Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss what happened in Russia over the weekend - was it a coup? Was it a false flag operation by Putin? And how the Right reacted to it was even more revealing. They poit out Interesting parallels to how the Right reacted to the tragedy of the Titan submersible imploding and killing all 5 people onboard. After briefly going over the big Fox News programming shake up, Jared talks with Jeff Sharlett about his new book The Undertow: Scenes From A Civil War, life in Trumpland, and the dangers of growing fascism.
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I'm Jared DeAnstis and I'm here with Nick Hausman.
Good to have you back, bud.
Thanks for having me back.
Luckily, there's nothing going on that we need to discuss today.
It's going to be a laid-back show.
Later on, actual pal of the podcast, Jeff Charlotte, the author of The Undertow Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is going to come by.
Me and him are going to talk about how great things are going in this country and how there's nothing to worry about.
Nick?
I assume that you had a restful time.
You weren't worried about unsecure nuclear weapons.
You weren't worried about major superpower states possibly being overtaken by mercenaries.
I assume you are well rested and ready to go.
I'm ready to go and, you know, well-rested is a thing I can take up with my watch, my Apple Watch, to see that and measure that later.
But, uh, because I haven't really gotten a great night's sleep in a long time, in like 10, 11, 12 days.
So, so we can discuss that in a different pod, I suppose, or a different, a whole different pod, like, all together for sleep help.
That's the Weekender.
We can, we can talk about sleeping on the Weekender.
okay yeah and we talked about like what the night not night terrors it's the one where you get stuck in between dreaming and awake you know that stuff absolutely yes this this has a lot of meat on the bone absolutely we're gonna talk about sleeping but we need to tell people if they want to listen to something like that on the patreon that they need to go to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast Patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
That's the place to go so you can listen to The Weekender on Fridays and hear us talking about our sleep.
I have things to talk about with my sleep.
I'll talk about my sleep patterns.
I'll talk about all of it.
We'll be open books.
Yeah, and I think it hopefully would help people.
Yeah, maybe that's what this podcast is for, to help people sleep.
Speaking of going to bed at night and not worrying about anything, Nick, this was one of the wildest weekends in a hot minute.
I assume everybody has heard of this, but let's go ahead and set the table.
In Russia, head of the Wagner Group, and for those who don't know, Wagner is a group of mercenaries that have carried out the war in Ukraine, as well as imperial projects in Africa.
Just an absolutely awful group of people.
Wagner's billionaire head, Yevgeny Prigoshin, basically declared war on the Russian state this weekend after he claimed that his encampment in Ukraine was hit by a missile strike, killing a bunch of his troops.
So what'd they do?
They got in their vehicles, they grabbed their guns, they went to Rostov-on-Don and took over the military complex there.
And then, Nick, they got back in their vehicles and they took off for Moscow.
They got within 120 miles of Moscow.
Along the way, by the way, they shot down roughly 39 jets and helicopters.
It was like one of the worst days for Russian aviation in terms of losses.
Vladimir Putin, speaking of planes, it seems like he jumped in his private plane and maybe took off for St.
Petersburg, leaving Moscow to the raiding hordes And then, what happens?
They stop 120 miles outside of Moscow.
It turns out that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko bartered some sort of a deal that we're going to talk about in a second.
Pragoshin said that he was going to go into exile.
Meanwhile, everybody came back and said, hey, what was the big deal?
Nothing happened.
It was a very odd 24 hours.
Before we get into the different aspects of everything, Nick, how did you feel watching this?
I mean I think the term that you'd like to use is wild and that's what it felt like because you had a sudden hope like oh my god is this going to be it obviously the other thing is is that Rogozhin would have probably if he had taken over made it worse for Ukrainians and like he wasn't happy that they weren't committing enough atrocities in this war so that that is you know there's an old saying never root for a new king Because, well, they don't even have to finish that sentence.
I think what was more interesting was the reaction by the right.
To this whole thing, right?
Because there's this weird thing going on that we've seen since the start of this war of, you know, maybe even before, since Trump took over, of this really pro-Russian right-wing alignment, which is so bizarre because the right-wing thing should have been pro-USA, anti-Russia, anti-Soviet Union.
Not no more.
Right.
It should be like in the cuckolds of their brains, still there, residual from back in the day.
So to see them try and spin this as some sort of a Putin's, you know, what we call a false flag operation that helps him get troops in somewhere and take over this and whatever.
It was some serious mental gymnastics, but they do make a point about How this also could have been maybe something from the American side as well, or that could be part of this.
I don't know exactly, but we need to explore this because there's going to be some answers, I suspect, when we're done with our conversation.
Well, so let's go back in time a little bit.
You know, when this whole thing started and we started talking about the war in Ukraine, I said there were only a few options on the table, right?
There was the possibility that Putin was going to roll Ukraine.
Didn't happen, so that option got taken off the table.
Another option Was that this would be such a destabilizing effort that it would put his regime in trouble because for those who don't know, they think about Vladimir Putin being an all powerful, you know, sort of dictator.
Well, he is very powerful, but the way that he has worked is through a regime of terror with his oligarchs.
There's a big group of people in Russia that are part of his criminal foundation.
If he likes you, you're getting billions of dollars and you basically help steal the spoils of the state and you live a great life.
If you cross him, don't stand near a window.
Like, whatever you do, don't stand near a window.
That, by the way, will create a regime in which you have control, but those people, they're not loyal to you.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, all of a sudden, they start looking at you like you're Nero, and they're like, we might need to take care of this guy at some point, which is one of the reasons why anytime you saw Vladimir Putin appearing in public with people, he was always at a really long table.
Right?
Like a mile-long table.
The question in all of this was, as this thing ground on, was there eventually going to be a challenge with his power?
Pragoshin himself is an extremely wealthy person.
He's not one of these oligarchs, though, that is like the pillars of all this.
I almost guarantee that he had some backing here, or he had the ears of some of these oligarchs.
I mean, you don't do this all willy-nilly.
This has been in the works for a little while.
Um, the question is what happened when he turned around.
I have some thoughts on that.
It's a little unclear right now, but it really does reach a thing where you realize this Putin-ish regime is, it's on borrowed time right now, which is both hopeful, and I get why people were celebrating that this was going on, you know, Vladimir Putin getting what comes to him.
Prigoshin's not a good person.
And the Wagner Group are not good people, right?
Like, we really don't know what would have happened if they would have seized the power of the state.
The nuclear question was up in the air, and I mean, it caused me to lose a few hairs on my head, I'll tell you that.
But this thing, it revealed that this thing is not only on borrowed time, but there were only a couple of destinations that any of this would lead to, and this story is not over by any stretch of the imagination.
I mean the progression story is fascinating to me because he was like a hot dog vendor on the street and then next thing you know... He was a caterer!
Yeah and he makes a he makes a meal for Putin he likes it like you described and then next thing you know he is he is amongst the oligarch class uh and it's still not clear I haven't been able to connect all the dots in terms of how he became you know Putin's chef to you know uh the head of the Wagner group.
Shout out to Jared Yates Sexton for saying Wagner uh versus Wagner which apparently is not the right way you'd say it if you're over there.
We'll accept either way, but Wagner, I'm going with that.
It's very bizarre, you know, in terms of, you know, you're building a business, you're making, you're making, you know, meals for people, next thing you know, I could build an army.
I have this, I have the strength or the knowledge for that too.
It is.
It is interesting because anybody who wants to pretend it was a false flag operation that was Putin designed is insane because why would Putin ever embarrass himself like this, right?
The only thing that comes out of this is that it's embarrassing for him.
His pants got pulled down in front of the world.
Yeah.
So I think that that's the thing.
And I was worried as well, because suddenly I started to realize, yeah, the nuclear material isn't really secured.
And if Putin is now in exile, all that kind of stuff, that would make me really nervous.
That said, it made me really nervous in 1991 as well.
And somehow nothing really came of that, I guess, right?
As far as that, unless Iran has a nuclear program because of the secrets they were able to get, who knows?
But the point being that it was really very strange for it to happen so quickly, to end so quickly, right?
And then here we are, you know, no harm, no foul.
We're back to our, let's go back to our regular schedule of fighting in Ukraine.
Yeah, and by the way, any Saturday where I have to look up from what I'm doing and say, does anybody have eyes on Erik Prince?
Does anybody know what Erik Prince is doing right now?
Is he taking notes?
