“Although no one believed in civil war, the air reeked of it…”
—Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, recalling 1860
1. It’s Cool
We watched her die before we knew her name. We watched almost in real time, or soon enough after, her death looped and memed before the fight was over. But then, the fight’s still not over. A video gives us a crowd throbbing against two wooden windowed doors, one reinforced glass pane spiderwebbing, three Capitol Police officers, standing between the glass and members of Congress on the other side. We don’t yet know to look for her, but she’s there on the screen, the only woman, up front (“a firecracker,” her friends will say), screaming at cops. (“Joking,” her defenders will claim.) There’s a knife in her pocket. She shouts: “Just open the door!” It’s barricaded. “Break it down!” chant the men. One screams at the cops, “You lied!” The cops said there was nobody on the other side. They can see them. Congressmen. Traitors. A young man wearing a black T-shirt and $325 Canada Goose aviator fur hat, shouts “Heyyy!” He stretches out his arms, pulsing veins—he has already punched the glass, hard—and opens his hands. “Fuck the blue!” shouts the crowd. A man wearing a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag tied like a bib beneath his MAGA hat hands Goose a black helmet with which to hit the glass.
Goose lines the helmet with his hat, to cushion his fist. The cops slide out of the way. (“Escape route,” one will later tell investigators; they thought they were going to be killed.) “Go! Get this shit!” the videographer shouts. They get that shit—pounding the reinforced glass.
“Gun!” the videographer yells. Two hands emerge from behind a pillar on the other side, aiming.
Fourteen seconds left. Does she hear them shout “gun”? Can she make out the warnings Michael Byrd, a plainclothes lieutenant in the Capitol Police, will say he delivered? That the man standing beside her will say, “She didn’t heed”? “Please,” Byrd will say he shouted. “Stop! Get back!” She doesn’t. He aims.
There are more videos. There she is, bobbing up and down, straining. Her long, smooth face, her dark golden hair, her golden skin. She has come to this moment—seven seconds—from Ocean Beach, California, where she lived in a bungalow beneath avocado and lime trees. Little woman. Five foot two, 115 pounds, her mother will say. One hundred ten, according to Representative Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who’ll make her name into a martyr song, “#onemoreinthenameoflove.” She’s 35; or in her “20s,” one witness will say; or “16, supposedly,” guesses another man, each aging her backward, into the imagined innocence of girlhood.
Goose smashes the glass.
“Go!” she shouts. She’s boosted up. She crouches on the sill, her Trump flag like a cape tucked under a red-white- and-blue backpack, like some absurd American bird.
The gunshot sounds like a cannon. Glock 22, .40 caliber. Big gun. One boom.
She falls back. Her hands fly up, open, empty, raised to her temples. As if rather than a bullet there’s an unsettling thought.
Nobody tries to catch her.
“#Sayhername,” the patriots will tweet, delighting in their appropriation of a campaign created for Black women. It’s grotesque. But the dead are the dead, no matter what they died doing. So, yes, her name: Ashli Babbitt. She wasn’t a hashtag. As a girl in rural Lakeside, California, she’d ride her horse to the 7-Eleven. She was a scrapper. “She just did boy things,” her brother will say. She joined the Air Force at 17. Two wars, eight deployments, 14 years. Her favorite movie was The Big Lebowski. Her thing was the shaka. “Hang loose,” thumb and pinkie. (Her last words, as she bleeds on the Capitol floor, according to a witness: “It’s cool.”) She did not climb the ranks, but she did marry, and then divorce, and in between she voted for Obama, and she fell in love with a Marine named Aaron Babbitt, and there was some trouble with his ex, who in 2016 claimed Ashli rammed her car three times, but Ashli was acquitted and anyway, maybe love is like that sometimes, at least for Ashli in 2016, since that was when she fell hard for Donald J. Trump. “#Love,” she wrote beside his name that Halloween, in the first of more than 8,000 tweets. “She was all in,” says Aaron, who did not share her devotion. She believed Trump was “one of gods greatest warriors.” She thought she’d be his “boots on the ground.” She wanted to be “the storm.” She had a husband and together they had a girlfriend; she had four younger brothers and parents who loved her, and in the end, she left them all. What’s left is a meme, “Ashli Babbitt,” on Twitter and Fox and Newsmax and Telegram, where she dies on permanent repeat for a man who won’t, in fact, say her name for half a year, until the day it proves useful, when the Trump Organization is indicted for tax fraud. He’ll issue a one-sentence statement: “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” That he knows is beside the point. Who shot her? They did. The enemy.
