Brad speaks with Jeff Sharlet about his NYT bestseller The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Jeff talks about everything from his long conversations about MLK Jr. with Harry Belafonte, to the lustful feeling of the first Trump rallies in 2015, to the desire for vengeance felt among MAGA nation in the wake of 2020, to following the ghost of Ashli Babbitt all over the country. In all, he paints a picture of a cracked nation filled with fear - and a longing for hope.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and today I have somebody who just absolutely thrilled, someone who's writing many of you are going to be familiar with and whose work in many ways has been groundbreaking on many levels over the last couple of decades, and that's Jeff Charlotte.
So Jeff, thank you for doing this.
Thanks, Brad.
It's great to be talking about these horrible things.
Both.
But I would start with a good thing, and you suggested that we begin our conversation with Harry Belafonte, and I'm really glad you did.
Harry Belafonte, I opened this book, The Undertow, Scenes from the Slow Civil War, which is about the bad times we are in now.
With Harry Belafonte and I'm grateful to my publisher for letting me do it because some people are going to open it up and say, what?
I wanted to learn about, you know, fascism and the Christian right.
And you're, you're giving me the, the banana boat song guy.
I think it was essential to do so.
It was essential for my own sanity.
I got to spend a fair amount of time with Mr. B, as he was known.
And I was trying to understand something about the long struggle.
And that's why he's there at the beginning.
He is the book's hope.
And it's not a cheap grace hope.
It's not a, don't worry, we're going to win.
We always do.
Harry was in the struggle all of his days until he died at 96.
Just recently.
And always fighting.
And he was so aware, in a way that I think many can't sit with, of the defeats.
He understood that the civil rights movement in which he played this essential role, he hated what he called the Hollywoodization of it.
The idea that that thing has happened and now it's over and it's good.
He spoke to Martin Luther King, who was his very dear friend, in the present tense.
He was haunted.
He was haunted by what was lost.
And that's part of the hope.
The hope is not based on ignoring the loss.
The hope is based on acknowledging and mourning it.
Mourning is itself a hopeful act.
It's the idea that we will go on.
So that's why he's there.
Plus the Banana Boat song, which is a great song.
I sang it in elementary school, in my little all-white elementary school, and we sang it.
And like all these old radical songs, if I had a hammer, which is sort of at toward the end of the book, you didn't know that these songs were from the long struggle.
Banana Boat, Day O, Daylight Come and We Want to Go Home.
It's a work song.
He learned it on the Jamaican docks.
And that was how he was always thinking.
How do I make A radical vision of what we could be.
How do I make it beautiful?
This is how he understood the struggle.
He was an angry man, very angry man.
But as he said, he said, it doesn't matter so much where your anger comes from as what you do with it.
He used it to make beauty and to share with us.
And that's the hope that we can carry going forward.
There's just so much there.
You know, I will be honest with you.
When I opened the book, I did not expect chapter one.
Oh, okay.
I guess Jeff is hanging out with Harry Belafonte and they're cruising around Manhattan and other places.
I was struck and I want to get to this by what you're saying about Belafonte's relationship with King and his longevity as somebody part of this struggle.
I will admit that what has hit me over the last day since Belafonte died is that Martin Luther King's last speech was the mountaintop speech.
And he says hauntingly in that speech, longevity is something we all want, but I may not experience that.
And he also says, I've seen the promised land.
I've been to the mountaintop.
Now, I may not get there with you.
But I have seen it.
And it's such a striking contrast, isn't it?
Belafonte lives to 96.
He lives so long that he lives through the Hollywoodization of the civil rights movement.
And that's its own kind of pain, as you describe it, because, as you say, he was haunted by his friend Martin Luther King Jr.
and the ongoing struggle to get home.
I mean, Deo is a song about daylight.
I want to go home.
The Promised Land speech is about, I want to go home, and they're both expressed in different ways and at different times with the same idea.
What I was telling you before we hit record here was this, I'm not sure that many, I'm just going to be real blunt, I'm not sure many non-black folks, especially white folks, understand the ways that Harry Belafonte, who is by all accounts the first major on-screen black star of the television age in this country, What he did is part of the civil rights movement.
He was a dear friend.
