In difficult times, the work of truth-telling can seem like obsessing on the negative. But the most important truths are very often uncomfortable and even frightening. This week, host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush welcomes writer Jeff Sharlet, author of The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War, back to The State of Belief.
As Jeff sees America’s slow civil war speeding up, he and Paul revisit his reluctance to initially use the term ‘fascism’ and now emphasizes the growing movement’s influence, without yet consolidating into a regime. They explore the implications of such movements on journalism, rule of law, and personal freedoms, highlighting examples like Trump’s cult of personality and Musk’s hyper-capitalist influence. The conversation also examines the role of Christian Nationalism and its influence on politics, with a particular focus on the intersection of religion and governance. Jeff underscores the importance of solidarity, complex storytelling, and the fight against inevitability in combating these trends, even though the future remains uncertain.
The dialogue between Paul and Jeff serves as both a cautionary tale and a call to arms. We need listeners and readers alike to stay alert, engage actively, and never lose sight of the human element amidst the grand political machinations. As we confront these challenging times, this conversation stands as a reminder that solidarity and storytelling are powerful tools in shaping a future where democracy and humanity prevail.
I remember at one point a Trump supporter showing me, sharing with me, some crazy conspiracy theories. And at the time I was out there, when I met her, I was reporting for Vanity Fair Magazine, and it was just a pivot. I remember I was sitting in her Cadillac outside a Trump rally. She was showing me this crazy stuff, and then I look up and it was actually a congressman talking on Tucker Carlson sharing this conspiracy theory. And I realized she’s not the fringe – I am.
– Jeff Sharlet, the best-selling author of books like The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War. His book The Family was turned into a powerful Netflix series, and his Substack is a must-read @Slow Civil War. Jeff is Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College.
Please share this episode with one person who would enjoy hearing this conversation, and thank you for listening!
—TRANSCRIPT—
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST: In difficult times, the work of truth-telling can seem like obsessing on the negative. But the most important truths are very often uncomfortable and even frightening. Jeff Sharlet doesn’t just tell the stories; he clearly also lets the truth get to him, because that’s the price of really seeing and understanding the people he writes about.
Jeff Sharlet is the best-selling author of books like The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War. His book The Family was turned into a powerful Netflix series, and his Substack is a must-read, @Scenes From A Slow Civil War.
Jeff, welcome back to the State of Belief, and thank you for joining us.
JEFF SHARLET, GUEST: Hi, Paul. Good to be with you.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH: We first spoke – not the first time we’ve ever spoken, but first spoke on this podcast – almost two years ago, on the publication of your amazing book The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War.
You now have a Substack and you’ve added some words that read: “It’s speeding up.” So the slow civil war is speeding up. And, we’re in a moment here – and I remember when we first talked, you said, “I’ve been reluctant for so long to use the word fascism. I’m less reluctant now.”
Tell me your kind of opening perspective on this moment that we’re in in America.
JEFF SHARLET: The good news – I always start with the good news – is I don’t think we have a fascist regime yet. We have a fascist movement in control of our government, and that’s different than the regime.
As much power as it seized so quickly, and what’s astonishing to me, I think even quicker than those of us who are watching, closely anticipated, watching closely – and we’re not the naysayers where we were the ones who were like, this is bad. It hasn’t yet fully consolidated for all sorts of reasons.
So that’s the good news.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH: And so tell me about that distinction with a difference. What are the things to look for as we parse out what you just said?
JEFF SHARLET: Elements of fascism that we want to speak of when we use that term – and there’s the the popular interpreters, the scholars, Timothy Snyder, Ruth, Ben-Ghiat; Federico Finchelstein is a writer who I think is a really wonderful scholar who resisted it until about 2020. Much like Robert Paxton is a great historian, his book is called Anatomy of Fascism, I think we talked about before. But when we look at the Trump regime, we have, obviously, a cult of personality – that’s a given. We have the othering, the organization of not just a politics, but an aesthetic around the “other” which we oppose with – I’m using the “we,” I’m speaking in this broad sense. I’m not part of this gang – which they oppose with a kind of gleeful anger.