2. Sacramento, California
The Justice for Ashli Babbitt Rally opens with a prayer, asking God to bless Ashli’s family, sitting in a row of white “Justice 4 Ashli” T-shirts, and to work on the hearts of the “opposition,” which, whether I like it or not, is me. Ashli’s mother, Mikki Witthoeft, has already told me this morning that she wouldn’t talk to me. “Media,” she’d growled. “Goddamned media,” she’ll clarify when she takes the podium.
Leading the prayer is a “patriot” pastor called JP. He looks like an especially dangerous mushroom. JP wears a black floppy sun hat, mirrored shades, a stars-and-stripes gaiter, green half gloves, and utility-belted jeans that puddle around his ankles. His black T-shirt features in golden letters a “battle verse” popular with patriots, Joshua 1:9. “Be strong and courageous,” the Lord instructs Joshua as he readies to storm Jericho and, at God’s command, to slaughter all—“man and woman, young and old.”
We’re on the west side of the California State Capitol. The rally was called by a group named Saviors of Liberty, hatched in a pickup truck three weeks prior by a couple of white dudes drinking beer and thinking about all that was wrong in the world and how they might fix it by building a supergroup of right-wing fraternal organizations. They’d need new T-shirts. Lady Liberty bleached white on a field of black, looking in sorrow on a red-and-black American flag, vertical so that its stripes appear to bleed. Packed into these T-shirts are muscle-bound men, some bulked up by bulletproof plates, many flexing studded leather gloves. Many are Proud Boys.
A rally organizer keeping a lower profile is a woman named Chelsea Knight, an administrator of Placer County, California, for Trump and a co-administrator, with her husband, Victor Knight, of a Telegram chat group called 1488, which surely has nothing to do with the “14 words” embraced by white supremacists—prattle about protecting white children—and 88, as in the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, which times two in the idiot math of fascism equals “Heil Hitler.” That’s Victor’s thing. He’s the one with an SS Totenkopf skull tattooed on his left fist. Victor’s here too, and that plus the 90-something-degree heat on the sunblasted concrete, plus antifa’s promise to disrupt, may explain the low turnout.
Antifa does arrive. A column of mostly black-clad, black-masked protesters coming from a rally on the other side of the Capitol for what should have been Breonna Taylor’s 28th birthday. The Saviors are ready. A Savior in a skull mask takes the first shot at the tallest antifa, a beanpole in black but for his fists and the pale skin around his eyes. Saviors call him Nosferatu. He’s skinny but he knows how to take a punch; it bounces off his head, and you can almost hear him smile beneath his mask. “That’s a pussy-ass move right there,” Nosferatu says.
Another Savior throws a punch. The cops observe. Then an antifa protester takes a swipe. The cops charge—at antifa. An antifa cries to the police even as they shove her backward.
“Shut up, fat ass!” a right-wing streamer screams.
“Fuck yourself, faggot!” she answers.
“These cops want to let us go at ’em,” comments the man next to me. It’s one of the speakers, Jorge Riley, an indicted J6er.
“They don’t have any worries about what the outcome would be,” says a Savior.
Riley smiles. He wears his black hair in a ponytail and a black leather vest over a black T. “I’m a French-speaking Native American Jew,” he likes to say. “For Jesus,” he sometimes adds. He waits for a laugh. He invaded the Capitol with three white feathers braided into his hair, three streaks of black paint running down each cheek. In a video, he boasts: “I may or may not have rubbed my butt on Nasty Pelosi’s desk.” Before January 6, Riley held positions in the local Republican establishment. Two days after the insurrection, he posted his address on Facebook: “Come take my life. I’m right here. You will all die.” The FBI, he thinks, didn’t get it. The “joke,” the threat, was for antifa. “I got six charges,” he crows. He says he likes cops, except the cop who shot Babbitt.
“You feel like the cops are on your side?” I ask.
“Obviously!” He swings his arms open. “They’re here protecting me.” He turns to a woman beside him and asks for the name of the officer who killed George Floyd. “And they only prosecuted him,” continues Riley, “because these people”—the protesters—“threw a fit.” A white cop’s nine-minute knee on a Black man’s neck? “Somebody doing their job.” A Black cop’s split-second shot at a white woman leading a mob? “Assassination,” Riley agrees with another of the speakers today.
