“any reasonable method to promote peace”
“The first militia church I went to I thought was a fluke,” Jeff Sharlet (The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War) told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday evening. “And then I started to realize that churches were arming up with the expectation of civil war.”
“The doomsday prepper of the past has become a mainstay of rightwing culture,” Sharlet found in his research travels.
Sharlet writes about Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed by Capitol security as she tried to climb through broken glass into the Speaker’s Lobby on Jan. 6. I did not know law enforcement had found a weapon on her body inside the ambulance. Babbitt’s knife appears on the cover of Sharlet’s new book.
It’s one of those details that the MAGA right does not want or need to know. It detracts from the near-virginal image MAGA Republicans have built up around her since the insurrection.
“They were aging Ashli back” within days, Sharlet says, making her “smaller, younger, as if whiter.” A young white girl. (Babbitt was 36.)
People speak of the right as a death cult, Sharlet says, but in some ways it’s “an innocence cult. They want to be innocent of history, innocent of race, and Ashli Babbitt served as this whiteness martyr.”
Sharlet spoke with several men at Rep. Lauren Boebert’s since-defunct Shooters Grill in a book excerpt at Vanity Fair. Things in this country are fast “going down the hole,” said David G who imagined he’d once met Babbitt.
The man was unfashionably unarmed inside Boebert’s “Hooters, but with guns” Colorado diner. He kept his “serious firepower” secretly stashed at his grandmother’s for when the time comes:
“How will I know when things are going down the hole?” I asked.
“You get into the city areas, you will see the people.” Which people? The “instigators.” I’d see them fighting in the streets. “When I say it’s going down the hole fast, I’m talking about that. I’m talking about those of us who have less tolerance for the instigators.” The instigators. “So some will resort to, let’s just say, other methods.” Militia? He smiled. “I’m not saying I’m not militia.” He would say he was a man of peace. The militia movement, he said, stands for “any reasonable method to promote peace.” Like guns. He offered his favorite quotation: “‘People who know violence and are capable of violence are always the persons to pick peace.’” He didn’t know who said this.
Sharlet knew it was time to leave when the manager approached disapprovingly, gun on his hip. It wasn’t a threat. That’s the point of the gun. “The point of the gun was the promotion of peace.”
Who needs a “heckler’s veto” when the sidearm does the talking?