The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

I pictured myself pulled by the undertow into deep water, jagged with needles and knives and razors and broken glass—like that of the window through which Ashli Babbitt, a subject of this book’s title essay, attempted to climb when she invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Babbitt, shot for her trouble, was a fool who pursued her own death. And yet, many of us might say the same of ourselves. The peril in which the country finds itself now is not natural; it is in the broadest sense of our own American making.

This book of stories of difficult people doing terrible things is a register also of grief and its distortions, how loss sometimes curdles into fury and hate, or denial, or delusion. Especially delusion.

He had no idea how he’d make a living, couldn’t foresee Calypso or all the awards, the stages he’d make his own that no African American had stepped on before without a broom.

“Well,” said Shawn, grinning as he wound up what he considered a zinger, “she sucks the president’s cock, don’t she?” It was the essence of Trump’s rhetorical style: vulgarity masquerading as candor. That the accusation made no sense only made it, in Trumpian terms, more “perfect,” since, lacking any appeal to logic, it could not be rebutted.

One of the evangelists, satisfied, broke off and drifted outside. His name was Brandon, and he looked like an even better-tanned version of Pastor Rich, wearing a black baseball hat that read “Almighty” in white cursive script. He was a DJ, he said, and a traveler, but mostly, he explained, a follower of Christ. He leaned on his car, a gray Mercedes E550 convertible with a cross made of straw hanging from the rearview mirror. “Nice car,” I said. Brandon stepped back and admired it. “I am so blessed, man,” he said. “God gave me a Mercedes.”

A red-pill moment, explained one men’s rights activist (MRA), “is the day you decide nothing looks the same.” It’s what the movement calls the born-again experience of opening your eyes to women’s Matrix-like control of the modern world.2 For a young MRA named Max von Holtzendorff, the red-pill moment was being accused of sexual harassment by a coworker to whom he proposed sex, “being blunt and forthright, because it seemed the best way to ensure consent.” For Jim Strohmeyer, a former professor, it was “six months in a box” after what he said was a false accusation of domestic violence. For Gunther Schadow, an MD/PhD, it was a “meta-study” on domestic violence that inspired him to seed a foundation with half a million dollars with which he hoped to overturn the Violence Against Women Act. For Dan Moore, whose MRA name was “Factory,” the red pill was a revelation in stages. First, he said, his wife cheated on him. Then she wanted him to know it. “She’d laugh at me.” His low point: lying on the floor in a fetal curl while she stood over him, mocking him. He said she had a butcher knife in her hand. (She denied this. All of it.)

“Women gone insane with the power of the pussy pass,” was how Elam described the movement’s raison d’être in an essay called “When Is It OK to Punch Your Wife?” It was another one of his “provocations.” Elam is White, and frequently complained about what he views as the disparagement of White men in popular culture, but he identified with Malcolm X; he believed he needed to shock society to be heard. He said his talk of “the business end of a right hook” and women who are “freaking begging” to be raped, was simply his version of Malcolm’s “by any means necessary.” To wit: Elam’s proposal to make October “Bash a Violent Bitch Month,” in which men take the women who abuse them “by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.”

On the second floor of the Bruce there was a mostly empty meeting hall, robin’s-egg-blue walls beneath a low-paneled ceiling, three brass seagulls next to an unused bar, and, at the back, selling swag, the women of the men’s rights movement. Not girlfriends or wives. They were the Honey Badgers, their name taken from a viral YouTube video of the actual creature, a ferocious, skunk-backed African weasel, shrugging off first a swarm of bees then the bite of a cobra in the pursuit of its prey. “Honey badger don’t give a shit,” says the voiceover. Such is the slogan of the Honey Badgers, who do not give a shit for the opinions of other women and their “mangina” friends.

