Jeff Sharlet road-trips into the darkness of hearts
In preparation for his journey through Wisconsin, Jeff Sharlet read Barbara F. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start.” People he met there are preparing as well. For civil war. For the government to come for their guns. For China to invade.
A 1972 pamphlet titled “Wisconsin Death Trip” inspired the visit. The flags he saw everywhere inspired photographs (Vanity Fair):
Trump 2024, two years ahead of time; and the red, white, and blue of the Confederacy, the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden. There are so many now. There’s new folk art too: handpainted “Fuck Biden” placards, homemade “Let’s Go Brandon” billboards, and DIY “Never Forget Benghazi” banners.
And the coffin leaning against a garage like an early Halloween decoration. This is militia country. The Supreme Court overturned Roe while Sharlet was there. Abortion meant something other to Rob:
Rob called himself “pro-choice,” but that term means something different in his vernacular. He meant the choice of whether or not to murder a baby is up to you. “If you choose to do something that’s medically possible, I’m going to leave it between you and God, until it affects me in the state of readiness of my defense.” Readiness. It requires panopticon paranoia, looking for threats down every sight line. Rob looked at falling birth rates. He looked at what he considered Mexico’s invasion. He looked at what he suspected would be civil war according to a rural/urban divide—in which, even though he lived in town, he would side with the land he held outside of it. He looked at China, he noted they ended their population control program in 2021, he contemplated 1.4 billion Red Chinese divided by half and then by some factor again to account for age and thinks of hundreds of millions of Chinese wombs churning out multiple Chinese babies (in fact, the Chinese birth rate is falling) and he thought, “they’re getting ready.” For the future war. “You start prepping several generations ahead to have bodies when you lose so many bodies that you need a level of fresh bodies you never dreamed you’d have to dig into.”
Some preppers stockpile freeze-dried food and weapons. Rob thought the country should be stockpiling cannon fodder as well. He’d never heard of the “great replacement theory” but was convinced he’d thought it up on his own.
Jerry didn’t consider himself a zealot. “Almost nobody” Sharlet met was pious. Jerry’s ideas were not his own either:
Not a word Jerry said was fully his own. I’d been listening to Fox, to right-wing radio, as I drove, and I’d already heard variations of every syllable he uttered. Jerry followed the news. He was a follower. He had not been a good student as a boy, he said. But now he had learned his lesson. The lesson was fear, the lesson was bitter, the lesson was that other people were getting more than their fair share. That grievance flowed naturally for him from his feelings about baby killers—as if women, by getting to choose, were getting more than their fair share too. He fretted about the Menominee Reservation, two miles away from the country home to which he’d retreated from Green Bay, because, he said, the city had grown “too risky,” not just with crime but those he claimed would barely allow a white man to speak anymore. The Menominee, though, were worse in his view. “A lot of them I believe are the type of people who want what you and I have. And they’re willing to take it.”
It’s a longer read than time allows to describe here. But it’s worth yours.