Inside the MAGA black hole

Jeff Sharlet has spent the past few years embedded in the deepest corners of the growing far-right movement in the United States. He's come to think of it as a black hole, something that can pull people in with ever-shifting grievances and a desire for power. He chronicles the movement and the characters in it in his book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War and joins us to discuss the book and how he's thinking about its thesis in the context of the new Trump administration.

We also discuss some of Sharlet's more recent reporting on war churches in Idaho and Washington, and how things that were on the fringes of the movement five years ago are now squarely in the mainstream.

Sharlet is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing and Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is also the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, which was adapted into a Netflix documentary series, and This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers.

His reporting on LGBTQI+ rights around the world has received the National Magazine Award, the Molly Ivins Prize, and Outright International’s Outspoken Award. His writing and photography have appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, for which he is a contributing editor; The New York Times Magazine; GQ; Esquire; Harper’s Weekly; and VQR, for which he is an editor at large.

Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. I'm Chris Beem.

Cyanne Loyle
I'm Cyanne Loyle.

Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy. Works This week we are talking with Jeff Sherlet who is a journalist, a professor at Dartmouth and an author, he visited Penn State recently to talk with us about his most recent book, the undertow scenes from a slow Civil War, which is really a travelog in some ways, of all of Jeff's time going around the country, deep into various parts of the MAGA movement. He's really an old school journalist. In that way, it's really just him and his notebook setting out to talk to as many different people as he can find. And as you might expect, he has no shortage of stories to tell about the people that he met along the way. 

Cyanne Loyle
And I really like how it seems that Jeff started out the project trying to document the fringes, right? So, so these voices that that were less were less heard, were less amplified in different spaces. And there's something really telling about the way in which a lot of these kind of fringe opinions or fringe movements have now ascended, right? There are now central in the US power structure. And so I think he has interesting things to say about looking at the MAGA movement from both of those places, right? So both before the kind of rise to power or return to power of President Trump, but then also now, right, and thinking about where we are in the current movement, as many of these kind of opinions are no longer fringe opinions, right or fringe beliefs, but rather now central to our political process,

Chris Beem
Or at least they've been elevated to a position of power that very few people would have predicted even four years ago, let alone eight or 10 and and as they've gotten more powerful, it's also true that they've gotten more aggressive. I guess there's this, there's this undercurrent of violence in in the that's presented in the undertow with folks in when he went, went to go visit a church, he was greeted by two guys with, I don't know, automatic weapons. I don't know what kind, but that's not something you typically see at a church. And also, just, here it is, folks, I mean, there's going to be violence. You know, we've kind of gotten a little bit, we're getting used to talking about it, and we've talked about it so much that now it doesn't bother us, or even like, kind of seem like something that we want to try to avoid. It's just, well, this is going to happen and and not to mention the people who were fighting against a are out to destroy everything we love, and are against everything we love, and B, they deserve it. And so it is a, it is an, I think you said interesting, I was going to say arresting or terrifying, you know, change in terms of how we see all this, right? 

Cyanne Loyle
I think that's what one of the things that resonates so much with, with me, with this interview is, is, these are not marginalized opinions anymore, right? These, these are central governing beliefs. 

Chris Beem
And for, you know, for those of us who are inclined, and I guess I put myself in this group, inclined to read about the folks in the manosphere, and, you know, kind of roll my eyes and, you know, look upon the whole thing, you know, dismissively and derisively. You know, that's not that's a luxury that we no longer have. I mean, this is, this is real, and it's out there, and it's powerful.

Cyanne Loyle
It's one of the things I like so much about Sharlet reporting, right? Is I don't think he starts from the place of eye rolling. I think he starts from a place of genuinely trying to understand the grievances and the concerns of of some of these individuals and, and even, you know, what we'll hear in a little bit, him discuss attending, you know, the manosphere kind of convention and, and it sounds like, you know, he really is wrestling with this concept of, kind of men's rights. And you know the, you know the dehumanization right, the lack of of human rights for men in the United States and, and so both, he questions, kind of, how you can hold that belief, but he really tries to understand the belief, right? So where does it come from? And why are people thinking that? And kind of, how have we gotten to that moment and, and that's one of the things I think I appreciate so much about the care with which he tells these stories is the lack of eye rolling, the lack of dismissal.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and there's a fine line between empathy and sympathy that I think we'll get into in the interview as well, and that's also a big underpinning of Sharlet's work. So without further ado. Let's go now to the interview with Jeff Sharlet. 