Such is the seesaw reality of January 6. “No cops were hurt,” Riley says. More than 150 were hurt. Five would die. Riley says it was a lovefest, J6ers and cops hugging it out after a friendly tussle. Delusion? No—his smirk bespeaks self-awareness. Disinformation? Too obvious. More like lucid dreaming: a deliberately surreal assault. I think of a Telegram message one of the Proud Boy organizers sent on January 6: “I want to see thousands of normies burn that city to ash today.” It wasn’t their own crimes that thrilled them, it was the prospect of drawing the many into their boogaloo vision. The city still stands. But in my mind—in the imagination of anyone who even now marvels at how close we came; how close we still are—it burns. The coup was a bust. The psyop? Victory.
Here, in Sacramento, the speaker at the podium, a former TV host named Jamie Allman—taken off the air of a St. Louis ABC affiliate after he tweeted his desire to “ram a hot poker up the ass” of a Parkland shooting survivor—declares January 6 “one of the most beautiful days I’ve seen in America.”
In the back of the crowd, protesters challenge patriots to define “Nazi.”
“We love America,” says one.
“If Ashli Babbitt were here,” continues Allman, “I guarantee you she’d be out there”—on the edge of the fighting—“talking to those people.”
“Scum!” a patriot screams at the protesters.
“Ashli Babbitt does not want you to be afraid,” Allman says, “ever again.” Present tense. Ashli Babbitt lives, in the hallucinatory. Allman says the patriots will return to Washington, to remember her. Ashli Babbitt dies, in perpetuity.
“I suffered,” says Riley. “But I didn’t pay the price Ashli did. I’m like the guy from 300. I lived to be able to tell her story.”
At the podium, Allman: “What her death does, when we compare it to Crispus Attucks, is—it calls for a revolution!”
“It calls.” The myth of history is calling the patriots. The “spirit of 1776” and 300, the 2006 CGI blood opera, 300 Spartan warriors’ battle against an overwhelming Persian horde until all but one Spartan falls. Attucks, the first man to die in one war, and the fictional Spartan warrior who was the only survivor of the latter, the source material of which is a comic book. Sacrifice stripped of history. “Trial by combat,” as Rudy Giuliani promised on January 6, hours before the mob made it real. “The first Patriot Martyr of the Second American Revolution,” an Oath Keeper posted before anyone knew who the martyr was, only that hers was the mythical victimhood of a white woman, killed by a Black man, they could now claim.
Now comes the mother: Michelle Witthoeft, who goes by Mikki, with an i, for independence, she says, which is why she named her firstborn Ashli with an i. Mikki and Ashli’s father, wordless beside her; the mother adrift in her oversized Ashli T-shirt, wrists ringed by red plastic Justice 4 Ashli bands, her white hair pulled back severely. A doleful woman, her proud, lupine face that of her daughter’s but whittled by grief. She hides behind sunglasses, giant black lenses, white-rimmed.
As Mikki begins, antifa’s chant of “BLACK LIVES MATTER” ricochets off the Capitol, at the entrance to which she has erected a banner: Ashli’s big grin on the left, Ashli flashing a shaka sign on the right.
“I miss her every day,” says the mother. “There are things I want to tell her.” Her voice wobbles. “Questions I want to ask.” She pauses, then lets it in: the fury. “My daughter was publicly executed!” She gathers herself. “Everybody knows Breonna Taylor,” she says. From the back: “BLACK LIVES MATTER!” “Everybody knows George Floyd,” Ashli’s mother says. The two women sitting next to me, Jorge Riley’s girlfriend, Kelli Morgan, in a sun hat with a leopard-print band, and a friend in cutoffs bedazzled in red, white, and blue across the back pockets—she says her name is Freedom—scream “Criminals!”
“Why don’t people know who Ashli Babbitt is?” asks Ashli’s mother.
“The criminal frickin’ media!” affirms Freedom.
“Exactly,” says the mother.
Antifa: “BLACK-LIVES MAT-TER!”
“Let your representatives know,” pleads the mother, voice wavering. “Over, and over, and over.”
Antifa: “NO MORE NAZ-EES!”
The mother stops. Pulls the microphone close: “ASH-LI BABB-ITT!” The same up-down cadence as “Black Lives Matter.” “ASH-LI BABB-ITT!” Four syllables like fingers folding into a fist.
“There’s no shame in what happened January sixth!” she cries.
“BLACK-LIVES MAT-TER!” antifa responds.
To which the patriots finally have a reply they think equal: “ASH-LI BABB-ITT!”
One white woman.
Iping-pong between the front of the rally and the back, the rhetoric and the action. Ashli’s mother tells the crowd to be proud Americans. “Be proud white Americans!” She goes on to list other races she feels should be proud Americans, too, but she’s hard to hear over Kelli and Freedom shrieking.
