Episode 1466 - Jeff Sharlet
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening how's it going where you at
Marc:Where are you at?
Marc:Where are you at in your heart and mind?
Marc:Or how about just where are you at physically?
Marc:Where's your mind at?
Marc:You know, I gotta be honest with you.
Marc:Welcome.
Marc:My name's Mark.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:I've been doing it a while.
Marc:We're hanging in there.
Marc:We're doing all right.
Marc:Had a lovely chat with Maria Bamford on Monday.
Marc:Always exciting and fragile, vulnerable, engaged, funny.
Marc:Brings the best out in me, I think.
Marc:So today on the show, I talked to Jeff Charlotte.
Marc:Now...
Marc:I've talked to this guy a few times back in the day.
Marc:We used to talk to him a lot on Air America when we were covering the influence of the religious right.
Marc:He's been covering religion for most of his career.
Marc:He was the co-creator of two religion publications, Killing the Buddha and the Revealer.
Marc:He's also written for Rolling Stone, Harper's, Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, and much more.
Marc:He's he's put out books about evangelical fundamentalism in the U.S.
Marc:government.
Marc:That was called The Family and another book called C Street.
Marc:And they are, I would say, very important records to help understand what's happening in America now.
Marc:The new book.
Marc:And don't run away from this episode.
Marc:Just stay put.
Marc:OK, because I ask him towards the end, look, this information, it is what it is.
Marc:And it's pretty well researched through experiential encounters.
Marc:This is almost like a travelogue.
Marc:It's almost like a memoir through this country that he just kind of follows his instincts to visit rallies and mega churches and smaller churches.
Marc:What do you call meta churches?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:But this book is called The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
Marc:Don't run away.
Marc:Because not unlike the book I'm reading now, which is the new Naomi Klein book, which I have to, I have to, man, yeah, did a lot of underlining.
Marc:Got to have a full brain of that for when I talk to her.
Marc:But this is this lays out where we're at on a personal level, on a political level, on a propaganda level, on a religious level in terms of how religion is being used.
Marc:And, you know, all in in the shadow of climate disaster.
Marc:And, you know, it's a lot to take.
Marc:But, you know, at the end of this, because I'm not I'm not unlike anybody, even those of us who are catastrophic thinkers, who are, you know, already a little paranoid, a little frightened, a little expecting the worst, that there is part of that mindset that looks for a little hope, at least to have a little bit of relief.
Marc:You know?
Marc:And I asked him, and you'll get it at the end, but I said to Jeff, I said, well, is there, do you have any hope?
Marc:And I'm not going to tell you what his answer was, but he did make a point to say, look, for me, with or without hope, it's important to know what the fuck is up so you can at least have that.
Marc:Because denial is what drives us.
Marc:We're insulated in our lives.
Marc:We take care of what's in front of us and feel that we are doing all we can to maintain some sort of I don't know if it's peace of mind.
Marc:I don't know if it's happiness, but some sort of grounded sense of, you know, to sort of exist in the world.
Marc:But a lot of that doesn't that's not big picture stuff.
Marc:So this is sort of a big picture thing, but you will get the information and you can handle it.
Marc:It probably just confirms, you know, your worst fucking nightmares.
Marc:But you kind of know, folks, if you're listening to me, you kind of know.
Marc:But I would ride this out because you got to take it.
Marc:You got to take it.
Marc:It's important to know.
Marc:And back when I was on Air America, I used to do, I used to have, I create languages.
Marc:Some of the, if you didn't realize this, the opening of this show, What the Fuckers, What the Fuck Buddies, is sort of a riff on something I used to do at Air America.
Marc:I had a long list of different people I would shout out to, you know, at the top of a show, kind of list a variety of people and nicknames and whatever.
Yeah.
Marc:But also during that show, I had created some sort of, you know, glossary for myself.
Marc:And I used to do a lot of talking about the Christo fascist zombie brigade.
Marc:Now, this was in 2004.
Marc:And this was something that Jeff Charlotte also informed and that I knew was happening.
Marc:But they were, you know, they were still somewhat marginalized.
Marc:They existed.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it was sort of a not a closeted affair, but a behind the scenes kind of affair.
Marc:And it didn't have the fuel other than religious zealotry that it has now.
Marc:And I also used a term which was independent speculative investigators.
Marc:That was my sort of nickname for conspiracy theorist.
Marc:And then years later, during this show, after Twitter became powerful, I came up with the the the nickname Army of Unfuckable Hate Nerds.
Marc:Now, independent speculative investigators, which was conspiracy theories at the time in 2004, 2005.
Marc:Yeah, again, a somewhat fringe sort of movement, but always there, always fueled by by right wing thinkers, Heritage Foundation, certain political action committees.
Marc:who would sort of feed the fire.
Marc:Same with the Christo-fascist zombie brigade.
Marc:There were always operatives outside of religion within the political sphere working on the behest of business to kind of push it along.
Marc:And then once the army of unfuckable hate nerds were turned out like little bitches by Steve Bannon and Milo Yanapapapapalitakalips,
Marc:Yenapocalypse.
Marc:What's that guy's name?
Marc:And were used to sort of take their gaming mentality into the real world through social media platforms and kind of fuck with reality.
Marc:This is where you begin to have this momentum.
Marc:It's the Christofascist zombie brigade, the independent speculative investigators, the army of unfuckable hate nerds coalescing to create and maintain division at the behest of the American oligarchy in the name of globally malignant late stage capitalism.
Marc:And it's all on purpose.
Marc:Appropriation of language, appropriation of ideas, neutering the fragmented left, which is not that hard to do.
Marc:And, you know, this conversation, you know, touches on this stuff.
Marc:And also, you know, hopefully we'll see how it goes with Naomi.
Marc:You know, I like having my head full of this stuff.
Marc:This is something, this kind of stuff that isn't necessarily politics per se, but just an assessment of what we're up against today.
Marc:I guess politically, but also just in terms of climate, in terms of shameless fascism, masking the
Marc:appetite of big business.
Marc:And somehow we're all left to just sort of adapt or die or see what happens.
Marc:I don't want to bum anybody out.
Marc:I'm at Largo in Los Angeles next Wednesday, September 6th.
Marc:Then I'll be doing five shows at Helium in St.
Marc:Louis, September 14th through 16th.
Marc:I'll be at the Vegas, Las Vegas Wise Guys on September 22nd and 23rd for four shows.
Marc:And then Bellingham, Washington.
Marc:I'll be at the Mount Baker Theater for one show on Saturday, October 14th as part of the Bellingham Exit Festival.
Marc:You can go to WTFPod.com slash tour for tickets.
Marc:I can lighten it up.
Marc:I can get you back in the loop of, you know, the Ukrainian refrigerator repair drama.
Marc:You know, after what I talked about on Monday, where there was screaming and yelling and a seemingly angry defeat in terms of my refrigerator, much of it my fault, it turns out, after months and months of going back and forth with Alex, who, as I said before, has been doing the refrigerator repair biz for 18 years and said, I'll quote again, I hate this fucking refrigerator.
Yeah.
Marc:I hate his fucking refrigerator.
Marc:After he broke the hinge, putting the door of the freezer back on, sending small ball bearings all over my house, which the cats are enjoying finding.
Marc:So I texted him because I said, well, let's try and fix it.
Marc:Because he said, get a new fucking refrigerator.
Marc:And I'm like, are you sure?
Marc:He's like, I can order the hinge.
Marc:You decide.
Marc:It's very aggressive.
Marc:So I told him to order the hinge.
Marc:And then I texted him.
Marc:I said, let me know when you can put the hinge on so I can use my freezer.
Marc:If you're tired of dealing with the fridge, I understand.
Marc:I screwed up with the valve.
Marc:It's there now, but it's okay if you don't want to fix it anymore.
Marc:I just want the door to the freezer to work.
Marc:I've given up.
Marc:But all throughout this thing, this guy, Alex, was determined to fix this.
Marc:And he said, don't worry, I will finish.
Marc:Hinges come tomorrow.
Marc:Text me tomorrow for appointment.
Marc:So this is ongoing.
Marc:And I feel like the Ukrainian rage that was shared between father and son last week is settled.
Marc:And maybe he's put it into perspective, but I really think he can't, like there's something in this guy that's not going to let him walk away from this fridge.
Marc:And I was ready to buy a new one.
Marc:I'm like, well, fuck it.
Marc:It's just garbage.
Marc:But like, you know, if he's on board, man, I'm on board too.
Marc:We're in this together.
Marc:And I think we can fix this refrigerator just in time for it to crap out entirely.
Marc:and become unfixable.
Marc:That's the way I roll.
Marc:It used to be the way I rolled with cars.
Marc:Just drive that thing, keep maintaining it, dump money into it, and maybe fix it one last time for a lot of money, only for it to crap out a month later.
Marc:That's how I roll.
Marc:I don't know who you are.
Marc:All right, you guys.
Marc:So, you know, relax.
Marc:Don't freak out.
Marc:You know, take some breaths and listen to me talk to Jeff Charlotte.
Marc:The book, again, is called The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
Marc:It's available wherever you get books.
Marc:And, you know, this is a sobering chat.
Marc:For me, living in California, I'll take any rain.
Marc:I don't care if there are floods.
Marc:I'll take the water.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, for me, living in Vermont.
Guest:It's different.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We go years without water here.
Marc:We go years just watching plants die.
Marc:I have a running stream through my basement, so it's a different thing.
Marc:Unintentional.
Guest:Unintentional, but it's been there a long, long time.
Guest:It just goes?
Guest:Yeah, there's what's called a French drain to circumvent it.
Guest:What part of Vermont?
Guest:It's a town called Norwich.
Guest:It's about halfway up the Connecticut River.
Marc:Yeah, I kind of remember Norwich.
Marc:I paid my dues in that region.
Marc:I like Vermont.
Marc:How long have you lived there?
Ah.
Guest:I went up there to teach in 2010.
Guest:Great, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's remote.
Guest:It's remote.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's lovely, and it's beautiful, and it's a blue bubble, much like L.A.
Guest:in a sense, but there's those pros and cons to those bubbles.
Marc:No, this is a bubble of chaos here.
Marc:This is an ever-expanding bubble that it's hard to make sense of, L.A., but...
Guest:Yeah, but a delusional bubble.
Guest:That's the thing, where lots of liberal and lefty folks sort of don't necessarily see what's going on or imagine things about the rest of the country.
Guest:And in Norwich, Vermont, it's funny because it's a real, you know, it's a super liberal little town.
Guest:It's next to a college town.
Guest:And everyone sort of imagines it, but you go, I go five miles in one direction and there is a Confederate flag.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:There's, you know, Trump as Rambo with a big machine gun flag.
Guest:There's the all black flag, which is a no surrender flag.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, all kinds of don't tread on me's.
Guest:And, you know, people don't understand that Vermont is, I've never been able to get reliable data on this.
Guest:I think it is the second or third best armed state in the nation.
Marc:And, you know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, I think that's the same with a lot of blue cities.
Marc:You know, I've been working on a bit that I do occasionally about how something about these liberals who live in these blue cities.
Marc:But it's a blue city.
Marc:Well, it's just the it's a storefront of a fascist state.
Marc:That's good.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah, that's it.
Guest:And I got to tell you, like traveling around with this book.
Guest:Because I'm there in Vermont, right?
Guest:But like the most, I don't want to say conservative, but the most naive audiences for events I've encountered were in New York City.