I mean, not a passing friend, not an acquaintance.
He was like a intimate friend.
Like, I will give you a key to my house, friend, with Martin Luther King Jr.
There are stories in the book, and I don't want to give them away, of him going, in essence, risking his life to make sure the civil rights movement continued, donating large sums of money.
So can you just reflect on that a little bit without giving away the whole chapter here?
Sure, yeah.
I mean, you know, Harry Belafonte says you sing your song and you give it away, so I'll give away the whole chapter.
In fact, I'll tell you, the thing that began when I was trying to understand who Harry Belafonte was, and I started spending time with him, but also going to archives To see some of the material that I couldn't find anywhere else.
And there was one, and the great thing is it's now on YouTube.
You can see it.
It's the best hour of television ever broadcast.
Tonight with Belafonte.
1959.
Sponsored by Revlon, right?
The makeup company.
Which Mr. B thought was very funny and started messing with him.
It was only one hour because after that the Souths were bolted and they said, uh-uh, no more of that.
But he was such a star that he could command this president's most radical hour of television you'll ever see on network television, right?
He was such a star.
As he mentioned, I think a lot of people don't realize, 1956, Elvis Presley sells a million records, but first Mr. B does.
Harry Belafonte, a black man, was the first person to sell a million records.
He was the first in so many, many ways, right?
And he always understood that power as something that existed to be turned toward the struggle.
And he would walk away from things that couldn't be turned toward the struggle.
And you mentioned putting his life on the line.
What was fascinating to me is Martin Luther King Going to Harry Belfonte was a big star.
Martin Luther King wasn't as well known.
Martin Luther King says this is a guy we could use in the movement.
Mr. B had real antagonism toward the church because of the slave catechism.
But they connected.
They connected so well that in his apartment there's this great photograph MLK and Mr. B. And you're right, he said he had a key.
There was a room that was his at Belafonte's apartment.
There was a special bottle of Harvey's Bristol cream that was kept just for him and Martin Luther King would mark with a line the spot.
Joking!
And that was a great thing, this photo of the two of them just busting a gut with laughter.
You don't see those MLK joy moments.
And it's, I mean, it gives you a heart.
But with that came the fear, you know, you walk with Martin Luther King, you put your life on the line.
And you mentioned this is a story I guess I would share.
And it's part of why I think people start to figure as they go through the chapter, oh, this is what this is doing here.
He gives us the diagnosis.
of the American condition, the white supremacy at the part of it.
And he speaks that not from observation, but from experience as a black man, but as also someone who, well, he has faced the Klan very literally.
He goes down Freedom Summer in Mississippi.
Three civil rights activists, Goodman, Schwerner, Cheney, are tortured, mutilated, murdered.
Freedom Summer says, we need more money to keep going.
You can't wire the money down to Mississippi, so he's gonna bring it.
Huge amount of cash.
With Sidney Poitier, his friend Sidney Poitier, his idea is two famous black guys, maybe the Klan, will be afraid to act.
Klan?
They land, they get off the plane, and the Klan is on them.
It's a car chase.
They're shooting at them.
They're being rammed.
They get to town, where all the activists are waiting, and the Klan backs off.
And they break into singing the Banana Boat Song.
Daylight come, and we want to go home.
The dawn, right?
The light.
That's the promised land.
That's what that man was willing to do for the movement.
And I think, Because the rest of the book is a pretty dark ride, right?
Yeah.
You had to start with that hope, and I think you also have to understand what it means.
We're not getting back to normal.
Harry Belponte didn't say, whew, that was scary.
All right, now we're all done.
He had a lot of years left, and we do too, I hope.
I so first of all that scene gave me chills and it I mean I could see the movie I could see you directing the scene because that's the way it's written and it was it was something that I friends when you read the book and I know many of you have already you'll you'll see that you'll see it in your mind's eye as vividly as I did the idea that he would roll up and after being chased and shot at by the clan you know dump You know, $50,000 on a table in cash, you know, and just say, all right, y'all, here you go.
This is what you need.
And for them to sing like that, that's incredible.
The other thing I want to say is it's, it's just, it's really fantastic.
You started the book with hope because we don't always do that.
