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Capitol Insurrection, January 6th 2021. Shared by OpenSiddur, under a Creative Commons By Attribution License
The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
April 27, 2023
In his latest book, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, Journalist Jeff Sharlet outlines a new era of martyrs and civil war.
Jeff Sharlet
The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War April 27, 2023
Journalist Jeff Sharlet outlines how those on the far right have manipulated the memory of slain Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt to become “a martyr of the revolution.” Yet the real Babbitt is almost unrecognizable from the symbol of white Christian womanhood she has become.

During a visit to an Omaha, Neb. church preparing for a holy war, Sharlet was threatened and forced off both church and public property at the point of a gun. He said the moment was pivotal for him as a writer and an American. When a church usher asks him, “How do you know I don’t have a gun?” Sharlet says this “has become the American question.”

Finally, Sharlet traces the signposts of fascism found in this new “age of martyrs” and offers a roadmap that may avert the “slow civil war.”

Jeff Sharlet, Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing and Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Journalist and New York Times best-selling author — most recently of The Undertow: A Slow Civil War from W. W. Norton & Company.


The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War" by Jeff Sharlet. W. W. Norton & Company
The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
W. W. Norton & Company





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