The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

This happened, he says, then: “They’re on a plane.” Present tense. “This is all happening.” Right now. It has the dream logic of a nursery rhyme. On the streets, in the air, dark shadows everywhere.

Sayhername,” the patriots will tweet, delighting in their twisting of a campaign created for Black women killed by police. It’s grotesque.

Her face disappears into the blaze of the flashlight’s glare. Police push her comrades back. “She needs fucking help!” the videographer screams. He is filming a policeman’s leg. Another voice says, “She’s gone!” Another shouts, “We gotta get EMS here”—oblivious to the fact that it is his presence, and that of the hundreds with him, the patriots—the rioters—the insurrectionists—who make that impossible.

His T-shirt featured the crossed butcher cleavers of the White nationalist American Guard (formerly known as the Soldiers of Odin), borrowed from Daniel Day-Lewis’s depiction of “Bill the Butcher” in Martin Scorsese’s The Gangs of New York—a “traditionalist” identity derived from Hollywood and Marvel Thor comics.

The Saviors had Antifa surrounded. Another Savior threw a punch. Bike cops observed. An Antifa protester took a swipe. Cops charged—at Antifa. An Antifa cried out.

“I suffered,” said Riley. “But I didn’t pay the price Ashli did.” He thought this was for a reason. “I’m like the guy from 300, right? I lived to be able to tell her story.”

They wanted to believe in what historian Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism, describes as an implicit “promise of Whiteness” offered to people of color willing to collaborate with White supremacy. This bait-and-switch—the promise of Whiteness is by definition unfulfillable—may be the next American contribution to fascism.

This time, White supremacy welcomes all. Or, at least, a sufficient veneer of “all” to reassure its more timid adherents that border walls and “Muslim bans” and “kung flu” and “Black crime” and “replacement theory” somehow do not add up to the dreaded r-word, which anyway these days, in the new authoritarian imagination, only happens in “reverse,” against White people.

They are drawn together by their love of “fairness,” which is how it used to be, they’re certain they remember, or, if they’re too young, they’ve been told.

Just as White people took the land from Indigenous people and then named themselves their victims, so, too, has Whiteness always been a means of claiming the suffering it inflicts on others as its own.

The simplest memes and saddest for those who actually cared for her, show a younger, less angry Ashli in her uniform, with say her name in block letters, the wrenching of that phrase from its Black context erased through repetition until her earnest partisans came to believe hers was, in a sense, the first murder of the revolution.

No longer would we be unlawfully taken or boarded, neither by taxes nor vaccines. But first we had to return to the beginning: our own. We learned how, by signing our birth certificates—government documents—our own mothers unwittingly condemned us to slavery. Yes, slavery. It all went back to the Fourteenth Amendment.

It was the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction, 1865–77—during which the federal government sought, unevenly, to enforce those equal protections—which is for the modern Right the root of “big government.”

The insurrectionists call such stories “research,” and believe each soul must google their own.

This is not true, but it reveals something about the construction of intellectual authority within the insurrectionist Right. It is based on a ragged democratization of knowledge, a protestant rejection of academic expertise, the idea that unmediated truth is available to us all through the invisible archive of chat groups and YouTube and Parler. That is, social media, the most mediated human interaction we have yet conceived.

Straight stopped to let the congregation imagine—or, as they believed, remember—this Eden. As history it was bunk, as politics, fascist kitsch. But as desire? Longing? The wish to be free, to live in the moment, unmediated, no more rent or mortgage, to enter the myth, the invisible archive, as the hero of your own story?

I spoke to a young woman named Madison, supervising a group of tween girls. She was a student at Chico State. She said a lot of what Straight taught went over her head, but “it gets you to think, for sure.” Like the news of Hillary Clinton being executed? “Yeah!” she said brightly. “It’s interesting!”

But what about the dead who don’t rise? Not Jesus, not Ashli—all those already gone, killed by Covid? “This will blow your mind,” Dave said. Covid was real and the dead were many, but there was a “good part”: the godless churches, the ones with crosses instead of swords, had closed their doors. “Clearing the field?” “Yeah!” The good part was that God had spoken: “an announcement that those who truly want to represent me, please stand up.” Dave, meanwhile, wanted to speak of trials and executions for those who don’t. This, too, he thought, was the good part: that now we knew who was standing, and who was not, and who, in the coming freedom, would dangle.

He added a dig at Dave: “this is not something that someone well-versed in Hebrew would say. It’s something that someone who maybe took a class or two in order to bolster their authority but doesn’t remember much and or doesn’t care what the Bible really says in its original languages would say.”

“The only good thing about a shotgun, that sound,” a clerk named Brian at Scorpius Tactical, supplier of fine militia gear, told me near Reno. His store specialized in custom AR-15s. A shotgun, he said, can no longer meet your self-defense needs.