Guest:And those are the folks, it was interesting, like Pan International, which is like, you know, the big sort of writing...
Guest:It's the big sort of like protect writers kind of organization.
Guest:And, you know, I'm at Penn and there's people like, well, what do you think about Joe Manchin?
Guest:Can he like bring us together?
Guest:And that's a question I wouldn't hear in any other part of the country because they know that's delusional.
Guest:But New York is so protected.
Guest:And I remember there was one guy, a kind of...
Guest:Pretty prominent leftist who I'm not going to name.
Guest:He says, well, I mean, come on, let's be serious.
Guest:Nobody has guns pointed at them.
Guest:I'm like, first of all, you didn't read the book because that happens.
Marc:And also every trans kid in America has a gun pointed at them.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:And it's spreading.
Marc:The spectrum of people who are in the sites...
Marc:It's spreading.
Marc:And I think, you know, in reading the book, which I did, and having, I believe I read The Family, but it would have been a while ago.
Marc:But this is a beat that you've been on for years, which is, you know, I was thinking about, because I was talking or even talking, you know, on Air America 2004, you know, daily almost using the word Christofascist.
Marc:And and I think I don't I know Hedges was, you know, openly using the word crystal fascist.
Marc:I feel like you were a little reluctant to use the word fascist for a while back in the day.
Marc:Not till 2017.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I it's like I write about there's like a little footnote in the book.
Guest:I was wrong.
Guest:In that book, The Family, I had a chapter called The F Word, and The F Word, of course, is fascism.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm talking about this right-wing, the group that does a national prayer breakfast.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And after World War II, they actually recruited Nazi war criminals, and still I said, look, there's more than one kind of bad under the sun.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're not...
Guest:And then Trump in 2015 comes down that golden escalator.
Guest:And you see him.
Guest:He's bringing a fascist aesthetic.
Guest:And the question is, will it be received?
Marc:Right away.
Marc:Right away.
Marc:All the photography.
Marc:You know, that's the other thing.
Marc:To speak to like New Yorkers and that question is that there is a generation of people that still get their news pretty old school.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, you know, they're just keeping up with politics, you know, from MSNBC or from the New York Times.
Marc:And, you know, the Internet, for the most part, eludes them until their brains turn to mush because someone showed them a thing.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So there's, I guess, an ignorance to that, but it's generational.
Guest:Well, I don't know if it's generational.
Guest:I was just actually –
Guest:I would say, actually, in general, older folks are more comfortable.
Guest:My experience of just sort of traveling.
Guest:You write the book, and I spend a lot of time with fascists, and then I go and I try and sell the book to people who are concerned about fascists.
Guest:And older folks are more comfortable with the term.
Guest:And then I'm thinking of a guy younger than me.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:New York Times reporter, senior politics reporter.
Guest:We're supposed to be doing this book event together.
Guest:But it turns out he doesn't like the book, which is fine.
Guest:Although, like, why is he doing the event?
Guest:But he just comes right in.
Guest:He's like, you know, I don't think you need to use words like fascism and racism.
Guest:And he claims, incorrectly, that the New York Times doesn't, because they do, but he doesn't.
Guest:And so I try and push him.
Guest:Well, okay, that's fine.
Guest:I mean, I use it historically.
Guest:We can talk about, like, what, it's fascism, you know,
Guest:the thing on fascism, people's like, you just call anything you don't like fascism.
Guest:And I'm like, no, I call a cult of personality with an open and explicit reverence for violence as a redeeming force and a purifying nationalist myth.
Guest:That's
Guest:And it's not 1936 fascism.
Guest:And this isn't the fascist state.
Guest:This is a fascist movement in 2023.
Guest:It changes.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it's shameless.
Marc:I mean, there comes to a point where, you know, I was also talking about this in terms of Jews, you know, who, as an ex-girlfriend of mine, put it right when Trump got elected.
Marc:I started freaking out and I needed to get my passport renewed because I was a Jew.
Marc:And she said, I don't think you're the first on the list.
Marc:And I'm like, that's probably true.
Marc:But we're probably fourth.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, right.
Guest:This is also sort of like one, I think, and I'm saying this as like a somewhere liberal lefty, I don't know.
Guest:But like one of the delusions of liberalism, and especially of white liberals, is this like, I feel so sorry for whoever they imagine on the front line.
Guest:And I'm like...
Guest:you know you're standing behind them, right?
Guest:And it's true.
Guest:They're going to take the first bullet.
Guest:But then we're seeing that, especially with, like, queer conservatives who are stunned that the anti-trans movement turns out to be an altogether anti-queer movement, right?
Marc:Well, I think that the evolution, and I mean, you hint about it in the book, but it's not the central theme, that this sort of evolution of what
Marc:They're othering.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then when does that become homicidal is when you get the word woke.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So anybody woke, you know, this is like a spectrum.
Marc:It's an umbrella term for people who either are of the enemies that they see or or people who are aligned with them.
Marc:So there's definitely this line drawn that is a firing line after a certain point.
Marc:And one thing that I felt in your book that I don't always feel is that, you know, the manpower and the will is close to being there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But this is also the great consolation.
Guest:I go to Congresswoman Lauren Boeber, who rose to fame, probably your listeners know, with this grill called Shooters, which is like Hooters, except the waitresses that wear cutoffs.
Guest:Yeah, you do a whole essay in there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I go there, and I'm having lunch.
Guest:I'm having a guac 9 burger with this militia guy.
Guest:And he's just sort of a gentle nerd at the counter, but he's armed to the teeth.
Guest:And everybody's got guns in there.
Guest:Everybody's got guns.
Guest:And he's talking about the Civil War he says is coming.
Guest:Everyone says the Civil War is coming.
Guest:And they're going to get out in the streets.
Guest:And Joe Biden is eating children.
Guest:And I'm like, wait a minute.
Guest:So when are you getting in the streets?
Guest:Because if there's already cannibalism happening, what is, you know, and he says, when they come for our guns.
Guest:And that's actually kind of comforting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because the U.S.
Guest:government isn't coming for their guns.
Guest:And they never have.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But again, there's the bubble where people sort of say... Or the way that people... I can't remember all those variations on Al-Qaeda that are like...
Guest:They're just imagining that all militia men are fat, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And first of all, I don't know what that has to do with being shot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And second, they're not.
Guest:A lot of them are not.
Guest:But the reality is, it's not like Civil War, like Game of Thrones, or like what you saw in a movie.
Guest:It's these sort of mini secessions everywhere.
Guest:It's Shasta County here in California.
Marc:I think that...
Marc:you know, there are these, there is a way to frame most of the domestic terrorism as, especially the way it's framed by the right as, as the battles in, in what is a civil war.
Guest:I mean, that's what I call a slow civil war.
Guest:And then like, like there's things, what's really interesting to me, whenever you hear a news story about, you know, somebody whose mind has been infected by QAnon and killed their whole family.
Guest:And there's been a few of those at this point.
Guest:Those are horrible.
Guest:Those are casualties of the slow civil war and,
Guest:There's a chapter in the book called TikTok, which is a QAnon thing.
Guest:And it's this woman who made no national news, barely made local news.
Guest:I just sort of stumbled awkwardly upon her.
Guest:Evelyn in Austin, Texas, lefty, kind of hipster.
Guest:Went down the rabbit hole and becomes convinced that for Donald Trump, she has to go and attack the cabal and starts ramming her little red Fiero into other people's cars.
Guest:Terrifies everybody.
Guest:No one gets physically badly hurt, but a lot of people are terrified.
Guest:Her life is now...
Guest:and people say, why do you care about her?
Guest:Because she was someone who was deluded and that didn't make any news.
Guest:Even like going through the police report, you couldn't, the local news, you couldn't tell this was a cute thing.
Guest:You just think, oh, it's just some crazy person.
Guest:And then you're like, oh no, this is another one falling.
Guest:And there's little Evelyn's everywhere.
Marc:I mean, I have neighbors who are Evelyn.
Marc:But I do think it's interesting
Marc:Just through the vax portal, how many of a certain type of ungrounded lefties got sucked through it?
Guest:The left to right slide, I think of it.
Guest:Let me bring a world of pain upon myself and call it the Taibbi slide.
Guest:You know, Matt Taibbi, a journalist who I really, really have respected for a long time and, you know, has, like a lot of folks, has sort of built on that credibility.
Guest:Robert Kennedy Jr.,
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:You know, I think I was... You're an Air America veteran.
Guest:I think he had an Air America show, and I think I was on his show once upon a time.
Guest:And now I see him as dangerous in so many ways, not least of which this sort of, like, weird flirtation with anti-Semitism.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which, again, like, oh, the Jews are fourth, but fourth is getting closer to the front.
Marc:For sure is.
Marc:But, yeah, I mean, and also the brain is a lot softer.
Marc:And, you know, look...
Marc:Softer in terms of its ability to protect itself from bullshit than I might have thought.
Marc:You know, and we all kind of move through our own bits of bullshit that keep us alive and well.
Marc:But, you know, lack of critical thinking.
Marc:And there's something you did that I thought was great in the book.
Marc:It's a very personal book for you, I think.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Because, you know, I saw a lot of you in there.
Marc:There's a lot of beautiful, almost poetic writing in there.
Marc:There are moments of you reacting to, you know, America even as it is now in a sort of way that's a little sentimental and sad and hopeful in a sort of way.
Marc:Because you've been on this beat for so long, you know, I think The Family was a huge book about...
Marc:That group that was, it was mostly, what, a Bush II era thing?
Guest:Well, they're still around, Mike Pence, but, you know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Look, this is my, I don't do political predictions, but my one claim to pressions is I did this book called The Family about this, they're the oldest and once upon a time, arguably most influential kind of Christian nationalist organization.
Guest:They go back to 1935 and they were founded with this idea that
Guest:The New Deal was satanic socialism, just like the rhetoric we hear today.
Guest:And God gives them this message that Christianity has been getting it wrong by focusing on the down and out.
Guest:Instead, we should focus on those whom they called the up and out, the elites.
Guest:And if you can convert them, you get this kind of trickle-down religion.
Guest:So I did this book, and it tanked, absolutely tanked, so badly that Wall Street Journal's
Guest:They're like, oh, they want a card.
Guest:I'm like, great.
Guest:And I'm like, no, it's a publishing industry guy, and he wants to do a story on what happens when everything goes wrong with a book.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And, oh, that was it.
Guest:And I was sort of declared kind of a conspiracy theorist.
Guest:This couldn't be real.
Guest:I'm like, but here are the documents.
Guest:It's the archive.
Guest:You can just see it.
Guest:And then a number of congressmen and politicians get caught having affairs.
Guest:And this is kind of the level of understanding that the political press in America has.
Guest:It's really...
Guest:It's really averse to kind of systemic critiques.
Guest:But a naughty man with his pants down.
Guest:Now we're talking.
Guest:And so I did this other book called C Street.
Guest:There's sort of a follow up to that.
Guest:And the one thing is at the end of the book, I'd written about one guy, a guy named Mark Sanford, who was once a presidential contender.
Marc:Well, yeah, that guy, did he have a South American experience?
Guest:Yeah, he disappeared, and people said he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail.
Guest:Right, right, yeah.
Guest:He was sort of an Ayn Randian mystic, Atlas-hugged, you know, the Bible.
Guest:Sure, good-looking guy.
Guest:Southern state.
Guest:What state was it?