Jenna Spinelle
Jeff Sharlet, welcome to democracy works. Thanks for joining us today. 

Jeff Sharlet
Hi, Jenna. Good to be with you. 

Jenna Spinelle
Lots to talk about your book the undertow, and some of the reporting and writing you've done since then, but you know you spent a good chunk of the last several years driving around, talking to people and organizations and groups that comprise the MAGA movement, or parts of it certainly. And you know, as I was thinking about it, they've had a pretty good couple of months here. This seems like they've gotten a lot of what they they wanted. Trump's back in office the January 6 folks are pardoned. Abortion is increasingly more difficult to get. People are being deported. You could go on and on down the line, and that's my you know, me is kind of an outsider looking in about their winning bigly, as Trump might say. But I wonder if they see it that way, or would see it that way as this has been kind of a successful period since Trump has come back into the presidency.

Jeff Sharlet
You know, my reporting tends to follow the people who who feel out of power. So actually, since since Trump comes back in, I've been spending more time with the rest of us. But that said, I the first person that comes to mind. I was in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, northern Idaho, which is very deep, deep red country, and I went to a brand new vegan restaurant. And veganism sort of hippies, and the food is delicious. And I get to talking. They're brand new, so there's nobody there. They're talking to the owner, and he has moved from California as part of this. We're moving to Idaho, and he's feeling good about how things are looking. And I saw like, oh, this vegan. This is a right wing vegan restaurant, talking to the waitresses. These two waitresses, and one woman says it feels like spring for the first time in my life, my American dream is finally becoming real. And this was a rhetorical formulation that, in my experience, real people don't actually use, but she was feeling so good about the moment, and not into any, you know, not policies and so on. She felt like she said, It's a feeling of becoming, we are becoming something, yeah, and I think that was a more articulate version of something. I've heard from a lot of people. They feel like they're coming up from underwater. They feel empowered these terms that we don't associate with the right and there's also a sense of Glee, which is is grotesque. I've encountered people who are, yeah, we're settling scores. A woman in what was a town central North Carolina, and she was very excited about the hangings she thinks are to come of the traitors, Democrats, I don't think we're there, but that was her, her optimism, as it were. Were bodies swinging.

Jenna Spinelle
And the fact that she feels comfortable saying that out loud, also, in and of itself, says something.

Jeff Sharlet
It's even I was about to say better. I mean, better in like a journey, it's like, holy moly, right? No, it's worse. This. She was a hotel clerk. I was checking into the hotel, and she was making small chat with, I guess, oh, you know, and that that just didn't seem to her. It was such a given where she was and the circles that she was in that a great crime had been committed, but that now it was gonna be punished, that justice was gonna be achieved. And

Jenna Spinelle
So you said that the woman who talked about becoming something right, like, what did you have a sense of like, what the goal was like? What would a fully realized Dream Vision? What have you look like, nevermind

Jeff Sharlet
My experience of the rank and file. I think MAGA overall is is a utopian movement. And I mean utopia, it's not my utopia, right to me, it's dystopian, but they understand it in that classic utopian like, we're going to create something that's never existed before. So even the again, I always think is a little bit misleading, because within the movement, the idea is to build an America that was always supposed to be but was never quite realized. They don't want to go back to 1955 they want 2025 to be a realization of something. And I think in the intellectual circles of MAGA, what's fascinating is they're really giving a lot of thought to what that Utopia might look like, and the everyday circles, maybe not so surprisingly, it's it really that over abused term of a vibe, right? A vibe of power? Yeah? Is, is, you know, it's almost as like, what's it going to be like? It's just going to be like, an electric current juicing me up all the time.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, yeah. You hear that utopian language, I think a lot from Steve Bannon. He maybe does as good job as anyone I've heard articulating that, or, yeah, putting, putting a more forward looking vision, as opposed to the, yeah, let's go back to the 50s or something like that. 