Toward the back, a livestreamer named Julius is providing commentary. “She’s right,” he tells his camera. “ ‘Slavery, slavery, slavery,’ ” he says, imitating his imagination of the nerdy voice of a leftist. “No one got time for all a that.” Julius is Black; he’s wearing a Saviors T-shirt, with bleached-white Lady Liberty.
Julius is not alone as a man of color in this crowd—there’s Jorge Riley, and a Black Second Amendment speaker. I meet nearly as many self-identified Latino people as white ones. Nearly all want it known that “patriots” are more diverse than liberals think. This is true. And yet the crowd cheers for “proud white Americans” not because they are blind but because they want to be—to believe in what historian Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism, calls the “promise of whiteness” offered to people of color willing to collaborate with white supremacy. This bait and switch—the mythical promise of whiteness is unfulfillable—may be the next American contribution to fascism. Purification projects have become impractical for a nation in which the rightist ascendency can contend for the loyalty of a third of Latinx voters. Now, white supremacy welcomes all. Or at least a sufficient veneer of “all” to reassure its more timid adherents that border walls and “kung flu” and “Black crime” and “replacement theory” somehow don’t add up to the R-word, which anyway these days, in the new authoritarian imagination, only happens in “reverse,” against white people. Such victims feel themselves drawn together not by whiteness but by that of which it is made: their belief in a strongman—Trump—and their desire for an iron-fisted God, and their love of the way guns make them feel inside, and their grief over COVID-19, and their denial of COVID-19, and their loathing of “systemic” as descriptive of that which they can’t see, can’t hold in their hands and weigh, and their certainty that children are being taken, stolen, if not in body then in spirit, “indoctrinated” to “hate themselves.” They are drawn together by their love of “fairness,” which is how it used to be, they’re certain they remember, or, if they’re too young, they’ve been told. And yet, “slavery, slavery, slavery,” murmurs the past. “It gets to be too much, sometimes,” Julius laments.
It does.
At the podium now is John Pierce, a ruddy-faced lawyer in a pink Brooks Brothers shirt who boasts a roster of past and present clients representing nearly the full range of right-wing concerns: J6ers, Giuliani, a Proud Boy leader indicted for vandalizing Black churches, and—the name for which the crowd hoots—Kyle Rittenhouse. Ashli, Pierce says, “was all of us.” This rally is her portrait, her marble, her bronze. “Generations from now,” Pierce declares, “when this once again is a free land, Americans will remember one name from that very fateful day on January 6.” Trump? No. Ashli, a.k.a. the “us” for which she stands.
Martyrdom is a magic trick, a sleight of hand and soul by which the dead substitute as the center of the story for those who survive to tell it. “She did not die in vain!” cries Pierce. Her death was a “warning,” he says. Of what? Slavery, slavery, slavery—“our” liberties stolen, “the worst political divide in our nation since the Civil War.” A subtle move, much like that of the speakers who conflate the insurrection with MLK’s March on Washington. To a “color-blind” crowd, the implicit equation is one of themselves with the formerly enslaved. Black becomes white, white becomes the oppressed. Whiteness has always claimed the suffering it inflicts on others as its own, white grievance and white justification overlapping to create the idea of an “innocence” that never was. And yet whiteness needs an “other,” an enemy. It makes one by means of law and whip and most of all fable. Think of the movies, the first ones, The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, white women tied to railroad tracks, here comes the big black engine; think of 1915’s The Birth of a Nation, the white virgin who flees the desire of a Black man—by leaping to her death off a cliff, foreplay to the film’s real consummation, the lynching that follows in her name.
“We live in very bad times,” preaches Pierce in Sacramento, “in the eternal battle between freedom and tyranny.” But all is not lost, he says, 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, a Black woman tries to slap a fascist and disappears beneath a pile of thick white men. Julius tells 1488’s Chelsea Knight, who is holding a flag featuring an AR-15, that he wishes he’d brought a deck of cards. To defuse the situation. “Man,” he muses, “if I had my cards with me!” He’s a magician. “Everybody likes to see a card trick.” A young white street pastor named Thomas, standing with the Saviors, says, “We’re the MLKs, not the Malcolm Xs.” A self-declared militiaman named Richard, tall and wide and draped in a dress-length T-shirt split vertically between the flag and Christ, says today’s for Ashli. “It’s sacred.” He invites Thomas and me to his church, Glad Tidings in Yuba City, this evening for a special speaker who, he says, will reveal the meaning of Ashli, January 6, and the coming storm. “There’s a lot more going on than you can see,” Richard promises.
