The Undertow by Jeff Sharlet

Author:Jeff Sharlet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2023-02-22T01:35:05+00:00

—by leaping to her death off a cliff, foreplay to the film’s real consummation, the lynching that follows in her name.

But it’s different now. Isn’t it? “We live in very bad times,” preached Pierce in Sacramento, “in the eternal battle between freedom and tyranny.”10 But all is not lost, he said—literally, he said, “all is not lost”—for God so loved the world he sent us an “angel like Ashli Babbitt,” to “remind us” that freedom “comes at a cost,” and that the price is “blood.”

Whose?

At the back of the rally, Nosferatu was down. A Black woman in a Raiders T-shirt tried to slap a Savior and disappeared beneath a pile of thick White men. Julius told 1488’s Chelsea Knight, who was holding a flag with an image of an AR-15, that he wished he’d brought a deck of cards. To defuse the situation. “Man,” he mused, “if I had my cards with me!” He was a magician. “Everybody likes to see a card trick, I’m telling you.”

Here’s some magic: White woman breaks into a building and tries to crawl through a smashed-out window and gets killed—and then lives forever.

Ashli Babbitt was processed, made productive, almost immediately after her death, transformed right away into yet another flag, like a new tarot card in the deck of fascism, where it joined the Gadsden, the coiled snake on yellow, and the Blue Lives Matter—an American flag drained of color but for a blue bar across the middle, created as a rebuttal to Black Lives Matter—and the “America Rising”—red gothic script above a skull glaring out of the Stars-and-Stripes in monochrome. All flew in Sacramento, or, at least, hung limp in the heat. Vexillology, the study of flags, is a theatrical discipline. The flags on display—like those of January 6, most famously the Confed erate Battle Flag—were those of imaginary nations, fascisms, plural, nostalgic and aspirational, the Right’s bitter utopianism.

Ashli’s flag is black, in its middle a white silhouette of Ashli in front of a red Capitol framed within a shield. It’s surrounded by six white stars, for the six states then falsely alleged stolen from Trump, and there’s a blue star on the White woman’s neck, for the shot that made her legend, which actually hit her in her shoulder. A crown radiates from her flowing hair, like that of Liberty or a saint. Ashli’s flag multiplies. In another, her face develops beatific features. Some flags trade her blue star for a thick red drop of blood. The six stars no longer work once it becomes known that the whole country had been stolen, so the six became four, “for the 4 Martyrs that were killed at the capital,” reads a post on Telegram from “The Western Chauvinist,” referring to Ashli and three other insurrectionists. Roseanne Boyland, trampled by the mob; Kevin D. Greeson, heart attack; and Ben Philips, inventor of the Trumparoo, a kangaroo stuffy dressed as Trump, who died of a stroke.

Memes and theories, memes as theories. “Who Killed Ashli

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