Because this rise in mercenary culture, it's not a coincidence.
And if you know anything about history, if you keep around mercenaries and you rely on them for your imperial projects, Doesn't end well.
I'll just go ahead and say that.
Just so Americans will get the idea.
In terms of this not working, I'm glad you brought up the fall of the Soviet Union.
A lot of people don't remember exactly how the fall happened.
There was an attempt by Soviet hardliners to carry out a coup and take over the state from Mikhail Gorbachev.
Like, Gorbachev was isolated, and basically they said, oh, he's very sick, we need to take over things and we'll go from there.
There was a pushback against that thing, but one of the reasons why that attempted coup failed, Nick, is something that you and I have touched on a few times.
There's a difference between plotting a coup and carrying out a coup.
Because eventually, when the fat is in the fire, you are the person who is trying to take over a state.
And this goes with Pragoshin.
He's a business person.
He's a mercenary.
When we talk about someone trying to take over a government, we think about them trying to have the power of the state, right?
You want to determine the future of the state.
Pragoshin cares about money, first and foremost, right?
He is a grifter, that's how this whole thing has worked.
I have a wild feeling that when push came to shove, and he's 120 miles outside of Moscow, first of all, people who don't know this, Vladimir Putin very well may be the most wealthy person in the world.
Secretly, in terms of the money and the resources that he has pushed away.
There's a possibility that, you know, Lukashenko gave him a call and said, a number, right?
This is what can be in your bank account.
There's also the possibility that his entire family could have been kidnapped and facing assassination and terrible repercussions.
There is a possibility that tactical nuclear weapons were on the game piece.
You know, this would have ended up, I think the Wagner Group would have given The Russian troops are run for their money.
We don't know what happened here.
But we also need to understand that, like, when you're in that position, Gary, to take over a state, you have to make a choice.
Do you cross the Rubicon, or do you not?
Are you in open rebellion, and you're trying to take over the state, and you're taking responsibility?
And I don't think Pragoshin had a taste for that.
I think he got a little wild in his feud with the defense ministry and basically got tired of the bigwigs ahead of him and probably had conversations with people about carrying out the coup.
But as we see from history, thinking about it, Considering it and doing it, these are different things.
Sure.
You don't want to be part of a coup if you don't know if it's going to work, right?
It's got to be a guarantee or else you don't want to be part of it because here we are.
Here's my take on it is that, and whether or not it was spur of the moment, there's got to have been some amount of planning.
It wasn't just like a missile blew up and, hey, let's go!
But I do think that, A, it exposed a big issue with the Russian army because it was easy for them to get on their way to Moscow without much resistance.
It's brother against brother.
Anyway, the Bognors are Russians and they're fighting against their own... I gotta tell you another thing when it comes to coups and revolutions.
If you are in a position of power, you do not want to risk that the military joins them.
Do you know what I mean?
Because they're tired of the war.
I mean, the citizens welcomed them.
They were marching heroes.
Like, that exposed... You're exactly right.
It exposed a lot.
So, but I hadn't seen the reporting where they shot down 39 aircraft of the Russians.
So my take on it was as they get strung out in a convoy toward Moscow, now they're sitting ducks for any kind of air support that Putin is going to order.
And I thought that might have been what got him to say, okay, this won't work.
We can't, you know, we're not going to do it if we can't.
If it ain't gonna work and I thought that that might have been the final thing where he felt felt like there was no way for him the way they were stretched out to actually successfully take Moscow for instance so that was like hey Lukashenko can you help me out here and he brokered a deal I mean there was there's talk that they're putting nuclear weapons in Belarus I think we've seen do you see that reports?
I don't think he wants Russian nuclear weapons in his country either to be a target.
So I'm trying to figure out exactly what his motivation is for brokering this deal, right?
I don't know what he gets out of it either.
But other than a guy who is so hot in his country.
With every, you know, one of the laser-targeted following him wherever he goes, that I don't know why he'd want him there either, so I suppose.
By the way, if it means anything, the half-insane Ukrainian woman sitting next to me in my son's dentist's office in the waiting room today insisted that this is an American op, and this guy, Poroshenko, will be in Beverly Hills with, like, plastic surgery pretty soon, living the life over here in hiding.
I love the way that we make up stories about this stuff.
It's fantastic.
And I have to tell you, this whole thing, it's such a strange thing because...
Russia is basically where modern misinformation, like, was birthed.
They're so good at, like, Putin's alternate reality and all the people around him who have carried out these operations and playing around with reality games.
I don't know about you, but it was like when it came out that Pragoshin had given the back-off order over Telegram, I was like, is that a deepfake?
Did they make up his voice today?
You know, it all of a sudden, it's just like every moment of thinking about Russia, your mind has to swallow a portion of itself and go backwards and tie itself in knots.
But that's no way for a country to really operate.
You know, and that's part of the issue here is Vladimir Putin made a calculation that the global order was on its deathbed.
He wasn't wrong about that, right?
We've talked about that.
It's starting to fall apart.
The question is whether or not invading Ukraine was going to make it happen.
I mean, China now has to make a decision, which is, oh, Vladimir Putin just has his pants pulled down in front of the entire world.
Are we going to keep helping this guy, or do we want to bet on another horse?
We don't know.
This was a miscalculation all the way around.
Putin's entire regime is just absolutely shaky.
It's unfortified.
We don't know what happens next, but I gotta tell you, this is a hell of like a chapter in a larger story.
And I think we're going to look back on this at some point or another and say, hey, what came next was absolutely choreographed at this point.
Right.
Well, I mean, we do know what happens next.
It's just we don't know when.
Right.
I mean, the war ends and I suspect it ends kind of like how it ended in Afghanistan.
You know, to some degree.
Interesting tidbit, because as you're trying to figure out how Wagner was even founded by this guy, you know, they were instrumental in the Chechen uprising.
And what was valuable for Putin was that he can use the Wagner group to make it seem like it was, you know, a grassroots organization just rising up when it was really just, you know, being paid by the Russian government to do this.
And it's the same kind of thing here where, and by the way, they were just shoving convicts, right?
People who were in prison saying, we'll give you, you'll get out in six months if you fight now.
But if you screw around in anything, we're going to kill you.
And they did.
They'd kill anybody who might turn halfway the other way to not go fight.
And then they were just cannon fodder to this, throwing them out in lines to take the fire from the Ukrainians.
So this is, yeah, not a way you want to prosecute a war.
We, you know, Catch-22 is a great example when we, you know, when we'd seen that in every iteration of what happens when you get so corrupt with your military.
You're not going to get people who really want, who care about what they're doing.
They're not going to fight very hard.
No, and I gotta tell you, you brought up Afghanistan.
If you actually look at what happened after the Afghanistan folly, people came back so disillusioned and Russia fell into... And actually, Russian history is full of this.
Russia always has this appearance of being unstoppable and strong, and then they go foolhardy into a war and they get their asses handed to them.
And then all of a sudden it's just like, well, what do we do now?
Oh, maybe, maybe we've been lied to it.
Maybe we need to reconsider it.
And so maybe this is a, maybe we're, you know, inching up on that.
I don't know.
Absolutely.
I mean, we saw what happened.
It was not that it was the complete correlation between the fall of the Soviet Union and losing Afghanistan, but those two things kind of go hand in hand.
And so, yeah, I don't doubt that that could happen.
And again, the way this is being framed on both sides is fascinating as well, because it sort of, it correlates to everything else we've been talking about and how the right versus left argument is definitely moving a little bit, too.
I feel like that has changed.
As we move into this, you know, this new age where we are, and it's troubling.
The tone has changed, I feel like, right?
Even though we might have said years in past, the U.S.
is heading for a civil war, or it's untenable between right and left.
It really starts to feel that way now, you know what I'm saying?
Like, I don't know where we're going with all this in terms of how we're going to exist as a country, but it seems like this is exposing a lot of that too.
It absolutely is.
And again, America should take notes on this and understand that at any given moment, if you're relying on mercenaries or if you have a military that you're using like this, like it can come back to bite you.
By the way, a reminder, Jeff Charlotte, author of The Undertow, scenes from A Slow Civil War is coming up in just a minute.
Nick, I was waiting to talk about this story for you to get back.
You know, this has been one of those weird little things that's captured everyone's attention.
Off the coast of Cape Cod, a 22-foot submersible called Titan, operated by a group called Ocean Gate Expeditions, carrying five people out to the Titanic wreck site, it went missing.
There was a international effort to try and find it.
It turned out that five people died in an implosion.
They paid $250,000 a person to get into this death trap and go out there, including a father and son.
It's so absolutely heartbreaking.
We've heard now that their quote-unquote experimental approach to structure pretty much doomed this thing from the very beginning.
This is an absolute tragedy, and I know this is going to shock people, but it turns out there's some greed at play here.
There's some real stuff to critique here, and this shouldn't have happened.
Oh, absolutely.
I don't know if this is the exact right time in this moment of talking about the fact how they responded to this on the right as well, but the parallel to how the right responded to what was going on with Ukraine over the weekend and what was going on with the subversible are very, very much the same.
It was very bizarre to me to read about that and just take this all in where you realize that later on we found out the Navy had heard of the explosion, right?
Supposedly.
But again, they also heard banging.
They thought it was the ship, but it wasn't that either.
So the right got really whipped up in a frenzy trying to make it seem like they hid this from everybody so that it would become a story and we wouldn't be concentrating on what's going on with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
That's where we're at now.
And, you know, I posted about this.
It's the perfect right-wing brain thing.
I love that Donald Trump Jr.
put on his, you know, his mind cap, and he was like, something here doesn't seem right.
And it's like, no, dummy.
Like, you know what happened here?
We have a company that was trying to make a lot of money, and they cut corners, and they didn't, you know, provide safety for people.
It's capitalism is what happened.
A corporation is responsible for this.
On top of that, there's so much we can talk about about why people are going down and doing this.
Why the rich are paying a quarter of a million dollars to get into a tin can and try and go look at the Titanic.
I've got thoughts on that.
But to sit here and think that it's some kind of like a wag the dog situation so people won't talk about Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden pleaded guilty I said this on The Weekender while you were gone, Nick.
Like, take the victory!
Take the W!
The guy that you hate pleaded guilty to these crimes.
Why do you have to keep going?
Just accept that you quote-unquote won.
Be done with it.
Take the W. And this, by the way, they just can't imagine that human greed Or Avarice played any role in this.
It has to be something else.
It has to be some conspiracy.
You have to blame somebody else, as opposed to the system that created this.
I mean, it's a two-tiered justice system, you know, because Biden... Now, that said, you know, Hunter paid the tax.
Here's what normally happens.
They catch you not paying taxes on income, and you pay it back.
That's generally what happens.
You don't go to prison for that, for anybody.
There isn't any two-tier system with this one.
But hey, I'm glad they found it.
Now, is there this notion that they slow walked it, and they were trying to bury it, and they didn't go, and then, you know, there's this whistleblower out there that's trying to make it seem like there's all this noise?
You know, I don't know.
And again, I said in the last one, you know, If Joe Biden ends up being involved in all of this somehow, and by the way, if he was a private citizen helping his son do some deals, that's not illegal.
See Trump, Donald, and his family.
The projection is very thick here.
And again, we don't necessarily expect anybody to ever have any self-reflection and say, oh, well, you know, I'm also mad at Trump's family for doing the same thing or worse while he was in the White House.
But it just makes it really hard to take when you have these supposedly serious people in Congress just going on and on about this.
And also just whipping people up with this notion of, yes, the Navy was in on it, on the submersible thing, to hide it so that, you know, this would obscure the Hunter Biden thing.
It's like, yeah, stop the world.
I would like to get off, please.
It's so stupid.
It's so stupid.
And you know, even the facts of the case are so stupid.
It's like, the Titanic's a big ship, Nick.
It's just a big ship down in the ocean.
And the porthole that they're looking at and taking pictures of themselves with the Titanic at, it's like the size of a cat food can.
Like, what are we doing here?
You know what I mean?
It's just like this wealthy boomer fantasy where, like, you have a ton of money.
If you have $250,000 to go down in the water and look at the Titanic, like, people, people are hungry.
You know?
People, there are people who don't have anywhere to sleep at night and we, like, this is such a useless thing and to lose your life like this sucks.
Like, to lose, like, a father and a son and just, like, To watch it go down so unnecessarily, and because these people, they weren't serious, you know?
They didn't have an idea, really, of what they were doing, and everybody said left and right that this thing was dangerous.
I love, by the way, you want to talk about, like, through lines and stories that tell you everything you need to hear.
A journalist at CBS had gone on a ride for this thing and then like it got lost for five hours while he was on the ship and they shut down the internet so nobody could tell anybody it was happening.
Then he wrote a story and put out a video and he never said anything about it!
Like, it's just this whole system of greed.
It just has this huge list of fatalities that should have never happened, that could have been avoided.
And these idiots, you're exactly right, within the Republican Party, within Congress, these people who have nothing better to do and nothing better to say, they have to continue beating the same dead horse over and over.
And these people, I'm sorry they died.
Like, you're gonna take their tragic deaths, and this tragic situation, and now you're gonna make it about this stuff over here?
I agree.
I can't.
I can't with this shit sometimes.
Well, what I didn't understand was, you know, the portal is so small, they could have just put a green screen, like a screen behind it, and shaken it a little bit, you know?
And no one would have known!
Oh, the water's getting choppy, guys!
Yeah, it looks like, you know, when you're looking out there, it looks like the footage that you'd seen that Cameron got 10 years ago.
So, it was like, again, what makes it such an exciting adventure for anybody when you're in there?
Like, I was trying to think about it.
Maybe if it was like a 10-foot window where you're like, you kind of feel like you're floating right through or whatever.
That would be the feeling you'd want from being down there.
Not this cool thing.
For $250,000 a pop, I want to find the jewel that the old woman threw in the ocean at the end of the Titanic, and I want to wear it while I pilot that thing out of the water.
You know what I mean?
You know what I mean?
250,000.
There's a problem with wealth.
And we're seeing it right now.
Like, when you reach a certain point of wealth, and you don't know what to do with it, you don't know how to enjoy it.
You spend it on dumb shit.
This just is, it reeks of that, you know what I mean?
It's like, it's like going to a restaurant and paying a quarter of a million dollars to have this delicacy that either will taste okay or it will kill you.
And it's just like, well, I mean, what else am I doing with my money?
Sure, I'll do it.
That's fine.
Let's try it out.
It's also the death of regulation, or how regulations apply to certain people, just like the law doesn't apply to certain people.
Because, you know, one of the most famous movies of the 80s centers around this group of people who are saving New York from ghosts.
And yet they are shut down completely by one guy, can walk in there, demand, you know, they don't have any, you know, paperwork, so they have to shut down their thing, right?
Because EPA says this is not safe.
How can this company operate in such a way that they, you know, I don't think that there's got to be lawyers out there who think they're going to win this case when the families sue this company.
And so all the stuff that says you could die on page, you know, three times on page one that you're signing away might not ever hold up when they find out that the portal they use, the glass, wasn't, you know, capable of going more than 100 meters down and they were going 400 meters down.
So this is an interesting thing.
And there were whistleblowers, right?
They fired people who were working there.
Oh, you know what?
I forgot the worst part about this whole thing.
That's what I wanted to say was The other thing they're pointing to is how, uh, the reason why this thing imploded is because they were woke.
Did you see this?
Tell me you saw this, right?
No, I, no, I didn't.
Oh my goodness.
Jared, Jared, there is a video or an interview with the company a year ago saying, well, we didn't want to hire a bunch of 50 year old white guys, you know, we, you know, to do this.
So that's why we, uh, you know, we had different, uh, you know, brain, uh, Influences from other we wanted other people to whatever what they're really saying is we didn't want to pay to have people tell us that this is not safe, right?
The engineers were going to serious people.
We're going to tell you can't go down on this thing.
I don't care how many times it works for you in a row.
It's going to fail and that's what they were really saying.
But these idiots are trying to make it seem like you know, the because they want to be diverse and their hires.
This is what they think that they're saying and that's why it imploded.
I literally again.
I don't want to be here.
Sometimes, sometimes things happen.
And I think that we've reached like the pinnacle of stupidity, or rather the Mariana's trench of stupidity.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's, it's real deep.
It's real, real deep, man.
That is stupid.
By the way, real fast, speaking of stupid, Nick, a shuffle at Fox news where they are trying different things.
They're moving some stuff around.
Laura Ingram is going on earlier.
We now have the ascendants Of Jesse Waters, one of the dumbest people to ever appear on television.
By the way, Jeff Charlotte brings us up and says he thinks he expects him to be even worse than Tucker for a variety of reasons.