Guest:South Carolina.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:So I say, all right, Sanford's out, but maybe in 2016 it'll be a little-known Indiana congressman backbencher named Mike Pence who makes it to the White House.
Guest:Well, I got it wrong, obviously, but he was there.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I don't think that he's ascended, and I think actually that –
Guest:I actually thought that that kind of Christian nationalism would be... That was part of my resistance to using the word fascist.
Guest:Because I thought America wouldn't switch out.
Guest:Jesus would get in the way.
Guest:He couldn't have a human cult of personality.
Guest:And so that's what I mean when Trump sort of arrives.
Guest:He's like, I present myself as a divine figure.
Guest:Will you accept that?
Marc:But that was an incredible turn that the evangelical community did in saying that sometimes God chooses these flawed...
Marc:messengers or these flawed leaders.
Marc:I mean, that was the rationalization.
Marc:God's chaos candidate was a bestseller about Trump.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:It's like, you know, who are we to question God?
Marc:You know, he's obviously, this is his guy.
Guest:Not only who are we to question him, but look at the proof.
Guest:you can tell this guy is divine.
Guest:Yeah, because he thinks so.
Guest:Thrice married.
Guest:Well, there is part of that.
Guest:The ego.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But also, he's so, I hate the word flawed.
Guest:He's not flawed, he's a schmuck.
Guest:But he's so broken in so many ways, right?
Guest:If he is in power, that's almost proof.
Guest:That's a logical proof.
Guest:If such a ridiculous figure can get into power, that's obviously got to be God's hand.
Guest:And that's, you know, one of the things I think people don't understand, that's evangelicals, right?
Guest:But, you know, most of the people I encounter in this book, Ashley Babb is a big part of it, most of them aren't churchgoers.
Guest:Christian nationalists aren't churchgoers.
Marc:They're angry people that feel pushed to the side for one reason or another, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that's I feel like.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But I feel like I think my view and you may differ is that I think it's too tempting.
Guest:I'm wary of that narrative because it's seductive to blue bubble liberals and sending like it's part of the myth that like, oh, you know what?
Guest:You know who's going to save us?
Guest:Young voters.
Guest:So, like, this idea that, you know what, these folks are going to age out, or America's going to diversify out.
Guest:So, like, one of the American contributions to fashion, I go to this... I'm going to these rallies, and I'm, like, looking around, and I'm like, oh, this rally is half people of color.
Guest:This one rally in Sacramento, most of the speakers were people of color.
Guest:And it's...
Guest:I think one of the things that there's a historian named Anthea Butler and wrote this great, like slim book.
Guest:If you like, I want to understand this Christian nationalism stuff.
Guest:I don't want to read too much.
Guest:This is your perfect book.
Guest:It's called white evangelical racism.
Guest:And she was before this, a historian of the black church.
Guest:And so she's paying attention to conservatism there as well.
Guest:And she calls it the promise of whiteness, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:This idea that, that instead of, this is sort of the American solution to the,
Guest:they can't take the German route, right?
Guest:It's already too diverse.
Guest:We can't purify it, right?
Guest:So we have to say anybody can be... In the whiteness?
Guest:Yeah, in the whiteness.
Marc:Yeah, so you're saying finally the sort of mythological fictions of American culture and actual politics and religion and now a certain amount of strange spiritual paranoia has come together
Marc:into this racist movement.
Marc:I mean, this book really is about the fascism that's happening as being fundamentally about whiteness.
Marc:I mean, throughout the book.
Marc:But whiteness that can draw in more than white people.
Marc:Sure, right.
Marc:Well, I mean, I imagine the Aryan idea that Hitler had, at least at the beginning when he needed boots on the ground, had a little wiggle room, not for Jews or...
Marc:Oh, I mean, sure.
Guest:All these nationalisms are, you know, there's no such thing as an Italian, right?
Guest:And you go back far enough, people would have found that absurd.
Guest:What do I have to do with someone from there or a Bavarian?
Guest:Are you kidding?
Guest:I'm nothing like those other people.
Guest:And so it's always this creation of this myth.
Guest:And, you know, to go back to the beginning, we were saying like Jews in fourth place.
Guest:One of the things that was fascinating to me is how quickly...
Guest:All you need is an other and that can mutate rapidly.
Guest:So Trump comes in and it's Muslims.
Guest:It's not so central now, right?
Guest:No, Mexicans next.
Guest:Mexicans next.
Marc:Journalists really actually play this really good role.
Marc:That was interesting in the book that the way you characterized it in that one chapter where the sort of the pen where the journalist was.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Or are, you know, and you have to you realize and they know that they are going to be the brunt of whatever Trump is going to dish out.
Guest:It's they show up to play the part in the passion play.
Guest:And we're doing it again.
Guest:It's kind of there's I think the coverage this time is a little better, but it's astonishing to me.
Guest:how many journalists are just sort of stepping up, speculating, you know, playing the same kind of horse race stuff.
Guest:Like this New York Times guy refuses to use the word fascist and scolds others and refuses not only to use it, but to learn...
Guest:the history of it, and I think it has to do with, um... Like you said, it's a personal book.
Guest:To me, it's, you know, the thing that's not present there.
Guest:There was once a chapter about COVID, the pandemic.
Guest:In this book.
Guest:Yeah, and then I decided to take it out for all sorts of reasons, but I wanted it to be.
Guest:That's kind of the undertow in the current, and that's this massive grief that is unacknowledged.
Guest:Oh, yeah, totally.
Guest:It kind of curdles into rage.
Guest:There is all sorts of loss.
Guest:for these people.
Guest:They're not wrong that we are living in an age of loss.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But what I have noticed is that it's a lack of willingness to admit a cross-cultural PTSD that
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That that, you know, has all the implications of any other sort.
Marc:We had a collective trauma and how anybody wants to deal with that, whether it's like, you know, anti-vaxxers or vaxxers.
Marc:The idea that we lost three years of productivity and millions of people.
Marc:I mean, it has an impact all across and how, you know, any one person who comes from an anti-vax family and they lost a couple of people to COVID, how they justify that, whether it's God's will or whatever.
Marc:As a human being, you're still dealing with the grief that
Marc:and the pain of loss.
Marc:And the loss also, like, will we step up to the moment?
Marc:No, we won't.
Marc:You know, what I always felt in my own assessment of things and what you sort of deal with in this book, and I've talked about it on several comedy specials, is that it's very difficult
Marc:To sort of think that any sense will come to people that, you know, believe that what's happening in the worst of ways, whether it's environmental or a disease or that the world ending is a deliverance.
Marc:So, you know, these people in the family, too, that, you know, they'll build policy around that fear.
Marc:But there's plenty of people in this book, and it's a thread through it, I think, that, you know, these are the end times.
Marc:And we've been waiting for them on some level.
Marc:So there's that weird mixture of like, we want this fascism, but, you know, God's going to do us all in anyways.
Marc:Well, yeah, there is.
Guest:I mean, like the Great Awakening is this thing.
Guest:There's a couple of Great Awakenings in American life.
Guest:And now people say this is another one.
Guest:The first one is Jonathan Edwards, this guy in Northampton who, you know,
Guest:is very important, actually, to the American Revolution, which had a lot of kind of... It wasn't called evangelical then, but evangelical sort of overlap, this idea of, wait a minute, I need radical protestant.
Guest:I need no mediation, no priests, no kings.
Guest:I'm going to run things.
Guest:And that's what this really...
Guest:appealing narrative, oh, freedom, the spirit of 1776, which for so many of these folks has sort of replaced the Holy Ghost.
Guest:It's the father, the son, and the spirit of 1776.
Guest:Except that, of course, it blinds us to the ways like, well, you actually are...
Guest:you know, I drove, the obvious thing, the response to libertarians, I drove here on roads and, you know, we've got this nice electric grid that we don't know how to do, but someone does.
Guest:And the way that we're very, very interdependent.
Guest:And I think, so there's that end times
Guest:But there's also this utopian ideal.
Guest:This one preacher, David Strait, in Yuba City, California, says, like, in the beginning, which is 1776, not biblical times, men lived like kings, free on the land, getting their own food.
Guest:You're dependent on no one.
Guest:This is a utopian fantasy, right?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I think, which is sort of another sort of, like, I feel like I'm just bashing the bubble, but, like, people...
Guest:These are utopians.
Guest:There's so much language I think the left thinks that we own, and it's politically neutral.
Guest:It's a movement.
Guest:It's a social movement.
Guest:Like, I don't like it.
Guest:It's a bad one.
Guest:But it is a movement.
Guest:They are utopians.
Guest:Like, how can they be utopians?
Guest:They believe in this hateful world.
Guest:They believe that this world of loving community, they're experiencing this as love.
Guest:And then, of course, there's the denialists.
Guest:There's the ones who are, like, looking forward to this.
Guest:But I think about coal rollers, you know, coal rollers, those trucks where you rig up your pipe so it like spews extra black carbon.
Guest:And when I see coal rollers, I think of that kind of grief and denial, like they're experiencing climate change.
Guest:Everyone's experiencing it.
Guest:They're saying it's not real, right?
Guest:There used to be this thing, I think in the 1920s, it was called the Yiddish anarchist ball.
Guest:You know, all these American Jews are all anarchists and communists and so on.
Guest:The anarchists,
Guest:of course, are atheists and so on.
Guest:And on Yom Kippur, they would roast a pig.
Guest:And they'd feast.
Guest:This is the day you're supposed to fast for the non-Jews out there.
Guest:And, you know, this is not atheism.
Guest:This is, see how much I don't believe in you?
Guest:The coal roller is like, if you really don't believe in climate change, you're not coal rolling.
Guest:This is like, see how much I don't accept the fires around me, the floods around me.
Guest:See how much I don't accept that I am losing things.
Guest:And I'm good.
Marc:And what do you see that as?
Marc:A will to power?
Guest:I think there's people who recognize that sentiment in people, that brokenheartedness in people as very malleable clay.
Marc:Okay, so it's a nihilistic fuck you to sort of empower the hopeless.
Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it's also, it's grief, you know, a way to understand it is like if you've ever lost someone, right?
Guest:And, you know, many people drink too much after they lose someone they love.
Guest:Many people fuck the wrong person after they lose somebody they love, right?
Guest:I do think that's a little bit of...
Guest:how the pandemic accelerated what was a fascist movement and has made it more powerful now is there's a lot of people who are expressing their grief in all the wrong ways.
Guest:And I don't want to let them off the hook.
Guest:Like, this is not...
Guest:Well, yeah, because like, you know, because they are they are.
Guest:I mean, you know, absolutely.
Marc:They have pain, but they're passing it on.
Marc:And right.
Marc:But yeah, they're they're doubling down on their anger.
Marc:You know, when you apply sort of contemporary psychological models of trauma to what you're seeing is the problem.
Marc:Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that, you know, it will be received as such and that there's any way for these people to process it properly.
Marc:Right.
Guest:No, I think this is the other question.
Guest:You always get a book of... Well, how do we speak reason to these people?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, well, first of all, I'm Jewish.
Guest:I'm not an evangelical.
Guest:I don't evangelize.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I do believe in organizing.
Guest:We negotiate.
Guest:We're diplomatic.
Guest:Well, and I believe in organizing.
Guest:But...
Guest:I think there's also this sense that these beliefs aren't sincerely held.
Guest:And the way I kind of frame this now is... Their beliefs.
Guest:Yeah, their beliefs.
