“any reasonable method to promote peace” “The first militia church I went to I thought was a fluke,” Jeff Sharlet (The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War) told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday evening. “And then I started to realize that churches were arming up with the expectation of civil war.” “The doomsday prepper of the past has become a mainstay of rightwing culture,” Sharlet found in his research travels. Sharlet writes about Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed by Capitol security as she tried to climb through broken glass into the Speaker’s Lobby on Jan. 6. I did not know law enforcement had found a weapon on her body inside the ambulance. Babbitt’s knife appears on the cover of Sharlet’s new book. It’s one of those details that the MAGA right does not want or need to know. It detracts from the near-virginal image MAGA Republicans have built up around her since the insurrection. “They were aging Ashli back” within days, Sharlet says, making her “smaller, younger, as if whiter.” A young white girl. (Babbitt was 36.) People speak of the right as a death cult, Sharlet says, but in some ways it’s “an innocence cult. They want to be innocent of history, innocent of race, and Ashli Babbitt served as this whiteness martyr.” Sharlet spoke with several men at Rep. Lauren Boebert’s since-defunct Shooters Grill in a book excerpt at Vanity Fair. Things in this country are fast “going down the hole,” said David G who imagined he’d once…