We then go ahead and have to deal with Hannity.
But then, Nick, we have the insurgence of Greg Gutfeld, one of the least funny people who's ever been on television.
This is your new Fox News lineup.
I got to tell you, it's a it's a loser.
That's all I got to say.
It's a loser.
Yeah.
I mean, well, you know, one of the reasons why is Jesse doesn't really dip his toe in the white supremacy thing.
By the way, this will be an interesting thing.
Why Tucker was so popular versus how it's cratered since he left.
And I wanted to say I was way off on this.
I thought that that time slot that Tucker was in was a placeholder that people simply just mindlessly turn the TV on.
That's how he got his ratings.
And that was wrong.
It was Tucker.
And so we're going to find out that what was the difference between Tucker and everybody else?
It was the white supremacy stuff.
The things that he would signal every day, every week, is what get people coming back.
And Jesse Watters is less of that and more of this, like, weird sort of homeless people thing he's got against.
And, you know, people from other countries.
That's his thing.
Uh, and we'll find out if that's going to get some of the audience back, but I don't think so.
But at the very least, um, it was a good test for Fox to find out that, yes, maybe they shouldn't have fired Tucker, even if he was talking about how white people fight or whatever that whole shit was.
Apparently that was one of the reasons, really one of the reasons they fired him.
But, um, I don't think so.
Do you think that Waters is going to resurrect that time slot and get the numbers that Tucker got?
I, what I'm going to be interested in seeing from Jesse Watters is how he evolves.
You know, there's a thing that happens, and you've seen this in, you know, sports.
You put people in a role and you see how they perform.
You know what I mean?
You're like, oh, okay, You don't want to be on the bench anymore?
We're going to put you in the starting five and see if you live up to it.
And sometimes people do.
Sometimes they change and they move things around.
Jesse Watters is not intelligent.
His entire thing is based on like this sneering, kind of like, mmm, the woke, am I right?
Tucker's thing, he was a gleeful, cruel person who mainlined and streamlined conspiracy theories and white supremacist ideas.
That's what he did.
If they approach Jesse Watters to try and do that, he won't do it the same way that Tucker Carlson did, but I almost guarantee that whatever they want him to do, he'll do.
You know what I mean?
That will be the interesting thing.
It won't happen probably in the first week of the show, but in the first month of the show, we'll have a pretty good idea of who Jesse Watters is moving forward.
But also, Nick, I think we'll have a pretty good idea of what Fox News is going to be like going into the GOP primary for 2024.
I think we're going to have a decent idea of what that coverage and what that messaging is going to be like.
I don't know that Jesse Watters can beat Tucker Carlson, but I think he can do a ton of damage.
I agree.
I agree.
And any kind of bump that they might have seen recently as far as getting some of the ratings back, I don't know if it's going to serve them well.
I don't know if Gutfeld will be able to do well.
Here's the thing.
Looking into the shift in their lineup, you find out some of the ratings and Gutfeld was beating Colbert.
He was beating Kimmel.
This is not a funny man, you know.
I've tried to watch and sort of get a handle.
I'm gonna go, I'm gonna do a deep dive for maybe before next show.
I'll give you, I'll give, maybe we'll get some clips to share because I think the audience, I clearly don't think anybody listens to this has probably even heard of Gutfeld, right?
I don't think they've I think they've heard of Gutfeld.
I don't know if they've watched him.
I've watched my fair share.
God, what was the show?
The Five or whatever it was.
Or Gutfeld After Dark or whatever.
Red Eye.
Red Eye.
That's what it was.
Red Eye.
Red Eye, I watched a tremendous amount of in a period of time where I hated myself.
That is a tough hang.
That is, he is not funny.
no like you know angry humor and like uh insult humor but like it's not the kind of insult you see you know um the dog uh comic the sonic the god insult the comic dog what's his name Oh, is it Insult the Comic Dog?
No, it's called, um, anyway, whatever.
But nonetheless, because that's funny, right?
Triumph!
It's not that.
This is angry and mean.
It's just worse than, like, the fraternity brothers hanging out in a room, you know, and the smell already was a problem, but then they just sit there and rip on everybody who walks in.
It's worse than that, and it's horrible.
But hey, he's getting a bump up and Fox News is changing.
We have to keep our eye on this and how that's going to work.
We're going to keep an eye on this.
I have to assume this will be the first time in his career that Jeff Charlotte had a segue from Triumph the Insult Dog to his work.
But let's go.
I have this conversation, really good conversation, with Jeff Charlotte, the author of The Undertow Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
Let's go to that.
Hey, everybody.
We are here with Jeff Charlotte, the author of the new book, The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
Jeff, I'm so glad that you came on here.
And I just want to say before we get going, you know, I enjoy reading a lot of books that examine what's going on in this country from an accurate perspective.
But I also want to go ahead and say, this is a beautifully written book.
And you know, there are a lot of books out there about this stuff that I think you and I have consumed a few of them that are drier than dirt and the prose is terrible, but I just want to go ahead and pay you a writerly comment.
This is a beautiful book.
Congratulations on that.
Thank you, Jared.
And that's meaningful coming from you.
And I think that's something that we share in the sense that the way that we address, the way that we have to address these issues is not like a choice between literature or politics.
We need both combined.
And I think we're both trying to do that.
So Well, that's very kind of you.
About the book, I want to get into this thing because, you know, when I found out this was the book you were writing, and obviously the journalism that you've been carrying out over the past few years, I thought the most apt thing from the beginning was, quote, this is a season of coming apart.
And I think that we all feel this.
I think that we all know this.
I think the people who are attuned to it and paying attention to it can recognize it in every single day.
I think a lot of people are in denial about it.
What was it like for you to get out and actually look this thing in the face?
Because for me, going to Trump rallies, talking to Trump supporters, being in these spaces, being around these same sorts of people, I think there's a sobering feeling to it, but also being able to try and understand it gives me a modicum of control or to be able to understand it.
What was it like for you to go out here and actually document this?
I think you and I also maybe, you know, Just two of the very few weirdos who feel that way.
But yeah, and it's something that's interesting because people sort of say, that must have been so horrible.
And to be honest, this kind of reporting is a kind of consolation.
It's to be able to take the measure to not live in dread and anxiety.
Well, you have all that, but you can see it.
You can see the measure of it.
You can see what it is and also what it is not.
I think for me, especially, there's a divide.
So the first third of the book is before January 6, sort of reporting that I've been doing over the years.
And then January 6, I really thought, like so many of us, was a pivot point.
And after that, it became also a way of traveling.
Once it was the first time I, the big essay, the book, The Undertow, traveling across the country, following the sort of the ghosts of January 6, as they shape mythology of the far right.
And it was my first travel after the pandemic.
And there's a way in which I think of this book also as a form of mourning.
And I think that can be really gloomy sounding, oh, it's all over.
But mourning is actually, mourning is what's missing.
I think from American political life the acknowledgement of loss that the loss is real, but when we mourn a loved one, for instance, we it's also thinking through, how do we go on living right and and it had to be done and I think Part of the time in the pandemic and I was stuck at home and I was sort of, we realized Trump wasn't going away.
I think you and I didn't think he would, but he really wasn't going away.
And it was a kind of grief and a frozenness.
So going out and going to places that some might see as frightening.
Was mostly a consolation.
And it's a dark ride, this book.
There's no hopium in it.
But it is also, okay, how do we begin to think of what might be possible in these circumstances now?
Well, and I gotta tell you, one of the reasons I've felt a kinship with you for a while now is I think we have a tendency to bum people out.
And I say that even though there are things about this that I'm optimistic about, but it reminds me a lot.
I was talking with somebody the other day about this.
When I lost my father about 11 years ago, I raged.
Do you know what I mean?
I drank, I ran around, I caused problems for myself.
And what I've discovered as I've started to really dive into what's going on in this country, and I thought your reporting with these people on the right, I thought was really telling.
They're not dealing with what's actually happening.
They're not dealing with where the country is right now.
They're out fighting windmills.
They're creating conspiracies that don't exist in order to rage against them.
They're getting caught up in charlatans who are stealing their money and turning them into divine agents and martyrs and saints.
And it feels in this book, and I felt like this is one of the reasons why this thing was so powerful, to go out and be amongst them.
And this is what I've noticed is, underneath the rage, underneath the calls for overturning elections, for killing people, for hurting people, there is a definitive pain.
