Jeff Sharlet
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jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Jeff Sharlet
@jeffsharlet.bsky.social
71K followers 2.2K following 8.8K posts
I wrote a book about now, THE UNDERTOW: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, & 2 about how we got here, THE FAMILY & C ST, also a Netflix series. My fave books sell fewest: THIS BRILLIANT DARKNESS; & SWEET HEAVEN WHEN I DIE. Professing @ Dartmouth. He/Him.
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jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Last, from the extremely weird latest DHS vid: proof of Jewish space lasers? 4/4.
The Washington monument either shooting a pink laser or being shot by a laser.
November 8, 2025 at 11:55 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Looks like DHS is leaning *into* the Epstein vibe. In its latest vid, for a fraction of a second between an image of George Washington's horse turning electric and the Appeal to Heaven flag, there's this girl winking. But that's not all! 3/4
November 8, 2025 at 11:52 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
*How* weird is the latest DHS video? This weird. But wait -- there's more! 2/4
What looks like a historical document superimposed over Bigfoot
November 8, 2025 at 11:50 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
From a really, really weird DHS video. Um, what kind of tank is that? 1/
November 8, 2025 at 11:48 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
"Let Gaza Live," torn down. In the London neighborhoods in which I've been walking, political posters of any stripe seem to be torn down as quickly as they're pasted, revealing layers of other messages and colors. What was the teal? Does that green hold the last syllable of "SUICIDE"?
As described, a poster of fiery orange, a bar of teal from another layer, below it neon green and part of the letters "CIDE," possibly SUICIDE.
November 8, 2025 at 12:26 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Are Women Real? And if so, can Ross Douthat fix it?
November 6, 2025 at 4:14 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Clive. “Says in my psychiatric report, When I think about God, I’m not well, and when I don’t think about God, I’m ill.” He can't win! But this is what he thinks about God: “He utters the molecules and holds them all together.”
B&W horizontal of the head of an older white man in profile, one meaty finger pressed to a forehead in shadow beneath a radiant cascade of white curls. B&W horizontal of his sign, written in pen on dirty cardboard: "YSHUA died on a cross; arose from the dead; went up; reigns far above all angels, rulers, and authorities; will return & will judge the living & the dead." "Angels," "will" and "dead," aere most heavily inscribed.
November 6, 2025 at 1:10 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Look, ICE is very bad, but there's a bigger problem, isn't there? Inefficient masks! Think of all the fascismising these heroes could do if their damn masks didn't keep slipping. (Images from an ongoing project about ICE masks. Not their "efficiency.")
Bald white male ICEe adjusts mask ICEe with face fully obscured by mask adjusts the nose of the black blankness in lieu of a human face. ICEe interrogating woman in car realizes his darn mask is slipping. Lady ICE sees a foreign invader but is slowed in her attack by her gosh darn slippery mask.
November 5, 2025 at 1:22 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Emergency
White man with a rough blonde beard, black jacket with pale blue sleeping bag draped over shoulders like a prayer shawl. Eyes glancing left beneath two hats, black ear-leafed backwards ball cap beneath brown cord backwards ball cap. Everything is cast in a bright red, magenta or orange glow by the light of the ambulance sirens the man, who says his name is Nobody, silently observes.
November 2, 2025 at 7:24 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Latest entry in my "Masked Men" series, screenshots from everyday people's vids of ICE agents, heavily edited to suggest the fantasies of power, fear & sadism operating on the other side of the mask. Here, an agent looks on as another attacks 57-yr-old protester Franci Stagi in Durango, CO.
As described, black and white: foreground is a blur as one masked agent rushes left through the night before the camera; background is a membrane of bare branches illuminated by headlights; center, darkest, a masked man in black follows the attacking agent with his eyes.
November 2, 2025 at 2:23 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
For All Souls Day—for the dead in purgatory, if that’s your thing—I leave you with the white-eyed jackdaw, King Spooky of black birds.
As named, in a stone wall of a castle, a field in the beyond.
