The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

Romeo didn’t mention this. Instead, he spoke of his appreciation for the way Rich preached without any morality at all. “I know I fall short,” he said. Why would he want church to remind him?

Kanye’s music, of which Rich was not really a fan, was infused with a questioning faith as complex as the troubled genius that would later disappear into hate, contradictions of lust and politics and fury and grief and laughter, a combination knotting and unraveling from the social gospel of “Jesus Walks” to the profane mysticism of “I Am a God.”

Nothing, he insists, has ever really happened to him at all. “If I had to preach from experience,” he told me on his penthouse balcony, the sunset behind him and DawnCheré, in pink and gold, murmuring her approval, “I’d have nothing.”

She wasn’t like anyone you’d ever seen on an American middle school wall, and at the same time there was a deep resemblance to the inner selves of countless children who have gleaned from the world that the adult world will not protect them, that they will have to save themselves and each other.

He had just returned from abroad, he said, a trip of holy wandering financed by whoever was inclined to give him money. He made no requests; he simply befriended and received, an odd, happy, young, beautiful man who liked talking to anybody.

And what has always made me marvel are the layers of stories beneath even the most seemingly absurd or banal surface, followers who bring to their faith depths unfathomable by their callow leaders. Maybe that’s so at Vous too. But never before Vous had I encountered a church that seemed so simply and completely empty.

Their words, the ones they’d given me in answer to every other question—be amazing and dream big and have fun and, murmured all the time like an amen, so good, so good—are cleaner than that; shiny. There wasn’t a speck on them. There wasn’t anything at all. I was waiting, I realized, for nothing, so I gave up and went home.

Most of all, it loathed women “leaning in,” women in men’s locker rooms, women in combat, women with the gall to think they, too, can be funny, or president.

Media attention surrounding the Isla Vista shootings was a twofold gift for the group, driving new recruits to the movement and allowing A Voice for Men to present itself as the moderate middle for its opposition to mass murder.

They were too excited about “security.” They kept saying, “No feminist better try coming here!” Local police had dispatched four officers, and the conference attendees had deputized even more security from their own ranks. “Security” wore black polo shirts, and there were a lot of black polo shirts, but since the line was slow, Security decided to sweep us all in with a request to return for a “check.” Nobody did.

Elam described such language as satire. Then again, one evening in a bar, he told me he stood by every word.

“Gynocentrism,” she said. She was considering homeschooling. The feminists might deny him “opportunities,” reserve every chance for girls. Kenney couldn’t remember any special breaks herself, but she knew it could happen, knew now that it was happening, all the time, everywhere, boys shunted to the margins.

“if a woman puts a gun to a man’s head and says, ‘I’m not even on the pill. And I have gonorrhea. I’m fucking you now.’ That’s not rape?” It is, I said. That would be rape. If it happened.

This made Calabrese feel better. He’d come to the conference, he said, worried he’d be alone in his beliefs. Not at all. “My average conversation has gone, I would say, considerably well.”

He warned her not to send mixed messages. For instance, he said, she shouldn’t put her hand on a man’s knee if she didn’t want to have sex with him. Sage put his hand on Ellen’s knee. This was not a mixed message, he wanted her to understand. She needed another hug. He needed to give it to her.

I should be very clear here: At no point did Ellen think Elam or Factory was actually going to rape her. We knew they were joking. Just a couple of middle-aged guys joking around about rape with a young woman they’d never met before in a hotel room after midnight.

We’d arrived: the dreamworld of Elam, where men are men, no matter how broken, because they can’t imagine wanting simply to be human. In the manosphere they never had to. The question was never raised. That’s what the manosphere meant: the solace of men, the solace of looking away.

“But it’s true,” Jones added, meaning the Great White Hope part. Which is how racism works at a Trump rally—signal, disavowal, repeat; the ugly words followed by the claim that it’s just a joke followed by a repetition of the ugly words. Joking! Not joking. Play it again, until the ironic becomes the real.