So we are talking about joy – and one of the frightening things is, there is a lot of joy within fascism. The uninhibited rage turned into something like Christopher Ruffo, who is the architect of the assault on DEI and on Department of Education; New York Times has said he’s basically dictating education policy by tweet, now. And one of those tweets yesterday was so vulgar, so hateful against trans people. So conspiratorial about this alleged trans brigade within the US intelligence apparatus that he sounded like Joe McCarthy, except worse. We have all those elements.
There was a debate going on with historians, of the skeptics who said yeah, yeah, this is really bad, but it’s not fascism. And one of their big objections was there’s no expansionist element to it. Ah, the good old days when we weren’t going to take over Greenland and Gaza and Canada. And essentially Ukraine. Ukraine just fell to a Hitler-Stalin pact, or is falling now, right? And they may survive, but at the cost of massive amounts of wealth.
And so I think all these are the elements of fascism. But the reason I say it’s not yet a regime is we do have these sort of vestiges of rule of law that are in place – they’re kind of falling by the day. I’m coming to this conversation just from having taught a class and so I’ve been away for two hours, so I don’t know what’s happened since then – except that as I was walking here, I discovered that in my state of New Hampshire, where my college campus is, the state police are seeking to be deputized as ICE agents with the power to stop anybody, anywhere, anytime, and ask them about their immigration status. That wasn’t there this morning, and now it is. So it’s moving that quickly, but they’re asking for that. They haven’t yet been given that power. The courts are trying to hold on. It’s true that Trump is mostly blasting through the court rulings and some courts are acquiescing.
We think of the institution that we’re both involved in, which is journalism. Recently with the Washington Post and Jeff Bezos’s declaration that we’re not even gonna pretend to be a newspaper anymore. Right now, I have these two things that I think are important: free markets as defined by an oligarch, Jeff Bezos; and personal liberties as defined by a guy who is courting the approval of the Trump administration and all its hate. That’s gonna be what’s in our paper. And we’re not – literally says – we’re not gonna make room for dissenting voices.
But even that’s not consolidation – because they haven’t purged the paper. There are still good reporters at the Washington Post and I urge people: remember there’s good reporters at the Washington Post, there’s good people working in federal government, trying to hold on, trying to hold on. And it is incumbent upon us to not forget that and not give in and to be in solidarity with them.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH: And part of your background is really looking at the way that Christian/militia/identity movements have been an underground over the past decades. And your Scenes From A Slow Civil War, which is just one of the most extraordinary essays ever written, I would say, and I’ve ever read ,necessary reading. It feels like when you were writing that and when I was reading it, I was like, what an interesting underground movement. And it feels much less underground now. How do you factor in the kind of Christian nationalists, Christian identity movements, Christian militias into what’s happening now that their guy’s in the White House?
JEFF SHARLET: Their guy’s in the White House. They’re not the underground – you and I are. And and I write about that in the book. I remember at one point a Trump supporter showing me, sharing with me, some crazy conspiracy theories. And at the time I was out there, when I met her, I was reporting for Vanity Fair Magazine, and it was just a pivot. I remember I was sitting in her Cadillac outside a Trump rally. She was showing me this crazy stuff, and then I look up and it was actually a congressman talking on Tucker Carlson sharing this conspiracy theory. And I realized she’s not the fringe – I am.
And I think that’s sad for those of us who care about accuracy and facts and truth – and care for one another. But as we recognize it, it can turn into a strength. And… Yeah, I’ll pause there. I don’t know about you, Paul, but I find myself, so many times, these days, getting lost in the swirl of things. And I think it’s also fair for us to acknowledge that, and I think a lot of us are experiencing that. And to acknowledge that and then say to the other person, Paul, you pick it up from there. You carry it now.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH: That’s totally fair. And I think it’s especially true for people like you who really are in storytelling, because the thread is so easily lost in this moment. What is really happening? And that’s by intention.