Jessica Kenney, a doe-eyed young mom with lyrics from a metal band called Incubus tattooed beneath her right bicep, said her red-pill moment was giving birth to a boy. She began to do research. About his future. She found it in YouTube videos. This was late at night, behind the desk of a Holiday Inn Express in upstate New York. Kenney had an MBA from Syracuse, but she’d always worked jobs like this. Right now she was working two. “I used to be girl power,” she said, but then she took the red pill. Late at night, behind the desk, one video leading to another. Testimonies, analyses, stats and facts. Revelations.

“If a woman puts a gun to a man’s head,” she said, explaining the rapist-in-the-bushes threat I could face as I walked to my car that evening—“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’s happening right now, insisted the Badgers. A Badger named Kristal Garcia told me that “in Africa,” there are “female gang-rapers” who drive around in vans, abducting men; and in Nigeria, said Kenney, a man was raped to death by six wives. “And wait,” said Edwards, “do we wanna mention there’s that woman who has AIDS in Africa and she’s just having sex with a bunch of men? Giving them AIDS?”

I wanted to ask why all their examples came from Africa, but they left no room for questions. They said they would send me studies. Science. A whole bottle of red pills. I wrote down my email with a shaky hand. “We are giving off a lot of information,” Edwards acknowledged. “It can be overwhelming.”

Kenney nodded, in agreement not with Calabrese’s assertion about age but with his intimation that sometimes receiving child pornography might not be the recipient’s fault. “There is a culture of girls who are just freely distributing pictures of themselves online. I don’t think they understand what that means for somebody else.”

Calabrese did not brag. Not really. “I’m easily googleable,” he said. He was: Albert J. Calabrese Jr., a former substitute teacher in Akron, Ohio, arrested for felony sexual misconduct with a minor. “My chick wasn’t a student,” he claimed, by which he means not his student. “She asked me out.” He thought it would help his case if the police knew she was more “experienced” than he was. “I was remarkably naïve.” He said he didn’t know he had a right to remain silent. He’d never watched a cop show. Such programs, he said, “are emotionally frustrating to me.” He said he didn’t want to hurt anyone. That a child would be hurt by an adult’s exploitation did not seem to occur to him. His desires, he believed, were a matter of masculine dignity.

Before she could respond, he pulled her in, pulled her up out of her chair, pulled her against his chest, and held her there, rubbing her back—an embrace Ellen would later describe as “the most unconsensual hug I have ever known.”

Sage loosened his grip. “I apologize for dragging you away. I wasn’t going to feel OK until I talked to you.” But he didn’t want her to worry about him—he had a lot of women, he said, running through a list of those he’d spurned. He seemed to mean this as a reassurance: Only “desperate” men, “vulnerable” men, rape, he said, and Sage was neither. 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.

The night wound on, with discussion of rape and “envelopment,” a term for the smothering of penises, and more about the narcissism of young girls. A sore point for Factory, who had two daughters. Like young women everywhere, he said, they competed for the most extravagant rape claim. It was, he said, a status thing. When one of his daughters came home one night and told him she’d been raped, he said he asked her, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Sitting with us, he hiked his voice up to a falsetto in imitation of his child: “ ‘Oh, I just got raped’ ” He laughed. There was a moment of silence. Bridge too far? “I told her if she pressed charges, I’d disown her.”

When we returned to the room, Elam and Factory began to “tease” Ellen. “Your last line,” Elam told me, looking at her, “should be, ‘Then we got the munchies, and Paul said, Bitch, go get me a sandwich.’ ” He was joking. More satire. He would never ask a bitch to make him a sandwich. But seriously, he said. Seriously.

The OK sign—thumb meeting index finger, three fingers splayed—has become a symbol of White power. It began as a joke; or rather, a “joke,” in scare quotes, ironic White power, a “hoax” meant to trick liberals into believing that the raised fingers actually represent the letters W.P. The joke worked so well that it became real. Now, in certain circles, OK does mean White power—unless you say it doesn’t.

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.

