right?
Now, the men come after that too, right?
And this is a rural area.
The police there are not going to be coming out to help the lesbian commune, right?
And I can't remember if Suzanne and her comrades armed up, but they definitely stood their ground.
They stood their ground.
And they protected those places.
Now, there was a young radical activist who says to Suzanne, and Suzanne by this point is, although as radical as can be, has just, if you think sweet Southern grandmother, you got the right picture.
White-haired, very gentle voice, just really just lovely and gentle and so on.
And this young radical activist says, that's so amazing that you build a safe space.
And Suzanne says, oh, honey.
There are no fucking safe spaces.
That wasn't a safe space.
It was a safe moment.
And it was made.
A safe space is inner.
It's just there, right?
A safe moment.
For a while, it's possible not to be scared even.
That is the hope.
That's the best that we have right now.
We can create these safe moments actively and hold on to them and remember them.
And instead of saying, that's just a goddamn failure, say, hey, wait a minute.
Look at that.
Lee Hayes.
Have you created a moment where it was possible not to be scared even?
Probably you have.
This show has.
I try to, right?
We try to do that.
Count the victories.
Count the small victories and don't...
Embrace the nihilism of we have not won.
Because that's the eschatological, that's the big final battle bullshit that fascism wants us to believe in.
As compared to a lot of other people, by which I would argue is 90% of people or something along those lines.
So I keep coming back to this idea of what do you tell somebody who is young, staring down the barrel of climate change, who just watched people almost successfully overthrow the United States government, and celebrates a violent revolution every year?
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I don't tell them what to do because they're young.
And there's nothing you can do to bring back those glaciers, right?
There's very little we can even do right now to slow shit down.
This is a condition we are going to have to learn to live with.
And this is the metaphor of the book, partly because I keep running into these fascists.
I had hit the genetic jackpot lottery, two heart attacks at 44, and you meet a fascist and, oh, you got heart trouble, I got heart trouble.
And suddenly we're talking because you understand when that happens.
People say, oh, don't worry, your heart's going to grow back.
Your heart's going to grow back.
What the?
What kind of biology class did you go to?
No.
There's a dead wall in your heart.
It's not going to grow back.
Glaciers aren't going to come back.
The assumption of normality.
Joe Biden's not going to bring it back.
We're not going back, right?
We're going to have to get into the space.
But I don't have those answers.
What do I say to a young person?
I said, we will need new songs if we are to make it through what is to come, what is already here.
I am not the one to write them.
My hope is less than that.
Only that this book may reveal fault lines within our fears, in which others will find the better words our children may one day sing.
It's why, you know, I mean, in the same flip side, when I do liberal interviews, people ask me about those Wisconsin kids with their guns.
They say, well, now, did you tell them that that's not the way?
I'm like, no.
I didn't tell them that's not the way.
When I go into Sacramento and there's a brawl between Proud Boys and Antifa and it's the dumbest brawl I've ever seen because they all know each other and it's like rules of engagement.
They know where they can't have weapons on the Capitol and so on.
And look, Antifa are being assholes too.
Antifa's yelling faggot and Proud Boys are yelling scum and boom, boom, boom, right?
I'm not going to tell those Antifa.
This is not the way, young people.
How could I say that?
How could any of us say that we know the way, right?
All I can do is I can write a book.
You can have a podcast.
They can brawl on the streets.
Theta can practice with her bow and hold up a sign that says, fuck off.
And who knows what else she's going to do?
And I mean that literally.
Who knows what else she's going to do?
I think there's some dumb shit.
I mean, I'm in Wisconsin.
There was great...
My favorite review of the book is in the Washington Examiner, a right-wing paper.
And I'm trying to remember the line.
It says, like, this book is the purest distillation of leftism.
Or I could have mentioned, as I did, the assholes who bombed the Army math recruiting building in Wisconsin.
1971 or two or something, which led to the creation of this book called Wisconsin Death Trip, which I carried with me through Wisconsin by my mentor in thinking about the struggle as long.
The violence had been there.
Stupid moves have been made.
They were going to do this in a way that nobody gets killed.
Well, they kill a young physicist.
They had a plane that they were dropping bombs from.
I'm not big about dropping bombs from planes, even if you believe in violence.
That's just not for me.
They were fools, the ones who blew up the building.
I mean, there's a lot of killing.
On the other hand, there's a lot of killing.
I've written elsewhere about the Vietnam GI movement.
I'm named Jeff Charlotte because my uncle was one of the founders of that movement, and it was a mutiny movement by GIs, and they were in mutiny against their commanders, and they sometimes killed commanders.
This is what we call treason, and I'm not going to say it was wrong.
And this is where the American left is as guilty as the American right.
And yes, motherfuckers, I am both sides in this.
The American exceptionalism of believing that this is somehow a uniquely American thing, as if there is not a Trump of Turkey named Erdogan, a Trump of Brazil named Bolsonaro, and Myanmar, a self-described trunk of Myanmar, a Buddhist monk who leads...
A genocidal mob of Buddhist monks to massacre the Rohingya Muslims, as if there are not the Philippines, as if there is not Indonesia, which has been fascist since the American-supported coup in the 1960s, which to this day celebrates its genocide.
Fascism is a global moment, and what is different now than in the past is in the 1930s, you had contending powers.