I have the benefit, in some ways, of being the president of an organization that is dedicated to action. And so I’m interested in telling stories, but I’m also interested in: how do we respond in real time to what’s happening and how do we push back as hard as we can in this moment?
So one of the things that we’ve been really doing is trying as much as we can with our ability to push back against the Christian Nationalism coming out of the White House and saying: actually, you’re the ones who are attacking religion over and over again. And really trying to put them a little bit on the defensive and just stating the narrative. That’s one arena.
And then, working closely with litigators and organizations like Democracy Forward, who are really, filing lawsuits around ICE and other things. So figuring out ways that we can speak into what’s happening and in some ways, I think, slow the kind of fascist march, or the march towards fascism, so that more and more people can look around and say, oh, okay, I’m beginning to see what’s happening.
And I do think that in some ways, buying time now, so that people can understand more and more that this isn’t what we signed up for. There’s going to be a very motivated core constituency that has grown. But I do think that if we can buy time and if we can actually buy time so that we can have a next election, that we will be able to motivate people to come out more and more and more and show a sign of resistance, which feels very important right now, and not to give to the inevitability, the dominance of the kind of Trump and Elon Musk movement.
So that’s how I’ll pick up your pause. Because we do slightly different things, I think it’s really important that we support one another, also, on this moment and recognize that there’s lots of ways to be responding in this moment and let’s all find a way.
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah. One of the things I keep coming back to, and we may have talked about this before, the first lie of fascism is inevitability, right? And the way we, I think as a writer and maybe as an activist, the way we speak back to that lie is you tell the story. And your commitment is to telling the story because it’s true, not because it will necessarily work. I’m going to tell this story as truthfully and accurately as I can because I want to tell the true story, and I understand that that story may not land.
The other day with the Washington Post, and a lot of people were very angry at the Washington Post and they were cursing out anyone who would still work there. And so in speaking for the reporters who I know who are trying to do good work within, or trying to do good work within State Department or whatever else, right, that’s actually not the most effective story. I could have cultivated and shared that anger and, you know, a pox on them all. But that’s the sort of the left version of giving into the inevitability of fascism lie, which is: wait a minute, this story is complicated. And if we insist on those complications at every step without ever losing sight of the simplicity of care versus hate, is really quite powerful.
There’s a great temptation all around now, toward categorization; toward dealing with the flip side of the inevitability of fascism’s lies: maybe I give into fascism because there’s no resisting it or maybe I tune out.
But there’s another risk that I think is not always as visible to those of us affiliated with the left, which is: maybe I interpret that great old labor song, which I love, “Which Side Are You On?” as an excuse to not do the hard work of solidarity, which is what the song is all about. So I can say I’m just gonna bash, I’m gonna bash the folks who I think are wobbly on this issue or not. And what you said about buying time is so essential, because part of buying time is solidarity. Collaboration work. Even the Democrats right now – who are driving me insane, like so many of us – in as much as any of them slows the process at all, I know which side they’re on. I may disagree with them on tactics, but I know which side they’re on.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH: Yeah, I think that’s super important. And part of what I hear you saying is, let’s remember that there’s people involved – and when we think about journalists – and you and I, me less than you, but I’ve been in editorial rooms, people really, actually, are trying to tell good stories. It’s a lot of them – not all of them; and also civil servants. And I think that part of what we view actually as a part of a tactic is to humanize the people who are being impacted by these drastic cuts. Not only on the people who will lose services, but also these people, the hundreds of thousands of people, are just being summarily dismissed.