And I think hope is something we tack on to the end.
I'm guilty of this and I appreciate that.
But as you say, within that hope is a diagnosis and that's really what we get into in the rest of the book and what I want to get into now.
I won't lie, Jeff, one of the things that I encounter every time I read your work is our characters.
You're able to bring these characters out of the page and just, it feels as if you're sitting next to them.
And you were basically part of, you know, the way you put it, all three of Trump's, you know, campaigns.
One is still ongoing.
And, you know, we have this situation in 2015, 2016, where Trump is running.
And the way you describe that campaign is one of prosperity.
You know, you link it to the prosperity gospel.
It's really about potential and possibility and positive thinking.
And you really encounter these folks who are looking to Trump to fulfill the promises that they feel like they deserve and the hope that they want to see come to fruition.
But you zero in on something else, and this is what I want to get into with this.
We meet a man That you call Gene, and Gene says at one of the rallies while you're waiting for Trump to land, I'm gonna beat the shit out of him, Gene promised, and get on CNN, talking about a journalist.
You say later, the joy of punching, real or imagined, is the ideal of action, an inner feeling made incarnate.
We all want to punch somebody in the face, and he says it for us, talking about Trump.
That's what his supporters say.
We envisioned it.
Knuckle.
Soft cheek.
You know you do, Gene.
He's saying, you know that's what you want.
The next page, you talk about the way that Trump taps into lust and envy and anger, our bluntest selves.
And you say that, you know, where other politicians have a limited emotional range, Trump is able to release all of the anger, all of the love, all of the hate, all of the vengeance in his supporters.
The way we've talked about in the show is that he is the id and he is just out with no regulation.
And I just wondered if you talk about that, what you saw in those rallies in that first campaign, the libidinal feeling, the lustful feeling, the erotic feeling of power and desire at those meetings.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, Gene's wife was there and they're this lovely grandparently couple until they start speaking of violence.
And Gene's wife looks at him after he says that and says, Oh, Gene.
And I think she's scolding him.
And then she kind of cracks a smile.
And this is like a sweet moment between them.
She admires her man talking about the violence he's going to wield.
And then she leans into me and she whispers in my ear, this is so creepy.
Imagine your grandmother whispering this in your ear.
She's talking about Hillary Clinton.
And she says words I don't think this woman often spoke.
Maybe Trump had released in her the ability to do so.
She says, don't she look like she been rode hard and put up wet?
I'm just sort of shocked.
I'm the prude here.
Which is to understand, in the same way that the dancing that happens at Trump rallies, the transgressive joy, the ecstasy, Boy, does he know how to work a crowd in terms of making them laugh.
The jokes aren't funny and they don't transmit.
But when you're there, I will confess there are even moments when I laughed and I'm like, wait a minute, what's going on in my head?
The book is broken up into sort of three songs.
Beginning is Deo on hope.
The long The second section is called Dream On, the Aerosmith song, classic rock.
I love it too.
At Trump rallies, people would spin in circles to that great kind of arena rock.
I did it too.
And I think that that was what was being missed right from the beginning.
And I think the gaudiness of it, the golden escalator.
Then you go to the Trump rallies, you're waiting for hours and hours and people are Telling each other tales of the gold.
Heavy with Gold is the title of that chapter.
Look, all the gold on his plane.
It flies heavy with gold.
Women are screaming for him.
You know, I've never really seen anything like it except in old movies about the Beatles.
Yeah.
This is What I think that we have to sort of talk about, yeah, the full range, the id, as you put it.
And I think what's really important, too, for understanding Trumpism as a moment, is he releases the id, right?
He is the current avatar of it.
But what I call the Trump-a-scene, the age of Trump, borrowing from my friend Jeff Ruoff, a filmmaker, it doesn't end with Trump.
There's a pastor, Hank Kuenemann, that I meet in Omaha, Nebraska, and he says, Trump is coming back, whether the man himself Or the spirit and the flesh of another.
The id has been released.
And that's the Trumpacene.
That's the new vernacular of American politics.
Well, yeah, I mean, a couple of minutes ago you said that Harry Belafonte died haunted by Martin Luther King Jr.