That is underneath all of this.
And there's a morning and there is all of this tension and turmoil underneath the surface.
And I feel like I feel like what you were able to sort of show here was a country that is lost but doesn't even necessarily know it.
Right?
It feels it instinctually, and at the same time, it's doing everything that it can to sort of push that away or even self-destruct before it has to look at that morning that you're talking about.
Yeah, it's a denial of death.
And I'm sorry for your loss with your father, but that's such an act.
way of thinking about it, and I've been trying to sort of say to liberal left folks and so on, understand these people.
If, you know, someone in grief goes out to a bar and gets drunk and sleeps with the wrong person, and maybe that's cathartic one day, but we've all seen some people who stay there for a long time, and whatever that grief is, it curdles, it goes rotten, it becomes anger.
And I think, you know, Ashley Babbitt, this really central figure of the book.
And I want to be careful because some people can hear this the wrong way.
And I think partly because in American culture right now, we have a difficulty distinguishing between empathy and sympathy.
Sympathy is a kind of solidarity.
Empathy is, I want to know what it feels like.
Why does that make sense?
It doesn't mean that I agree with it.
What Ashley Babbitt did She became a fascist.
She wasn't always a fascist.
She was a person who didn't understand what all these, the same forces that are besetting us all, right?
She had a financial meltdown that she didn't understand.
She had debt that couldn't, you know.
It's like Bruce Springsteen's Atlantic City.
She had debts that no honest person could pay, took bad loans, had made bad choices in her life, but understandable choices.
But she had, what I was fascinated by was, and where the title of the book really comes from, she had all her life sort of struggled to be a decent person.
She wasn't, no one's born a fascist.
Before Trump, her favorite voter, her favorite president was Obama.
She, you know, she tried to be decent.
She was living there in Southern California, which is beset by houselessness, right?
She was trying to respond to that with compassion.
But then I think of this sort of turning point.
Houseless man defecates in her tiny front lawn.
And it's sort of like, I think maybe that that's the snapping point.
And instead of saying, she lacks a structural language to think about, hey, what are the forces of capitalism and neoliberalism that are creating this crisis?
Instead, she's just like, that man shit in my lawn.
And along comes Trump, fascism, authoritarianism, that says, hey, You know the anger you feel?
Don't swim against it.
Let that current take you out.
And the anger you feel, and I see this a little bit sometimes with people who are grieving, they feel you drink too much, you sleep with the wrong people.
It feels like a kind of ecstasy.
But what it really is, is a kind of transubstantiation of rage into that form.
So Ashley Babbitt is told by Donald Trump, this anger, this rage you feel, it's love.
And you don't have to process it.
You can sit in it.
You can marinate it.
It's a good thing, this anger, love you feel.
When we understand that, that allows us empathy, not sympathy, right?
But it does allow us also to understand none of us are immune from this.
None of us are immune from this.
And I don't think you or I are about to Go down what I've been lately calling the Taibbi slide after Matt Taibbi, former leftist, becoming a right-wing journalist.
But we probably both know people who have.
We probably both know people who are getting ready to vote for RFK.
They would never vote for Trump, but they're going to vote for RFK, who is running on essentially a fascist platform with fascist aesthetics.
And we have to sort of contend with that in order to struggle with it.
Yeah.
And, you know, just to let's go ahead and let's get real uncomfortable, but like real honest about this.
And this is one of the reasons I've been looking forward to this conversation.
I think we're facing a crisis of meaning.
I think we've I think our politics, our economics, our society has been very hollow for a while.
You know, neoliberalism, you know, the duopoly of the parties, our economics is based on get as much money as you possibly can.
There's no meaning behind it.
We even see that the people who succeed are lonely.
They're miserable.
You know, we're even now dealing and it's pathetic, but we're watching some of the most powerful and wealthy men in the world rage against the fact that they don't have purpose.
And what ends up having a cage match, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
God forbid.
I mean, I think we're roughly the same age as these guys.
Can you imagine if Jared, we have to fist fight to find meaning, you know?
We have to hurt to find meaning, right?
I want to make myself bleed to remember that I can feel.
This is the adult man's version of the adolescent who cuts themselves.
Exactly.
But they're adults.
They should know better.
They should know better.
And I want to point out, and this is a hard thing to say when you're talking about Ashley Babbitt, like Ashley Babbitt lived a frustrated life in modern America.
And listen, if we're going to be empathetic and we're going to talk about values, Ashley Babbitt became a martyr.
Ashley Babbitt ended her life becoming a literal religious martyr to, I want to say thousands, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people.
Literally.
Feel as if she has become a martyr in a religious cause, and that in and of itself, that's what forwards fascism.
People don't understand that.
They think that fascist is about getting dressed up in cool uniforms and listening to speeches, but it's literally new religion.
It's taking old, decrepit, sort of used up ideologies and systems and then saying, no, there's something more than that.
Join this thing and become more than that.
And like, we're all capable of being caught up in that.
And it doesn't have to, like you said, it doesn't have to be, you know, storming a Capitol.
It can be voting for somebody who isn't going to be a Democrat.
Or a Republican, you know?
It's whatever it is.
Everyone's looking for alternatives.
And when there aren't good alternatives, some people, it doesn't mean, of course, that they were right in doing what they did, but they end up finding something to give them meaning.
And that's exactly what happened here with Babbitt and so many of these people.
Well, I think of a, you know, I don't name it quite such in the book, but I think of it as, and I borrow this term from a colleague of mine, a filmmaker named Jeffrey Roth, he calls it the Trumpacene, the age of Trump.
Whether Trump is here or not, we are, our politics, our culture exists in this vernacular.
And I think of it as having sort of three theological movements that I'm trying to track in the book.
The first is The prosperity gospel, how it came to power.
We're going to win so much, you're going to get tired of winning.
QAnon comes, conspiracies, the dead of the pandemic, it becomes darker.
And I describe that as a kind of bastardized, Americanized, Gnostic gospel, a religion of secrets and a deep state and so on.
But with Ashley Babbitt on January 6, 2021, and And, you know, I imagine your listeners probably remember who she is, but this 35-year-old white woman, 14-year Air Force veteran, leads a charge, climbs up to a broken window, and we see the hands of a Capitol Police officer shooting her, and they're the hands of a black man.
And watching that on that day, I knew, of course, that is the lynching story.
Innocent white womanhood combined with Air Force veteran.
It's almost like she occupies a double gender role.
Like she's immediately starts saying she's just a little girl.
She's a 35 year old woman.
And she's a veteran stabbed in the back by law enforcement, which is a real fascist myth, by a black man.
That's the lynching story.
And this is what I had seen at Trump rallies.
And I think you saw this too, was that, you know, Trump was trying to create martyrs.
He would talk about those killed by undocumented people, but it didn't, none of them had quite the singularity that Ashley Babbitt offered.
It wasn't that she has becomes the central figure of the movement, but she ushers in this age of martyrdom that now becomes the frame With which you understand your engagement.
So you don't even have to die anymore.
She's the blood witness, as the Germans would put it.
But you, you know, the January 6th prisoners are martyrs.
You know, your friends maybe don't like you anymore because of your Trump hat.
You've suffered for your faith.
And Trump, of course, himself, I think about, you probably get all the Trump emails too, and it's always fascinating before he knows some big criminal thing is going to happen, you get these emails and say, friends, this may be the last time I speak to you.
He has become the martyr.
And I know there's people out there saying, they're not martyrs, which is a misunderstanding of what martyrdom means.
A martyr isn't good.
That's right.
And you don't get to choose the martyrs of other movements, right?
I mean, it's not up to us.
A martyr is one who dies as a witness for their cause.
Ashley Babbitt did.
Her cause was false.
She brought her death on herself.
But she becomes a martyr.
And that is incredibly dangerous.
That is To me, I think this sort of ends the debate about whether we can call this fascism or not.
That tips us over fully into a fascist phase of this authoritarianism.
I'm not sure, though.
Are you comfortable with the F word?
Well, I, you know, that's one of those things.
I actually think, and you and I, we both spend our time in the Academy, and man, do we love arguing semantics.
You know what I mean?
And that is because that's the thing.
Listen, I respect Danny Bessner a lot.
For anyone who doesn't know, Danny Bessner is a brilliant leftist who has weighed in on this over and over.
And Danny and I went a couple of rounds on this where he said, no, fascism is a very specific thing that happened in post-World War I Western Europe.