November 1, 2025 at 11:32 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Every now and then you come across a passage somewhere that so fully articulates something you've been trying to think about and express to friends for awhile. It's what people mean when they write, here, *this.* Amit Chaudhuri writing in @newstatesman1913.bsky.social on Jon Fosse:
It’s not the Nobel that’s of interest here, but a kind of writing that, from the romanticism of the 19th century onwards, constituted a subterranean stream in cultures dominated by the Enlightenment, and which made the literary such an inexplicable but powerful category in the modern world. One characteristic of this stream is an obsession with what another Nobel laureate, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, called the anavashyak, or the “unnecessary” or “superfluous”. It’s a way of thinking that is deliberately indifferent to the thematic. When the filmmaker Satyajit Ray said that some of the worst films have been made on the noblest of themes, he was speaking from the heart of this tradition. The stream seems to have dried up in the time of globalisation, not least because of the monetisation of the thematic, the “relevant” and the representational by publishing houses and the role these categories have played in the new morality of today’s sociologically driven humanities. But a counter-movement has been at work, in which Fitzcarraldo has played a significant role, restating literature’s oddity while downplaying what’s so important about it to the mainstream – its moral temper and cheerleading capacities.
October 31, 2025 at 1:55 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
you're walking home from buying some blueberries for breakfast tomorrow morning & you look up as two silver pipes blast steam through a tree still green, & steam, tree, streetlight, some holy moly good goddamn trinity, like Angels in America, only it's London and you think, "sometimes, I'm lucky."
As described
October 30, 2025 at 1:49 AM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
What shall I write with this snap? "Halloween fun?" "House of the (un)Dead"? "Eek"?
Eerily lifelike flat masks of Kim Jong Un and Putin hanging in plastic bags at the door to a shop. A red chain hangs in front of them, and a glint of red light seems to make Kim Jong un's eye flow demonically. Also, tote bags.
October 29, 2025 at 7:10 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Yes, Lord of the Rings is about how you must trust the “hard men.” Just as Narnia is about an evil lion. And the New Testament tells a tale of a wimp who wouldn’t fight back. Next week on “fascists read classics,” we’ll meet tech visionary George Orwell…
October 29, 2025 at 2:13 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Trump joking/not joking -- the rhetorical move by which he oozes new violations into the mainstream -- about a permanent presidency, 2019 in Hershey, Pennsylvania, from my book THE UNDERTOW. I hate "told ya so," but some of us have been publishing this a long time. It wasn't hard. We just listened.
“Time for a “joke,” again with numbers. “Five years,” Trump said. He paused, smirked, letting the crowd fill it in; it was their joke too. “Nine years, thirteen years, seventeen years, twenty-one years, twenty-five years, twenty-nine years.” Then the punch line: “When I leave office.” The crowd roared. “Now,” Trump said, pointing to his cage full of reporters, “I’m only doing that to drive them totally crazy. That drives them crazy. Even joking about it!” Joking. “I don’t know, should we give it a shot? Maybe we’ll give it a shot.” Maybe. “I’m only kidding. Media, I’m only kidding.” Not joking. It worked: His “joke” would be the only part of the rally that made the evening news, none of the violent dream that followed. If Trump said it was a joke, reporters reported that claim. They wanted to believe that some norms still held. Some feared that if they acknowledged just how far beyond norms he’d gone, they’d be normalizing the new American spectrum, one in which dictatorship had become not just a hyperbolic charge thrown around by each party’s most heated partisans but an actual idea. A joke or maybe a possibility, sooner rather than later.” — The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet
October 28, 2025 at 11:18 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
From a Homeland Security video. The queasy, disorienting surrealistic vision of power they *want* to project. Reminds me of James Tynion’s Department of Truth comics, a brilliant text on Cold War paranoia and fake news chaos now.
Neon green blurry silhouette of Trump double exposure with US flag kn green and orange and purple
October 28, 2025 at 9:18 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Meanwhile, here’s how ICE actually wants to be seen: They’re also distorting color and light to make themselves look as menacing as they feel. From the same video trollishly set to a song neo-Nazis have adopted as their own.
