The Undertow Quotes

“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.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“The Solace of the surreal, the comfort of chaos, the great relief of all the "issues" falling away, like a body letting go, falling backward, into the Foreversville of conflict itself as the cause for which one fights. The topic—the border, guns, election "integrity," pedophiles—does not matter. Only the fight.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Where your anger comes from,' {Belafonte} says, ' is less important than what you do with it.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“American politics tends to produce a limited emotional range, mostly positive, peppered with indignation. But Trump scrawled across the spectrum: not just anger but rage; love and, yes, hate; fear, a political commonplace, and also vengeance. It didn’t feel political. Politicians have long borrowed from religion the passion and the righteousness, but no other major modern figure had channeled the tension that makes Scripture endure, the desire, the wanting that gives rise to the closest analogue to Trumpism: the prosperity gospel, the American religion of winning.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“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—”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Joe,” in Fountain Hills, was Sheriff Joe Arpaio, nationally known for the boiling-hot tent-city jails he joked about as concentration camps, his theory of sexual humiliation as a form of rehabilitation and his “saturation patrols” in Latinx neighborhoods in search of “illegals,” a practice that led to a 2013 federal court ruling against him for racial profiling and unlawful detention. Trump was particularly proud of his endorsement.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“The bartender did not try. He sighed and slapped another round of sickly sweet fireballs, shots of cinnamon whiskey, on the bar, glancing at a party including both Black and White people he hoped was out of earshot. He, like me, was White. We both rolled our eyes at Shawn’s racism rather than confronting it, which is to say we cowered in what is sometimes called White privilege.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“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...You can't fact check a myth.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Do I need to say none of this is true? Would it matter?”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“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 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.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Pepper spray blinds, but it has a way of clarifying the issues.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Movements are born from the problems of everyday lives, but they are not limited by them.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Walt Disney admired Mussolini and in 1938 quietly hosted Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, a month after Kristallnacht.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War