In the same register, but on the flip side of the coin, we will be haunted by the ghost of Trump and what he unleashed, the spirits that he unleashed in our ether for a long time, regardless of whether or not he is
One of the things I've thought about recently, and I interviewed a guest who talked about Walter Benjamin, this great theorist of the 20th century, and Benjamin talked about fascism in a number of ways, but two words stick out to me.
One is aesthetics.
It looks a certain way, it's shiny, and it's a mode of expression.
And the other is as erotic that there's like you just described it, this magnetism, this sense of like circulating energy, right?
that you just feel, even if like the television cameras when they catch it and you watch it on MSNBC or CNN or something, it looks tacky and it looks like, why would you laugh?
Why would you even wanna be at this rally?
He talked for like three hours, he rambled on and what's the point?
But as you're saying, as I was reading these pages where you were there with these folks, I felt a little bit of that expression and that sense of erotic desire, that magnetism.
You then go into the kind of, you know, second campaign and the re-election campaign.
And you talk about it in a way that is really one, you know, the word I kept thinking of was as an invisible battle or a battle against invisible entities.
You talk about in the form of Gnosticism.
I'll get there in a second.
But you say on page 113, In 2016, the Trump faith was Make America Great Again, the prospect of the restoration of a mythic, read white, past.
By the second campaign, the new religion was a secret one.
Its enemy invisible and everywhere, the deep state, the pedos, and the FBI.
Democrat-ruled sanctuary cities and the illegals they sent forth to pillage.
the heartland.
MAGA became COG, keep America great again, which required a new prosperity, which Trump legions believed he had delivered, but the eradication of America's enemies, which are within.
I haven't read a paragraph or a sentence that really encapsulates the shift in tone so well.
In its own sick way, the 2016 campaign was one of hope.
In 2020, we felt the vengeance.
And I'm just wondering, before we even get into what Gnosticism is and what that means and why you would call it that, you were at these rallies in both campaigns.
How did you feel that shift in tone, that shift in tenor?
I mean, the energy in the 2020 campaign was so much darker, as it had to be.
The pandemic had begun.
People were dying.
And, you know, the sort of the potential energy of, we're going to win so much, you'll be tired of winning.
Well, now we've been doing all that winning.
And they were a little tired, and they'd moved into this kind of esoteric space of conspiracy that has to explain, inasmuch as you didn't win, well, what went wrong, right?
So now we get into the deep state.
And that pleasure and violence, that excitement and that thrill, right, from 2016, that's been realized to a certain extent.
That's becoming institutionalized.
And it is expanding.
It is expanding very rapidly in the summer of 2020 especially, right?
The summer of George Floyd and Look, there's always been shooting, but now there's more, right?
There's tear gas.
There's Trump with his upside-down Bible in front of the church.
We're moving more into this holy war, and Trump is introducing these notes that elevate the stakes, which of course he's going to do.
It's an aesthetic, as you say, and it's an aesthetic of movement and of transgression.
So remember when he says, I'm the chosen one.
And I don't know where you felt at the time.
A lot of people were like, I can't believe he said that.
Yes, he was joking.
And you know, the right-wingers are saying he was just joking.
Yes, he was joking.
That's the aesthetic.
Joking, not joking.
Joking, not joking until it becomes real.
And by 2020, it was real.
And the people believed it.
And it was a sort of a, it was a very angry and frightening God.
But also, if people say, well, that's not the Jesus I recognize.
They would say, well, of course.
You don't know the real Jesus.
And this is where the Gnosticism comes in.
And with apologies to Elaine Eagles, author of the Gnostic Gospels, who said in an angry note she did not She had heard an interview I had done about this, and said, well, that's not Gnosticism!
I'm like, no, it's not Gnosticism.
It's Trumpism.
It's an Americanized, bastardized sort of appropriation of the thundermind of Gnosticism that she writes so beautifully and brilliantly about.
This ancient Christian heresy that becomes a code.
And what's fascinating to me is that QAnon believers, I would say, are familiar with Gnosticism.
Oh, yes, yes, they are.
Not the deep scholarship, the idea of codes within codes, of knowledge that is available only to the initiate, right?
That's the real pleasure.
