“We’re all just foot soldiers in a long history of American exceptionalism,” Vardaman said. “This past year I’ve been called a radical and a racist. But let me tell you something, friends, don’t you listen to what the fake news tells you. We’re on a rendezvous with destiny this fall. Those people want to tear down our flags. Our statues. But that dog don’t hunt here in Neshoba. We know honor. We know truth.”

Sheriff Quinn Colson turned to his wife, Maggie, her jaw muscles clenched so tight they looked like walnuts. Her pale green eyes scanning over the crowd, in disbelief and anger at what she was seeing and hearing, spinning her wedding ring around her finger. “Jesus God.”

“Don’t give him any ideas,” Quinn said.

“I think I may puke.”

Much of the crowd was on its feet, in the shade of the pavilion’s wide metal roof, waving the red bandannas and yelling, most of them incomprehensibly, as Vardaman spread his hands wide, palms outstretched, and soaked in the praise. An elderly woman in a wheelchair, oxygen tubes going up her nose, held a WOMEN FOR VARDAMAN sign decorated with the stars and bars of the Confederate flag. Sweat trickled from Quinn’s brow and he removed his Tibbehah County sheriff’s ball cap to dry his face.

He’d been sheriff now for nearly a decade and he still wasn’t sure the state was getting any better. It was the entire reason he’d retired early as a U.S. Army Ranger, believing he could make a difference, fighting corruption, drug running, and violence in his own backyard.

“If that man is elected governor, he’ll set Mississippi back fifty years,” Maggie said.

“Considering where we are now,” Quinn said, “that’d put us somewhere during Reconstruction.”

The scene around Founders Square on the Neshoba Fairgrounds looked as if it might’ve come from a Norman Rockwell painting. Shoeless kids ran wild with packs of dogs behind them, oblivious to the speeches going on under the big pavilion. Every summer, families gathered for two weeks of horse races, livestock shows, carnival rides, and deep-fried food, culminating in the most important stump speeches in the state. Maggie’s family had been coming for decades.

Quinn was born and raised in Mississippi, but this was his first time at the fair, coming at Maggie’s urging to meet his new extended family after their wedding in June. He was a tallish, muscular man with a chiseled face of sharp planes and edges, dark green eyes with a hard glint in them. He had on blue jeans and a starched sheriff’s office shirt, despite it being nearly a hundred degrees. Compared to Camp Anaconda in Afghanistan, Mississippi in August felt like a cool spring day.

He shifted in his seat in the long wooden pew, feeling the Beretta digging into his hip.