Three days after the assault, according to testimony he later gave, Jones called another pizzeria down the street. “Honest mistake!” he explained to me. He thought it was the child-sex-trafficking one. “I’m coming to finish what the other guy didn’t,” he told them. “I’m coming there to save the kids, and then I’m going to shoot you and everyone in the place.” He did not think to block his number.

Now, though, he claimed he hadn’t actually threatened to shoot, but he couldn’t risk prison because of his lawn-service business. Also, his pets. “So I said fuck it, I’ll take the guilty plea,

A reality set free from context or history, shimmering with feeling, millions of individual truths—Jones’s, Jesse Lee Peterson’s, the Ping Pong shooter’s—all streaming toward one great “fact”: Trump.

In 2016, I attended Trump rallies around the country to witness the role played by religion. Back then, the candidate was taken as living proof of what’s known as the prosperity gospel, not so much concerned with saving society as it is with getting right with God by getting rich. Show your faith in His blessings, as revealed in the opulent lives of His anointed preachers, and good fortune will trickle down. Like Trump, the prosperity gospel is transactional. Quid pro quo, a deal with God: affluence (or the dream of it to come) in return for unquestioning belief.

While watching the evening news with his wife, Melania, [Trump] witnessed the escalating violence and riots happening in Baltimore. In that moment, Melania turned to Trump and said, “If you run now, you will be president.” “What?” Trump was legitimately shocked by this sudden declaration. “I thought you said I was too bright and brash to get elected?”

It was the coming together of the populist economic Right and the so-called Alt-Right, the resurgence of Reagan’s men and the rise of a new generation; the money of the elite and the electoral volume of the masses, all brought together under a white flag not of surrender but of supremacy, felt if not said.

Trump, meanwhile, fused his penchant for self-pity with the paranoia that runs like a third rail through Christian conservatism, the thrilling promise of “spiritual war” with dark and hidden powers.

The gospel of Trump, like that of Thomas—noncanonical, antiestablishment—is Gnostic, a form of exclusive knowledge reserved for the faithful, a “truth” you must have the eyes to see.

One needs no diplomas to know truth, no “data” contrived by “experts.” Knowledge lies not in scholarship or information but within, “the gut,” as Trump had long maintained, or “right here,” as he said at one of his coronavirus briefings, tapping his temple to show us “the metric” by which he would know when it was safe for us to go outside, when we could gather again by the thousands to adore him.

Trump was still hours distant, but the arena was nearing capacity, the playlist on rotation like a plane that can’t land, much of it the same as ’16, Queen, the Stones, and Pavarotti. The crowd liked it that way. They liked hearing the same songs over and over, knowing all the words.

“You can feel it,” said Pastor Sean’s wife. Sean nodded. “Likeminded.” Even I know the verse to which he referred. Philippians 2:2: “Fulfill ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.” One mind, 14,000 hats, most of them red, like Pastor Sean’s.

“Yes. They matter. They mean things.” He pointed. There: one of their shirts. And there, up in the seats. Another shirt. And there, and there, and there, as if repetition itself was proof. “It’s not a joke?” I asked, since the shirts were also a mockery of Black Lives Matter. “No!” Dave wasn’t offended. “It’s like—” He looked for a word. “Scripture?”

Nonbelievers roll their eyes over the apparent hypocrisy of Trump as a tribune of family values, the dopiness of the rubes who considered him a moral leader. Nonbelievers, in other words, miss the point. They lack gnosis.

Trump was for his followers what Gnostics called “The Depth,” or, perhaps more aptly, “The Abyss.” Gnostics believed that what other Christians considered God was a “demiurge”—fake news, a front, an entity deluded into believing itself the source of power because it had constructed the material world. In the gospel of Trump, that was the bureaucracy of government. Cut the red tape, drain the swamp, deregulate—let the Trump within you be Trump—and the true depth of the divine is revealed.

The joy of a Trump rally wasn’t partisan; it was the convert’s conviction that they have entered the light, undiluted and pure.

After the earthquake, it was worse: epic mismanagement of disaster relief by Clinton loyalists, serious allegations of corruption. But Diane lacked the language of structural critique. She had only the blunt terms of her faith. Good and evil and spiritual war. The Clintons’ mistakes could not be errors, or even hubris; they were the deepest of sins. They were evildoers.