The pleasure is in knowing things that others don't.
You may think Trump has a lot of typos.
That's just because you don't know how to read.
That was incredible.
Yeah, and I mean, it ends up tracking for them so well, the Gnostic concept of waterless canals, right, with which it describes, in a sense, the bureaucracy of the church, which is on the outs.
That's the deep state.
Trump himself is the abyss, right?
The abyss is not a bad thing.
The abyss is the true knowledge of God.
The presidency, you might say, is the demiurge of Gnosticism, is the false front.
Beyond that is the Chosen One, the Emperor-King.
And I think that, I have to say, in 2020, that just It was thrilling to be there, because you know what, sex and violence, even horrible sex and violence, unless you are a very righteous person, when I drive by a car accident, I don't want to know if it bleeds, it leads, and we all do gawk, and I think understanding Trumpism has to We don't have to stay in that place of gawking, and that's what Trumpism wants you to do.
But you do gawk.
So when I was at those rallies in 2020, I was thrilled and I was terrified.
And that's how I was supposed to feel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, again, of all things that I thought would happen on this show, I knew I knew we would get people claiming that Trumpists were not real Christians.
I did not know that Dr. Pagels herself would say to you that that's not real Gnosticism.
Nonetheless, you know, friends, if you're listening and not, you know, Narcissism is not something you're intimately familiar with.
A, just read the book because Jeff does a great job of outlining everything he just mentioned.
But I think one of the things that will at least just be easily understandable for anyone is that there's this idea that if you are one of the initiated, you have a secret knowledge that no one else can understand, and so you see things.
You see signs and symbols, you read gestures in ways that the uninitiated can't.
And that's exactly what the folks told you over and over and over again.
You know, the way I put it in my book about my own experience in white Christian nationalism is that there were times where I felt that I was part of the secret remnant of the secret remnant.
Or, you know, I mean like I was one of the initiated within the initiated.
Great, right?
Yeah.
And I'm inside now, right?
But it's even better than that, right?
I'm an insider and an outsider at the same time, because no one wants to be establishment.
The insider, oh, I'm invited to the think tank, right?
That's boring.
I'm an insider and an outsider.
I'm inside this secret, outside this within.
It's a Mobius strip.
I mean, it's a dream politics.
And I think fascism, and I do use, you know, I use the F word and I use it very advisedly.
I would say that when Trump came down that golden escalator, I said, here comes a fascist aesthetic.
Let's see what happens if he's able to take the extreme right of America and expand it into a fascist move.
And he was.
And I think now, I'm not one who says every president I disagree with is a fascist.
They're bad in their own way.
But this is a particular ideological formation and a particular aesthetic formation.
I mean, I don't know if it helps you pass the time.
Insider, outsider at the same time, contradictions.
It's why the endless sort of liberal kind of counting of hypocrisies, I mean, I don't know if it helps you pass the time.
It's not going to put a dent in fascism.
The contradictions are the point.
The paradoxes are the point.
We say the cruelty is the point.
The chaos is the comfort of it.
That's, you know, it is deliberately surreal, a kind of lucid dreaming.
Well, and just going back to, so we in this, you know, in 2016 we talked about prosperity, in 2020 we talked about Gnosticism and vengeance and cosmic war, but in both cases It's a, it's a movement that puts you in your body, not out of your body.
You know, when you're at the think tank and you're with the talking heads, cause I've been at the think tank, I've been in the ivory tower.
You're not in your body and you're not supposed to be.
And so if you're going to combat.
This movement if you're going to combat the the what seems to be the dangers of Trumpism it's never going to be uh as whether you're saying you know proof texting people you have to understand it's about affect right it's about emotion it's about incarnation it's about the meat of yourself not the spirit of yourself alone and I think I think sometimes that's missed.
I want to get to the third campaign which is really Yeah, it really comes to play here in the last two-thirds of the book.
You have a chapter that hits on Ashley Babbitt, who I wrote about in my book, and you really talk about the blood witnesses of January 6th.
I think you and I agree on this point.
That January 6th served as just a rallying point and a battle that will be valorized.
So let me just read a little bit about what you say about Ashley Babbitt, because I think this really brings into focus what you're saying here.