Curious, for you – I love hearing you talk, not that I’m not enjoying this conversation – but I do love your writing. And I’m married to a writer and I really appreciate words and I appreciate when they are so really extraordinarily used to paint a story, but one that you told recently – and this is a plug for your Substack, I think it’s a really important place, although it will not be your most fun visit of the day for the internet, so it comes with a warning. But There Are No Faces was something that I literally read with my mouth open. And but it was so important because the horror of it – and getting back, in some ways, to this glee of fascism. And so can you talk a little bit about that piece, just as one example of the kind of writing you’re doing right now and as an example of the danger that we are in?
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah, so There Are No Faces is about a video that was put out by the White House. It was called ASMR Illegal Alien Deportion Flight, and then it had a little emoji of a stereo speaker to make sure you listen to it with sound.
And it’s a very different kind of propaganda. And I paid attention to it, first, because I try to keep track of those moments that even for me and fellow writers, activists, who are long on the fascism beat, who have been calling this fascism for a while, who’ve been speaking to that – there are still moments when I still did not quite see that one coming. And your breath just pauses. And that was my experience.
This was put out on Twitter, and it’s a 49 second video, ASMR, I can’t remember what it stands for. Audio Sensory Median Response. It’s this whole genre of video that begins in the sort of early 2000’s where someone speaks in a whispering voice and they tap things and they do gentle sounds. It’s sort of like it’s the evolution of I’m gonna listen to a recording of a stream or rain falling to fall asleep. These are sounds that give you shivers and tingles and so on. They give you pleasure. So in calling it ASMR, they’re saying, these are sounds that will give you pleasure. They’re saying this will feel good.
And you watch the video. It seems to be two men – although if you pay attention to it closely, you realize they’ve actually montaged a number of migrants – who is being chained. And we hear the chains pulled out of a crate, and we hear the links going against each other. And then we hear the click, click of a man’s hands which we see being handcuffed behind his back. And then we see a closeup. And there’s never, as I say, there’s never any faces. It’s just body parts. The body dehumanized. We see the shackled feet of this person walking up the metal steps of the plane on which he’s going to be sent away.
49 seconds. That’s it. No argument. It’s just, they want us to know they’re taking pleasure in pain. It’s a kind of bondage porn. It’s a kind of BDSM. But even then, I think, the wink in that work, the wink, and for those for whom that’s a kind of eroticism, is always that this isn’t real, right? That there’s a safe word and all these kinds of things; we’re gonna perform, we’re gonna play at this power relationship. The wink in this video, the wink that’s coming from the White House is: this is real. The pleasure is not in the play; the pleasure is in the actual pain that we’re inflicting.
And I think it’s really important to read those videos. It’s a kind of coercive storytelling. Trolling is a kind of coercive storytelling. And we want to dismiss trolling, but there’s a difference when trolling comes from a jerk on the internet, and it comes from the State trolling the public square. And it’s coercive because you’re going to play a role in it whether you want to or not. You may say, that’s disgusting. I will not sully myself with that. I look away. You’re the one who sees no evil – or in trolling terms, you take the bait. And I took the bait. I wrote about it, and I tried to read it. I tried to read it as a writer. I tried to read it just, and I did this with my students, as well, I said, okay, let’s read this like we’re workshopping a story. What is the story they’re telling? They’re not trying to persuade people. There’s nothing – if someone’s like, yeah, I think deportation is a good idea. I’m on the fence. This is not going to persuade them, this is going to lose them.
This was an expression. They were showing their contempt for persuasion and their commitment to coercion. And in telling that story, though, I do look: what threads can we pull? There’s a reason there’s no faces in that video. And I think it has to do with the fact of some good reporting at the Washington Post by good reporters who are trapped working for Jeff Bezos, but they followed up a series of other propaganda videos put out the week before Guantanamo Bay and the mass internment camps that are being built there, and Department of Homeland Security, Christie Nome, strutting around in bell-bottom jeans and mirrored shades like this is a glamor shot.