“The truth and the lies,” she said. I didn’t know what she meant. She turned away again, returned again, her eyes watery. “I’m going to say it,” she decided. But she couldn’t. She walked off. Her friends were worried. She came back. “They eat the children.” The Clintons, she meant. She shook with tears.

Diane’s face was in shadow. She wanted to know if I’d received the message. If I had discerned. “You listened to him tonight and you kept in mind what I said, and you realized he talks to us in codes, right? Now you get it?”

“You’re gonna get red-pilled one way or the other from me!” Maybe she sensed my concern. “You need to! For your spiritual health. You better get your life right with God, now.” Her voice rose. “It’s all about God!” she shouted. “All about spiritual warfare. Trump will tell you that. Over and over and over.”

Operation Paperclip, the post–World War II program by which the U.S. government really did secretly import Nazi war criminals to work on biological weapons, and, yes, the possibility of mind control. That actually happened. And the connection Diane drew between Disney and these secret Nazis, while not true, wasn’t as farfetched as one might think. Walt Disney admired Mussolini and in 1938 quietly hosted Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, a month after Kristallnacht. Disney did not team up with Nazis to cook up mind-control methods encoded into cartoons, but the roots of Diane’s “logic” weren’t hard to find.

paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party—and what you got was this: Diane was not fringe. She might have been closer to the new center of American life than you are.

I started to ask why Trump didn’t just give a speech revealing all that he had been secretly shown by God. But then I caught myself. If the gospel of Trump was a gift to the initiated, its value lay precisely in its exclusivity. Let the elites and the ivory-tower fools wallow in their “expertise.”

If I had thought to bring a sound-level meter to the rallies, I could give you a precise rendering in decibels of the ascending passions of the Trumpocene: God, guns, and, loudest of all, hating CNN and the very idea of media—mediation, someone who might know more than you—that it’s made to stand for. A cartoon Trump pissing on the CNN logo was a popular T-shirt at rallies; another read: “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.”

“Illegals,” in the mind’s eye of the believers, were easily identifiable by color, and implicitly subhuman and thus unable to truly plot America’s destruction. They were not the enemy itself but rather its pawns, the hordes that “the media” ushered toward our borders.

All had in common the ability to pass. Now it was the journalists. They moved among us unseen; your own child could become one.

Through him, they became him, each man and woman remade as Trump, Trump, Trump. “They spied on our campaign!” Who spied? Who didn’t matter, it was the verb that counted. Spied. “They hid it! Hid it so nobody could see it!” Hid what? What didn’t matter, it was the verb, hid, and the response, Trump spreading his hands wide: Trump! Trump! Trump!

“Say it, you crooked bastard!” The crowd screamed. Say what? Crooked. Bastard. “I’d like to force him to say it!” The crowd wanted to watch.

If Trump said it was a joke, reporters reported that claim. They wanted to believe that some norms still held. Some feared that if they acknowledged just how far beyond norms he’d gone, they’d be normalizing the new American spectrum, one in which dictatorship had become not just a hyperbolic charge thrown around by each party’s most heated partisans but an actual idea. A joke or maybe a possibility, sooner rather than later.

“And chopping the body apart with a machete!” A machete—even the knives were alien. Why did this happen? Because they wanted it to happen, Democrats who gave “safe haven to those who commit violent sex crimes.”

Q communicated through cryptic “drops.” She thought this wise. Q could transmit only to those willing to discern. Evelyn discerned. She “followed the white rabbit.”

By then she had been awake, a friend believes, for three days. There was just so much information. So many links. She got into her little red two-door Pontiac Fiero. It was older than she was. She’d been drinking—she’d later test at twice the limit—but that didn’t slow her. She had done her research. YouTube and tweets and podcasts. The algorithms fed her. She fed the algorithms, making memes. She’d text her findings to her friends. One tried to warn her: “You’re being used.”

Kyle Rittenhouse, the White seventeen-year-old who brought his gun to a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he killed two protesters, and whose original defense attorney declared Rittenhouse had fired the first shot of the “Second American Revolution.”