Jeff Sharlet
Yeah. And I think, I think it's, it's that's actually been, you know, the many, the many authors of the Democratic Party and democracy's failure to resist, this is caricature of MAGA. And I don't say that. And some people hear that and they say, oh, you know, I'm defending them. And no, I'm not. I'm not defending that guy. I I'm with the historians and scholars to say, Yes, this is the F word. Is correct here. This is a fascist movement. And as a fascist movement, in fact, we should pay attention fascist fascism, with its roots in Italian futurism. And it's kind of techno fantasies and and so on. And it's kind of fairy tale imagination of of of purity, the caricature, which is they just want to go back to 1955 the caricature that was so devastating that any journalist who was really out there reporting knew was false, was that this was a whites only movement. I do think it's a white supremacist movement, but I look there, I often cite a scholar named via Butler at the other pen, University of Pennsylvania, and a book called White evangelical racism. And she talks about, and she's a historian before this, of the black church, and she talks about what she calls the promise of whiteness, and the promise of whiteness. Whiteness as both a, you know, it is a constructed identity, but also as a political identity, such that non white people can imagine, can experience through MAGA that somehow they are reaping the benefits of this, and so then they become foot soldiers. And what has now, I think, inarguably, established itself the I think the last vestiges of centrist bickering is it really white supremacists have to be gone now with the erasures of history, we've seen the attacks on not just the eyes of policy, but on the very mention of Jackie Robinson or Harriet Tubman or MLK their erasure from the record.

Jenna Spinelle
And is, is another element here, the sort of ever shifting grievance, as I was sort of ticking through the list of wins air quotes, so to speak. You know, the governor of California, of all people, has shifted his position on trans kids in sports, right? And that you would think that that is when, but I suspect that there's going to be something else now, like there's, there's never, never enough, right? No matter what you get, there's still always more to be angry about, more ways that you have been wronged. 

Jeff Sharlet
Yeah, MAGA, too much. Never enough is definitely and I think also, I mean, we can just look at the history of MAGA to see, you know, the shifting enemy within. And again, this has been a failure of liberalism and the left and democracy and largest because we we take the categories of villainy that they describe, and then we sort of build these rigid structures of defense around that, like, Okay, we'll hit this other group instead. So if you go back to 2016 the number one target is the so called Muslim ban, right? That's not it anymore. Trump wasn't talking about trans people in 2016 In fact, there's a speech I'm trying to remember, if it's 22 or 2023 it's one of the first times when he mentions it. And there's a video of it. It's quite astonishing, because he gets this roar from the crowd, and you see him, you know, you see the lizard brain working like whoa. You like that, huh? You know, that's that'll work. I think the enemies within a fascism are cumulative, but none of them are end stage. There's always, there's always a new enemy. And, you know, I did some reporting in Russia in 2013 2014 when Putin was consolidating power via an anti LGBTQ crusade. And this was also not a given. In fact, Russia had been through a pretty steady march of liberalization on queer rights since the Soviet era. But he needed an enemy within, and it wasn't going to work in an, I mean, Russia, do they ever have an old school enemy within the Jews? Who is it the Jews? The Jews? And he, he would kind of and he could. Into the Chechens anymore, because he kind of crushed the Chechens. So it became queer folks. It's not that Russia suddenly solved the problem of anti semitism, or the ethnic Russians fell in love with Chechens, but they turned the focus right. And then onwards and onwards. I mean that keeping you know now Ukrainians are, in essence, an enemy within. So I think the grievance, the manufacture of an enemy within, is a kind of, I think a lot of MAGA experiences it as a thrilling process and, and I would almost even say, like the phrase that I find so fascinating, you know that we mock it. Now, do your own research, right? Do your own research which has embedded within it a kind of its own caricature, a caricature of democratization of knowledge. So that here we are sitting at a university, and we have access to libraries, and we have training and how to use the libraries, but now, now, everyday people can do their own research and find their own enemies, and they're not dependent for their defense on someone telling them who's dangerous or not. Why I Googled this myself, and I saw that the teacher and my kids, you know, fifth grade class, is actually a sinister villain. So I think right now, even though they're, they're in this sort of ascendant movement, I think we're going to see an acceleration of grievance, which is sort of counterintuitive, except unless you think, hey, it worked to get us here, right where we'll take us, right?

Jenna Spinelle
Let's talk a little bit more about the manosphere, so to speak. This is something that came onto a lot of people's radars in the most recent election, but you wrote about it in the undertow, and we're reporting on it even, maybe even before 2020 I don't know when exactly you that that reporting took place, but talk about the the people that that you met at that time.

