The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

“#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...