Right, that we can't go ahead and call it that.
I have to tell you, I think it's just a symptom of a human disease.
In the work I did on my last book, it's just a cycle that keeps happening.
And if that word goes ahead and expresses it, because it's true, it's a group of people who reject liberalism, say that democracy is dangerous, and they try and create what we're watching now, which I got to tell you, I think your book is a masterpiece of.
We are watching the revival of a fascist religion.
That's what's happening there.
I would say even more than a revival.
It's not, well, I guess every revival is a new iteration.
And I think about in Midnight Kingdom, and you sort of describe the sort of the role of mass media, and as I recall, and sort of German fascism.
And I think where Bessner gets it wrong, and I just read actually his, it wasn't quite a debate, but it was a two sides with Ruth Benget.
And I thought she really had the better part of it.
There's a weird kind of anachronistic thing of saying, no, fascism is this in this period of time.
Well, first of all, that's a real Europeanist perspective, because Indonesia entered an age of really straight up fascism from which it hasn't fully emerged.
with the the coup of Suharto and so on.
There was fascisms going on around the world, there were South African strongmen, there was South American strongmen who are modeling themselves on that, and not only modeling themselves, improving it.
And the way that I think some of these people argue about it, what they need to do, well nobody needs to do this, but they spend more time, I don't write about this as much in the book, but I think mass shooters are You know, when we think of the slow Civil War, which is I think there are part of it.
And you've probably, you know, read some of their manifestos.
You look at each manifesto, it copies some from the last manifesto.
I remember reading Anders Breivik's The Oslo Shooter and just realizing that in fact, I teach at Dartmouth College, the beginning of it is plagiarized from a Dartmouth right winger who was in the Reagan administration.
They copy, they oftentimes do cite, they do their citations and they say, now I'm doing this.
And I say, now here are the steps I've taken to improve this method.
And I'm going to die, but hopefully you'll be able to use this to keep going forward.
That's what fascism is.
Why would fascism alone amongst all ideologies remain static to time and place?
No, it's not German.
It's not a German fascist regime in 1935.
It's an American fascist movement in 2023.
It's learned a lot.
For instance, and I think one of the arguments of the book is, while it remains absolutely white supremacist, it holds out what Aunt Thea Butler in her book White Evangelical Racism calls the promise of whiteness.
So it exerts a gravitational pull.
Can bring in far more than I think a lot of liberals and lefties know.
It turns out whiteness is malleable.
Yes, whiteness is malleable and people are like, yeah, I'd like some of that.
I'd like some of that privilege.
I will take it.
And fascism, you know, we can look at Candace Owens or Tim Scott and so on.
And I think people want to dismiss those as merely tokens.
They are representative of a small but sizable and potent transformation that I'm sure you saw, you know, going to Trump rallies evolve over time.
I never forget until I went Sunrise, Florida, and I read about in the book in Broward County.
And of course, I knew there's going to be Cuban Americans, but I know there's going to be huge contingents of Puerto Ricans, Venezuelan Americans, Nicaraguan Americans waving their flags.
Then I get to the Ashley Babbitt rally in Sacramento, California.
The majority of the speakers are people of color.
The majority of the crowd are people of color.
A lot of the Proud Boys battling Antifa in the street are people of color, fighting for a white supremacist cause.
It makes you dizzy, but we can't pretend it's not there.
And in that way, Bessner is like, right, this is not the racially purest fascism of the 1930s.
I also think one of the things that happens, and I think you and I could probably talk about this without setting the table for people, but just to go ahead and bring the audience along, I think part of the problem that's taking place right now is how much of this conversation, whether it's fascism or what's actually happening in this country, is based in sort of these tribal battles between the so-called left and liberals and all of that.
So like, you know, again, you know, Bessner, the online left, all of that.
They sneer at all of this, whether it's what liberals are doing or conservatives are doing.
They think that it's all hollow.
Right?
That it's all performative, that none of this actually means anything.
And actually, in our politics, there is a lot of performativeness, right?
There's a lot of people who say that they have principles, but that they don't.
The right means it.
That's the, and that's one of the things that I've appreciated about your work is getting out.
The people that I've talked to, they'll tell you what they mean, you know, and what they think and what they believe.
And I actually think one of the reasons why right now is so dangerous is they are looking for something that means something.
They are looking for something to believe in.
And this ticks off all the boxes.
Fragile masculinity is, It tells really, really lonely, powerless-feeling men, terrified men, that you can be strong and do this thing.
They're looking for people who need nationalism as part of their identity.
They're looking for people, Christian nationalism, in order to fill in all those holes and give them, you know, the story to operate by.
They don't need Christian nationalism, they need something.
Yes.
And there it is.
And I'll say in a previous book of mine, 2011, and I saw this and I didn't quite, I wish I'd understood it then, I was writing about a movement called Battle Cry, Ron Luce, and they used to have these huge, you know, 50,000 kid Three-day Christian rock festivals with really militant stuff.
And, you know, I know you're from that Christian right background.
I spent a lot of time in it, but this was more militant than that.
And I would go to these events and I'm like, wow, this really does have a Nuremberg aesthetic, but also the rhetoric.
They would bring out a cowhide.
And they would brand it.
And then they'd be showing on the screen, Coca-Cola, Oakley, this, do you want to be branded by a corporation?
And I'm like, this could be ad busters.
This could be the left.
And, but the left isn't there.
So in comes this space.
They're filling the vacuum.
They were doing the martyrdom back then too.
They was talking about Columbine and the myth of a young woman named Cassie Bernal, who when the mass shooters at Columbine, Allegedly said to her, and it's been proven this didn't happen, but this is what's believed.
Do you believe in God?
And she said yes, and they killed her.
In fact, they were killing everybody regardless, and they didn't ask her.
But you had 50,000 kids in the stadium with fists in the air.
She said yes, and saying to hell with corporations.
This is, this is a loss of, of energy.
These kids want something.
So yeah, they mean it.
And, but you know, to that idea of the performative, like, one of the things I think of is like, just theater, people like to say it's just theater.
I'm always puzzled by that.
Because what do you, what do you, especially us literary types, what do you mean just theater?
Hitler, there's a lot of theater there.
It did a lot of damage.
That's why it worked.
Yes.
Theater is powerful.
Theater is powerful.
Performance is powerful.
A little bit of that kind of sneering left.
Look, I'm an all hands on deck person.
If you want to be, and I'm not going to name magazines, but if you want to be in your little corner of magazines talking about how dumb everybody else is and how you're the only... That's fine as long as you're still fighting fascism.
I'm not going to do it.
I'll work with the Never Trumpers.
I'll work with everybody.
I did an event the other day, real literary, not going to name them, but a big, a sophisticate, a New Yorker, and comes sort of at me, sort of saying, you know, we've got to stop talking about cultural issues, trans, trans, trans.
And, and I said, look, Every trans kid in America is on the front line right now.
I wrote this book in part for my child who was trans and said, I've got to go get back in this fray and figure this out.
Every trans kid has a gun pointed at them.
And it was so, this person wasn't anti-trans.
In fact, they were like, we have to focus on capitalism.
I'm like, yeah, right, smash capitalism.
First things first, when a gun is pointed at you, you don't say, no, I'd like to talk to you about marks.
We've got to move those guns aside.
And the guns are pointed.
And I think some folks in the safety of the bubble don't realize that.
There are more guns.
I saw more guns reporting this book than I've seen in 20 years.
I'm not afraid of guns.
I'm a gun owner.
But I'm afraid of guns when they're being used like this.
This is...
Well, and by the way, on that note, I think that's also part of what's happened is this country has been so successfully balkanized.
And, you know, anytime people want to talk to me about red states, I blanch.
I say, there are no red states.
You cannot just go ahead and chalk the country up on electoral college maps.
That doesn't work.
And on top of that, doing that actually makes this situation much, much worse.
And it feels like... I think it was David Brooks that originally coined red states and blue states, wasn't it?
So, put that, you know, in the long list of great David Brooks ideas.
I know, we have a lot to thank Brooksie about, you know.
But it is one of those things where I think there is such a divide between the enclaves of sort of liberal bastions, you know, the cities and the rural areas.
But if you get out, like, if you get out into the rest of the country, if you manage to do it, and this is where I spend most of my time, and I know that you go out in order to find these things, you start to understand that, like, It is not as cut and dry as everyone believes it is.