Guest:And, you know, writing about the right, that's always kind of what's always fascinated me is, I mean, partly I'm politically motivated, but also to me it's just like, wow, what is it...
Guest:like to live in, you know, it's like going to evil Narnia.
Guest:What is it like to live in a world where this makes sense?
Marc:Well, yeah, it's also like Sidney Pollack said, Michael Clayton, people were fucking incomprehensible.
Marc:So, you know, so you just thinking of rewatching that movie.
Guest:I haven't seen it since it was in the theater.
Marc:Well, I like the idea that you don't feel like there's a deep commitment, that it is a reaction.
Marc:And that doesn't imply that you can fix it, but it implies... No, no, no, no.
Guest:That becomes deep.
Guest:Just because it's not... So, the little anecdote in the beginning...
Guest:I talked to you years ago about this book, Killing the Buddha, where we're traveling around and we were talking.
Guest:A person had gone in and shot up a church in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
Guest:And my writing partner and I got there the day after.
Guest:We're trying to understand this.
Guest:Thank God the gun was filled with blanks, but think again of the terror that it instilled.
Guest:And so we go to see this sheriff, the local sheriff, and he did not like us at all.
Guest:So we're sitting there, and we're just like young writers, and we don't know anything.
Guest:And he's just sneering at us, and he opens his drawer, and he pulls out and points a gun at us.
Guest:And, you know, we just about piss our pants.
Guest:And it's an absolutely realistic moment.
Guest:Now, that's just a toy.
Guest:But if you had pointed at me, I would have shot you.
Guest:And that's just to show you that things that aren't real can still hurt you.
Guest:So it's a reaction, right?
Guest:But it becomes real.
Guest:The things that are... QAnon isn't real, but it can still hurt you.
Guest:The delusions of Trump...
Guest:aren't real but it doesn't matter to the person on the other end of the gun and they believe it so sincerely so i was going to say like the example my kid from whom this book is in my elder child and my two kids but my elder child who's been trans kid struggling with a lot of mental illness and so on uh very aware of the news terrified of the news it's sort of like how do i find
Guest:not cheap grace, but hope for them.
Guest:Their school in a very liberal area is, we don't know the status of the legal status.
Guest:A group of families is trying to, you know, change what they're doing.
Guest:They want a list of all the kids who come wearing, you know,
Guest:Clothes that are supposedly of the other gender.
Guest:Like, how do you determine that?
Guest:You know, pronouns.
Guest:They want to attack all this stuff.
Guest:So I think, look, my kid is in real distress.
Guest:These are neighbors of small town.
Guest:Maybe if I just go to them.
Guest:I don't know them.
Guest:Maybe if I go to them and say, I'll fall into that trap of I'll talk reason to them.
Guest:And then I look them up.
Guest:And they're Dartmouth college grads.
Guest:They're very educated.
Guest:Very successful.
Guest:And I'm like, oh.
Guest:These people, it's not that they don't understand what they're doing.
Guest:I can't go to them and say, what if they said, you know what, Charlotte's trying to stop us from doing this.
Guest:What if we just, instead of fighting, what if we knocked on his door and explained to him that transgenderism is a threat to the American people?
Guest:Maybe we can talk reason.
Guest:No, they can't talk reason into me in that sense.
Guest:I can't talk reason into them.
Guest:That's where I think...
Guest:the simmer of civil war happens when instead of saying we are beyond the talking reason, like this is a which side are you on kind of.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:Well, once tolerance is removed from the democratic equation, it's impossible to maintain.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:And I think there's this bull sidedism that like Charlotte says he, he, he won't tolerate.
Guest:No, I won't tolerate them trying to force my child out of school.
Guest:And they, so they say, I won't tolerate Charlotte's child in school.
Guest:And I said, I won't tolerate you kicking my kid out of school.
Guest:These are not the same thing.
Guest:It's a little bit like I, you know, you run into all these folks who like, well, you know, trans issues are difficult and so on.
Guest:And I can always simplify them for them because around the country now, for people who follow this stuff, you know, virtually every weekend somewhere, there's a big pack of burly dudes, oftentimes armed men with guns outside a school, a library, a hospital, a bar.
Guest:And inside, there's some kids.
Guest:And you can say you think drag story hour is stupid or whatever you want, but there's a group of kids in there and there's a group of men with guns on the other side.
Guest:Which side are you on?
Guest:This isn't complicated.
Guest:Save your nuance and your questions for later because we are at that moment.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But isn't that the moment also where that whether they're from Dartmouth or not, that you can't, after a certain point, not call them fascists?
Marc:Oh, no, I didn't.
Marc:No, I call them fascists because they're general.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Oh, well, that's the other temptation.
Guest:They're not fascists.
Guest:They went to a good college.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:But it's like what is the functioning GOP now is a shameless fascist movement.
Marc:And until they change the language, I don't think people know what it means.
Marc:Right.
Guest:They could call, I mean, I'm very much an all-hands-on-deck person.
Guest:There's something from the 1930s called the Popular Front, and this is where the American Communist Party eventually comes around to sort of say, look, we don't like FDR.
Guest:We're way to the left of him, but we all got to work together here, right?
Guest:And I think it's a popular front moment.
Guest:So like if you want to call it authoritarianism or if you're like a Republican never Trumper with whom I disagree on most things, that's fine.
Guest:I do think there is value.
Guest:Like I'm not going to evangelize, but I do think there is value to sort of saying let's learn about the word fascism.
Guest:And how it changes and the confusion between, this is not like Nazi Germany.
Guest:No, it's not.
Guest:That was a fascist regime in power.
Guest:This is a fascist movement trying to take power.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Not as bad.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Still a little bit of hope there.
Guest:But combined with climate also, really, literally, potentially world-ending in a way that...
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Hitler never was.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, and it's, yeah, one supports the other.
Marc:I mean, you know, Hitler wanted to take over the world, but if this plays out the way it could, then there'll be no awareness or no caring, because I would imagine that if a fascist regime takes power here, the machinery of capitalism is just going to be unregulated entirely.
Marc:And
Marc:and serving the nation.
Marc:Unlike our current well-regulated system.
Guest:And this is where then lefties sort of say, but it's so fucked up now.
Guest:And I'm like, yes, it is.
Guest:But the folks who imagine, well, this is the other response is, well, you know, if you're a young black man, right?
Guest:Dealing with cops, you're already living.
Guest:and that experience, right?
Guest:Every day.
Guest:And so like, oh, now white folks are just going to discover it.
Guest:And well, no, I'm going to say it could get a lot worse.
Guest:And I think this is kind of the privilege that we have of not living in a... Most of us, unless we come from somewhere else, have not experienced a war where, you know...
Guest:Look at Ukraine.
Guest:It can get a lot worse.
Guest:The threat is not militias marching.
Guest:That's sort of ridiculous.
Guest:The threat which, you know, senior military commanders have said is division in the military, right down in the chain of command.
Guest:And all these little fringe guys, like the guys I meet all over the country who have each one has a little different conspiracy theory of their own.
Guest:It's so isolatable.
Guest:But suddenly it's there.
Guest:The base for... Sure.
Marc:All you need is like, you know, four more Michael Flins.
Guest:We have four more Michael Flins.
Guest:But what's interesting, having reported on the military a long time too, is that the military historically has been really good at...
Guest:keeping crackpots in line.
Guest:They kept Michael Flynn.
Guest:It didn't matter if you believe in astrology.
Guest:If you get the Jeeps, they're on time.
Guest:It doesn't matter.
Guest:And the conspiracy theories weren't built around this central question of the commander-in-chief, the chain of command.
Guest:And that changes things so that you see even senior military officers saying, look, the military is not as monolithic...
Guest:As people think it is, we're already seeing these little simmering, not these illegal terms, but the way National Guard commanders and I think seven states refused to abide by the vaccination orders.
Guest:Well, so Biden could have said, all right, we're going to crack down.
Guest:I think very wisely, he didn't.
Guest:Like, let's not...
Guest:I'm not like one of those people.
Guest:Let's draw a line.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then people say, well, does that mean you don't think we should indict Trump?
Guest:No, but you do need to recognize that each thing has its own power.
Guest:It has its own power.
Guest:And the next thing won't be like the last thing.
Guest:Well, there's no January 6th when they arrest Trump, so I guess it's over.
Guest:I don't think there'll ever be another January 6th because that movement is... All these folks that I'm visiting, I met so many January 6th's, they'd all been visited by the FBI.
Guest:Many of them thought, I must be the FBI.
Guest:And it was a little bit... One of their sort of fuck yous.
Guest:Like, I don't care.
Guest:I'll talk to you.
Guest:The guy invites me into his house that's filled with an arsenal of...
Guest:guns ammo yeah body armor he's a leader of a militia he says i can take pictures of the guns and his cats like you he's a cat lover yeah four cats yeah uh like you and me he's jewish or so he says yeah not really but he's like you know like one of these that's his thing like i'm one of the chosen yeah and um and yeah i take pictures of the guns these are the legal ones and so on yeah um
Guest:This guy is not the militia that's gonna march.
Guest:This guy is the guy that is there who is sort of the fabric that is ready for...
Guest:Someone to exploit.
Guest:Someone to exploit?
Guest:Exploit, yeah.
Guest:Is that a diplomatic word for kill?
Guest:Oh, no, no, no.
Marc:I mean, for... Oh, so he's a recruiter.
Marc:He's a guy with boots on the ground to spread the word.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And to make more... Everybody to normalize the idea.
Guest:I saw a headline, AP headline the other day about this Georgia indictment.
Guest:Trump and his allies.
Yeah.
Guest:Allies.
Guest:Allies.
Guest:That's a political term.
Guest:They're not allies.
Guest:They're accused co-conspirators, right?
Guest:But there's that normalization and that expansion of this power and this liberation of these folks.
Guest:You know, the other thing I think about is like, you know, you're talking about conspiracy theories, and I know you've thought a lot about conspiracy theories.
Guest:It feels very liberating to give yourself over to a conspiracy theory.
Marc:Well, yeah, and that's what I wanted to talk to you about in terms of your explorations of religion in general and some of the through lines of this book.
Marc:Now, I thought that...
Marc:It was very interesting the way you bookended this book.
Marc:You know, the chapters at the beginning and the end, you open with a fairly lengthy exploration and history of Sidney Poitier's sort of what he... Harry Belafonte and Poitier... I'm sorry, Harry Belafonte.
Guest:But there is a scene where they go to Mississippi together to... But it's Harry Belafonte, I'm sorry.
Marc:But it is sort of the arc of Harry Belafonte's activism, his blackness, his...
Marc:his anger and how that impacted culture and how he maintained a certain radical and black spirit in the face of white culture.
Marc:And he made choices in his life to maintain that despite white culture and in spite of opportunities he may have had himself.
Marc:And this is the way you chose to open this book that unfolds as an exploration of the evolution of white racism.
Marc:And then at the end, you talk about Lee Hayes, the folk musician who was in the Weavers with Pete Seeger, who wrote If I Have a Hammer.
Marc:And you talked about that very specific event in, where is it?
Marc:Peekskill, New York.
Marc:where the weavers who had been identified as either communists or communist sympathizers or the voice of communism or socialism in America, and they were to play there.
Marc:And I didn't know about that event, but it came a bloody fucking mess that, you know, they went the first night, a few, you know, a small mob.
Marc:And then the next night when they rescheduled, it was a huge mob that included military people.