“Just the projection,” said Brian. Of force. Good for sales. He said he could retrieve one of his own rifles—he had many—from his safe and establish three points of contact—shoulder, grip, trigger finger—in less than five seconds. “I’m prepared.” There were no zombies at the compound. Brian was in nursing school.

All the blond daughters of the Angel Families, the term used by the Right for those whose loved ones have been murdered by “illegals”; every cop ever killed even close to the line of duty (except at the Capitol); Vicki Weaver, shot to death at Ruby Ridge by an FBI sniper as she cradled her ten-month-old baby when the government came to take her husband, Randy, away for the simple act of selling two sawed-off shotguns to an informant with whom he’d discussed joining forces in the coming battle against a federal government he believed secretly controlled by Jews.

Three: a number to them not dispiriting but inspiring. If true it would mean 3 percent of a people can overthrow a regime. But it’s not true. A better estimate is that around 25 percent of the colonists participated in the revolution. What 3 percent can do, though—the tactics we typically describe as terrorism, violence in service of a meme—is frightening.

“No news,” he said. “The problem’s right there.” He gestured to the man beside me, lost in his phone. “We gave it all to those things, and we let our newspapers shrink till they’re almost nothing, and then we wonder why we don’t know anything.” Which is how, he said, speaking of Ashli and the collapse of which she was a symbol, you get to Washington, January 6–wise. “We did it to ourselves.”

He didn’t mind if I used his name. Tom Woodring, veteran, Air Force, the full twenty. His concern, he said, was the past. History. “Why,” he asked, “are they teaching the White kids that they’re the slave to the Black? That they shouldna been born?” The thought made him hot.

Stetson brim to brim with The Man’s Navy ballcap. “What about those guys that tore down that guy’s fence?” The Man looked confused. Tom shouted, “Got in his yard and him and his wife came with guns to chase them off”—Tom mimed aiming two pistols, one in each hand like a gunfighter—“and they went to jail, not the fucking convict!” “Around here?” I asked. The Man shrugged, as confused as I was. “Another state!” said Tom, embarrassed that he didn’t have the details. I made a guess: “St. Louis?” St. Louis, Tom agreed. Ah—the McCloskeys. Who did not go to jail. By “convict” Tom meant “Black protesters,” who he felt should have been imprisoned. Who were in the street, not the yard. But what about Ashli? Did she not cross that line?

“If I could have a selective machine gun”—The Man cradled an invisible one in his arms. Buda-buda-buda. “I’d a blasted every goddamn one of them to hell and back.”

So Byrd was exonerated not according to homicide law applicable to nearly every other shooting in the United States but rather a civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242, that would have required that the government prove Byrd “willfully” deprived Ashli of her constitutional rights, “with a bad purpose.” Short of a declaration from Byrd of murderous intent, this standard would make a conviction—of Byrd, or most other police officers charged with its violation—nearly impossible. Which was why the 2021 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act would have struck the word willfully from 18 U.S.C. § 242. But the same Republicans who asked, “Who killed Ashli Babbitt?” had no qualms about killing the George Floyd Act, an apparent contradiction that seems like evidence of hypocrisy only if you mistakenly believe that the question of who killed Ashli was ever meant to be answered.

The preacher spoke more about the weight of his jeans. “The weight of our lives.” The weight, he said, is anything that distracts us from God. His sovereignty. His authority. That was all that mattered, even more than his three boys. The “weight” that drags you down could be anything. “It may be a love.” Even for your children. “Lay it aside,” he rumbled. There is no saving this world.

But I hadn’t come to Shooters to meet Boebert. Her story was a stunted one: long gun, short bookshelf. I was here for the atmosphere. Dinner was a bust. They were winding down when I arrived after eight, and the only waitress remaining was an older Latinx woman who spoke limited English, which was surprising, since Boebert’s views on immigration and English were exactly what you’d imagine. She didn’t even carry a gun.

“Veterans, myself included, will rise up when the moment comes.” He’d had six months in the Army. What had he learned? “I was almost blown up.” I didn’t follow the lesson. It happened twice, in training. Mortars landed next to him. His mistake or the artillerist’s? Not the point. Here he perched, polishing off another fat plate from Shooters. The point was that he’d been in the shit, even if the shit was self-inflicted. The point was, he was prepared. “I’m indestructible,” he said. What ended his Army career? “Something like asthma.”

Militia? He smiled. “I’m not saying I’m not militia.” He would say he was a man of peace. The militia movement, he said, stands for “any rea sonable method to promote peace.” Like guns. He offered his favorite quotation: “ ‘People who know violence and are capable of violence are always the persons to pick peace.’ ” He didn’t know who said this.