And they made the mistake, in the background, you would see some of the imprisoned men who are all said to be, and I quote, “the worst of the worst,” dirtbags, members of this evil gang – and the Washington Post worked really hard and they were able to identify who six of these men were, five of whom had no criminal records whatsoever; one of whom, his only criminal record was after having been taken, imprisoned, there was some kind of altercation in the prison. They put them in the space. None of them had any gang affiliation at all. Most of them were family men.
And in that piece people can go and look at, There Are No Faces, I decided to end with this photograph that the Washington Post had found of one of these men. And he’s just standing there, and I don’t know where it is, maybe it’s Christmas time or something, there’s lights in the trees. He’s got a nice outfit that he likes, and he’s smiling this gentle smile. We tell the story because it’s true. We tell the story. This man is real. Naming him, seeing his picture, that’s not enough. He’s probably already been deported. He’s already been separated from his family. It’s not enough, but we tell it because it’s true to buy time, to remember the humanness of these people, so that we can keep struggling to actually free them from those chains.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH: I think that’s incredible, and I really urge people to go to – I think that your Substack is Scenes From A Slow Civil War, right? And Jeff Sharlet, and people can find it there. That story is, you’ll easily find it, but it’s important to continue.
I think that’s it’s not exactly the same, but Cecile Richards, her great quote was, “We lose, we lose, we lose – and then we win.” And it’s not exactly about this, it was about fighting for abortion rights. But it is about: we’re not going to win in the near future. We’re not going to feel good about all that we’ve accomplished, but really showing up right now – and I think one of the things that is powerful, which they want to discount, of course – is that people are beginning to show up. And people are beginning to show up in town halls, and people are beginning to show up in spaces, and in some ways it punctures this narrative that everything’s going swimmingly.
And the more we can,force a different kind of narrative about uncertainty and the uncertainty of the popularity of these initiatives, uncertainty around Elon Musk. And I do want to ask you specifically around Elon Musk, because it’s almost – as a writer, if you had to create a villain out of whole cloth, it’s hard to imagine anyone more terrible than Elon Musk, who has emerged from whatever shadows he was living in before I became aware of him, as an abstraction, as the head of Tesla. And then all of a sudden, now look at him. He is really extraordinary in the way he’s – from the work at DOGE, but then, the salute and then the Holocaust jokes afterwards and etc. etc.
So give me your understanding of what is going on with him, Elon Musk, in this moment, and how he fits into this broader conversation. Because it’s very interesting that in some ways he’s eclipsed Donald Trump.
JEFF SHARLET: I wish I could remember who wrote this, because I think it’s important to give credit to someone’s writing online, just about Elon Musk as a supervillain, a comic book supervillain, beside which someone like Dick Cheney is a portrait in subtlety. And remember, Dick Cheney, back in the day, people said, this guy is Darth Vader. We don’t normally, most politicians pretend they’re nice guys. Dick Cheney is, no, I’m not nice. I’m gonna do dark things.
But with Elon Musk, we get cut-rate Lex Luther. And I do mean cut-rate because Lex Luther, Superman’s villain, was a genius inventor. And one thing to remember about Elon Musk is, he’s not actually a genius inventor. He is very, very good at consolidating power and consolidating the work of genius inventors. And he is very good, I think, at recognizing tools that most of us would overlook. And I’ll give one – and the worst – example, I believe he was actually just named, they finally named him, his real name yesterday in The New York Times – although of course, the Department of Justice has warned journalists who identify Elon’s workers that maybe were committing a crime. Fortunately, I didn’t read the article, so I don’t know the man’s name. I only know his villain name, Big Balls. The 19-year-old who goes by the name Big Balls.
And we like to laugh at that, right? We’re like, look at these fools, look at these, these are… You almost want to… Master saboteurs. And it turns out a master saboteur is not someone who is savvy and cunning. A James Bond sneaking in. It’s a dork who calls himself Big Balls, who comes in and goes to the computers and pours soda on them so that they don’t work, and that will break things.
