Civil War Is "on the Table": Jeff Sharlet on the Martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt and What's to Come

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/jeff-sharlet-on-the-martyrdom-of-ashli-babbitt-and-whats-to-come

No paywall
https://archive.ph/z7ThE

*snip*

Vanity Fair: As somebody on the front lines of [the far-right movement], how frightening to you is the prospect of civil war?

Jeff Sharlet: Scarier than it’s ever been. I mean, the young son of a friend, when I stopped on the way to meet a militia commander, says, “Why would you talk to a Nazi?” It’s kind of a good, sensible question. But I think I’m driven by a certain counterphobia. Ten years ago the idea of civil war in the United States was absurd. I still think it’s not inevitable or maybe even likely, but it’s definitely on the table and there’s definitely people preparing for it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, almost a little more comfortable to go and see it. Until you get too close! There’s the church I mentioned in Omaha. When they saw that I was speaking to some of the members of the church, a man in full tactical gear, armed, came out with a church usher, and the church usher says, “You’re not allowed to talk to our members.” [I said], “You don’t actually control them and we’re not on your property.” It didn’t matter to him. And I said, “You brought a man with a gun. I've got a notebook, and you brought a man with a gun.” And he just leans in and he says, “I didn’t bring a man with a gun. How do you know I don’t have a gun?”

There were no honest reporters; I was the enemy and I was in trouble. And that was terrifying. I have to say, I had never been threatened with guns at a church before in my years reporting. [Being threatened with a gun] is uncommon, but it happens.

Can we even call the proliferation of far-right groups and QAnon believers a “fringe” at this point?

The fringe has become the center. And I think that’s sort of why it matters to me to keep looking at this stuff. And I think there’s people who say, the thing that every journalist says is, “Why don’t you tell stories about people who are doing good things?” But there’s also people who say, you know, “I know everything I need to know about these guys. I don’t need to know anything about them.” And I don’t think that’s true. I think what’s happening right now and this kind of global fascist moment is a great broad convergence of many tributaries, many strands. It’s not a monolith. That’s part of what makes it so dangerous—there are so many pieces of it, and to resist it, we have to map it.

After January 6, I knew on the surface about the martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt but didn’t realize the depth of it. She really is a key figure now.

Yeah, Ashli Babbitt, this 34-year-old white woman from Southern California, had not been a particularly political person most of her life. Voted for Obama twice, was in the Air Force, and then had a pool-cleaning business and became radicalized. Something about Trump clicked for her. In 2016 she wrote her first tweet, and it was “#LoveDonaldTrump.” And she kept going deeper from there and was all the way to the Capitol where she was shot. The Capitol Hill police officer who shot her, Lieutenant Michael Byrd, was a Black man. And even before his name was known, you could see the photo of him. And as soon as I saw that, that day, I said, “I think I know what they’re going to do with this.” Because this is a very old American story. It’s the lynching story, the idea of “innocent white womanhood” and “the dangerous Black man,” and that’s exactly, exactly what they started doing. So it wasn’t so much that they had to create a martyr story; they just had to plug her into a very old, racist martyr story and take it from there.

*snip*

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

1. They all want to die for the dotard?

[Caliman73]

6. No. They want to advance full on White Supremacy.

Trump is just the current vehicle.

This is not about Trump. They like Trump because he says the quiet part out loud. If he were to turn away from his rhetoric, they would eventually cast him aside.

These people have been waiting for their "race war" since David Duke was an outward clan member, since Tom Metzger started his White Aryan Resistance movement in California in the 80's.

[onecaliberal]

2. They talk out their collective ass until shit gets real. When the national guard was finally

Deployed to the Capitol, they ran away. THEY RAN AWAY.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

9. That was a practice run and they did not yet have enough of the country erupting.

[Kaleva]

10. The militia members involved didn't think it was a practice run.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

11. Yeah, they thought they were saving America by destroying democracy or something.

I still can't understand their thinking.

Fortunately, the Select Committee considers this not over.

[Kaleva]

13. Rational thinking would have told them the plan had no chance of succees

But they believed their own and Trump's bs.

[Effete Snob]

3. More of them should have been shot

Ashli Babbit was attempting to climb through a broken window into an area in which Congressional personnel were being evacuated.

A whole lot more of that scum should have been shot before she got that close.

She got every bit of what she had coming to her.

[gopiscrap]

4. exactly

[Dorian Gray]

5. I agree

more could have been shot.

I disagree that she had it coming.

I would fully support her family for suing Trump/Stop the Steal/4Chan/8Kun and whomever else the could for radicalizing her. I blame them for her death. Because she shouldn't have been there. What led her there is what led her to her death. She wasn't one of the people million about outside. She was up front breaking in through congress. Who/what led her there?

[Caliman73]

7. I don't like the idea of "she had it coming"

She definitely got a consequence for the actions she took. The shooting was justified.

I am sure that the officer who was forced to shoot her to protect himself and the Congress, struggles with that choice.

I also understand the anger and outrage that would lead to "she got every bit of what she had coming to her", but it sounds like wrath, and if we trade in our humanity for wrath then we inevitably head toward atrocity.

Her death was tragic. Her radicalization was tragic. The movement which radicalized her needs to be stopped, discredited, and swept into the "bad history" dustbin.

[anarch]

8. think what would have happened, had it been a crowd of angry black people

I expect it would have looked something like the first couple of platoons hitting Omaha Beach on D-Day

[Elessar Zappa]

12. I don't believe we'll have a civil war.

Worst case scenario is a situation similar to “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, which is bad enough.