We talked about my travels. Some of the people I’d met. “American personalities,” she said. She didn’t mean it cruelly. “They seem so . . . disoriented. They’re not—rooted anymore.”

Pastor Hank Kunneman, presiding, maybe the most militant of self-declared prophets on the national scene, who does not deny Covid-19 but celebrates it, who declares “this virus is the spirit of God,” who channels messages from Christ that Trump will return. When? Soon. He’s coming, sayeth the Lord. It might be Trump the man or Trump the idea, in another man’s skin, because prophecy never errs but its truth takes many forms.

“Drought, great heat, will be upon the land!” Pastor Hank cries. Yes, Lord, says the man beside me, as if grateful for this renaming of the sizzle outside as not “climate crisis” but confirmation of the divine. That’s how prophecy works. More diagnosis than prognosis. More description than soothsaying. It can be a means of deception or perception, or both at the same time.

When he started his church, he says, he asked the Lord to spare him “people like this”—he means the prim honkies—and says the Lord gave him a gift. “You know what it was?” They do—“Black people!” And the people, most of them White, exalt, over the Black people they believe God has given them.

An American question: “How do you know I don’t have a gun?” Open carry, concealed carry, a backpack, a trigger, made of metal or in the mind. How did Marquise know I didn’t have one? How did the cop who killed Ashli know that the woman climbing through the window was unarmed? One man wears ammunition strapped to his chest, beneath an American flag; another keeps it in his pocket. Ashli had a knife in hers. What are you packing?

Trouble has always already been present. That’s the fear I felt racing too fast under the skin of my left wrist. I left LORD OF HOSTS, drove out of sight, pulled into another mostly dead strip mall, and noticed I’d parked in front of a gun store. I put my hand on the little wooden box of Fiona’s ashes.

One of the last times we talked she said to tell them that yes, she was dying but by her bed she had a window. “I can see the dawn,” she said, winded, each sentence standing alone.

Will we save democracy, or lose it? Will the earth boil, or will we all drive electric cars? Are the dead gone, or do they live in our hearts forever? Such imaginations we have.

She spoke about that common problem of journalism, “parachuting in.” A reporter from the big city drops into a small town to collect color at the local diner. Why, I’d done it in Rifle. The opposite of such a practice is immersion, rooting yourself in one place, one story, for a duration. Parachuting, immersion—these are metaphors of the vertical. I was on the horizontal, cutting a line.

This isn’t that kind of story. The crisis kind. The kind in which the outcome is yet to be determined. It isn’t a “crisis,” January 6, any more than the fire and heat I’d been driving through all these miles. It’s a condition. Our condition. The one we share.

Ezekiel 37 talks about how he went to the valley of—” “Dry bones,” I say. I know it too. Can these bones live? A metaphor for faith where there is none.

We sit. We’re in it again: the “it” that doesn’t fit neatly. “I’ll ask you this question,” he says. “Who do you say God is?” I’m about to say, “I don’t.” But I’m looking out the window. “I’m looking at the clouds,” I tell him. “Not like ‘up in heaven.’ But—creation is beautiful. Even a parking lot—” Across the parking lot, behind the gas station, there’s a little yellow house. Really just a hut. Like lemon meringue pie, with a silver-gray roof. Nothing special, just a pretty little bit of color.

When pundits complained about the word, she vowed to say “lynching” herself every day. “FACTS!!!!!!!” she all-capped. “White liberals continue to support a party that tells them that they should regret being white.” She would never regret her color. “I live 15 min from Tijuana,” she tweeted often, furious with those who could not see what she believed she saw, the “atrocities” of the border, rape, murder, drugs, children drugged, raped and murdered. The wall was to her a romance. “FACTS FACTS FACTS,”

That is the great truth of our paranoia now: Not knowing. Not needing to. Not knowing as its own dim, dreaming certainty.

“It’s been wonderful.” Last words. Only, he didn’t say it like that. He died as so many of us will, short of breath. Three words, three sentences: “It’s. Been. Wonderful.” His eighty-three years. He felt privileged to be able to say goodbye. Not everybody gets to.

That year, five U.S. soldiers raped an Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. Then they killed her and set fire to her body, and killed her mother, her father, and her little sister. At the end of the year, Saddam Hussein was hanged.

It’s too late to turn back, to wind time in reverse, to climb down out of the window, to retreat back through the Capitol halls, and the tall grass, and the Trump years, back to the pony at the 7-Eleven and the Milky Way bar. Too late because it was already too late then. It always has been. We’ve got to go through it. The Whiteness, this stolen land. Into the smoky, copper-bright uncertain, reckoning with the haunted past, which is hard, learning to love the smoldering days ahead, which is harder.

I listened to their testimony, their graying voices, their account of the pressure building, thinking, This is the stress test of fascism. Trump, probing prodding, feeling for weak links. Will this bend? Will this one break?