Jeff Sharlet
I mean, the title of the undertow scenes from a slow Civil War. The title of the undertow is really to think because I've been, I've been on, you know, as a journalist, as a number of interests, but a kind of continuity throughout is always interested in Far Right movements, and always interested in Far Right movements. Partly, I oppose them politically, but also because, in my experience, they have always been more complex than the caricature, not nicer necessarily, but more complex. They are intellectuals. They are utopians. There are people with ideas, and there are people who will say, No, just listen. Let me explain. It'll all make sense. And it was in that spirit that in 2013 I went to a convention of something called men's rights activists, which was so fringe then, and they were using the term manosphere. Then they had outrageous claims that, you know, really, men are the oppressed class in society. Now, they were able to look at some real numbers. You know, there was, there was elements of their critique that the Andrea Dworkin actually would have recognized the male suicide working class men and wars and soldiers, all these kinds of things. But they would take those things and then, and then boil it all down to, I'm not going to say it on the radio, you know, fill in your misogynist sir, and you know, looking at those guys as fringe characters then, and how the undertow is sort of like there was a current out there on the edge. And I said I always was going to these far right groups, because they were more interesting. That was the first one. Their caricature was dumb, and they were dumber, you know? I mean, they really were, like, their caricature, like, well, actually, patriarchy is inverted. And then you would sit down with them, like, I should have killed my ex wife. Like, oh, there's nothing. There's no ideas here. There's just memes and trolling and joking, not joking, joking and not joking. And the undertow is, could that actually? Could the current actually pull that into the center? Absolutely.

Jenna Spinelle
And so I guess in a very dystopian version of this as what was the undertow 10 years ago, is now mainstream. Is there another Undertow behind that? That is, you know what? I guess, what's on the fringes now that we, you know, could be in the mainstream five or 10 years from now?

Jeff Sharlet
War church and this, couple of these in the undertow. I just attended one in Spokane, Washington a week ago, before last, and I think so I've been writing about varieties of religious conservatism and United States for a long time, and then the religious right, and I'm talking about politicized right, not feel it not only theological political, and there's that movement From a kind of a political right church to a fairly militant church. And it's almost, sort of like now, I almost sort of think you can divide the right wing of evangelicalism and a certain kind of Catholic right wing as well, between what I think of as sort of policy churches. They're instead of theology, they're doing politics, but they're wonky. They're still wonky, right? And then there's war churches. And so in the undertow, I write about one, the church of glad tidings, and Yuba City, California, not a big church until the pandemic, when it refused to close its doors. And so suddenly, Candace Owens and Michael Flynn and and all these MAGA influences are making their way there to speak on its stage. They had gotten rid of the cross because they thought it was that's that's good. They like the cross, but that's for peace time, and it's war time. The pulpit was made of swords. There's a viral video you may have seen that went around of them presenting General Michael Flynn with a customized AR 15 on on stage, which he says is going to go hunting in Washington. Less noticed was the fact that they also presented their pastor with a customized an AR 15, inscribed with Joshua one nine, which is considered a battle verse, right? So, war churches, war churches that have gone from you know, we're really going to contend aggressively in the public square to bodies are going to hang. It's going to be a war. Church of glad timings. Had militia training. Went to a church in Omaha, Nebraska, which was even more plugged in church. They had gunmen at the church. The pastor talked about them and celebrated them. He said, Thy rod and thy staff. What is thy rod? It's a gun. It's church in Spokane. People carry to church not in violation of the sacred space, but in their mind to honor the sacred space. You bring your gun to church to show how holy you are. Well, yeah, that's still fringe. That's still fringe.

Jenna Spinelle
How much does faith in God matter at these churches, or is church just, you know, something to call an association of people that you don't, I don't know what else you would call it. I Some of them would be comfortable with, with a militia or something like that. But I guess, yeah, how much does faith really play into these, these churches.

Jeff Sharlet
Profoundly. And you know, this is like my know it all list of mistakes of secularism is, is, you know, the idea that that's not real Christianity, you know, tell it to the Crusaders. Real. There are variety. You know, it's not the only Christianity. And it's not the great Christian witness of Martin Luther King or Dorothy Day. It's not even, you know, the steady, the steady Christian witness of a conservative evangelical like Russell Moore, but it is a Christianity. And in fact, one of the things, every time I go to one of these churches, I come away, and this happened Sunday before last in Spokane, just feeling, oh, we are so not ready for them, because I go to these churches and they are on fire and they're ecstatic. The music is great. It's usually pretty great. The imagination. They are white supremacist churches. That are very diverse, way more diverse than most. I go and I speak at liberal churches, and the truth is, it's mostly older white folks. They are filled with energy. And so where is the line between God and your gun? It's hard to draw that line right. And in fact, when you go to the gun store now, if you spend time in gun stores, there's a whole lot of gun manufacturers. You know, that was a customized AR at the Church of flat tidings. 