I linger after the rally. Too long, it seems, for a group of Saviors decked out full commando. One pushes his chest into my notebook. The men gather. I’m surrounded—until a big guy wearing a blue T-shirt depicting Snoopy and the words “Red, White, and Chill,” says, “He’s cool! I vetted him.” I’d told him I liked his shirt. “I vetted him twice, actually,” Snoopy says. By which he means, I can only guess, that he’s gathered I’m white and a Snoopy fan. Good enough. The commando smiles. “Just checking,” he says.
3. The Church of the Insurrection
Double-vetted, I drive north through orange groves to the Church of Glad Tidings in Yuba City. “Yuba-dooba-doo!” as Glad Tidings’ cherub-cheeked pastor Dave Bryan calls it. From the beginning of the pandemic, Pastor Dave refused for his church any COVID precautions. Instead, “we advertised we will be open every night.” The church never closed its doors. “No one else had the courage,” he says, and for that Glad Tidings graduated from a local profile to a national one. Leading lights of the right come to address the flock. General Michael Flynn’s pulpit turn later in the summer goes viral when the church presents him with a customized AR-15. “Maybe I’ll find somebody in Washington, D.C.,” he’ll declare.
Glad Tidings sits by railroad tracks that cut through agricultural fields. Kids line up outside in the dry and dusty air to ride Train to Glory, an elaborate golf cart made to look like a locomotive. Inside, the first thing you notice is the pulpit: It’s made of swords. A red-hilted shaft of steel plunges into the stage, intersected by two black-hilted blades to form an upside-down triangle. I see no crosses. “They miss the point,” says Pastor Dave. He compares the cross to the tender dove: weak-tea figuration that fails to convey the great breadth of ass kicked by Christ once he was risen.
Pastor Dave’s hair is still thick and dark but his goatee is gray and long, fraying at its edges. He favors cowboy boots and tight shirts beneath lively printed button-downs, worn open, the better to showcase his jumbo belt buckles. He says he’s a spiritual warrior. “I am an exorcist,” he explains.
“Like in The Exorcist?” I ask.
“Exactly.”
Where once Pastor Dave’s ministry mostly involved driving out “perverse thoughts” and lifting the yoke of autism, now his attention is turned toward the enemy incarnate: mask mandaters, vaccinators, election stealers. Servants of Satan. Also, journalists. It may be the fact that I’ve come from the Ashli rally that redeems me. I spot Thomas the street pastor. He asks if I’ve read Psalm 91, a scripture invoked by snake handlers: “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder.” “COVID’s like snakes or strychnine,” he says. “ ‘No plague shall take you,’ ” a gloss on Psalm 91’s 10th verse. He gestures across the sanctuary. Capacity 900, nobody masked.
An associate pastor takes the stage to tell us about upcoming events, women’s groups, and “the militia new recruit meeting.” Then Pastor Dave introduces the special guest with a confession. “I have tried to be faithful,” Dave says, but he’s strayed. From Trump. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He means the prophecies: Within conservative Pentecostal circles, Trump’s 2020 victory was widely foretold. Its theft was not. But God helps those who help themselves. On January 6, God’s people did just that. “We were able to take the castle,” Pastor Dave says—the Capitol—and yet that glory too melted into air. “And then suddenly it is, well, quiet.” He seems embarrassed. “Frustrated.” His buttered-toast voice sounds like it’s going to crumble. The election was stolen and then the revolution defeated with just the one shot that killed Ashli. “Why the heck,” he wonders, “would we ever vote again for anybody?” But Pastor Dave brought his dark questions to the Lord, and the Lord answered, through tonight’s speaker, David Straight. “He goes from deep rabbit hole to deep rabbit hole to”—there are no other words for the depths illuminated by David Straight, so Pastor Dave triples down on the ones he has—“deep rabbit hole.”
Down we go. Straight’s no ordinary evangelist. He wears a denim shirt and black slacks, a large-shouldered man at ease in the space among others his broad back affords. He slicks his graying hair back, but he’s not slick. He doesn’t so much take the stage as drift toward its center. He has no notes. He’ll speak, or not speak, as the spirit leads. He paces, not speaking, one hand in a pocket. “I’m one of those guys you probably don’t know,” he murmurs. “I’ve always worked in the shadows, and”—a pause, long enough to let us know he doesn’t care if we believe him—“I’ve done a lot of things. I travel all over the world and”—pause—“I’ve done a lot of missions.” He says he’s served Trump under three executive orders, that Trump “looked at me right in the eye and said, ‘I’ve done everything I can. It’s up to you to be hard on your people.’ ” Us. Straight says Trump told him to show us “ ‘how to have power.’ ” He says he leads a secret team under Melania that just arrested 95 child traffickers.