Guest:5,000 in the use of air power, helicopters from the New York State Police, helping the rioters who are trying to kill Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and most of all, for the transgression of being a black communist, Paul Robeson, kind of forgotten, but a superstar of his time, called the Russia-loving Negro baritones, this is the local paper.
Guest:And they try to kill him.
Guest:The last line of that story, which I organize around Lee Hayes, who was this big towering guy from Arkansas, Pete Seeger's songwriting partner.
Guest:I mean, even, it's not my music, but also was my music as a kid in elementary school singing, if I had a hammer, you know, on top of old Smokey.
Guest:Yeah, my dad loved Pete Seeger.
Guest:Yeah, you sang all those songs and they're stripped down, they're sanded down, they're smoothed over to discover that they have this radical core, this radical imagination.
Guest:Lee Hayes is this big guy.
Guest:He wasn't a brave man.
Guest:Where Pete Seeger goes and testifies before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, and his whole idea is he's prepared a song from each right-wing congressman's district.
Guest:And they say, what is, you know, beliefs?
Guest:Well, I have a song for you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Lee was broken.
Guest:He was broken.
Guest:He was destroyed by it.
Guest:These prosecutions.
Guest:In the same way I think of, we're reading now about Ruby Freeman, the elections worker in Georgia who Trump targeted just an ordinary person and has now been in hiding since, is afraid to go out.
Guest:Lee never went out again, but he had this, in writing his sort of memoirs in Peekskill and remembering nearly being killed by this mob...
Guest:He goes back even further to this moment in Arkansas, where he's from, and he's driving around with these labor organizers, black and white, which is a big crime at this time, and there's a carload of gun thugs.
Guest:You know, this isn't the Klan, this is just from the company, coming after them, and they're singing, and they're terrified.
Guest:And they start singing, you know, they've got their radical labor songs.
Guest:But then they all grew up in the church.
Guest:And they start singing hymns.
Guest:And he's got this line.
Guest:And it's the last, I'll give it away, it's the last line of the book because it was the first line.
Guest:It's like, how do I get there?
Guest:Because that's the line I need to write for my kid.
Guest:Was, for a while it was possible not to be scared even.
Guest:Right.
Guest:For a while, it's possible not to be scared even.
Guest:The hope is not, don't worry, it's going to be okay.
Guest:The hope is not in the language of safe spaces, we're going to make safe spaces.
Guest:I think of another Arkansas organizer, Suzanne Farr, legendary queer rural organizer.
Guest:And she's organizing with this, and she's living in a queer commune with all these women, and I think it's the 70s or 80s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:straight women start fleeing their violent partners.
Guest:And the violent partners come after and say, hand them over.
Guest:And Suzanne Farr and her friends say, no, they stay on the ground.
Guest:And, you know, this is a different kind of thing.
Guest:This is not...
Guest:There may have been guns.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:They say, no.
Guest:And I remember Suzanne was telling this to me and a young activist.
Guest:And the young activist says, that's so wonderful.
Guest:You made a safe space.
Guest:And Suzanne Farr, who for all her radicalism is like my southern, my granny was from Tennessee very much.
Guest:She says, oh, honey, there are no fucking safe spaces.
Guest:That's the hope of this.
Guest:And the reason that's there is there's no fucking spaces, but there's safe moments we can make.
Guest:And if we're depending on that static energy or depending on young voters just fixing things for us, no.
Guest:The hope had to begin with that.
Guest:And I wanted to expand the radical imagination.
Guest:But if I comment that with a straight-up organizer in a didactic way, people are going to say no.
Guest:If I comment it with a song, as Mr. B, Harry Belfonti says,
Guest:Deo, the banana boat song, which he understood as daylight, come and me want to go home.
Guest:It's a work song.
Guest:It's a guy saying, fuck the boss song.
Guest:Come Mr. Tallyman, tally me banana.
Guest:That's the guy who's deciding how much he gets paid.
Guest:Harry, who was radical and
Guest:We just lost him at 96.
Guest:People get upset when I say Harry was angry to the end of his days.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:I mean, he was joyous too, but he was angry.
Guest:The struggle is long.
Guest:This is the hope.
Guest:Trump wants us to believe that there's a storm coming.
Guest:The cataclysm is now.
Guest:And either we will win or we lose.
Guest:This is climate change too, right?
Guest:We don't do something now.
Guest:We're going to die.
Guest:Well, a lot of us are going to die.
Guest:And then the next day, and then the next day, the struggle is long.
Guest:So that's where it begins.
Guest:That's the hope.
Guest:Both those guys, Harry Belfani and Lee Hayes, were both defeated, right?
Guest:How is that the hope, right?
Guest:Well, here we still are.
Guest:They were defeated.
Guest:This is not going to be decided tomorrow.
Guest:It's not going to be decided in 2024, even if Trump wins, which I think is a pretty strong possibility.
Guest:And if we go through a period of fascism, which I think we will.
Guest:You do think that.
Guest:I do.
Guest:I do.
Guest:I'm not positive.
Guest:I think that, you know, one of the things I... One of the central lies of fascism is inevitability.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's where we get... That's why I write a lot about movies in the book, too, is sort of thinking about the stories by which we make... It's why I reject the term crisis.
Guest:No climate crisis, no crisis of democracy, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:The crisis is like...
Guest:And then the end, right?
Guest:But that's not going to happen.
Guest:It's not, you know, either we'll stop climate change and the glaciers will come back or we'll all incinerate.
Guest:Neither of those.
Guest:We could all incinerate.
Guest:We're definitely not getting the glaciers back.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Fascism is going to come, I think.
Guest:I mean, we're already in a lot of parts of the country there.
Guest:I would say...
Guest:Florida is a mild fascist state now, right?
Guest:Texas, close.
Guest:Texas, Texas, close, right?
Guest:And individual counties all over.
Guest:I mean, there's parts of the Northeast Kingdom and Vermont that are, that's a region of Vermont, that are already there.
Guest:Local officials.
Guest:There's a million little Trumps.
Guest:And it's a global movement, right?
Guest:So, you know, there's plenty of other places.
Guest:And then what, right?
Guest:Like you said, you know, getting your passport ready.
Guest:To go where?
Guest:Well, to go where, right?
Guest:And actually, this is the first time that I'm actually... 2016, I thought, oh, that's ridiculous.
Guest:You're not going anywhere.
Guest:It's hard.
Guest:Not you, Mark.
Guest:It's hard to go other places.
Guest:And 2020 is saying, this time, get my passport ready.
Marc:Get your papers in order.
Guest:Yeah, I do think this... I think people aren't paying attention.
Guest:We've been so numbed to the awfulness of the rhetoric...
Guest:And understandably, most people want to live their lives and aren't weirdly fascinated like I am.
Guest:We don't notice that it's changing.
Guest:And Trump has, the Trump rhetoric has gotten far more.
Guest:I mean, that's one of the themes of the book is that there's these stages.
Guest:The first campaign was like the prosperity gospel.
Guest:You get rich.
Guest:God wants you to get rich.
Guest:Well, Trump wants you to get rich like him.
Guest:2020 was the QAnon gospel or like a bastardized American Gnostic gospel.
Guest:Conspiracy is dark.
Yeah.
Guest:With January 6th, we enter the age of martyrs, what historical fascism calls the blood martyr.
Guest:And Trump had been trying to drum that up.
Guest:I would go to these rallies and he would say the names of people killed by undocumented folks.
Guest:And a good number of part of the crowd knew them.
Guest:But they just needed that official license of Ashley Babbitt killed on January 6th.
Guest:And she's not the forever martyr.
Guest:She's just sort of like holding a spot on the cross.
Marc:You spend a lot of time with her in the book, in talking about her.
Guest:She changes the book.
Guest:The book was going to be a very different book until...
Guest:January 6th, and I see that killing.
Marc:And then you could see the final piece of this propaganda puzzle or the myth puzzle of what you see as this.
Guest:Thank God it's not.
Guest:The final piece is the killing piece, and we're not there yet.
Guest:But the martyr piece is the piece before.
Guest:The killing of the other?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, we see like little pop, pop, pop here in different places.
Marc:So in talking to you,
Marc:About this specifically now you enter this book, you know, believing that, you know, whether it's there's there's no end to it, but there is a change and that, you know, fascism is likely.
Marc:So you begin that this book in that mindset.
Marc:And and so what it seems like you set out to do, which, you know, has its moments of beauty and empathy.
Marc:for the people in this movement, in a way, is kind of show people what is happening throughout the country in smaller pockets and larger pockets, you know, in the churches, you know, from the flags, in local governments a little bit.
Marc:But it seems to be the through line is really about these rallies, whether they're religious rallies or smaller churches.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the people that have certain flags.
Guest:Services is sort of what I would say.
Guest:Like, yeah, at first I was like, well, no, that's like the first, you know, the campaigns of 2016, 2020.
Guest:I wanted to sort of, originally the book was going to be just sort of, you know, an episodic history of that decade.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, it was going to end on 2020.
Guest:On 2020, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I sold the idea of the book in 2018.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then after January 6th, I threw out a lot of stuff that I was gonna include in it.
Guest:And then I just started sort of wandering around, but you're right.
Guest:Those become, you know, these little militia churches, a lot of sort of mini mega churches, even some mega churches now have not figuratively, but actually have their own, you know, Wednesday night is women's night.
Guest:You know, Thursday night is youth night.
Guest:Tuesday night is new militia recruit night.
Guest:This is Yuba City, California.
Guest:Omaha, Nebraska.
Guest:I went to... That one's a heavy scene.
Guest:That's where you were in the parking lot in Omaha?
Guest:That's this... Weirdly, that's the scariest thing I think that has happened to me in 30 years of journalism.
Guest:And I've been in worse places, but I have never...
Guest:I've been so fucking terrified.
Guest:I'm in Omaha.
Guest:I go to the church of Lord of Host Church, and it's sort of a strip mall.
Guest:And I'm just—basically, it's Sunday morning.
Guest:I'm driving.
Marc:How did you—did you have a map of where you wanted to stop?
Guest:I mean— No, no, I don't—that's—
Guest:I don't know how to do that.
Guest:I'm not, I'm not a good reporter in the sense I'm going to go and find the most important person.
Guest:I've done some of that, but there's other people who do it better.
Guest:So you're really going sort of town to town.
Guest:You chose a route.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:People, not even, I was like a lot of times like, oh, a detour, I guess we're going this way.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:I got to jackpot Nevada because of a fire and go, well, you're going this way now.
Guest:Um, uh,
Guest:Omaha, Nebraska, I'm just sort of going through, and now I'm trying to get home, and it's Sunday morning, I'll go see what's happening in this church.
Guest:It's a strip mall, and you have your choice of megachurches.
Guest:All the big box stores have become megachurches, and I choose the one that looks like Best Buy.
Guest:Each one is like a different store.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Pastor Hank Kuhneman presiding means nothing to our listeners, but he is a figure of like medium national prominence.
Guest:A prophet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Is on a show called Flashpoint that Trump and various right wing congressmen go on.
Guest:It's an open pro civil war programming.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:People like not like this could happen.
Guest:Not like what if it happens?
Guest:It's going to happen.
Guest:Not like that's sorry.
Guest:We're going to kick ass.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:When, when, when does, when does it start?
Guest:That's pastor Hank.
Guest:He gets prophecies from God and he's a great pastor.
Guest:And it's interesting.
Guest:The other thing people is odd.
Guest:Here's this church.