How to say then that Ashley Babbitt is not a martyr?
There's the word itself, martyr, which means witness, one's life given as a testament to some larger truth.
The story for which she put herself in front of the gun that the election was stolen?
Verifiably false.
Count, recount and do it again, Georgia or Michigan or Arizona, the outcome is the same.
But what if she died as a witness not to fact, but to dream?
And, you know, what I've maintained and I think others who are paying attention have is that Ashley Babbitt is one of the first martyrs.
Of January 6th, of Trumpism and perhaps of a new civil war, a cold civil war, a slow civil war, what may be.
I'm wondering if you can talk about what that looks like on the ground.
You know, what are the ways that someone like Ashley Babbitt, a witness and a martyr, a witness as martyr, helps to galvanize a movement as it enters its third phase?
Yeah, yeah.
The age of martyrs, I think, you know, and preparing for war, you're right.
You also have that section of MAGA martyrs.
And it's a little bit like, you know, saying they're not real Christians.
To say that they're not really martyrs, we don't get to decide the other movement's martyrs.
I think people want to say, but she wasn't good, therefore she's not a martyr.
That's not what a martyr is.
There's a way in which a martyr is always a kind of a sleight of hand in which the dead sort of are made to serve the living, right?
I think what's fascinating to me about Ashley, so when I saw on January 6, 2021, we watch her die, you know, this 35-year-old white woman climbing through a window.
Many people say she was unarmed.
They're still saying it on TV now, she's unarmed.
The knife on the cover of my book is Ashley's knife.
She was carrying a knife.
Some people say, well, that's just a handy knife.
Well, try taking onto a plane and see how far you get.
No, she had a knife.
She was armed.
She was leading the mob and she was killed.
And we see the hands of the man who killed her and they're the hands of a black man, Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd.
And as soon as you see that, we know, in the American mythology, what's going to happen with that.
And it happens right away.
It's the old lynching story, right?
Innocent, white womanhood.
And even that very day, they start making her more innocent.
Well, she's 35.
Maybe 125 pounds.
No, she's in her 20s and she's 115 pounds.
No, she's about 16, 110 pounds.
Until finally, one of the men who actually planned to seek out and execute Michael Byrd for his crimes before the FBI caught him.
Execute the police officer who killed her.
Says she was just a little girl, a little white girl.
Virginia Dare, the first white girl born in America.
Birth of a Nation, the first film screened in the White House, which is about a white woman who leaps to her death rather than be raped by a black man.
Thus, in the movie's horrible logic, justifying the Klan, right?
So I knew this was going to be a modern myth.
I wanted to watch it happen.
I flew out to Sacramento, California, where there was a rally with Ashley's family, Justice for Ashley rally.
It quickly devolves into a brawl between Proud Boys and Antifa.
And someone at the rally says, if you really want to understand why Ashley died, come to my church tonight, Saturday night, they're having a special speaker.
The Church of Glad Tidings in Yuba City, California, which became sort of regionally notable for never closing its doors during COVID.
Major right-wing figures start going out there.
People may know it because there was a viral video of General Flynn being presented an AR-15 at the church.
What they didn't pay as much attention to is the pastor was also being I know you write about Joshua, the centrality of Joshua, right?
And it's inscribed with Joshua 1-9, right?
which is not really the killing part of Joshua, but in that world, it's come to be referred to as a battle verse.
Aster at Ashley's Rally, Joshua 1-9.
This AR-15, Joshua 1-9.
I go to Lauren Boebert's restaurant, Shooter's Grill, Hooters with Guns, all the merch, Joshua 1-9.
And when you start traveling through this world where that makes sense, you start encountering people who are thinking of Ashley Babbitt, yes, as a martyr, and a little bit.
There's an old labor song about another martyr, Joe Hill.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night.
Woody Guthrie's song.
Joe Hill was a labor organizer for the Wobblies and was killed.
I would meet people who said, yeah, I dreamed I saw Ashley.
Or people who said, I met Ashley Babbitt.
Of course, they hadn't met Ashley Babbitt.
She becomes this figure.
I met another J6er who says, I'm like that guy from 300.
The Zack Snyder Bloodfest, the 300 Spartans versus the Persian Horde, and one is left alive to tell the tale.