It's not just red state and blue state, but there are things that are happening that are, they're metastasizing, and it's happening very quickly.
And that, they mean it.
They really, truly mean it in how they feel and how they're going through this.
And they are being scooped up by people who get it.
They know how to go ahead and activate this stuff.
They know how to use it.
We've already seen basically every right-wing billionaire create these little red state fiefdoms to go after gay and trans kids as well as voting rights and education systems.
And meanwhile they've been virtually untouched.
Like everything is sort of sprouting all at once and to go ahead and sneer at it or to pretend like this isn't happening at all I think maybe it helps people sleep at night, but I don't think it does anything towards this.
I think it only makes this exceptionally worse.
I think it's an absence of solidarity.
And, you know, in New York City, there are more Trump supporters than there are people in Vermont.
In California, I believe there are more Trump supporters than there are people in New England outside of Massachusetts.
I'm in Vermont, and I can, you know, I read a lot about flags in this book.
I learned the new word vexillology, the study of flags, because there are, I mean, literally, I mean, hundreds, but definitely over 100 variations of flags.
There is a burst of creativity.
And that's one of the things I want to explore.
Fascism, It's a grotesque imagination, but it is not unimaginative, and it is an aesthetic.
It's worth remembering, of course, as you know, that a lot of it grew out of an avant-garde artistic movement in the 1920s in the Italian futurists.
And I see all these flags.
I can see them around here, not just the Confederate flag, Uh, and the Gadsden flag, the don't tread on me flag, the coiled snake, um, all their older revolutionary flags, reborn 1776 flags, meant to order given logical means.
And then this very scary flag, the all black flag, it's an American flag.
But it's just black.
Not the Blue Lives Matter flag.
I know you know what I'm talking about.
But this all black American flag.
The first time I saw it was not in a red state.
It was in Palmyra, New York.
And I stopped to meet the nice young sort of hippie couple that was flying it.
They described themselves as Hindus.
They were white.
I think they might have meant that in an Aryan sense, but the flag meant to them, coming civil war, take no prisoners, kill them all.
It's an exterminationist flag.
It's, and that doesn't mean that they're actually going to do it.
So we can reassure us as well.
They haven't killed anybody yet.
So I guess it's okay.
I guess I am of the feeling if someone feels comfortable hanging a flag that says, when the coming conflict comes, I'm going to kill you, my neighbor, and you, and you, and you, That's a problem.
That's a slow civil war that terrorizes our kids.
I know it scares my kids.
That's here in Vermont.
That's not in Missouri.
That's here.
And I think if you take that with the fact that what the bubble folks aren't getting, Those things are coming.
The school stuff is happening in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Sarasota County, Florida.
These are very affluent, very educated counties.
These are the places where these fights are happening.
There's a lawsuit against my school district here in Vermont, New Hampshire.
We're a two-state, I think.
This is a very blue, very educated area.
And They're threatening our schools.
So, you know, I think about this, I wish I'd put this in the book, because the last line is, I give it away, no one has to buy it, now they know how it ends.
For a while, it was possible not to be scared even.
And I'm quoting a singer named Lee Hayes, part of a 1940s and 50s group called the Weavers, once the most popular group in America, until they were blacklisted, blackballed, they were gone.
Pete Seeger's songwriting partner, the man who wrote the words, If I Had a Hammer, And, but he was describing this moment.
He's driving through the Arkansas countryside, where he's from, with a group of union organizers and a group of company gun thugs on their tail.
And they're, they're, they're cooked, they're in trouble and they're singing.
And they were singing labor songs, but they all grew up in the church.
So they start singing hymns.
They're not believers, they're, they're communists, they're radicals, but they're singing hymns and they're harmonizing.
And they're saying, he says, for a while, it was possible not to be scared even.
And the thing about that is it's time, right?
I think about for a while, it was possible not to be scared even.
That's the hope.
There's another Arkansan named Suzanne Farr, legendary organizer, also from Arkansas, I think in the 70s, helped build a radical lesbian commune in rural Arkansas.
Not the most welcoming of spaces.
And these were women who were just like, we're going to go off and do our own thing.
But soon enough, local heterosexual women started coming to them for help fleeing violent relationships.
So they let them in.
And then their partners came.
And They were angry and they were violent.
They came with guns.
And so Suzanne and her comrades decided to stand their ground.
Now, by the time I met Suzanne, she was like a sweet old, she had the affect of a sweet old Southern grandmother, right?
And there was a young activist and said, that's so wonderful.
You created a safe space.
And Suzanne, just like your grandma says, Oh honey, she pats her hand.
She says, There are no fucking safe spaces.
That's it.
There are no safe spaces.
There are safe moments.
That's right.
That's something you have.
But the safe moment, you have to be aware of.
You have to seize it.
You have to build it.
But if you're sitting there in New York, nothing for me to worry about.
There are safe moments.
And by the way, 2023 in America is not one of them.
So let us make some safe moments together is where I would say that we need to be.
I think we wanted to outsource the safety.
We just wanted to believe that other people had it and we could go about and do our business, you know, and, and, and meanwhile, there was not something gestating.
And I think that's the problem in this is I, and reading your book, talking to you, seeing what you've said, what you said, you've been in these conversations same way as me.
There are people out there fantasizing about murder, like literally thinking constantly about when it happens.
Every weekend somewhere in America, men with AR-15s lining up outside a school, a library, a hospital.
And no, they haven't fired yet.
How do you feel?
I mean, the folks who, I think we both been around guns, like someone standing with an AR-15, even if they're not firing at you, It's a tense situation, right?
And that's happening now on a weekly basis, and there is killing, right?
There is killing.
There's institutionalized violence.
All the pregnant people dying for lack of reproductive rights.
The penultimate chapter is going around Wisconsin, which, when Roe fell, becomes the first blue state to make abortion completely illegal.
I travel around.
I want to find out what the people who like this feel about it.
They're really easy to find because they're flying flags with skulls with guns.
It's their identity.
It's their outward identity.
Yes.
And each one of them has another crackpot idea about how human reproduction works.
So each one, you could say, oh, that guy's just crazy.
It's fringe.
This fringe together makes the fabric of something that is right now more mainstream.
You and me, we're the Fringe, you know, Midnight Kingdom, The Undertow, we're off on the margins.
Used to be Tucker Carlson, now you say today Jesse Watters is taking the primetime show.
And Jesse Watters, for folks who don't know, is the Fox host who's going to take over from Tucker Carlson.
My prediction is he will be worse.
Because he's even dumber.
I mean, Tucker wasn't dumb.
Tucker wasn't dumb at all.
Jesse Watters doesn't seem too bright.
He doesn't actually have a formed idea.
He doesn't have a history in journalism, which Tucker did before he did this.
So he's just gonna punch and punch and punch.
I mean, by the way, I think Jesse Watters is lucky if he's able to brush his teeth in the morning.
I mean, like, and he has no idea what's going on, and the profit incentive is there.
There is a hole a mile wide to understand.
And that's also, Tucker saw it.
I think feeling it is a different thing, the instinctual sort of thing, which is there is room now for people to continue to profit off of this, which, you know, if you actually go back in history, is exactly how fascism works.
People keep getting more and more of an appetite and it grows and grows and grows and gets more extreme and feeds off of each other and now we're in this cycle and as long as we pretend we're not in the cycle, the cycle gets worse.
Well, and I think a lot of people, liberals and leftists, reassure themselves with that idea that, oh, these are grifters, right?
Michael Flynn is a grifter.
Michael Flynn is a grifter.
Ashley Babbitt was not.
The people who are now, you know, the thousand people who are facing jail time for January 6th, they weren't grifters.
They, in fact, were willing to put their body on the line.
And they did.
And some of them died.
And whether or not You know, I begin the book with just a little sort of fable, how I learned this from a sheriff, a Southern sheriff, Thomas Breedlove.
And I was interviewing him about a person who had gone into a church and opened fire.
Thank God there's nothing but blanks.
Right.
And so I'm sitting across from him.
He's pretty antagonistic to me.
He didn't like a New Yorker.
And I mean, it really was sort of like an old movie.
And he pulls out of his desk a gun.
And I, you know, I just about wet my pants.
And it's a perfect replica.
He says, see, now that's a toy gun.
But if you pulled that on me, I would have shot you.
And that's just to show you that things that aren't real can still hurt you.
And that's it.
I mean, QAnon is not real.
