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| Scenes from the "Undertow" (encore) |
January 18, 2024 |
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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 genuine 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."
(This is an edited version of a story that first ran in April 2023.)
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.
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