He says, I survived January 6th so I could tell her story.
I'm like, but wait a minute, dude.
Everybody but her survived.
What are you talking about?
It doesn't matter.
In the dream logic, you are justified in your further violence by the love for Ashley.
Any means necessary.
There's an Ashley Twitter account with Malcolm X.
The number of right wingers who have now gone from, they used to appropriate Martin Luther King, now they're appropriating Malcolm X. Any means necessary.
Or Ashley as an angel.
Ashley with wings.
Ashley with an avenging sword.
That church that I mentioned, Church of Glad Tidings, is fascinating to me.
I had not seen this before.
A church, I've seen churches without crosses.
Oh yeah.
But I had never seen a pulpit made of swords.
And a church with its own militia.
And as I learned, traveling across the country, because I follow Ashley's ghost across the country, that is increasingly, I think, a vernacular.
It's time for the war gospel.
Yeah.
Well, and you even have a line in there about how, you know, you ask about the cross and the pastor's like, well, the cross, yeah, I mean, just kind of, it doesn't do it for us.
Yeah.
And I mean, it doesn't do it.
It doesn't turn us on.
Right.
Yeah.
And that eroticism, like, I want to get excited, man.
It's that's boring.
But but, you know, you think of the the end of Mel Gibson's.
Which is what, they're like, yeah, Christ's rising from the tomb and it's, you know, it's ripped muscular Christ and the Enya chords give way to the military beat and it's this hard-bodied man and he's gonna go and kick ass and by the way, he's gonna not be wearing a shirt in a sexy way while he does it, right?
That becomes this thing, and all of that's there in the church beforehand.
This has always been there.
Again, I think this is, to lefties who say, look, it's always been bad.
I've been writing about right-wing movements for 20 years and studying the history going much further back.
I think the age of Reagan, which precedes Trumpism, which gives us a right-wing vernacular that we speak in, even if we're Democrats, right?
Reaganism was a violent ideology, but it never celebrated its violence.
It was a lustful ideology, but it came garbed as puritanism, right?
That's why that Reagan era movie, Wall Street, with Gordon Gekko saying greed is good.
That was telling the truth about what it was.
Trump inverts that, right?
The violence isn't hidden.
The lust isn't hidden.
It's the point.
It's what we're there for, right?
And why, good God, why the press and even, you know, some scholars are still going over policies.
That's what it's about.
Yeah, that's a whole, that's a discussion for another day.
And I know you don't have time for that today.
I want to be respectful of your time, and we only have a few minutes left, so I want to get to something that's right at the beginning of the book, because it hit me personally.
I mean, there's a lot of things in this book that hit me personally, but here's one.
You're talking about the undertow, which is part of the title.
He's talking about a friend who was talking to you about the age we're living in.
He meant it as hard to see hope, but I could only think that What we see as we rise with the water is that the next wave will be bigger and the one after that bigger still.
And if we make it to shore, there's the smoke of wildfire.
And before that, you talk about, you know, hearing your friend talk about this sort of metaphor of waves in the ocean.
and being caught in the undertow, being thrashed around.
And you talked about it as sharp objects, being thrashed around amongst sharp objects.
And so I will just admit to you, I have lived this very scenario like physically because I'm a surfer and I often surf in Santa Cruz.
So I have lived it.
And the nightmare scenario for any surfer is that you are caught in a place where the waves, the set waves break in front of you and you have no choice but to sort of go underneath And you know that there's so much water and there's so much power that it's going to thrash you, it's going to thrash you up and down.
And you're going to be under there for a while.
You're not going to know which way is up or down for a minute.
And when you get up, here's the problem.
Your first thought as a surfer is what, what's the next one?
And your biggest fear is, all right, I just made it out of one.
I'm out of breath.
I'm disoriented, and I'm going to do this shit all over, okay?
So you do that, and then you're like, all right, time to go home.
I need to get out.
And I've literally done this, Jeff.
I look on the horizon in Santa Cruz, and there's smoke.
And in my head, I'm like, fire.
We had a wildfire today, right?
Because we live in California, and that's what happens like four or five months a year.