Jeff Sharlet
But if you want a gun with a Bible verse, it's not hard to find right now, and it's not hard to find, you know, various kinds of supplies of that stuff that are sort of saying, this is part of your Christian responsibility. There was a piece in The New York Times just the other day about the new what is it? They wanted to distinguish them from preppers. It's more mainstream than preppers, like prepared citizens. And I'm like, oh yeah, we could call that preppers. But you know, all these sort of everyday people taking this kind of commando training and one of the leading figures framing what he's doing as Christianity, like he's going to teach you, you know, how to sprint, drop and you know, fire 10 accurate rounds. And God is not a cover for that. That is the form of worship.

Jenna Spinelle
I'm curious how these more radical churches exist in the places in which they are. So in Spokane, in Coeur d'Alene, like, are they out at the Fall Festival with the table? Are they, you know, part, are they, part of the fabric of the civic life of the places, I guess.

Jeff Sharlet
Absolutely. I mean, well, in Coeur d'Alene, they are the civic life of the place. And Spokane, right, pretty much as well. But in blue cities, too. I mean, one of the, one of the stories in the undertow is a church in Miami and and an arts district of Miami, and it was the most hipster church I've ever been in. I originally reported on it for GQ MAGAzine. Oh, this is the guy who married Kim and Jim and Kanye, and he was Justin Bieber's pastor. Rich. He had a reality show. His name was rich, rich in faith. He'd come out of a fairly apolitical prosperity gospel, which is a God wants to be healthy and wealthy. And the way you can do this is by giving your pastor money, and you know, the fancier his car, those blessings are going to trickle down to you. It's like Reaganomics, but theologically. And you know, that's like a deep blue place. They're part of the civic life of that place, they were not they were when I was there, they were simmering toward politics. They had certainly detached a lot of hipsters. And this is where I see those kind of hipster church movements. They detach them from their kind of default liberalism, right. They don't go in that church, which was coming from a very it was denominationally Backed by a right wing denomination. But they, you know, go slow, bring people over, have fun music and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And they're absolutely part of the civic life and doing the ordinary things. You know, they doing outreach to the poor and all those kinds of things and and that's a form of normalizing, you know. I mean, even where I live in Vermont, we have an Evangelical Church is nowhere near as right wing as these churches, but it's so much further right than our community. And I mean, in some ways, through civic engagement, they're engaged, you know, they're they're advocating for what they show up, they do things. They do good marketing young families think, Hmm, now we have kids, maybe we should go to church. Hey, I saw a sign for that That looks fun. Let's go there.

Jenna Spinelle
So as we start to wrap things up here, we could keep talking about this stuff all day, but you know, the big question is, so what do we do about all this? I don't expect you to have the be all, end all answer, by any means. But I, you know, there's this idea that should we, you know, we've spent a lot of years calling Trump a fascist, and it hasn't worked, and it's maybe seen by a lot of people as, like a feature, not a bug, that we're, you know, calling him that. And so there needs to be a Democrats need to present a more positive vision of the future, or just a different vision that's counter to the MAGA one. Yeah, where, where do you come down on, on some of those things, or what from your years of being among this movement? What do you think is the best strategy for a counter movement? 

Jeff Sharlet
I mean, I think we're going to go through it. I don't think we're gonna and I'd be happy to be proved wrong. And before now, I wouldn't have said this, but you know, I'm part of a group of journalists and scholars who've been calling, calling the move right for a long time, and people are saying, Oh no, you're alarmist. And at a certain point I'm gonna say, Okay, I'm gonna trust and I'd always say, like, Well, yeah, maybe I am, maybe I'm and still maybe I am, but I think we're going to go through it. I don't think we're going to have a counter movement right now. I don't think we're ready. I think the left and the liberal liberals have constructed themselves over decades to engage in a kind of argument that doesn't work here, right? Because, just as you said, fascism is a bug or as a feature, not a bug. That for so long as you know, my colleagues in academia, left colleagues, liberal colleagues, invested in explaining how seemingly benign language might, in fact, stand in or even disguise ill governmental intentions. And so it's almost like a decoding sensibility, right? And, well, that doesn't work anymore when they're like, yeah, yeah, we're gonna send mask guys and we're gonna grab people off the street, and we don't care if you're citizens, and we're gonna put them in a hell hole. No decoding necessary, right? And and so I see this right now. I see the left and liberals sort of saying. 