The congregation cheers. “Booyah!” somebody hollers.
“Under President Trump,” he continues, “we arrested 15,000.”
“Glory to God!”
“Dominoes are falling,” stays Straight.
“C’mon!” shouts Pastor Dave, urging them to topple.
“Word up, Lord!” calls a believer.
Hillary, we learn, has secretly already been executed. You’ve seen her since? Green screens. There are, we learn, two United States: the one that “lives in our hearts” and the wicked one in Washington. Trump’s not only still president of the real one, he’s the 19th president, because most of the others since Lincoln, including Honest Abe, were illegal. Will Straight lose them here? No—Straight’s in the Word, which is like speaking in tongues, based not on reason but on the faith that there’s meaning even in—especially in—that which at first seems strange. Trump, Straight coos, “is the commander in chief of the military right now.” Yes, Lord! “He has not turned over the football.” The nuclear codes. That’s right, says the congregation. Amen!
Such are the spiritual truths of the Trumpocene, which didn’t end January 20, 2021. A “fringe” that surrounds the center and moves inward, until suddenly there it is, the fringe, at the heart of things: the QAnon Shaman in the Senate chamber, or Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene; Ashli Babbitt, who died empty-handed, or Representative Lauren Boebert, who open-carries; the “zip tie guy” or Ginni Thomas, who helped plan that awful day in Washington.
Straight doesn’t mention Ashli, but I understand now why Richard at the rally urged me to come this evening. I really am learning what Ashli knew. The Trump dream. “All I dream about and pray for,” she wrote; “it is all connected,” “the pedos” and the “enslaved.” “You can’t sell your soul to the devil without a price.” She retweeted the price deep-state traitors will pay: “DEATH BY FIRING SQUAD.” She’d come to care deeply for the 800,000 children she incorrectly believed are stolen every year. She spoke with hurtling indignation about immigration and drugs. She experienced her anger as love: channeled it into belief; embraced the authority of her president-redeemer. She embraced authority, full stop, as the fundamental frame for knowing the world.
Straight preaches at length on maritime law, about how legally we are all “vessels,” subject to the same regulations as ports and pursers, the ship’s officer in charge of money. Purser; person. It’s all right there for those with ears to hear. With each term he reveals secret etymologies—“deep rabbit holes.” The winding path on which Straight has come from Trump to lead us will restore to us, We the People, command of our own ships, our vessels, our bodies. We learn that by signing our birth certificates, our mothers unwittingly made us slaves. Yes, slaves. It goes back to the 14th Amendment. You may think that’s the one that ensured the rights of formerly enslaved people—“equal protection of the laws.” That’s what they want you to think. “It’s not your fault,” Straight says. You were fed fake news. Critical race theory. You don’t know that the 14th Amendment made you—true American “you”—a slave.
What Straight’s doing isn’t so simple as rhetorically waving a Confederate flag, even if it amounts to much the same. Straight swaddles the myth of the Lost Cause in universalism. For the modern right, Reconstruction, the uneven attempt to enforce those equal protections, is the root of “big government.” People you can’t see, in places you haven’t been, having a say in how you live your life.
“See,” preaches Straight, “in Genesis 1:26 through 28 God gave me, man, dominion over the land, the air, and the water, and everything therein. And this is law.” Amens ripple through the sanctuary. The law, says Straight, tells us we’re not “citizens” but kings. “God is our king of kings,” says Straight, “he ain’t the king of slaves.”
There’s world building here, much like the imaginary past summed up in Ashli Babbitt’s use of a date, 1776, the year itself like the Holy Ghost. There was the gospel of the Father, which Christians call the Old Testament, and the gospel of the Son, which they call the New, and now comes a gospel of 1776, apotheosis of revenge and redemption. “We chant 1776 because it reminds us of revolting against our government,” said another insurrectionist, naming the date as a kind of kairos, a New Testament word for time out of time, God’s appointed hour. As history it’s bunk; as politics, fascist kitsch. But as desire? Longing? The wish to live in the moment, to enter the myth as the hero of your own story?
“Mask Free Autonomous Zone,” read a poster on the front door of Ashli’s pool cleaning business, “Better known as AMERICA.” A place of “men” who “smile, laugh, shout, and have a damn good time!”
“You can either be a 100 percent citizen being protected by your ‘civil rights,’ ” Straight proposes—a “slave”—“or you can be 100 percent sovereign, protected by your unalienable rights given you by God” (a white man, in spirit if not in fact).