And when I read those pages, I thought this is the perfect sort of description of, you know, we're living in an age just like this.
And so, you know, thank you for that.
And I'm just wondering, as we close here, You know, where do you see us now?
We got Biden saying he's running for president.
We got an election coming in a year and, you know, so many months.
We've got, for me at least, a situation where the thrashing and the disorientation rages on despite Trump not being president.
And the slow civil war, as you talk about it, continues it seemingly to march forward.
So closing thoughts about where we are, the last parts of the book and the way you leave it, anything like that?
I mean, the first line of the book is, you know, throat clearing, substance is pregnant, usually accounts for a journey that ends with a book in your hands.
But this book is written from the middle of something.
Yeah.
A sense of coming apart.
And this section is called Our Condition.
We speak of the crisis of democracy.
We speak of climate crisis.
I think the good news, the hard news, but the good news is that we can reject that language.
Because that's fascist, that's fascist aesthetic.
The final battle, right?
Trump is trying to tell us this final battle.
Well, Harry Belafonte fought that battle for 96 years and now it's our turn to keep going.
This is our condition.
It is a condition of loss.
And we have to mourn that, because grief unmourned curdles into rage.
Grief denied, well that's okay, we'll just elect Biden and everything will be fine, allows that rage to fester, right?
The reality of climate Which is the wildfire, right?
Look, the glaciers aren't coming back.
We all know this.
We have to live with this new condition.
The reality of the fascism that has happened.
We're not going back to the way it was before.
It doesn't exist.
I think what we do is we learn how to live with that loss.
We learn how to live with that fear.
We learn how to make something beautiful.
The last line of the book is A very guarded hope.
Not guarded.
It's actually an unguarded hope.
It's a moment.
Another forgotten singer.
More forgotten than Harry Belafonte.
A guy named Lee Hayes.
If I Had a Hammer.
On Top of Old Smokey.
The American Songbook.
That's him.
Pete Seeger's songwriting partner.
It was Lee who wrote the words.
But he was broken.
He was broken by the anti-communist purge.
He was just a destroyed man.
But he remembered this beautiful moment, and it's just like Mr. B driving through the night in Mississippi, except now it's Arkansas, and the gun thugs now are not Klan, but they're working for a corporation, a company.
They're chasing union organizers, and they start singing.
What they would do is they would used to take old church hymns, and they would turn them into labor songs.
He says, that night we sang the hymns with the old words, right?
Because the struggle is long, and the hymns Sustain them.
And this is Lee's line.
I always knew this would be the last line of the book.
For a while, it was possible not to be scared even.
For a while, it was possible not to be scared even.
Not, don't worry, everything's going to be okay.
For a while, use that moment.
Use that moment to gather your breath, right?
To get ready for the struggle and to keep going.
And What happens in 2024, man?
Well, let's hope that we're both still here to talk about it.
Yeah, well, but first of all, thank you for that beautiful send-off that, you know, those moments in which we don't have to run for our lives to be absolutely in a state of lethal fear are the moments we gather, we celebrate, we commune, and then we march on, and we face the condition we're in with resolve rather than denial.
That's just fantastic, fantastic advice.
Well, Let me just say one more time, friends, the book is The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
It is already a New York Times bestseller.
I saw you telling some folks on Twitter the other night that you were going to be proud of that.
And I thought to myself, I don't know why you wouldn't be.
You should shout it from the mountaintop.
That's a huge thing.
So congratulations on that.
The book is selling like gangbusters.
I know people know where to get it.
Where can people link up with you if you've got speaking stuff or you've got more work in the pipeline?
What's the best way?
I haven't adapted well to the age.
I have no website, but you know, I'm on Twitter and I tell the upcoming book events and so on.
I try and keep them updated there.
So Jeff Charlotte at Twitter or Instagram, whatever, those kinds of things.
You are where you are.
Could be Yuba City, could be Youngstown, Ohio.
You know, you go where you go.
All right, friends.
Well, as always, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
You can always use your help on PayPal, Venmo, Patreon.
That's all in our link tree.
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Everything we're doing, you can find there.
For now, I'll say thanks for being here.
We'll be back later this week with It's in the Code and the weekly roundup.