Through a season of Trump rallies across the country, I spoke with dozens of Trump supporters who believed that the Democratic establishment primarily serves as a cover for child sex trafficking. Some were familiar with QAnon, the name claimed by believers in a host of conspiracy theories centered on an alleged “deep state” coup against Trump, and his supposedly ingenious countermeasures, referred to as the coming “Storm,” or “Great Awakening.” Most were not. It was, they told me, simply known. “Perverts and murderers,” said a woman in Bossier City. A youth pastor promised me that Trump knew the names of all the guilty parties and was preparing their just deserts. The president himself, in speech after speech, intimated that Judgment Day was coming. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, he spoke of “illegals” hacking and raping and bludgeoning, “relentlessly beating a wonderful, beautiful high school teenager to death with a baseball bat and chopping the body apart with a machete.” And that, he added, was only what he could reveal. There was more, he said, much, much more. Believe me.

Such is the intimacy of Trumpism: innuendo and intimation, wink and revelation. Jones got it.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I called them up.” He was not just a believer in the Trumpocene’s conspiracy theories, he was a soldier on their behalf, convicted in a deep-state court of law. On December 4, 2016, a man traveled from North Carolina to a Washington, DC, pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong, the basement of which, according to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, was the heart of a Democratic child-sex-trafficking ring. The man was there to save the children, which he attempted to do by opening fire with an AR-15. Inspired, Jones decided to do his part. 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.

This is what amazed him now: Caller ID. “They didn’t even have a recording!” After spending forty days and forty nights in jail, he said (thirty-three, actually), Jones decided to plead guilty to one count of interstate threatening communications. 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, because at least what I’m pleading guilty to is good. Even my preacher said that. He said, ‘You did a good thing.’ ”

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.

In Bossier City, the line wound through a parking lot, a sluggish serpent that moved only in hiccups and burps. Nobody seemed to mind. Two young women in front of me, who had taken off work to travel from Arkansas in bedazzled red-white-and-blue Trump gear, passed the time bragging about their firsthand knowledge of the Clintons. They held my place so I could take a snapshot of a man who wore a T-shirt depicting Bill and Hillary—him with a handgun, her, leather-gloved, flexing a garrote—over the words clintons: they can’t suicide us all. “They say,” confided one of the women, “that the Clintons may have suicided my uncle.” He had been a prominent conservative lawyer in their town, and he had died at a restaurant, choking on steak. Or had he? They called such killings—caused by the Clintons, for reasons upon which one could only speculate—“Arkan-cide.”

In 2016, the mood at Trump’s rallies was electric but heavy, a mix of dread and ecstasy, anger and the possibility of “winning”—winning so much, Trump promised, that we would get tired of winning. Since then he had won; and won and won and won. The energy now was victorious, and even darker. Not potential but kinetic, synchronized. “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.

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.”

“#Sayhername,” the patriots will tweet, delighting in their twisting of a campaign created for Black women killed by police. It’s grotesque. But the dead are the dead, no matter what they died doing, so, yes, her name: Ashli Babbitt. She was not a hashtag. When she was a girl in rural Lakeside, California, she’d ride her horse to the 7-Eleven. She was a fast talker, a scrapper. “She just did boy things,” her brother Roger will say. Her nickname on her high school water polo team was “The Enforcer.” She joined the Air Force at seventeen. Two wars, eight deployments, fourteen years. Her favorite movie was The Big Lebowski. Her thing was the shaka, the “hang loose” hand symbol, extended thumb and pinky. She did not climb the ranks, but she did marry, and then divorce, and in between she voted for Barack Obama, and she fell in love with a Marine named Aaron Babbitt. There was some trouble with his ex, who in 2016 claimed Ashli rammed her car three times, but Ashli was acquitted and anyway, maybe love is like that sometimes, at least for Ashli in 2016, since that was when she fell hard for Donald J. Trump. “#Love,” she wrote beside his name that Halloween, in the first of more than 8,000 tweets. “She was all in,” says Aaron Babbitt, who did not share her devotion.4 She believed the election was stolen. She believed Trump was “one of gods [sic] greatest warriors.” She thought she’d be his “boots on the ground.” She wanted to be “the storm.” She had a husband and together they ha...