Straight’s a partisan of the growing “sovereign citizen” movement, which holds that federal government has no authority. He replaces “citizen” with “national,” but the concept’s the same—just as in essence is the broader ideology of “states’ rights” expressed by governors in Texas and Florida when they stand in the door to block federal laws. So too does this ethos animate those who stormed the Capitol. “If you guys get indicted, like some of us did on January 6,” says Straight—then he interrupts himself, because in his mind he is sovereign. “Not me, of course—I’m a king. I’m free. You can’t touch me.”
After Straight’s sermon, I meet Pastor Dave. What are the odds, I ask, that I’d fly across the country to attend a rally for Ashli and find myself at this church in the country, learning the theology of her cause?
Dave laughs. “Did you know that in the language of scripture there’s no word for coincidence in either the Old Testament or the New? Coincidence is just a spectacular thing, that God remains anonymous.” Take COVID-19. Dave says scripture teaches that what your enemies—China, Fauci—intend as evil, God makes good. Isn’t that the meaning of Christ, murdered by the deep state of his day, then risen to conquer it? The meaning of every martyr?
But what about the dead who don’t rise? I ask. Not Jesus, not Ashli. The million lost to COVID?
COVID is real and the dead are many, Dave allows, but there’s a “good part.” God has spoken: “ ‘Those who truly want to represent me, please stand up!’ ” Dave says there will be trials and hangings for those who don’t. Straight’s testimony of Hillary’s execution gives him hope, he says. Now we know who’s standing, who’s not, and who, in the coming war, will dangle.
4. INLAND
Or maybe here’s the good part: There is a word for coincidence in the Bible, Seth Sanders, author of The Invention of Hebrew, tells me. “The root קרה and associated noun הרקמ are fairly frequently used, and mean to encounter by chance.” He adds a dig at Dave: “This is not something that someone well versed in Hebrew would say.”
It’s satisfying when an expert flattens a false claim. That’s how so many of us believe we’ll resist the undertow of civil war, fact-checking our way back to solid ground. But much like the cross for Pastor Dave, such corrections miss the point. You can’t fact-check a myth.
How to say then, that Ashli Babbitt is not a martyr? There’s the word itself, martyr, which means “witness,” one’s life given as testament to some larger truth. The story for which she put herself in front of the gun, that the election was stolen? Verifiably false. But what if she died as a witness not to fact but to dream? Through a glass darkly: the comfort of chaos, the relief of “issues” falling away, like a body letting go, falling backward, into conflict itself as the cause, never ending? How do you disprove that?
From Yuba City, I turn inward. Toward the center. I drive over Donner Pass the next night, listening to talk radio rise and fall according to the ridgeline. “First-time caller,” defending the AR-15. “It’s our heritage.” Flip the dial. Kenny Loggins, “Danger Zone.” “Be safe,” Aaron Babbitt, Ashli’s husband, texted her as she prepared to fly to Washington the day before the insurrection. “I cannot lose you.” Ashli was headed toward the front lines. She responded from the plane not as wife or lover but as soldier: “Tons of trump supporters on my plane!!!!”
She was posting a lot of selfie videos by then. In her kitchen, driving to work. “There’s riots, there’s arrests, there’s rapes,” she says. “I-I-am-so-tired-of-it!” she says. She’s 15 minutes from the border. “Thousands of people on the other side,” she warns. They’re coming. She’s ready. She’s a digital soldier. She’s a real soldier. She’s going to take it IRL.
She wasn’t crazy. Her ideas were, but she wasn’t insane; she was mad. So what? White rage is close cousin to “white tears.” To which many quite reasonably say, Get over yourself. And yet, if sorrow and anger are shaped by race, they’re not products of it alone. How much of Ashli’s anger was rooted in her experience as a woman? As, seemingly, queer in practice if not in name? How much had been formed by her frustrated Air Force career? Did her failed first marriage play a role? How much was linked to her struggling business’s debt, a court judgment against it for $71,000, an ill-considered short-term loan charging interest she calculated at 169 percent? She liked to say she was living the American dream, but her anger dislodged her from one dream and propelled her into another. A red dream, cascading into the Capitol, and—almost—through that window.
Her death itself became the dream of others. Consider Garrett Miller of Dallas. When the FBI came to his door, they found him wearing a T-shirt that declared, “I Was There, Washington, D.C., January 6, 2021.” It was Ashli who led to his arrest: “A beautiful soul,” he wrote online. “They murdered a child.” Then he found out about Lieutenant Michael Byrd, the Black officer who shot her. Miller debated execution methods. He settled on a noose. “She fought fir me,” he wrote, “now I fight fir her.” Sic.
