Kopkind Colony

Jeff Sharlet, a terrific reporter and writer, will be at Kopkind on Saturday, August 5, to talk about his new best-selling book, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, a free public event to close out our seminar/retreat session for left journalists and activists.

When: 6 pm, community potluck to start off the evening. (Bring a side dish!)

7:30 pm, book talk, followed by discussion.

Where: The Organ Barn, 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, Vt. 05301

In 2021, Jeff took a cross-country trip following the ghost of Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old blonde Air Force veteran who was shot by an officer while climbing through a broken window inside the Capitol on January 6. Along his trip, he’d talked with white people who venerate Ashli as a martyr; with people who’ve revised her age downward, to where she’s just a girl, maybe only 16, curious— just wanting to see: hey, what’s going on?—innocent; with Christians who see her killing as the start of, or battle in, a civil war; with others who insist storming the Capitol was a “false flag,” even though they were were doing the storming; with preachers who have removed the cross from churches because suffering Jesus is a sissy; with one who has fashioned an altar out of swords.

Jeff has reported on the Christian right for decades; this was the first time, he said, that he had been afraid. During a church service, one preacher had already denounced him as an enemy of the people. It was something Donald Trump had started calling the media at his rallies in 2016, while reporters were caged and the candidate’s worshipers were encouraged to take ecstatic pleasure in the abuse he heaped upon them. After the service, having been denied an interview with the preacher, Jeff was in the parking lot talking with two women when an usher and a heavily armed guard threatened him and ordered him to leave. “I have a notebook and a pencil, and you come with guns?” he said, recalling the moment to us toward the end of the trip, miming the pathetic way he’d held up his weapons.

His encounters across the country form the center of the book. They are bracketed by extraordinarily beautiful essays on history, culture and radical hope. “Weaving religion, hate, hope and fear into stories that catch us unaware, Jeff Sharlet confronts us with the realities of the shifting American psyche,” Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism, wrote about the book. “A must-read in order to understand the conflicting voices and tensions in America today.”

Jeff is a must-hear witness to the shape of authoritarian desire—guns, power, war, a strongman.

Please come on August 5!