Jeff Sharlet
Well, what we'll do is we'll use our powers on each other. We'll decode each other. We are not rising to the moment. We are not rising to the moment. I see little blips Cory Booker, that's good, but we're not rising the moment that said, so what do people do? I do think, and this is maybe pollyannish of me, I think almost all of us are doing more than we realize. We have to do so intentionally. We look at the assault on universities right now, and anyone who is following the right for a long time understood that universities had their head in the sands. They assumed that they somehow were above the fray. You go back to the old moral majority, majority. Jerry Falwell, they knew that universities were liberal Bastion enemy territory. They had to knock them down right now. They're making that very, very plain. So you work at a university, great. You're already doing democracy work, your volunteer your library. You're doing democracy work. You can say, well, obviously that's not enough, okay, but one step is to be intentional. You know, I go and I work at my food kitchen. It's not accidental that food kitchens all around the country are in trouble now because they're losing federal funding. So you go and you volunteer your food kitchen. I've always volunteered at my food kitchen. That's not political. The right thinks it is. The right thinks it is. And if you can be intentional about that and follow that intentionality in your local space, because we do not have a national movement for you to line up with, is my feeling. And if someone's out there saying, Oh, but I think this movement's Great, good, then do it. It's all hands on deck time is Popular Front time? Yeah, get ready. 

Jenna Spinelle
One final thing. So there's also a debate within democracy circles about how much to engage people on the right or people, if that's even the right way to still think about it, how to engage the MAGA movement more broadly, like, do you try to bring them in? Or do you that that is maybe the biggest argument in this field right now, is how much to engage?

Jeff Sharlet
Yeah, and then I mentioned Jerry Falwell and the universities, and the way I like to think of this is years ago. I was at a decades ago. Now, Congress is a very prominent Harvard scholar and sort of a liberal, liberal theologian. And he was talking about, you know, what? They just want to be heard. And he invited Jerry Falwell up to Harvard. And, you know, Jerry was really a nice man, and they had a they had a dialog, and it was great. The fucking arrogance, the fucking arrogance, yes, these right wing movements that have been there all along, they were just waiting to be invited to your party. Of course, not. Jerry Falwell went home and he did. It was a setup, and he knocked out of the park. He said, Yeah, I've been to Harvard. Not so great. I'm gonna build something better, Liberty University, right? So I do think there's the arrogance of saying, Oh, we have to reach out to them. That's imagining that we're the center. We're not. Where are the margins now, right? I also think it doesn't take seriously, oh, these people, if they just understood, there's a whole lot of people who understand what democracy is and reject it, they say no. 

Jeff Sharlet
And so if someone wants to go and have those arguments, and you it's a little bit like kind of old school evangelicalism, you know, save one soul, you save the world, right? That's nice building mass movements, I think has to do more with let's organizing folks, all the people who are sitting there saying, I want to do something, I don't know what to do. So wait. We're going to go and spend time talking to your MAGA neighbor, who is steeped in this stuff, and who isn't coming to this because they don't know they're coming to this because they spent all it's a feature, not a bug or someone is like, I was never really political before, but I'm alarmed by this, or I lost. I'm a postal carrier, and I'm worried, what do I do? That does seem to be very much the organizing principle. I'll close on this. There's an old Christian Right warlord named Chuck Colson, Nixon's Hatchet Man, famously went to prison where he was born again, and he wrote a bestseller called Born Again, right? And he came out, and he was a, he had been a rough guy for Nixon, but he came and now I'm born again. He was still the same rough guy. I spent a long time in his archives. He was a, he was a tough guy, but there's a letter, and I'm going to paraphrase it. Someone can go to the Wheaton College archives and get the precise letter, and he says, he says, I love dialog. I love dialog. I sit right where I am, and they always come to me. So let's not fall for that trap. Yeah,

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. Some of our listeners may very well go to that archive and find that letter. We'll also link to your books and your sub stack and the places that people can find your writing. Jeff Sharlet, thanks for joining us today.

Jeff Sharlet
Thank you. Jenna.