It feels drier here, inland. “Record heat wave,” says the radio. The sky darkens. Smoke, not rain. I’m driving through fire, detoured onto leaner roads. I pause to watch flames lick over a ridge, flickering down to the black ribbon on which I stand. The smoke isn’t just black and orange but green, sometimes purple. The sun peers through, copper, like a faraway penny.
“It was an incredible thing,” a Nevada J6er named Matt Virden tells me. He means the moment that Ashli was killed. He was outside when a man who said he’d been inside staggered from the building. Virden says he could see it, the death, the meaning: “the ghost on his face.” Outside the Capitol, the news “spread like wildfire. Before you knew it, everybody was aware of it. This is a different situation.” Virden says that on the Capitol steps, 500 circled and held hands. (Consider these spiritual numbers: Virden says he saw more than a million souls. Law enforcement put it in the thousands.) They prayed. “Everybody bowed their heads and had incredible reverence for what had happened and what was going on.” The shooting, the blood, the battle. To Virden, it was peaceful. The love. Hand in hand. The spirit. 1776. The dead girl.
My friend Phil has given me a book to read as I travel, a novel by his daughter, Ivy Pochoda, called These Women. It keeps me company in the desert, at night, when I’m not driving. A California story. About how women are killed and how we tell stories about these killings. “Here are the ways a body can come apart,” writes Pochoda. “It can drown or be drowned and turn the color of a deep-sea creature that has never seen the light of day. It can get trapped between the dirty, barnacled rocks and bang on them for a day or more before someone takes it away. By then it will barely seem a body at all, but rather an obscene organism, a swollen alien form.”
But what are the bodies in this story? Ashli. The body of Christ. The body politic. The body of “the nation.” How does that body “come apart”? The answer is in the question I’ve learned to ask the believers: “Do you think there’ll be a civil war?” They say “yes.” Some say Ashli Babbitt was the first casualty; others note January 6 as one more date in a calendar crowded with the death days of modern martyrs. All the blonde daughters of the Angel Families, the term used by the right for those whose loved ones have been murdered by “illegals”; every cop ever killed even close to the line of duty (except at the Capitol); Vicki Weaver, shot to death at Ruby Ridge by an FBI sniper as she cradled her 10-month-old baby when the feds came to take her white supremacist husband, Randy Weaver, away for selling sawed-off shotguns.
Most of the believers express some form of sorrow for what has become, in their imaginations, the fact of this coming war; some grow red in the cheek. “The spirit of 1776,” they say. You can hear the blood throb faster in their veins.
In Logan, Utah, I stop to visit an old friend, Andrew. We hadn’t seen each other in 17 years. He is a present-centered man. “I don’t really do the past,” he says. He’s a scientist, he studies soil, the actual land; also a cyclist, extreme. As I’m driving cross-country west to east, he’s preparing to participate in a race up its spine, border to border, 2,700 miles in the same two weeks it’ll take me to drive. I’m on the horizontal, he’s on the vertical. “How do you do it?” I ask, trying to imagine pedaling 18 hours. “Focus,” he says. “I don’t try to think.” Thoughts come in the form of flora—at Utah State he teaches a course in plant identification, on a hike into the canyon by his home he shows me a bright yellow flower, dyer’s woad, from which a blue dye can be extracted, once so valuable it sparked wars. Or fauna. “Antelope,” he says, “wild horses. Bears. Too many bears.” Sometimes he carries bear spray in place of a water bottle. Once, up north, a grizzly charged. A trucker offered him shelter in his cab. “You have to take care,” Andrew says.
I had a name an hour south. Scott Sneddon, an Air Force veteran and the founder of a local militia called American Patriot III%, as in the three percent of the population patriots believe fought in the Revolutionary War, a number to them not dispiriting but inspiring: If true, which it is not, it would mean it only takes three percent of a people to overthrow a regime. I found Sneddon’s number online because he’s also a Realtor. He advertises with a big dough-faced smile, pointing at you, the customer, with hands like happy six-shooters.
When I called, he said, sure, he’d be glad to meet. After the bad press around January 6, he felt it important to show the bright side of the militia movement. In Utah, he said, it’s “nice. Community.” I asked what community meant to him. Community, said Sneddon, is about being prepared to take care of your own.
“Prepared?” I asked.
“For whatever happens.”
“Preppers?”
“Yeah!” he said, pleased that I followed.
“Doomsday?”
Could be, he allowed. He liked “nicer” terms. “Love,” he said, “is about being ready.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mistakenly credited a photograph of Vicki Weaver to Jeff Sharlet. The photograph is by U.S. Marshal Service/Court Files.
This story has been updated.
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