And I think Musk simultaneously want us to hold them in contempt, but also not to let that… I think the temptation right now is to see the cartoonishness and use that as a reassurance for ourselves. Like, what a fool. Like, yeah, but that cartoon is a, a whatever, a category five hurricane cutting a swath through our lives. And we need to contend with it.
I was just talking to a a colleague in journalism, Sandhya Dirks, who’s a journalist at NPR and very interested. And we’ve long talked about the South African roots of Elon Musk – and I think those can be overstated if we get trapped into: what’s the psychology of Elon Musk? We’re probably not going to be able to answer that, and I don’t think it matters. What’s the psychology of the hurricane? Not so important, right? What is the damage that it does? But looking at that as a model for fascism that is markedly different than the mid-century European fascisms, the age of classical fascism – which is, it’s a minority rule fascism.
The Germans did not appeal to minority rule. They appealed to majority rule. More recent contemporary governments that you could argue are fascists in the Philippines or in Indonesia or Brazil, they appealed to – if they didn’t have the majority support, they appealed to a veneer of it. And they came close to it. Apartheid in South Africa is a model of minority rule, and I think it’s something that we should pay very close attention to, with a Musk and Bezos and the billionaire who owns the LA Times and these figures who we’re tempted to read as iterations of capitalism, of which we have a critique, and yet they are something else. Their wealth is so vast. They have almost immunized themselves from both capitalism and democracy.
They don’t have to submit to the market and they don’t have to seek a majority. And I think that’s how Musk, I think that’s the insight that he’s had and that he’s advancing, and why all these sort of, like, “Hey, great news, everybody. Musk’s popularity numbers are down!”… And?
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH: It’s interesting. I wrote this piece that seemed a little random after the inauguration, but when Trump said, “We’re in the golden age of America” and I’d interpret that as the Gilded Age. And I do think there’s parallels, but I actually think the Gilded Age was before a lot of what we view as the accomplishments of the 20th century, which were the ability to fight back against monopolies, the ability to protect working people, all of those things. We’re in that moment. It’s hard to imagine what could possibly happen to Elon Musk given his incredible wealth. But I do want to ask your thoughts on – Elon Musk has said, “I’m not a Christian, but I’m a cultural Christian.” And I think you could say that for Donald Trump. No one would say he is a real Christian, but he, he has a…
JEFF SHARLET: Oh, I would. I would, absolutely. I’d say they’re both real Christians, I’d probably disagree with you there. And I think this is actually part of a question I derailed on before on the question of the underground that has become the overstory of Christian Nationalism.
And I think that’s a big argument in the book The Undertow and something that’s emerging ever more, which is, in the same way that fascism is a different order of the right wing than very bad things that came before – like, I would argue the Bush administration – Christian Nationalism is not the same thing as the Christian right. And part of why we keep missing it is we keep trying to measure its strength via church-going, or, – I always think of them as, like, warlords, the the big chieftains of the Christian right. All of whom have been pushed aside. Paula White – nobody, 20 years ago and said, who’s gonna be the most powerful Christian right figure in America, would ever have picked Paula White, Trump’s faith advisor.
But Christian Nationalism, like most religious nationalism – this is true of Hindu nationalism, it’s true of the Christian nationalism in Russia, it encourages a kind of fundamentalist relationship to the faith, but insists that relationship can be had outside of institutions. It’s fundamentally anti-institutional. And so the reason I’ll say that Trump is a Christian – that’s not a compliment or an insult to me, although I have plenty of insults for him – that’s just description, right? That he calls himself a Christian. Okay. Now our understanding Christianity has to be large enough to include him, in the same way that I can’t write out all the crusaders that I don’t like.
And the fact that he doesn’t go to church, the fact that he’s absolutely unpious, the fact that Musk takes that step – or Jordan Peterson, if you’ve seen that awful interview between Jordan Peterson and Musk, and they’re talking about Christianity, they take that step toward “cultural Christianity” as they’re putting it, is, they’re saying, this is the paradigm under which we’re going to organize and consolidate power. Term one, we had to take a trip over there and talk to Mike Pence and cut a deal. That’s all fallen away, I’m a Christian because I am.