Cyanne Loyle
Well, Jenna, thanks for that fantastic interview. You know, as I was listening to it, one of the things that that struck me was actually a point that Candace watt Smith made on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, and that was this idea that, you know, just historically, we've always thought of Republicans as this, as pushing a very conservative agenda, but we've seen this really intense flip in just the last couple of years, where it's now the Democrats that are the Conservatives right, who are arguing to keep things the same right, to make sure that that liberal institutions stand and that our democracy functions the way it always has. Well, well, it's now the Republican Party that is pushing this much more radical agenda. I mean, one of the things that you know, it makes the radical liberal agenda, you know, whatever that is, you know, seem very tame in comparison to the changes that are now being advocated from the Republican Party. 

Cyanne Loyle
And it's one of the things that that strikes me, is this idea of of the MAGA movement as really amplifying a utopian vision right which, which is very different. You know, it's and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, Chris, but I think it's really different than a populist movement, than a pure populist movement, because when we think about a populist movement, we're also, we're often thinking about kind of these very clearly articulated grievances, this very clearly articulated other, right, this enemy that, that we can identify, but, but Sharlet really lays out a an ideology from the MAGA movement that is is much more versatile than that, right, much more agile in its flexibility. And the comparison to Franco's movement and selenium. And I think these are just, these are fabulous and fascinating comparisons about the way in which fascism really doesn't really is much more maneuverable as a political platform than just populism.

Chris Beem
Wow, that's, that's really interesting. And I think it's right, it, it's right in that you have this, you know, mish mash that is doesn't necessarily cohere, and coherence isn't even an objective. I mean, you, you know, I think is, was it Jeff, who's. Said it anyway. Somebody said it recently, where, you know, Trump will just throw out, I think it was about a trans people or about trans sports. But in any case, he got, he got a big reaction. He goes, Okay, that's in because if it's a big reaction,

Cyanne Loyle

And this is the part that that I think is different than populism, right? So I wasn't even until I was listening to Jeff that I remembered, like, Where have Muslims gone? Right in in this narrative, right? I mean, we've stopped talking about Muslim bans. I mean, this is just no longer the enemy. And so to the extent that the enemy can really be anything that you want to draw upon to maintain power, it's, it is less of an ideology, because ideologies have an underpinning, right? They have a logical kind of background to them. But if we can switch from Muslims to transports or just trans people in general, because that then becomes an easier leveraging point or a more marginalized community, it feels less ideological to me somehow.

Chris Beem
I would argue that DOGE and the, you know, unitary executive are are understood to be necessary means to help us restore the America that we used to have, rather than anything that really articulates, you know, what, what kind of vision they have for the world, right? Or for the United States they, you know, if it were Biden or Obama, no one will be talking about nobody, no MAGA person would be talking about the unitary executive, right? I mean, you think that's right, don't you?

Cyanne Loyle
I mean, that's a, that's a great question. So, because this goes back to my point, my concern about a lack of of real ideology, right? Because I don't, I don't know that there's much, and I think we, I think we need to distinguish between, you know, Project 2025, and the MAGA movement too, right? So I do think that there are, I don't want to, should I say, well reasoned. There are well reasoned, intelligent people that are articulating an alternative plan of governance, right? And and that may not, that is not a direct concentric circle overlap with many of the people that that Jeff is interviewing from the MAGA movement, right? There are two different things true. And so I think, I think potentially, we're kind of talking about different things. But the distinction that I think was most relevant for me is that it's not just nostalgic, it's not just populist. 

Cyanne Loyle
There is a future vision that's being articulated, maybe not futuristic, and that, to me, is what smacks so clearly a fascism, right, like it's, it's, it's not just about taking things back to the way they were. It was a it's about needing to reconstruct society, to make us weather it better, into the future, right? Whatever these new changes are, you know, we're not, we're not going back to manufacturing, right? We're pushing an AI agenda. We're investing in super computers, right? There is a look to the future in some of these policies, you know, albeit misguided as we, as we undermine all of those structures at in university, in higher education, universities, but, but still, right? I mean, I think there's, there's a vision for that. 

Cyanne Loyle
One of the the things that Jeff talks about is, what's the new fringe, right? So, if MAGA isn't fringe anymore, what's the new fringe? And he does a deep dive for us on war church. And this was just such a fascinating area for me to start wrapping my head around. And I'm sure you've got some stuff to say, Chris too, about whether or not Christianity and radical violence of this level is fundamentally incommensurate, or do we see a lot of overlaps, right?