Guest:It's about third people of color.
Guest:Pastor Hank's a white guy.
Guest:He claims to preach like a black man, to have learned in the black church.
Guest:And I will say, I mean, he's a good preacher.
Guest:He's a good performer.
Guest:At one point, I've identified myself as a reporter, and he starts preaching against reporters.
Guest:And I'm like, it's like he's going to throw his Bible at me.
Guest:And he's like, I hope you're having a good time.
Guest:And I am.
Guest:I mean, the music is fantastic.
Guest:It's good.
Guest:Afterwards, no one will talk to me.
Guest:I go out in the parking lot.
Guest:And I meet these three women who I'd seen inside, and they're also visitors.
Guest:They've driven four hours to be there.
Guest:So we're just talking, and it's like 90 degrees and blacktop and blasting.
Guest:I'm wearing a jacket because I'm trying to respect the church.
Guest:And just sweating, and they're sweating, and they're telling me about the Civil War that's coming.
Guest:It's not even a question anymore.
Guest:It's a Civil War.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And an usher and a gunman came.
Guest:And Pastor Hank had already preached.
Guest:He said, you know, Psalm 23.
Guest:People know that.
Guest:You know, thy rod and thy staff that come from me.
Guest:He would make fun of them.
Guest:Thy rod is thy gun.
Guest:And when he does this, and I didn't put it in the book, and I wish I had, he does a hip thrust.
Guest:Thy rod is thy dick and thy gun.
Guest:And he's very plain about that, right?
Guest:And the gunman, full tactical gear.
Guest:It looks like a cop in riot gear.
Guest:Not a cop.
Guest:He's part of the church's force.
Guest:And the usher is like, you can't talk here.
Guest:And I'm like, but we're in public.
Guest:And I just get stuck on it.
Guest:And I know I should turn away.
Guest:And since I had a heart attack, I vowed never to get in those situations again.
Guest:I just run away from conflict.
Guest:But I got my little mechanical pencil.
Guest:And it's like this most pathetic Freudian thing ever.
Guest:I'm like, I just bought a pencil.
Guest:And I'm clicking the leads.
Guest:And the leads are dropping.
Guest:And you brought a gun.
Guest:And...
Guest:And it's just getting, I remember this because I had never really understood this.
Guest:I've always been like in situations where, you know, the kind of dude who pushes his chest in you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's scary, but it's also bravado.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's also your clue that this is probably not someone who's going to hit you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If someone's going to hit you, you don't put, they don't put their chin out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They show you the hand that's scary.
Guest:This guy's curling in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Curling around his chest, is grinning, which is a sort of thing, this human instinct that we have.
Guest:Like, have you ever seen someone grin when they're angry at you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're burying their teeth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I learned after the fact, this is actually like this old lizard brain part of our brain.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm like, shit, this guy, they don't care.
Guest:Not the gunman, the other guy.
Guest:Yeah, the gunman is like super cool.
Guest:He loves this moment because like here's like, they're just sort of stepping forward.
Guest:I said, you brought a man with a gun.
Guest:And finally the usher says, how do you know I don't have a gun?
Guest:And I just turned around and I ran.
Guest:They didn't actually draw their guns.
Guest:I could feel like this is a situation, these people,
Guest:When I was younger, I'd say, this is great.
Guest:They're going to hit me, and then the local cops are going to arrest me.
Guest:That's going to make my book a bestseller.
Guest:But now I'm like, I can feel my heart.
Guest:I can feel my pulse.
Guest:I'm very aware of my pulse.
Guest:I got to go.
Guest:The undercurrent of the story is I'm carrying my stepmother's ashes in the car.
Guest:It's a little odd, but I retrieved them on the way.
Guest:I don't want to go to jail.
Guest:And I ran.
Guest:And, you know, I've been in other countries.
Guest:I've had real guns and bigger guns pointed at me and knives and baseball bats and so on.
Guest:And this was scary.
Guest:This has never happened.
Guest:The thing about reporting on the right in America, I'm a cis white dude.
Guest:I'm bald.
Guest:That helps.
Guest:I look non-threatening.
Guest:And I look like, you know, so I'm able to go spaces.
Guest:But even that, people know I am.
Guest:would always say, it's no accident that you came here to this church, this compound, this whatever, you know?
Guest:And they were trying, you know, they were sure I was going to convert.
Guest:They're not interested in conversion anymore.
Guest:You're a journalist.
Guest:You're on the other side.
Guest:We're not going to like say, yeah, we know you're the devil, but we'll spread our message through you.
Guest:They're going to bring a gunman out.
Guest:and say get the fuck out of here they are ready to go and it's like here's the here's the metaphor i've come up with i didn't put in the book but it's like you know no it's not on fire right but if you ever like flick matches and you can't light one yeah yeah and how long every time a line of guys with guns is outside a library yeah they don't shoot
Guest:Flick a match.
Guest:Flick a match.
Guest:And maybe they will, and everyone will say, that is terrible.
Guest:Or the next mass shooting by a fascist who's copying the manifest of the last one.
Guest:One of these, you know, we're standing over a box of dynamite and flicking matches onto it.
Guest:And saying, they haven't caught, there's nothing to worry about.
Guest:This was a match.
Guest:You felt it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So that's why it was scary to me personally.
Marc:It was scary to my heart.
Marc:Well, also that moment when you say, you know, what it was like in the past is that the cops were probably in the church.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, you know, there was no.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I said, I'm going to call the cops and they're like, oh, yeah, go ahead, please.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They know which side that the cops are on there, you know.
Guest:Um, and you could always, from there, I didn't put this in the book.
Guest:I drove to, uh, uh, Iowa and I was meeting with another reporter who's been doing the same thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She's like, yeah, it's different.
Guest:It used to be, you could go anywhere.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, you could go up to straight up Nazis.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in this book, three times, first proud boys swarm me.
Guest:I get vouched for basically cause I'm a white guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Um,
Guest:Lauren Boebert's grill, this guy comes out.
Guest:And I mean, it's all this sort of acting performance.
Guest:The manager decides it's time for me to go with his hand.
Guest:I'm on radio.
Guest:You know, he's got his hand hovering over his sidearm.
Guest:Like he's going to do a quick draw or something.
Guest:It's like, it's time for you to go.
Guest:And I'm not afraid of guns.
Guest:I'm a gun owner.
Guest:I mean, I'm afraid of guns in the way that we should be.
Guest:I'm a gun owner.
Guest:I live in this armed state.
Guest:I've seen guns and so on.
Guest:I've never...
Guest:There are at least 400 million guns in civilian hands.
Guest:And, you know, the things that really... I'm all hands on deck, but the lefties were like, well, they're not the only ones who have guns.
Guest:And I'm like, yeah, but they have about 375 million of them.
Guest:So, like, forget it.
Guest:Nobody wins a civil war.
Guest:Don't say, hey, we'll meet you, right?
Guest:I've never seen so many just out and part of it.
Guest:And even gentle churches...
Guest:There's another church I really loved in Holiday City, Ohio.
Guest:I love this guy.
Guest:He was so great.
Guest:We're in it.
Guest:We're talking together.
Marc:Oh, the guy who was putting the tent up?
Guest:Pastor Pete.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then Civil War.
Guest:Wait, he said fire.
Guest:He calls it pockets of fire.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He says pockets of fire springing up everywhere.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and will become a forest fire.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And the other thing that you're talking about in terms of the rationalization or the ignorance of the left and regular people who just want to live their lives is that because of the nature of technology, all these people are communicating.
Marc:They're all relatively on the same page.
Marc:And they have their own TV shows, like you just said.
Marc:I don't know that show.
Yeah.
Marc:And that's a big one.
Marc:There's so many layers and layers and layers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you talk about the rabbit holes that people go down.
Marc:And I like the whole sort of, you know, modeling, you know, or the reference to the Gnostics and Gnostic writing and how there's there's there's not an either or there's both.
Marc:And that is the thing that becomes slippery in the human brain when you start to believe conspiracies.
Marc:There's a line in the book that I underlined, which is, that is the great truth of our paranoia now, not knowing, not needing to, not knowing is its own dim, dreaming certainty.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like because you've had those moments where you're trying to have a logical conversation with an QAnon person or a person that believes in this spectrum that you discussed in the book.
Marc:And you you do the opposite point to make your point that she might be wrong.
Marc:And she goes, exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Diane G in Sunrise, Florida.
Guest:Yeah, Diane Gee was great.
Guest:She's another... I mean, nobody's born a fascist, right?
Guest:And everyone knows that, but they still subscribe to this kind of essentialism.
Guest:And they still imagine that they are immune, whether demographically or by their virtue, or worst of all, by their taste.
Guest:And I remember I was... I gave a talk about this at the American...
Guest:psychiatric association, weird venue, but they want it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And all these, like the, this, you know, this, the coolest, most hipster urban psychiatrist.
Guest:And one guy says like, well, you know, I think they're in the arts.
Guest:There's really a lot of resistance to this and there's stuff that just cannot be absorbed by fascism.
Guest:You know, like, I don't think like, um, like I think of a queer artist, like Lil Nas X. Yeah.
Guest:Well, we can't ask Ashley Babbitt, the central figure, but I know a lot about her.
Guest:If she was alive, I think she would love Lil Nas X. Yeah.
Guest:Not to mention the fact not so known.
Guest:Ashley was queer in practice, if not in theory.
Guest:She lived with her husband and their girlfriend.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, those lines are not as sharp.
Guest:I think about another guy named George Riley, who was a January 6th insurrectionist I met in Sacramento.
Guest:And we were sort of together watching a brawl between Proud Boys and Antifa and...
Guest:George who, George is great.
Guest:He claims that he is a Jewish, French-Canadian Jewish Iroquois.
Guest:Oh, that guy.
Guest:That guy, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and he goes into, on January 6th, wearing war paint, you know, feathers in his hair, and his great grievance is that the guy who has his boots on Nancy Pelosi's desk gets all the credit when it was George, just because it wasn't a photograph who pulled down his pants and rubbed his ass on Nancy Pelosi's desk.
Guest:He is getting credit in the legal system.
Guest:But, you know, he identifies himself.
Guest:He says, I'm like the guy in 300, that Zack Snyder gore fest, like the last one left alive to tell the tale.
Guest:I'm like, but George, Ashley is the only one killed.
Guest:You're all left alive.
Guest:And you all won't shut up.
Guest:You're all telling the tale.
Guest:It doesn't matter.
Guest:But...
Guest:This is not George being stupid.
Guest:It's not George being purely delusional.
Guest:I mean, I come to think of it as a kind of lucid dreaming.
Guest:Like, the pleasure is in the both-and of it, the yes-and of it.
Guest:Like, I know that reality and this reality.
Guest:And they're coexisting.
Guest:And just the way that I've been fascinated by, you know...
Guest:I've been doing this stuff for a long time, but actually sort of what I do is I do one book on, one book off.
Guest:It's sort of work that way.
Guest:Like, I cannot be with them anymore.
Guest:I'm gonna go do something very different.
Guest:But I kept getting drawn back, because I'm interested in people who believe in magic, right?
Guest:They are too, right?
Guest:Or the way so many people I met
Marc:think elon musk is going to save them these are the right wingers yeah um and if we can just win elon musk for christ think of what we can do and then he can put souls and robots and you know this is a fantasy idea but yeah but whether they he can do that or not the truth of the matter is is that elon musk is is trying to do that right but he's also vulnerable ideologically and wants to be part of
Marc:The big thing.