That ASMR video? That’s a Christian video. That’s Christian music, right? That is, now the most powerful Christian on the planet has released this and said, these are sounds of pleasure and in his mind, community, we can all enjoy together the sounds of chains, clinking, binding another right? Casting out the evil. We have to contend with that. And I think those of you who are also Christians and in a very different faith tradition, I think you guys are on the front line, as you have been for so long.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH: I agree with you completely, by the way. I think what I was trying to use were the other things you were talking about, like piety and concern.
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah. And that’s a fight that we’re still going. Because so many secular people are like, what? Haha, he’s not really Christian, therefore this isn’t real.
First of all, no, it’s real. He’s real. The power is there. And secondly, what are you achieving? It’s an authenticity game that we’ve lost ahead of time. That down that path we don’t lose and lose and lose then we win. Down that path, you lose and lose and lose until you forget what the game was.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH: I really appreciate all that you’re doing right now. I don’t come to you for happy-hopey. I don’t think anybody ever has, but I do think that you maybe have a a vision that can see beyond the immediate horizon, and I’m curious if I can ask you about that right now. What do you – not that you can foretell the future, but what can you imagine that – if we work hard and we do what we need to do – what might be a path forward for the United States to to come through it? To go through this, but come out the other side?
JEFF SHARLET: I don’t know if I have particular confidence that the United States will… I’m probably less optimistic. I think there could be elections in ‘28 and they could even be some semblance… I don’t put a lot of faith in that, but I do think that coming through it – and that’s one of the things I was trying to write about in The Undertow – we’re going to have to go through this. My kids, the next generation, everybody’s kids, are going to have to go through this.
We’re past the phase of: what can we do to stop this and avert it? Now we can go through it, but we can have some faith that we will. We can have some faith in the chronology of time. And I think about, you quoted Cecile, you lose you lose and then we win, right? It brought to mind another quote, and from a figure that we think of as so iconic and so distanced from ourselves that we can’t apply to ourselves, as MLK in some ways is channeling Moses, “I may not get there with you.” And I think that part of that recognition of the going through it is, not all of us are going to make it through.
Already, today, we’re observing the year anniversary of a friend’s nephew, very brave young trans man, I found him a real hero, he’s a guy who went to one of these big right wing Mike Flynn rallies, stood in line just so he could shake Mike Flynn’s hand and look him in the eye and say, “You know, you’re shaking the hand of a trans man.” Not because he thought Mike Flynn would say, “Gosh, you are human.” There was defiance in it.
He took his life a year ago today. He’s not going to get there with us. Other of us are not going to get there with us. And you follow me. That is a hopeful statement. When he, when MLK, who is an icon… But look, we’re all in that spot. MLK was not saying, “I may not get there with you” like, I’m the greatest. All of us.
This is a struggle. Some of us won’t get there. And if we recognize the fullness of that statement, the there, right? Not all of us will see it. My friend’s nephew Ash isn’t gonna see it. You and I might not. Those men being chained in that video, they’ve already, in many ways, been lost.
The case that the State of Washington, God bless them, bringing, and the power and the testimony, if you’ve read that, that one of their cases against these anti-trans laws was, a beautiful young person who, upon hearing of the executive order, took their own life. That person’s not going to get there with us, but we are going get there. That’s what’s in that statement. I may not get there with you. That’s the hope. And that is a darker hope. I know that, but we’re gonna tell the story ’cause it’s true. That’s a true story. We are gonna get there. We are gonna get there. And let’s bring as many of us along as we can.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH: Jeff Sharlet, thank you so much for speaking with us today on The State of Belief, and for all that you are doing in this moment.
JEFF SHARLET: Thank you Paul. Thank you for what you’re doing.