Chris Beem
Yeah. I mean, you know, I, I actually talked to Jeff after about this, and then it was reflected in his podcast too, that that he thinks that, you know, this is not a version of Christianity, that that I or he would, you know, advance or or like, but it is Christianity, and I don't think that's true. And I'm not making that argument in a normative sense. I'm not saying it's wrong. It's, you know, Jesus doesn't like it. That's not what I'm saying, at least not exactly. I'm saying that there that words have to mean something right. Concepts can't include everything. And you know? And I went and looked up what, what the Nazis did with Christianity in in Germany, and they called it positive Christianity, and they basically drained it of anything that really was Christian about it, right? And, and I just, and so I don't think you're going to get a lot of argument, you know, from anybody who who understands what Christianity is, to say that positive Christianity understood. Time in the Nazi framework was not Christianity, was not really Christianity. And I think you can do this for just about any concept, right? You can just say, well, it has to mean something, and if it means something, that means there are some things that are ruled out and so, and I think that's the same thing with war Christianity.

Cyanne Loyle
Well, I wanted to move over to talk a little bit about Jeff's thoughts, about how we move forward in the current moment. I was really struck by his his comment that we just have to go through it. In some ways, it's one of the least optimistic takes we've heard around here, and we can be pretty unoptimistic at times. I heard it as a pretty strong dismissal for any sort of organization of a counter movement, or kind of where we are in terms of kind of pushing back against some of the less, less democratic tendencies of the current administration.

Chris Beem
He that the Democrats have, you know, pretty much failed to live up to the moment at this point, but, but what he was talking about was, what do all of us do? What do regular citizens do? And there, I think he there. I thought it was more hopeful and more, you know, standing up and recognizing the ways in which you're already standing up.

Cyanne Loyle
You know, the other thing, Jenna, I really liked your question about reaching out to people on kind of both sides of the aisle and trying to form these inclusive dialogs. And I and I thought, you know, Jeff had some really interesting pushbacks to how we often frame that, because the idea of kind of letting them come to us, or coming to them, depending on how you word that is, is assuming a place of centrality right, that that you are in the right. And I think that really is something that that Jeff's book puts into question. I mean, if we have, I mean, if MAGA is now a centralized ideology in power, the question is whether or not they're going to reach out to liberal Democrats, and, you know, want to talk to them and hear kind of what they think and why they think that. But I think it really pushed me to critically think about what I mean by dialog and how important that is and and whether or not that is important.

Chris Beem
And what are the necessary? And you know, heretofore assume prerequisites to dialog right? What has to be there in order for dialog to be meaningful, let alone productive. And you know, how much can, how much of the, how many of those presumptions can you rely on when you're talking to two guys who have, you know, automatic weapons on the shoulder and who consider you to be evil, right? I mean, his argument is that he calls it arrogance. I don't know if I would call it arrogance. I would say these were assumptions that were valid 20 years ago, more or less, and which are kind of in the Democratic DNA, if you if you can't assume that we're going to argue in good faith and we're going to affirm the the, you know, the status of the person we're arguing with, well then we're not going to get very far, but most of us do presume that,

Cyanne Loyle
And so. So I think that I like that call Chris of a call to to more, to just being more maybe strategic is, is too strong a word, but just more thoughtful in how to build a more cohesive movement and really thinking through who's who's open to. To hear alternative viewpoints, yeah, and change their opinions. 

Chris Beem
I mean, there's something to be said for sticking up for dialog, even when it doesn't work. But you know, you know, there are opportunity costs. You know, when you see this stuff on tick tock or on on YouTube or Twitter, whether it's just people yelling at each other, you know, this is accomplishing and it's just kind of ugly. It's not just unproductive, but it's ugly, yeah, and I think you see that among I think there was just something in the New York Times today about talking to people who said, you know, I mean, I'm absolutely convinced that that these things are problems, you know, waste and inefficiency in the government. But I'm not wild about the way these are going about that he's going about this, yeah, anyway, well, I mean, it's, it's very clear that. I mean, first of all, Jeff Sharlet is a terrific writer, just wonderful to read, and it's his book and his sub stack are worth your attention. He's also an extremely decent person who's doing his best to understand, and there's no doubt that that in the moment we find ourselves that's that's a necessary right, not only a good thing, it's necessary so and really modeling and modeling these forms of dialog that we've been calling for, right? Truly listening and engaging and kind of being in the spaces where alternative viewpoints are being voiced absolutely.

Chris Beem
So on that, you know, for us, pretty positive note, I'm Chris Beem.

Cyanne Loyle
And I'm Cyanne Loyle. Thanks for listening.

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