Guest:Oh, I think he's part of the left to right slide too.
Guest:And there's this whole thing of people like, well, he was always like this and he's South African.
Guest:Nobody's born a fascist.
Guest:He wasn't, I mean, he's always a schmuck, but he wasn't always like this.
Guest:I mean, we watched him since he took over, you know, the artist formerly known as Twitter.
Guest:We watched him in real time go from troll to, I think, pretty arguably troll.
Guest:at least fascist fellow traveler right now.
Guest:He began as a troll and moved right.
Guest:And that kind of lucid dreaming that he's engaging in
Guest:with sort of like you're in an unreality, but you feel you have some control over it.
Guest:That's that Gnosticism.
Guest:If I study the typos and Trump's tweets... And the numbers?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:There are codes here to be determined.
Guest:And that's also liberating in this sort of weirdly small D democratic sense, which is, you know...
Guest:your listeners went to college or so on, they have access to, everybody has access to libraries, less and less, because libraries are closing down.
Guest:I work at a college.
Guest:I can go to the library and so on.
Guest:These are folks like, wait a minute.
Guest:I can go to the archive now.
Guest:You can't, by the way.
Guest:Suppose you just want to go to the archive.
Guest:Of what?
Guest:All kinds of archives you have to.
Guest:You want to go to the National Archives.
Guest:You got to get a permit.
Guest:You got to explain what you're doing.
Guest:Now I just log online and I'm in the archive.
Guest:We mock doing our own research, except that that comes out of a liberationist idea for a long time.
Guest:Do your own research.
Guest:Yeah, do your own research.
Guest:Find out the history of the Klan in America.
Guest:Do your own research.
Guest:Find out, you know, step by step until you get...
Marc:as you know, to conspiracy theories.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, then all this leads to what you were talking about earlier is that this all inclusiveness to this new whiteness idea that can incorporate everyone, that it's a mythological concept, but nonetheless, you know, they're going to be done away with.
Marc:They only serve to the building, right?
Guest:I, we don't know the shape of,
Guest:of the fascism that is possibly to come.
Guest:It will not look what has come before.
Guest:So I don't know the shape of it and how much room there would be within it for others, how much those people can be recast as white as we have seen, certainly in some South American countries, which still sort of, the fascist regimes always sort of elevate whiteness over indigeneity, but also incorporate
Guest:all sorts of folks who otherwise wouldn't be white.
Guest:And in the same way that, you know, I've reported from fascist regimes in, you know, I remember reporting in Uganda and they're still talking about Soros and everything.
Guest:And this was their, the so-called kill the gays bill, which they just passed, which was based on American stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a genocidal bill.
Guest:And I'm talking to the guy who wrote it, and he's talking about Soros and Soros.
Guest:And I'm like, well, but, like, why are you so afraid of the Jews here in Uganda where there really aren't any?
Guest:And he's like, what?
Guest:Soros was Jewish?
Guest:You know, he doesn't even know it, but that doesn't mean that that's not still an anti-Semitic myth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In the same way that Trump, in his first post-indictment, last indictment speech, says at the end, I think, if I get it right, he says, we're going to drive out the...
Guest:the globalists chase out the communists.
Guest:And this is Gospel of John, Gospel of Matthew, the money changers.
Guest:Whoever wrote the speech, and it might have been Stephen Miller, a Jewish guy, doubled down on that anti-Semitic old lie, right?
Guest:And, you know, this is this escalation, but it's the way that now, if you're an anti-Semite,
Guest:You know, it's like fan service.
Guest:You know what that means.
Guest:You know what a globalist is.
Guest:If you're not an anti-Semite, even if you're a right-wing Jew, why would that have anything to do with Jews?
Guest:Just because it has for, you know, a thousand years, that's been the rhetoric that's been used.
Guest:Right?
Guest:And the same thing with the RFK post, right?
Guest:There was like this weird post.
Guest:And this, I don't know, could have been an accident.
Guest:14 and 88 are next to each other, which is white supremacist language for the 14 words of whiteness in 88.
Guest:the idiot math of American fascism.
Guest:H, I mean, to even explain it is just degrading.
Guest:It just means hail Hitler.
Guest:It shows up.
Guest:Now, maybe he didn't mean it, right?
Guest:He let it ride.
Guest:And it's a little bit, it's more than what we think of as dog whistling, because what it's doing is people who hate the globalists
Guest:They hate the Jew, whether they know it's a Jew or not.
Guest:It's taken that kind of, the potency of that anti-Semitic myth and universalized it.
Guest:So what happens in the fascism to come and who's included and who's not, it's hard to know, right?
Guest:Because they've kind of, that's a big, we should be frightened because that's a big, weirdly evolutionary leap.
Guest:That's the velociraptors have learned how to open doors.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So...
Marc:Given all this and given your, obviously you wrote this book, but you say you had a heart attack.
Marc:Yeah, it was 44.
Guest:It was a young heart attack.
Guest:I wrote the last line of my previous book, and I was literally pushing myself away from the table.
Guest:I'm like, I think that's it.
Guest:That's the last line.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And the book had begun two years before with my father's heart attack.
Guest:So, uh, you know, I remember on the table, it was, I was on the table during Trump's second debate with Hillary Clinton.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I was actually plugged up to a machine where this is the one where he's roving around like a toxic orange cloud.
Guest:So I could actually see my blood pressure going.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The nurse who saved my life is a Trumper, like so many nurses.
Guest:That's a whole other story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:trump nurse connection yeah um and watching it and so on but i remember just sort of thinking god if i get through this book begins with a heart attack ends with a heart attack wow what a gift you don't get symmetry like that very often but in terms of like you know your sensitivity and your own personal belief system or spiritual system or what gets you through the day you know obviously you know where you stand around the
Marc:the possible future of this country.
Marc:And, you know, you've had, you know, the experience of moving through this country, you know, and documenting it.
Marc:I mean, how do you sort of live your life day to day mentally, physically?
Marc:And what do you do?
Guest:What are your priorities?
Guest:I mean, I'm a little bit counterphobic.
Guest:The chapter in the book called The Great Acceleration, which acceleration is when the term began on the left, moved to the right, this idea like, let's speed it up.
Guest:The Boogaloo Boys, if you ever heard them, like, let's just bring this war on.
Guest:And I was in Wisconsin with my child.
Guest:who they're fine with this being public, who was there for a mental health program.
Guest:And I was very heartbroken.
Guest:I mean, you know, and I could only visit them on weekends.
Guest:And so I had a lot of time.
Guest:And that was when Ro fell.
Guest:And it's a little bit like the fall of Roe is like, for those of us who sort of study the right, like January 6th, that could happen, that could happen.
Guest:And then it happens and you're still shocked.
Guest:Roe, you're like, yeah, you know they're coming.
Guest:Like they've been organizing for 50 years.
Guest:That's not coming out of nowhere.
Guest:And you're still shocked.
Yeah.
Guest:And the way I had of dealing with it and my fear for my child and so on, like the way that is peaceful is I would just go around and I'd look for fascist flags and I'd knock on doors.
Guest:Not to reassure myself that we're all the same under the skin, but that's like the small agency I have, right?
Guest:I had quit writing about fascism, but I'm like, okay, it's really here.
Guest:I know how to do this.
Guest:I can go and talk to these people.
Guest:I know their history.
Guest:I know their history better than they do.
Guest:I can sort of interpret this language.
Guest:Um, I know how to read stories, right?
Guest:Like, you know, the other life I'm an English professor.
Guest:I know how to read stories.
Guest:And, um,
Guest:So that, and this is not recommended.
Guest:Hey, everybody, how do you deal with this dread?
Guest:Go talk to fascists.
Guest:Although people say, look, now you knock on the door, you'll be killed.
Guest:It is dangerous.
Guest:Usually you won't.
Guest:I mean, you know, in Marinette, Wisconsin, guy comes out with his gun and says, come on in.
Guest:And you say yes to that invitation because you're white.
Yeah.
Guest:I'm white, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's interesting.
Guest:There's a guy in the book called Nazi Ralph, and it's because he is a Nazi with swastikas tattooed all over him.
Guest:He lives in Vermont.
Guest:Flies- Your neighbor.
Guest:Yeah, flies fascist flags on a birch pole.
Guest:Yard is littered with ammunition, you know, casings, cell casings and so on.
Guest:Has a shooting range out back that some local cops apparently shoot at.
Guest:If listeners have ever been to Killington skiing, a lot of people go to Killington, you have seen Nazi Ralph's house.
Guest:It's next to the chairlift that comes down to Route 4.
Guest:If you've gone to Killington and through very... I'm not even going to get into it, but through very...
Guest:You may have even transacted with him in some way, right?
Guest:And I knock on his door, nobody there.
Guest:Next day I call and he had clocked me on his security cameras and we're sitting in my car because it was raining and he's got his gun, his Glock in his lap.
Guest:And he says, what are you?
Guest:And I know what he means.
Guest:I'm not gonna say, I'm a journalist.
Guest:But I'm also not, I'm a Jew.
Guest:But I did, I'm like, I said, I'm a half Jew.
Guest:Which is, my father is Jew.
Guest:I'm a Jew, but, you know.
Guest:And in his mind, it's like, I'll talk to you because you're half white.
Guest:And, you know, that is also sort of the moment where
Guest:Yeah, the white privilege that allows me to do this reporting and to think I'm gonna use it and so on, it is less of a screen than it used to be.
Guest:I mean, at the Ashley Babbitt rally in Sacramento, Proud Boys just also clocked me for what I was immediately.
Guest:It was not a puzzle.
Guest:And I'm like, what is it?
Guest:Is it my pants?
Guest:Is it my, you know?
Guest:They clocked you as a Jew or a journal?
Marc:Not as a Jew, just... Yeah, not them.
Marc:Right, not them.
Marc:Yeah, so what you're saying in the answer to my question is the way you live your life is by engaging and understanding and knowing the reality of it and also having a tremendous amount of concern for your children and yourself because of your heart.
Marc:But you're teaching and you're engaging with young people.
Marc:I mean, how do you keep the informed dread of
Marc:You know, not at bay, but at a level to where you're not freaking everybody out other than this book.
Guest:So I really... I think there's a difference between grief and mourning, right?
Guest:Grief is, you know, I'm pulling out my hair.
Guest:I've lost a loved one.
Guest:We're losing...
Guest:kind of safety we had in this country losing the weather right morning morning is the long process right where you know um and there's a lot of mourning in this book because you know uh go to my father i didn't make it my father's grave my stepmother dies you got the ashes the whole way through ashes my own child and their suffering and covid and all that we've been through and um uh
Guest:Mourning is sort of the recognition that something is lost.
Guest:Acknowledging that it's lost.
Guest:But also acknowledging that you still exist.
Guest:When you're tearing out your hair in grief, how will I go on?
Guest:You can't believe you'll be able to live.
Guest:And why, why, why?
Guest:Mourning is...
Guest:the process.
Guest:So, so all this stuff, and it can be knocking on doors in this counterphobic way.
Guest:It can be, you know, doing the hippie things we all do to be sane, like walking in the woods.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Um, but that's mourning.
Guest:And that's the kind of, I, I, I think mourning is a hopeful act.
Guest:It's,
Guest:And we want to have triumph of the spirit.
Guest:Well, that's a little close to triumph of the will, right?
Guest:What if we mourned?
