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The General’s Warning

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 10 › the-generals-warning › 680279

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In March 2023, when Mark Milley was six months away from retirement as a four-star general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he met Bob Woodward at a reception and said, “We gotta talk.”

Milley went on to describe the grave degree to which former President Donald Trump, under whom Milley had served, was a danger to the nation. Woodward recounts the episode with Milley—who almost certainly believed that he was speaking to Woodward off the record—in his new book, War:

“We have got to stop him!” Milley said. “You have got to stop him!” By “you” he meant the press broadly. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” His eyes darted around the room filled with 200 guests of the Cohen Group, a global business consulting firm headed by former defense secretary William Cohen. Cohen and former defense secretary James Mattis spoke at the reception.

“A fascist to the core!” Milley repeated to me.

I will never forget the intensity of his worry.

For readers of The Atlantic, this will sound familiar: Milley’s warning about Trump as well as the steps Milley took to defend the constitutional order during Trump’s presidency were the subject of a cover story last year by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. As Goldberg put it in that story: “The difficulty of the task before Milley was captured most succinctly by Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster,” who served as the second of Trump’s four national security advisers. “As chairman,” McMaster said to Goldberg, “you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?”

Milley knows well the risks of criticizing Trump. The former president has reportedly expressed a desire to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who have criticized him, and he has even suggested that Milley should be executed. Since Milley retired, Woodward noted, the combat veteran who served three tours in Afghanistan has endured “a nonstop barrage of death threats,” which led him to install bulletproof glass and blast-proof curtains in his home.

I long resisted the use of the word fascist to describe Trump. But almost a year ago, I came to agree with Milley that Trump is through-and-through a fascist. He is not only unhinged in his narcissistic self-obsessions, a problem which itself renders him unfit for office; he is also an aspiring dictator who demands that all political life centers on him. He identifies his fellow Americans as “enemies” because they are of a different race, national origin, or political view. And he has threatened to use the powerful machinery of the state and its military forces to inflict brutality on those fellow citizens.

Of course, it’s one thing to hear such concerns from angry members of the so-called Resistance on social media, from liberal talk-show hosts, or even, say, from curmudgeonly retired political-science professors who write for magazines. It’s another to hear them from a man who once held the nation’s top military office.

Some observers question whether Milley should have said anything at all. I understand those reservations: I taught military officers for decades at the Naval War College, and I am familiar with the tradition—handed down from America’s first commander in chief, George Washington—of the military’s avoidance of entanglement in civilian politics. I, too, am uncomfortable that, while still on active duty, Milley spoke to Woodward about a presidential candidate. He could have waited a few months, until his retirement; he could even have resigned his commission early in order to be able to speak freely.

My own objectivity on the issue of Milley speaking with Woodward is strained by my strong feelings about Trump as an existential danger to the nation, so I checked in with a friend and widely respected scholar of American civil-military relations, Kori Schake, a senior fellow and the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“It’s a legitimately difficult call,” she wrote to me. She noted that resigning and then going public is always an option. She admitted, however, that for a general to throw his stars on the desk might be an honorable exit, but it’s not much use to the people remaining in uniform who must continue to serve the country and the commander in chief, and in general she sees the idea of simply quitting and walking out to be unhelpful.

So when should a general—who’s seen things in the White House that terrify him—raise the alarm if he believes that a president is planning to attack the very Constitution that all federal servants are sworn to protect? Schake thinks that Milley overestimated his importance and was out of his lane as a military officer: “The country didn’t need General Milley to alert them to the danger of Trump, that was evident if people wanted to know, and plenty of civilian officials—including General Milley’s boss, [Mark Esper], the Secretary of Defense—had already been sharing their concern.”

Schake is one of the smartest people I know on this subject, and so I am cautious in my dissent, especially because other scholars of civil-military affairs seem largely to agree with her. And like Schake, I am a traditionalist about American civil-military relations: Trump, as I wrote during his presidency, routinely attacked the military and saw its leaders as his opponents, but that should not tempt anyone in uniform to match his egregious violations of our civil-military norms and traditions.

A comparable situation occurred during the final days of President Richard Nixon’s time in office: Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger told the Joint Chiefs chair at the time, General George Brown, that any “unusual orders” from the president should be cleared through him. (The Constitution, of course, does not have a special provision allowing Cabinet officers to subvert the chain of command at will if they think the president is having a bad day.) Schlesinger’s actions arose from concern about Nixon’s mental state; four years earlier, Admiral Thomas Moorer, one of Milley’s predecessors as Joint Chiefs chair, was so worried about Nixon’s policies that he actually oversaw some internal spying on National Security Council proceedings.

And yet I understand Milley’s alarm and frustration. He was not grousing about a policy disagreement or trying to paper over a temporary crisis regarding the president’s capacity. He was concerned that a former American president could return to office and continue his efforts to destroy the constitutional order of the United States. This was no political pose against a disliked candidate: For Milley and others, especially in the national-security arena, who saw the danger from inside the White House, Trump’s continuing threat to democracy and national stability is not notional.

I also am somewhat heartened that a four-star general, when faced with what he sees as a dire peril to the nation, believes that the sunlight of a free press is the best option. But, more important, are people now listening to what Milley had to say? The revelations about his views seem to have been overwhelmed by yet more of Trump’s gobsmacking antics. As I was writing today’s Daily, news broke that Trump had added Nancy Pelosi and her family to his enemies list. (Paul Pelosi has already suffered a hammer attack from a deranged man stoked by conspiracy theories, a ghastly incident that some Trump supporters have used as a source for jokes; Trump himself has referenced it mockingly.)