Silhouette of a hulking ice agent against background of fiery yellow and red, a single glaring green light in his helmet like a cyclops eye Blurred bluish image of two hulking ICE-ees hauling away a shitless man, his armed twisted behind his back and up
October 24, 2025 at 2:40 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Latest DHS terror video, set to slowed down MGMT song taken up by neo-Nazis, does same thing I’ve been doing w/ ICE vids, distorting color & light to make figure look scary as they think they are. Only I do that for men w/ guns. They’re working with bunny ears and fuzzy wuzzy suits. 1/
Blurry figure with bunny ears Blurry figure in royal blue stuffed animal costume
October 24, 2025 at 2:34 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
East End of London
View down a sidewalk of a bright red vertical strip of a building and beyond a bright billboard which reads in giant, stark letters, “OUR GOVERNMENT IS COMPLICIT IN GENOCIDE”
October 23, 2025 at 2:40 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
I brake for wheat paste.
Side by side B&W images of wheat pasted posters badly worn away: the left features a young woman in a keffiyeh holding a bullhorn; above we see "REVOLITION, only VOLUT remains clearly. On the right, "MESSIAH IS HERE," Moshiach's face torn away and replaced with a Bart Simpson sticker
October 20, 2025 at 3:18 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
This, FWIW, is my current teaching policy on AI, always subject to revision. It is, I recognize, easier applied to creative writing, which draws students who *want* to take the course rather than have to.
This is a course for those interested in writing not as means to an end but as an end in itself. Recently a friend and I read a cover story in New York magazine titled, “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College,” by James D. Walsh. My friend has also taught writing. He likes to tell his students, “If you want to be a writer, put on a cool hat and go sit in a bar with cheap beer. If you want to write, write.” I didn’t think AI would be a temptation for creative writing students. “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College” persuaded me that for many it’s not a temptation but a condition. You sleep in a bed, you wear clothes, you don’t scream at teachers. Just the way it is. Maybe AI is becoming that, too, part of “just the way it is.” Maybe it is that already. My mind raced through ideas about how to “beat” AI. The article dismantled them. Then I thought, “That’s not my job.” I’m a writer and a teacher, not a cop. If you want to work with me on writing, we can do that. If you want to cheat, you can do that, too, and I probably can’t stop you. I’m interested in working with students for whom writing feels… good. Who seek that feeling. A feeling of being, of alertness. Of purpose; of intention. This is a course for those who are interested in using writing to experience some variation of this feeling. Sometimes this feeling comes in a moment of clarity, sometimes in the making of a lyrical juxtaposition. There are so many more emotional, intellectual, and spiritual possibilities that arise from the act of shaping language. I live off the aftermath of that act—the recognitions, financial and otherwise, I earn from the results—but there is no paycheck, or even a finished book held in hand for the first time, that has ever brought me as much complicated pleasure as the arrangement of words. Maybe you’re like this, too. Or maybe you want to be. If so, I designed this course with someone like you in mind.
October 20, 2025 at 12:11 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
"Let's do something special." // Man whose sit this was said I could photograph his "place" when he left. Triangle on right's a sandwich, still wrapped. He was asking for money. Someone gave him a sandwich. "Didn't ask for a sandwich." His needs or his vices are his own.
Overhead black-and-white horizontal frame looking down on dirty street on which two pages of a tabloid have been spread on which to sit. One page features a soccer story, with the headline "Let's do something special." To the right is full page fashion, a gaunt, brunette white woman, with long, lank curls, in a ratty black fur, above the word "NEXT." To the right of the spread are coffee cups, cigarettes, and a wrapped white traingle, an unasked for sandwich.
October 19, 2025 at 7:05 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Getting my nails ready for Halloween.

(Rain-soaked sidewalk placard under inadequate plastic, Edgware Road, London)
October 19, 2025 at 12:48 PM
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Hmm. Don’t know about this one…
Man holding protest sign that reads “authoritarianism for parents not presidents”
October 18, 2025 at 2:03 PM