Right now, what have you got?
China is a fascist regime.
Fuck this state, communism, whatever.
It's a cult of reality around Xi.
It wasn't always, but it has become one.
Russia is.
And we can quibble over details, but Russia is.
And I would say they are fascist regimes of the moment, right?
So people say, this is how it is different than Germany.
Right.
Because it's called Russia.
And it's 2023, not 1926.
That's why, you're right, it is different.
Fascism like everything else.
We have all that.
We have European countries sort of toppling.
We have the great victory of Lula in Brazil, but let's see how long that lasts.
We have a lot of fascist regimes in Africa right now.
Uganda is a fascist regime.
Sudan is...
Tell me that Sudan's going to come out looking pretty from this one.
Came out of a fascist regime.
And it struggled.
The long struggle.
So do young Sudanese people say, holy shit, we overthrew Omar...
What's his name?
Omar Bashir.
We overthrow this guy.
We did it.
We did it.
And we even muted the military and got them to be on our side.
And then just a few years later, look at this.
Well, can't join them.
Can't beat him.
Might as well join him.
I guess I might as well just go for authoritarian rule.
That's Chris Sununu deciding which side is he on.
No, we lost.
The good fight is the one you lose.
The good fight that the Sudanese who overthrew that dictator, they fought the good fight.
The Egyptians who overthrew Mubarak and now suffer under al-Sisi, they fought the good fight.
This is where fascism is different now because there are no contending powers, right?
There's no Soviet Union.
And there's no...
There's an America.
Or America's...
No, we're not fully given in.
We are not as given in as Russia or Hungary.
We are still contending.
And one of the mistakes that the left has made, and I'm writing from the right for a long time, the left is terrible at recognizing the ground that it occupies.
Right?
The ground that it owns.
And I think about this for so many years, liberals would say the universities were neutral.
No, they're not biased.
And leftists would say, no, bullshit, they're just right-wing tools, right?
And the right-wingers I read about, the guys who founded Liberty University and Regent University and Oral Roberts University and Hillsdale College, which is now giving its curriculum to public schools all over the country, they understood.
That these crappy elitist universities, nonetheless, they were part of the center that was holding.
It wasn't a very good center, but they were part of that.
I have colleagues now who think that fighting our administration at Dartmouth, where the full spectrum of political views is kind of like, are you a Bernie Democrat or maybe more of an establishment Democrat, right?
That's what you get.
And that's fine.
That's fine.
I'm not like, there should be intellectual diversity.
Whatever you think, right?
But they think that fighting that administration puts them on the front lines, the bulwark of the battle, right?
When you have a gun pointed at you, you don't say, well, there's some structural...
In Omaha, Nebraska, in this book, right?
And they bring out the gunmen.
I didn't want to say, well, let's talk about the ways in which your church...
You know, you're pointing a gun at me.
Right.
I've got to do something about that, right?
And so I think that state violence, like, I am not as opposed to the state right now.
And I think we need to look at this right now because it's who owns the state capitalism.
But capitalism leads to fascism.
But it is not the same thing.
Biden is not the same as DeSantis.
And if we come to the real fear that I think is there, and that you're seeing generals say, and, you know, not all generals, but right.
The military is not monolithic.
If we come to a real chain of command dispute in 2024, the fear is not the militias and the resistance is not the John Brown gun club.
It's an Air Force base in one state that believes that Trump is president and an Air Force base in another state that believes that Biden is president and follows the orders.
So I think like that state, the state and the people, those terms meant something at one time and we should recognize that they mean something now because of fascism is different now.
And the key difference is it is a global movement without a significant countervailing force.
And when by significant, I don't mean like the people.
No, I think talking about Harry, you know, it was...
It was so strange.
He died so shortly after we spoke, and you taught me so much about him that it hit so much harder, and it was a lot more difficult to reconcile the way that...
You can remember him being portrayed as like so many other people, you know, like watered down.
He's just this entertainer.
He's somebody who has rubbed elbows with civil rights icons in the past.
And then to hear about his truth, his true life, you know, that spending your life on the front lines, as you said, that's the most inspiring story in your book.
That's the best stage there is, as Harry puts it, right?
Like he's talking about the march from Selma to Montgomery.
And the first march had ended in violence.
And then they come back, just like in Peekskill, they come back with more and they march out.
And there's George Wallace, the little segregationist troll governor.
And he's afraid to come out of his capital.
And Harry and Joan Baez and Mary from Peter, Paul and Mary, they get up there and they sing.
And you can see some old CBS footage of this.
They sing so badly because they're exhausted.
They lost it because they've been marching, because there's been guns aimed at them, but they sing their song, and he says, "That's the most beautiful stage there is.
For a while, it's possible not to be scared, even.
Is that stage a safe space?
Hell no." And right after that stage, right after that march, he notes, you know, one of the protesters was killed.
He says, "Every time." Harry Bell finally never forgets.
You know, the violence is there.
But I think, like, I'll say his death at 96. I didn't experience it as hard, and I don't think that's the good fight is the one you lose, right?
But you're pushing me to ask these questions, and you're challenging, and we're thinking about the book not just as an object, but as this thing that's in this moment that we're all living through, and that I really appreciate, so thank you.