Guest:And even all these white supremacists and so on, they are losing some white power.
Guest:They should lose it.
Guest:They want to lose it, right?
Guest:Part of the mourning would be them realizing, hey...
Guest:Like, that entitlement that I am losing, that freedom I had to turn on my TV and never see anybody who didn't look like me, and that's not the case anymore, that's good that you lost it.
Guest:You get there by morning.
Guest:But they sit there and say, I used to watch TV and it was just good white folks.
Guest:Now, what happened?
Guest:That must mean there's fewer chances for me.
Guest:And they sit there in that frozen, static place instead of saying...
Guest:This is also my hope.
Guest:I think it's a hopeful book.
Guest:Not too many people do, but I do think it's a hopeful book.
Guest:I think Harry Belafonte is hopeful.
Marc:In a poetic way, yes.
Marc:And I can see that in the way you opened and closed the book and in also the empathy you approach these people with.
Marc:But I mean, there's no last chapter that says why we should be hopeful.
Marc:So I can hear you saying it's a hopeful book, but that's your framing after you put this all together.
Marc:I can't evangelize some— No, I get that.
Guest:Because I work with young people, too, especially like— Yeah, I'm not saying you should.
Guest:Like, some of the hope in the book is those kids in Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
Guest:Yeah, that— This is a tiny town, right?
Guest:But when I read that, though, I— Well, yeah, some people don't think they're hopeful.
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:It's not that I didn't think it was hopeful.
Guest:I was scared for them.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We should be scared, and they won't all make it, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
Guest:I'm going on... There's a famous book called Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lessie, who's my mentor.
Guest:And a death trip is actually a memento morgue.
Guest:It's a kind of mourning.
Guest:It's not, let's get all dark.
Guest:It's sort of like, wait a minute.
Guest:Well, explain the book.
Guest:He was early 1970s, another time of great political violence.
Guest:He was in Madison, Wisconsin, a graduate student in history.
Guest:This is when a building at Madison, Wisconsin gets bombed by leftists.
Guest:There's another group of leftists who've gotten a crop duster and are flying around dropping bombs.
Guest:The world is falling apart.
Guest:Michael is a young radical.
Guest:but he's in the archive every day in 1890s, this small town of Wackerer Falls, and the town photographer, not an artist, just the town photographer, who took pictures of what you took.
Guest:You know, people standing, a strong man, and a lot, a lot of pictures of dead babies.
Marc:That was something they did at the beginning of photography.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Your baby died, and it died a lot then.
Guest:You put it in a beautiful dress, and you propped it up in the coffin, and you took a photograph.
Marc:They were good sitters for photographs, because you had to leave that aperture open for a while.
Guest:Stay still.
Guest:Stay still.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But then he starts reading the local newspaper, which still exists.
Guest:And...
Guest:At this time, American history is still holding on to that make America great again.
Guest:Oh, that was the pastoral time, the small town.
Guest:He's like, wait a minute, this newspaper, arson, suicide, murder, murder, suicide, arson, sent to the madhouse, you know.
Guest:And it feels, the 1890s to him feel like the early 1970s.
Guest:Things fall apart.
Guest:The struggle is long.
Guest:I mean...
Guest:Not to say it's gonna be okay, because we've been through it before, but we've been there.
Guest:So I'm traveling around Wisconsin, and I go to this town where this all takes place.
Guest:Black River Falls.
Guest:This is not Milwaukee.
Guest:This is not Madison.
Guest:This is not hipster Wisconsin.
Guest:It's a little town.
Guest:Church is at the end of the street, looms over everything.
Guest:Day after row, and there's this young woman on the bridge over the Black River, and she's holding a sign, and it says, your misogyny is showing.
Guest:And she's just by herself.
Marc:Teenager.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And people are honking and screaming.
Guest:And this local fundamentalist preacher, with whose daughter she had grown up figure skating, he's this big guy looming over her, telling her she's a whore and everything.
Guest:And she's just like, she's four foot something, you know, tiny person, you know, fuck off.
Guest:And she's joined by this group of other young women and queer folks.
Guest:And it is worth noting in the context of misogyny, there are no straight white boys showing up to stand with them.
Guest:This is brave as hell.
Guest:So I go out with them, and then one of their moms come.
Guest:They're teenagers and young colleges, real straight-laced kids, student body president, you know, that kind of stuff.
Guest:And we go to a Perkins, like a Denny's, you know?
Guest:This is what you do in a small town.
Guest:eating pancakes at 11 at night and they're feeling like they've had a great victory and the mom's there and then so on.
Guest:So I don't even want to say what, you know, like, well, you know, some people think there's going to be a civil war.
Guest:I think they're going to be horrified.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And like, uh-huh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they're ready.
Guest:And they're small town, rural Wisconsin.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Every one of them knows how to shoot is armed except for their leader.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:who was an archer.
Guest:And in their mind, she's like Katniss from The Hunger Games, right?
Guest:And they're like, bring it on.
Guest:Now, my hope here, that's not hopeful because they'll get slaughtered, you know?
Guest:One of them's going into the military to be prepared, right?
Guest:But I don't think it'll come to that.
Guest:My hope is...
Guest:There's a cheerleader named Peyton, cheerleader for the Black River Falls Tigers.
Guest:And her sign doesn't say, you know, Roe or Miss Sodom.
Guest:Her sign just says, fuck off.
Guest:Bright red letters.
Guest:And she's a smiling cheerleader, fuck off.
Guest:And I'm like, what does it mean, Peyton?
Guest:And it says...
Guest:fuck off to you, Mark, to me, to all of us who are older, and failed them, right?
Guest:And did not protect their rights.
Guest:They are not waiting for anything.
Guest:They are not seeking the conflict.
Guest:They know that there is a conflict.
Guest:They are not saying, how come I wasn't protected?
Guest:They recognize that they weren't.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's hopeful.
Guest:I mean, that's a dark hope, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But these kids are not lambs being led to the slaughter.
Guest:Yet you don't believe in the young voter idea.
Guest:I don't believe in the young voter idea, but I do believe in the young organizer idea, actually.
Guest:Um, the energy to go and organize, to build, you know, whatever it is.
Guest:Um, there's a chapter in there about Occupy Wall Street, which is, like, ancient history now, right?
Guest:But this moment, like, people forget, like, just a little more than a decade ago, like, the big movement was, hey!
Guest:maybe Obama's gonna be left in the dust is too conservative, right?
Guest:And it was this moment of political imagination.
Guest:Drove everybody nuts, because they had no demands.
Guest:But they've got, you know, the free kitchen in Zuccotti Park in New York.
Guest:And I love the free library.
Guest:Not like those little free libraries, but like 3,000 books.
Guest:A library.
Guest:I love libraries.
Guest:And, you know, it got crushed.
Guest:Cops came in, you know.
Guest:Quick.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, in the end, this whole idea, you hear anarchists sometimes say, well, we faced the cops in Portland.
Marc:No, they were just figuring out how to stop it and politically make it look like it was the right timing.
Guest:I think that is, for some young leftists, like...
Guest:The police force of Peoria, if it ever really decides to crack down, that's that.
Guest:This is what Kent State teaches us, right?
Guest:If someone opens fire, it doesn't matter.
Guest:So don't get to that point.
Guest:You go and you organize.
Guest:And these kids, yeah, they were all armed, but they were more interested in organizing.
Guest:They were more interested in questions like, how do I organize?
Guest:Probably not the traditional ways.
Guest:Yeah, sure, I'll vote.
Guest:Maybe they're the cop city kids.
Guest:And, and, and Atlanta, you know, you know, and maybe they're, and, and maybe they're saying extreme things too.
Guest:And I feel like there's this thing where, cause I teach on a college campus.
Guest:You see these right wingers who go and they're basically like, they're like minecrafters, like they're mining colleges for ridiculous statements.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Cause it's going to blow your mind.
Guest:18 year olds sometimes say stupid shit.
Guest:You wouldn't think, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Of course they do.
Guest:And because they're trying to invent in politics,
Guest:A lot of times these young folks, they'll reject some lefty that I think is great.
Guest:So what, you know?
Guest:Like, yeah, like let them figure it out.
Guest:They're gonna find out something that you and I don't know.
Marc:So there's hope there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Well, it was good seeing you again, Jeff.
Guest:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:We got to the hope.
Marc:No cheap grace, but the hope.
Marc:But I like how you, when you say hope, you kind of, you suck in when you say it.
Marc:It's not a hope.
Marc:It's a hope.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For a while, it's possible not to be scared even.
Guest:And then you'll be scared again.
Guest:But for a while, that moment, hold on to those beautiful moments.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I'll try.
Marc:Okay, so there you go.
Marc:Temper your hope.
Marc:Know that you know.
Marc:The book is called The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
Marc:It's available wherever you get books.
Marc:Hang out for a second, will you?
Marc:Hey, people, if you're a full Marin subscriber, we've got another round of producer cuts posted this week.
Marc:These are clips that were cut out of the WTF episodes, and the only way you can hear them is on the full Marin.
Marc:Out of nowhere, I get this text from John Mulaney.
Marc:You know, just to hang with a few comics.
Marc:He told me it's like Kroll, Nick Kroll, Joe Mandy, American Dan Levy, Jezelnik, Spade was going to drop by.
Marc:You know, it was just a group of comics.
Marc:And I was like, yeah, that sounds good.
Marc:Just at an Italian place.
Marc:I'm like, that sounds great.
Marc:He's like, yeah, we'll just hang out.
Marc:Sometimes I have to really appreciate the community I come from and the legacy that we are part of, which is stand-up comedy and knowing comics my whole life and having this connection.
Marc:this group of people that I don't necessarily know that well, but we know each other to be who we are and what we are, which is comics.
Marc:So we're sitting around and it turned into exactly what,
Marc:What you think would happen, what's supposed to happen is it just turned into this storytelling session, you know, over Italian food, a lot of laughs.
Marc:And I get into a very fuck it.
Marc:I give I don't give a shit.
Marc:I'll throw people under the bus.
Marc:I'll tell you how I really feel.
Marc:I'll do these stories, which is a good lubricant for for other guys who might be a little more diplomatic than me.
Marc:It kind of opens up the floodgate.
Marc:To sign up for the full mare and go to the link in the episode description or head over to WTFpod.com and click on WTF Plus in the menu, right?
Marc:Next week, we have Chef Michael Simon on Monday and songwriter Bernie Taupin on Thursday.
Marc:That was, how do they say it in Britain?
Marc:That was a banger, me talking to Bernie Taupin.
Marc:I was nervous about it, but we got right into it.
Marc:He's an all right dude, level-headed dude.
Marc:And the book is pretty great.
Marc:Pre-order it.
Marc:Bernie Taupin, Scattershot.
Marc:It's not just about Elton John.
Marc:It's not just about being his co-writer, but he covers a lot of the people of the era.
Marc:Harry Nelson, John Lennon, talks about meeting Graham Greene, talks a little bit about drugs, a little bit about Elton, Alice Cooper.
Marc:I mean, it's just, you know, it's a very well-written reminiscence.
Marc:So pre-order that.
Marc:I'll talk to him next week.
Marc:And I think this is sort of a riff on a Brian Eno, maybe partially inspired by Taking Tiger Mountain.
Marc:But I did it up with the slide.
Marc:Anyway.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I'll talk to you later.
Okay.
guitar solo
guitar solo
guitar solo
Guest:Thank you.
guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey and the fond of cat angels everywhere.