Think of all the deaths and broken families that have already occurred because of that.
Trump's wall isn't real, we reassure ourselves, but think of the human misery that has resulted from it.
And I think that's a little bit where we both work, you know, in the Midnight Kingdom and the Undertow, we're both trying to sort of understand these stories that people You know, Joan Deeding says, we tell ourselves stories in order to live.
And some people say, oh, isn't that wonderful, beautiful.
They got to read the rest of the paragraph in that white album, the suicide and the sermon, you know, the way that you can make meaning and twist things and tell stories about 1776 or a stolen election in 2020, or the globalists or the Jews drinking the blood of children.
And that gives you meaning.
When I say we have to contend with the stories, and I feel like the other problem that we both face a little bit is people say to us, like, well, so what do I do?
And unless you have come up with a 15-point plan that I'm not aware of, I'm like, I have some ideas, but I think anyone who says now conclusively, this is how we do it, well, they're a liar.
I don't trust them, because we wouldn't be here.
We do it with Midnight Kingdom.
We do it with Undertow.
We do it with, you get involved electorally.
You get involved in the arts.
You do it with, you get, you know, wherever you want to show up.
I mean, I used to be against Antifa.
I just thought they were fools.
And now I'm like, look, you want to brawl on the streets.
It's not my way.
I don't think it's going to work, but I don't know.
So all hands on deck.
You do that.
And someone else is like, Biden is the best.
It's not my way, but go ahead.
Give it a shot.
I look at it, and maybe this will translate, maybe it won't.
I look at it in the same way.
Anyone that you've ever cared about, whether it's like a sibling or a parent or like a significant other, there are moments in your life where you're not able to communicate.
You get into a cycle, and it cycles and gets worse and worse and worse, and you throw up in your hands and you say, this will never get better.
This could never possibly get better.
We're going to be stuck in this forever.
And then eventually you can imagine something different.
And that imagining of something different frees up attention and maybe moves you out of a cycle.
I feel like right now, our current political moment, it feels like it could never possibly get better.
Nothing could possibly happen to get us out of this thing.
And one of the problems is neoliberalism convinces us to not imagine anything outside of it.
You know like it could never possibly and meanwhile it's ending you know like it's it's it's reaching this like grinding era and it feels like authoritarianism is absolutely and fascism is absolutely um Faded at this point, but I think it does have to start with going back to what we were talking about.
I think you have to work on yourself and you have to start finding meaning in other things, you know, like I think I think that's the only way forward and that's the way like revolution start and that's the way changes happen.
But like saying that, you know, it does sound a little woo, you know, it does sound a little spiritual, but I don't think that that's the worst thing in the world.
I don't either.
Look, I just spoke at a Unitarian church yesterday.
There's nothing more rude than a Unitarian church.
And they're like, oh, but what can we do?
And I think one of the things that the left and liberals have What I've been really bad at is recognize what they're already doing.
This was a Unitarian Church and it was a book festival.
And I'm like, a book festival?
In an age of book bans?
You're doing it.
Because I've been out with those people.
They think the Unitarian Church is abomination.
They think a book festival where I can get queer books and radical books and so on is a threat.
You are doing this.
So own that.
Start there.
Give yourself a little credit.
And give yourself a little, I mean, I start the book, you know, I ended with Lee Hayes and I started, it begins and ends with songs.
It was originally going to be a songbook, actually.
It's just going to be all these old songs that were actually smoothed over.
You know, if I had a hammer, like I sang in elementary school, and I begin with Dale, the banana boat song, you know, daylight come and we want to come home.
And there were actually Radical Freedom songs, and I didn't know that, and I wanted a secret history of songs.
So I begin with Harry Belafonte, who I got to spend time with, just died at 96.
Also, because it was just, I knew it was going to be a dark ride, and I could not start with But I mean, Harry's story is not easy, and he was angry every one of his days, 96 years, and joyous, but the struggle is long.
This is where, like, when we talk about the crisis of meaning, and maybe I'm being too academic, and because, look, crisis is the language we use, but I, you know, as writers, sometimes we can ask people, say, but what if we just tweak that a little bit?
Instead of crisis, which I feel like has an arc and is going to be a good end or a bad end, what if we think of it as our condition?
We don't have a climate crisis because we're not getting the glaciers back.
We have a condition.
How do we live with it?
We don't have a crisis of democracy.
Either we're going to lose it or we're going to save it because you have to make it fresh every day.
So if we think of it as our condition, it allows us to recognize the loss and the long struggles.
Why start with Harry Belafonte?
This guy's in the struggle for 96 years.
And he dies, you know, he dies lamenting the Hollywoodization of the civil rights movement.
There's no crisis there.
He doesn't say that's over.
This is onward.
You know, you get up and you keep struggling.
I think we hear Trump right now and his imitators, you know, this language of the final battle, this apocalyptic language, which you speak to in your book.
They want us to think this is it.
You know, Trump's most recent claim is he's now saying, if I'm not back in power, the world will literally be destroyed by nuclear and I am the only one Who can stop it?
Well, it seems absurd, but if you accept that, what are you willing to do for it?
What if you say, you know what, maybe you're a Trumper, Trumpers in power or not, but you know what's going to happen?
I had this advantage that I write about in the book, which is that I had a heart attack in 2016, right before the election, at age 44, very unexpected heart attack at a young age.
I was watching the second debate, While I was having the heart attack in the hospital with my nurse, who was a Trumper, my nurse keeping me alive.
The one where Trump hovered around Hillary like a toxic orange cloud.
So I actually knew my blood pressure was going up, but I got through it.
I survived.
And then a few days later, Trump's elected and I'm still like, oh my God, you know, well, fascism is coming to America and lucky me, I am alive.
To see it.
You know, I knew, I just had the perfect timing of the experience of like, and then what?
You know, the heart attack, the absolute crisis that came, and then the next day, what happens then?
And this is true even if Trump comes back in 24, which I kind of think he will.
Then what, you know?
It will not be the end of the world, to be honest.
It really won't.
And I think real fast, I think the point that you made earlier about being at that church, I think one of the problems is this is such a struggle that you have to sit, you have to say each day is an opportunity.
Each thing that you're able to do is a victory and you have to like hold on to those things and build off of it as opposed to succumbing to absolute hopelessness and despair, which is what fascism feeds off of.
That is its fuel.
And you can't give it that.
You simply can't.
Ashley Babbitt was despairing.
She was in despair.
And then, you know, that's that guy in fascism that comes and says, the despair becomes this other thing.
If she had been able, if there had been someone with her to sit in that despair, sit in that sense of loss, some of that loss you've got to lose.
A lot of white folks losing white privilege.
They're good.
They shouldn't lose it.
But it is also a loss.
They have to sit there and reckon with it, huh?
I had certain entitlements that I didn't deserve.
Right.
What did I lose?
Yeah, what did I lose and what, but what does that loss make possible?
Yep.
And how did that loss even, or how did that thing even hold me back in the beginning?
Jeff Charlotte, um, one of the best to do it.
I, again, congratulations on Leander Tow, an absolute achievement.
Uh, very, very well done.
Where can the good people find you?
Oh, I'm on the old Twitter.
I'm on Blue Sky.
I haven't really taken to it.
And that's about it.
And I write for Vanity Fair, so I'll probably have more coming out in Vanity Fair soon.
And yeah, we'll just all keep reporting and talking and make some more democracy tomorrow, we hope.
I'm glad you're out there doing it.
Thank you, Jeff.
Thanks, Jared.
All right, everybody.
That was a conversation with Jeff Charlotte.
Again, the book is The Undertow Scenes from a Slow Civil War, a brilliantly written, pertinent book.
I absolutely recommend that everybody check it out.
Nick, I got to tell you, I think we did the whole gamut today.
I mean, we went from a Russian coup to Triumph the Insult Dog.
Nobody can say that we don't have range.
That's true.
And we keep our vocal cords flexible.
Absolutely.
And we're going to be flexing those vocal cords?
Yeah.
Okay.
The sweet song.
There you go.
We'll bring you the sweet, sweet song on The Weekender Edition on Friday.
Reminder, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
That will be coming out on Friday, but you don't want to miss those shows.
And on top of that, we've heard the people Nick, we need to do a live taping here sometime soon.
I think when we get off this call, we'll grab a calendar.
We're going to figure that out.
We're going to make that happen sometime in the near future.
We miss you lovely people.
In the meantime, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me SMH.
