Ep. 327: Jeff Sharlet Reflects on Navigating and Surviving the American Dream-Nightmare

The Chauncey DeVega Show

Jeff Sharlet is a journalist and bestselling author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy. He is also the executive producer of the Netflix documentary series based on those two books.

His newest book is This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers.

Sharlet is also a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine as well as Harper’s. His writing has also been featured at such leading publications as Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, Mother Jones, and The New York Times.

Sharlet reflects on writing about and living through the Age of Trump and its fascism, death, plague, isolation, and other miseries for the American people.

He also shares what it was like to personally encounter some of the most powerful and dangerous people in the United States – the Christian fascists and others who are tying to do undo secular multiracial democracy.

Sharlet also highlights how the recent mass shooting hate crime against the Asian-American community in Atlanta embodies so much that is wrong with America’s culture of guns, violence, nativism, racism, sex, and right-wing Christian theocracy.

Chauncey offers some thoughts on America’s gun culture and the narcissistic injury that telling the truth about guns, white identity politics, and Whiteness causes too many white conservatives and others.

And Chauncey also explains how the new Jim Crow anti-democracy “voting” bills being imposed by Republicans in Georgia and soon elsewhere are an assault on the fundamental human dignity of black and brown Americans.

SELECTED LINKS OF INTEREST FOR THIS EPISODE OF THE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA SHOW

• Top 1% of earners don’t pay taxes on one-fifth of income, study finds
• The IRS Is Letting the Rich Get Away With Tax Evasion
• It's now illegal in Georgia to give food and water to voters in line
• Philosopher Jason Stanley: Fascism's definitely not beaten — but there's reason for hope
• Conservatives are mad at Michael Moore again — because he's right about gun culture
• All That We've Lost

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Music at the end of this week's episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show is by JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound. You can listen to some of their great music on Spotify.