Here’s some magic: White woman breaks into a building and tries to crawl through a smashed-out window and gets killed—and then lives forever.

It’s satisfying when an expert flattens a false claim. That’s how so many of us believe we’ll resist the undertow of civil war, fact-checking our way back to solid ground. But much like the cross for Pastor Dave, such corrections miss the point. You can’t fact-check a myth.

Marquise nods. “Well. You can do that.” Except, he means, we can’t. “But you’re conducting interviews on the church’s ground.” It’s a parking lot. But I stay silent. “So that’s different,” concludes Marquise. He says if we were talking about “today’s game,” it would be one thing. But he senses we’re talking about God. And on this land, that topic belongs to Pastor Hank and his shepherds, with their rods and their staffs. He smiles. “There’s a proper way to do things.”

There was a photograph of her outside the Capitol that morning, flashing her “hang loose” sign. She had a motto, “Hydrate and Press On.” She pressed on through a door kicked in moments before, after a Proud Boy used a stolen police shield to smash a window. Surging toward another set of doors that wouldn’t open. Veering left, down a hall, the flow gathering force, until she crashed up against the doors through which she had to pass, if she were to save the children, or love her president, or defeat the mask, or get out of debt, or prove her mettle, her moxie, her all-American badassery. Hang loose. She wasn’t charging, she was riding a wave. Surfing the current. Guns, God, what-have-you.

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

I’d been driving for a week, since the first night of the January 6 congressional hearings, listening to them on the radio as I counted the flags. Not the American ones but the Trump ones. Trump 2024, two years ahead of time; and the red, white, and blue of the Confederacy, the yellow Don’t-Tread-on-Me Gadsden. There are so many now. And there’s a new folk art in the land: hand-painted “Fuck Biden” placards, homemade “Let’s Go Brandon” billboards and homespun “Never Forget Benghazi” banners. The cities and towns still ripple with rainbow pride, and their numbers are greater, but on many country roads the ugly emblems tick by like the miles.

In Ashippun, Wisconsin, I pulled over for a display of American flags and a yard sign, rebecca for governor. That meant Rebecca Kleefisch, a GOP candidate, the “moderate” who merely agreed with another politician’s declaration that pregnant rape victims should “turn lemons into lemonade” by bearing a rapist’s child. In the minds of the abortion abolitionists—those who would outlaw it in every instance—it’s a matter of finding beauty even within suffering. To Peggy Morrisey, who’d put up the sign, it was the liberals she said drove by and yelled foul things at her flags who brought ugliness into this world. There is so much ugliness, said Peggy. They shouted even when her daughter was in the yard. As a mother, Peggy feared that the ugliness was growing. Getting closer. Milwaukee, Madison, cities threatening her immaculate lawn. Ugliness, everywhere. “Education,” she said, by which she meant indoctrination. “The border,” she said, by which she meant—we were close to Canada—the other one, 1,500 miles south, across which, she said, “they waltz.” I didn’t ask who “they” were.

In How, Wisconsin, I broke my rule of never approaching a house hidden from the road if it advertises itself with Trump flags, which is why I found myself backing up, very slowly, before two barrel-chested barking black Labs. Their owner was Jerry Pinchart, a fit former contractor with white hair and skin almost exactly the same color as his salmon T-shirt. It was the afternoon of Dobbs, which Jerry told me was good news but also bad. Good for God, bad for the nation, which now faces “chaos.” He was a proud no-exceptions man. Rape, incest—God let it happen for reason. Life of the mother? No, sir. That’s up to God. Prayer was all the medicine a mother needs.

Not a word Jerry said was fully his own. I’d been listening to Fox, to right-wing radio, as I drove, and I’d already heard variations of every syllable he uttered. Jerry followed the news. That was the word for it: he followed. He was a follower. He had not been a good student as a boy, he said. But now he had learned his lesson. The lesson was fear, the lesson was bitter, the lesson was that other people were getting more than their fair share. That grievance flowed naturally for him from his feelings about baby killers—as if women, by getting to choose, were getting more than their fair share too. He fretted about the Menominee Reservation, two miles away from the country home to which he’d retreated from Green Bay, because, he said, the city had grown “too risky.” Not just due to crime but to those he claimed would barely allow a White man to speak anymore. The Menominee, though, were worse in his view. “A lot of them I believe are the type of people who want what you and I have. And they’re willing to take it.”

What you and I have. He didn’t ask whether my politics were like his. The latter to him was implied by what he observed, correctly, as the Whiteness we had in common.

“It’s coming,” he said, of war. With the Menominee? The Democrats? The aborters? The name of the enemy didn’t matter, just that it existed. Jerry was prepared. “We are”—he p...

Wayne was younger, bigger, and bushier, one of Brian’s employees. He settled down in one chair while Brian took the other, vacated for him by the old woman. She stood. The story was secondhand to Wayne, too, but he thought it such a good one he told it as if it was his: “You know how it is—twenty-four-, twenty-five-year-old little smartass girl.” He did his own imitation, same fluttering fingers. “ ‘Y’all keep your hands of my body, my body, my body!’ ” Wayne’s clever friend had said, “ ‘It’s just you’re out runnin’ around and you spread your legs for every gentleman round, and chance of you getting pregnant is very high whether or not you use protection.’

He worried about what’s going to happen when the Second Amendment falls, which he viewed as likely, perhaps soon, and the government comes for their arms. “We have a gun in the truck and guns in the house and the kids know how to use them,” he explained. Mom and Dad owned roughly thirty-five between them. Dad was thirty-six years old. The older he got, he said, the angrier he became about abortion. He said it’s the second most important issue—after guns. He spoke of a singular picture he couldn’t get out of his mind, although there seemed to be many. Government knocking on his door, demanding his weapons, and the question that haunted him of what he’ll do then (“I won’t be handing them in, that’s for sure”); and boys dressed as girls and girls dressed as boys and furries—“kids who identify as animals”—and litter boxes for such creatures in schools, which don’t exist but had become a piece of permanent fascist folklore since a clip of a Nebraska state lawmaker lamenting the practice went viral. (“How is this sanitary?” the legislator demanded.) But the worst picture—the killing picture—was of an abortion. An imaginary one. “When I picture these doctors, sticking wires in their—crap—and—literally cutting their arms off, so they bleed to death?” He spoke with White-man vocal fry: “Killing the chunks? Throwing them in a garbage can?” And White-man fury: “I tell you what. Put that doctor in front of me—I’ll do the same to him.”

Glock under the left arm. Two flags and on the porch inside, a Confederate windsock. What was I doing on his lawn? I explained my mission. I asked for his name. “Just a guy,” he said. An Average Guy. One with another gun in his right pocket, a tiny .380 that almost fit in his palm. One you could see, one you couldn’t. He was a city man, Milwaukeean, native-born. Nothing to do with Confederate anything, he said of the red flag, which belonged to his stepson. heritage not hate, it read, though in the dank heat only the latter word could be seen. He recited the right-wing rosary—borders, crime, stolen elections, stealing our guns, “our” guns—and added his own variation to my growing toxic bouquet of reproductive disinformation: man traps. The dark marriage plot. Abortion as “birth control,” he thought, allowed women too much leverage. He pitched his voice high: “ ‘I got pregnant because I wanted this guy to marry me’ ”—so many men I met discussed abortion by imitating voices they considered feminine—“ ‘and now he’s found out I’m pregnant and he doesn’t want to marry me. So I’m going to have an abortion done. Until the next guy comes along that I can maybe chicken into marrying me because I’ll get pregnant with his baby.’ ”