Jeff Sharlet 90F Presents “Scenes from a Slow Civil War” at Hampshire’s Community Day of Learning

The Community Day of Learning brings together students, staff, and faculty once a semester to address timely topics. Classes are canceled, and instead the campus attends panels, breakout sessions, and group dialogues.
 
This semester’s event, titled “The Rise and Rise of White Supremacy and White Christian Nationalism,” focused on the ideology of the far right. Attendees explored the way this extremist group deploys religion to secure its place in U.S. politics and political culture, as well as the role white supremacy plays in higher education, methods for employing antiracism advocacy, and community building.
 
Senior Vice President for Justice, Equity, and Antiracism Sheila Lloyd introduced the final session, which highlighted the erosion of the distinction between church and state in the United States. Associate Professor of Media Studies Viveca Greene then discussed her work both in her classes and as part of our Learning Collaboratives, which centers on disinformation and conspiracy theories, the meaning of truth in a post-truth era, and how the political landscape and elections are being influenced by these factors. Greene ended by introducing best-selling author, Dartmouth College professor, and Hampshire alum Jeff Sharlet, who delivered the keynote address.
 
 “Thank you, Hampshire, for the education that brought me back,” Sharlet began. “Thanks for holding firm to the commitments to have events like this.”
 
He went on to describe working in the field, traveling to attend Trump rallies, studying QAnon, and writing to understand the psychology behind the far-right movement. Sharlet explained that he spent years talking to ordinary people about their beliefs in falsehoods and propensity toward violence, and warned that the political moment is leaning hard into the “grievance politics” of authoritarianism and fascism.
 
Sharlet said some journalists he’s spoken with find him hyperbolic in his tendency to suggest that the time we are living in is enormously dangerous. He reported that there are 400 million guns privately owned in America; that there is a gravitational pull toward white supremacy, one that even draws in non-whites; and that most who identify as Christian fundamentalist are not actual churchgoers.
 
The history of the white Christian nationalists use of what he called a “reassurance narrative” to persuade followers goes way back, he said, long before the televangelist and conservative activist Jerry Falwell cofounded the political lobbying group the Moral Majority, in the 1980s, and even earlier, to the fundamentalists of the last 1800s. Sharlet described Trump as pro-violent, and the flags supporting him as the folk art of our time.
 
Sharlet framed the well-known quote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” from the essayist Joan Didion, in its starkest terms: “These people think, ‘If I have to tell stories, I will,’” acknowledging the fiction regularly being sold as fact by white Christian nationalists.
 
“And, you can’t fact-check a myth,” he said, quoting himself from his own The Undertow.
 
In addition to The Undertow — a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award — Sharlet is the author of The Family, adapted into a Netflix documentary series of the same name; and This Brilliant Darkness, among other books. He is a contributing writer for Vanity Fair and an editor at large for VQR. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New York, and other publications. His writing on Russia’s anti-LGBTQIA+ crusade earned the National Magazine Award and his writing on anti-LGBTQIA+ campaigns in Uganda earned the Molly National Journalism Prize as well as the Outright International’s Outspoken Award. Sharlet is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth.