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'They're ready for executions': Author sounds alarm after interviewing 'ordinary' conservatives
March 30, 2023
Author Jeff Sharlet has spent years interviewing conservatives and found many unassuming Americans are ready and eager for violence against their political enemies.
Sharlet's latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is the result of more than a dozen years of reporting on the religious right, compiling numerous interviews conducted throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, and he's more worried than ever about the possibility of civil war, reported The Guardian.
"I’ve been writing about the right for a long time," he told the newspaper. "I’m always interested in the margins of things that tell us about what’s happening at the center. An undertow is a metaphor for that, for the force that’s been pulling us to this place for a long time. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought another civil war would be possible in the United States, I would have said no. But to think so [now] is to not understand that the right in America is as dangerous as it is."
He cited a "nice-looking" family he met near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who seemed like "ordinary" conservatives, as the newspaper described them, but harbored bloodthirsty fantasies rooted in extreme conservative politics.
READ MORE: Trump's new embrace of his 'bloody riot' is a 'huge mistake': conservative
"[The father said] he had a 'Let’s go Brandon' sticker because he didn’t want to swear around his son," Sharlet said. "They’re a middle-class dad and mom. They were always gun people, but not a lot of guns. Now they’re up to 36, now they are arming up. The father had always been anti-abortion. But now it was like a dream had moved into his and his wife’s mind. He described, in incredibly violent detail, the process of abortion. Then he described, in incredibly violent detail, the punishment he thought he and others were going to give to abortion doctors. They were ready for executions."
The current political moment was rooted in a decades-old struggle against fascism, and Sharlet said Donald Trump, intentionally or instinctively, used its "dream logic" to spellbind his followers, who fill in the unfinished thoughts in his pronouncements with their own beliefs -- and that creates the illusion that he's speaking their truth into existence.
"The free association that happens at Trump’s rallies, the ways people make connections that make no sense – it has dream logic," Sharlet said. "One minute, a scary man is crawling into the window to rape your wife, and then the next minute we’re laughing at windmills, and then the next minute we’re sad for the birds that were killed by windmills. And then, in the next minute, we’re yelling, 'Lock her up.'"
"This is dream logic, and there’s vanity in it, right?" Sharlet added. “'I will interpret what they’re saying and I will bend it.' It’s the vanity of the base, the vanity of the mob, the aggregate grotesque imagination of power. It becomes a spinning whirlpool that pulls more and more people in. These are people for whom reality is not enough."
The illusion that's created for Trump and his followers feels interactive and very real to them, Sharlet said, and that's where the twice-impeached former president gains his power.
"This is why the right feels they are more democratic than the left," he said. "The intellectual rightwingers are like, 'F*ck democracy, we don’t need it.' But the everyday people, they’re like, 'This is the most democratic I’ve ever felt. I am not only receiving – I receive, I interpret and then I transmit back.'"
Sharlet sees a similar dynamic at work within the anti-abortion movement, which the left sees as an effort to control women's bodies, but the right sees as a cause so righteous that violence is necessary.
"Yes, the project is misogynist to the core," he said. "But it is not experienced as such by many on the right. Once you make that move, that we’re talking about children, what kind of person are you if you don’t want to save that child?"
"It’s astonishing there hasn’t been more violence," Sharlet added. "I think we’ve had a shield from that violence for a long time and now that shield … I sound like Jerry Falwell saying the hand of God is being removed from America."
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Republicans are stepping up their war against Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg as he considers charges against Donald Trump.
House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has already called for committees to delve into Bragg's investigation of Trump's hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels, and GOP lawmakers are weighing subpoenas for the county prosecutor to testify about his probe, reported The Daily Beast.
“It is pretty clearly a wrongful persecution of a free American citizen who happens to be the former president of the United States,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) told the website. “Because of those circumstances, I think it’s appropriate for Congress to inquire into what drove that decision making process for Bragg."
Higgins suggested that Republicans would coordinate their timing on a potential Bragg subpoena with the former president's legal team to avoid interfering with their defense.
READ MORE: 'Crazy stuff': Morning Joe panelists burst out laughing at Trump's latest campaign riff
“[A subpoena] would be an interesting conversation amongst my colleagues,” he said, "[but] the appropriate timing of something like that should include consideration whether or not that case is moving towards permanent closure, and allow that to happen.”
However, other Republicans are pressing for a more extreme response to Bragg's grand jury investigation, which some of them have suggested is funded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
"It’s time to arrest Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for prosecutorial misconduct after hiding hundreds of pages of exculpatory evidence," said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. "Bragg is on the verge of indicting an innocent former President and top Presidential candidate against the opposing ruling party. Bragg is breaking the law and trying to incite civil unrest with his Soros funded political war. Hold him accountable!"
Republican senators don't have the power to go after Bragg as the minority party, and some House Republicans seem to think their pressure has already had an effect on Bragg's probe.
“But you know, [Bragg] seems like he’s kind of, you know, maybe, I don’t know, maybe backed off a little bit,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). “But we’ll have to see, we’ll see what he does.”
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According to a leading conservative columnist, Donald Trump's decision to try and make heroes out of the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 is a massive mistake that will likely doom his political future.
As the former president kicked his 2024 presidential bid into high gear with a rally in Waco last week, he also took part in making a recording with rioters currently in custody, thereby aligning himself even more tightly with them which will become fodder for his opponents -- both Republicans and Democrats.
Writing for Politico, National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry admitted Trump's embrace of what the conservative called a "bloody riot" is an epic miscalculation.
"From the perspective of the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6 it was hard enough to believe that Donald Trump would survive the event, let alone make it a plank in a powerful comeback bid just a few years later," he wrote before adding, "For Trump, a master at appropriating the catch lines and attacks of the other side, reversing the meaning of Jan. 6 would be his most audacious move yet."
READ MORE: 'Crazy stuff': Morning Joe panelists burst out laughing at Trump's latest campaign riff
Adding, "This is a huge mistake in every way, most importantly on the merits, but also on the politics," Lowry wrote that it shouldn't be surprising the former President is making it a central theme of his political comeback and that should be of concern too.
"Making excuses for or valorizing Jan. 6 is deeply wrong," he explained. and then added, "... justifying or excusing political violence has a deranging influence on the republic. The more reason both sides have to physically fear each other, the easier it is to justify extreme measures in response, in a widening gyre of escalation."
To a lesser degree, he added that, from a political perspective, it is a massive unforced error.
"If the other side is desperate to portray you as in bed with fanatics and rioters, it’s best not to go out of your way to prove them right. It’s perverse for Republicans that just as the Jan. 6 Committee has been put out of business and is no longer in a position to constantly remind the public of Jan. 6, here comes Donald Trump to remind people of Jan. 6," he explained. "What Trump is doing flies in the face of the lessons of the midterms. Jan. 6 lent emotional power to the Democratic argument that democracy was under threat, and Stop the Steal candidates proved radioactive. Trump wants, in effect, to repeat November 2022’s failed political experiment on a larger scale in 2024."
You can read more here.
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