All of this raises the question, once again, of what it will take, what will be enough, to rouse the last undecided or less engaged American voters and bring them to the ballot box to defend their own freedoms. Milley and other senior military officers are in a bind when it comes to talking about a former president, but telling the truth about Trump is a duty and a service to the nation.

Related:

How Mark Milley held the line Trump floats the idea of executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley.

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The man who’s sure that Harris will win A Trump loyalist on the brink Shoplifters gone wild

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier aired tonight at 6 p.m. ET. Italy passed a law that criminalizes seeking surrogates abroad, including in countries where surrogacy is legal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented the country’s Parliament with a “Victory Plan,” which aims to end the Ukrainian-Russian war by next year and calls for a NATO invitation for Ukraine.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Found Image Holdings / Corbis / Getty.

The Sunshine Staters Aren’t Going Anywhere

By Diane Roberts

Floridians regularly observe that Florida is trying to kill us. Venomous water snakes lie in wait for heedless kayakers paddling down the wrong slough. More people die of lightning strikes in Florida than in any other state. I-4, from Tampa to Daytona Beach, is the deadliest highway in the country. Mosquitoes the size of tire irons carry several sorts of fever and encephalitis, and the guacamole-colored algae infesting our waters can cause severe respiratory distress and liver disease. Despite claims of perpetual sunshine, the weather in Florida is often horrendous: 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 95 percent humidity.

Then there are the storms.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small, in the “Dear Therapist” newsletter. This month, she is inviting readers to submit questions related to Thanksgiving.

To be featured, email dear.therapist@theatlantic.com by Sunday, October 20.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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The End of Parallel Parking

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › technology › archive › 2024 › 10 › end-of-parallel-parking-robotaxi › 680276

For decades, my dad has been saying that he doesn’t want to hear a word about self-driving cars until they exist fully and completely. Until he can go to sleep behind the wheel (if there is a wheel) in his driveway in western New York State and wake up on vacation in Florida (or wherever), what is the point?

Driverless cars have long supposedly been right around the corner. Elon Musk once said that fully self-driving cars would be ready by 2019. Ford planned to do it by 2021. The self-driving car is simultaneously a pipe dream and sort of, kind of the reality of many Americans. Waymo, a robotaxi company owned by Alphabet, is now providing 100,000 rides a week across a handful of U.S. cities. Just last week, Tesla announced its own robotaxi, the Cybercab, in dramatic fashion. Still, the fact remains: If you are in the driver’s seat of a car and out on the road nearly anywhere in America, you are responsible for the car, and you have to pay attention. My dad’s self-driving fantasy likely remains far away.

But driving is already changing. Normal cars—cars that are not considered fancy or experimental and strange—now come with advanced autonomous features. Some can park themselves. You can ask your electric Hummer to “crab walk” into or out of a tight corner that you can’t navigate yourself. It seems that if you are on a bad date and happen to be sitting on a restaurant patio not too far from where you parked your Hyundai Tucson SEL, you can press a button to make it pull up beside you on the street, getaway-car style. It’s still hard to imagine a time when no one needs to drive themselves anywhere, but that’s not the case with parallel parking. We might be a generation away from new drivers who never learn to parallel park at all.

It makes sense that the task would be innovated away. Parallel parking is a source of anxiety and humiliation: David Letterman once pranked a bunch of teenagers by asking them to try to parallel park in Midtown Manhattan, which went just as hilariously poorly as you might expect. Parallel parking isn’t as dangerous as, say, merging onto the highway or navigating a roundabout, but it’s a big source of fear for drivers—hence a Volkswagen ad campaign in which the company made posters for a fake horror movie called The Parallel Park. And then it’s a source of pride. Perfectly executed parking jobs are worthy of photographs and public bragging. My first parallel park in Brooklyn on the day I moved there at 21 was flawless. I didn’t know about alternate-side parking, so I ultimately was ticketed and compelled to pay $45 for the memory, but it was worth it.

Whether or not you live in a place where you have to parallel park often, you should know how to do it. At some point, you will at least need to be able to handle a car and its angles and blind spots and existence in physical space well enough to do something like it. But this is an “eat your vegetables” thing to say. So, I thought, the best people to look at in order to guess how long we have until parallel parking is an extinct art might be the people who don’t already have a driver’s license. According to some reports, Gen Z doesn’t want to learn how to drive—“I’ll call an Uber or 911,” one young woman told The Washington Post. Those who do want to learn have to do so in a weird transitional moment in which we are still pretending that parallel parking is something a human must do, even though it isn’t, a lot of the time.

I talked with some longtime driving-school instructors who spoke about self-parking features the way that high-school English teachers talk about ChatGPT. The kids are relying on them to their detriment, and it’s hard to get them to form good habits, said Brian Posada, an instructor at the Chicago-based Entourage Driving School (not named after the HBO show, he said). “I’ve got some students who are really rich,” he told me. As soon as they get their permits, their parents buy them Teslas or other fancy cars that can self-park. Even if he teaches them how to parallel park properly, they will not practice in their own time. “They get lazy,” he told me.

Parallel parking isn’t part of the driver’s-license exam in California, though Mike Thomas still teaches it at his AllGood Driving School. His existential dread is that he will one day be less like an educator and more like the person who teaches you how to use your iPhone. He tells teens not to rely on the newfangled tools or else they will not really know how to drive, but he doesn’t know whether they actually buy in. “It’s hard to get into the minds of teenagers,” he said. “You’d be amazed at how good teenagers are at telling people what they want to hear.” Both instructors told me, more or less, that although they can teach any teen to parallel park, they have little faith that these new drivers will keep up the skill or that they will try on their own.

Teens are betting, maybe correctly, that they soon may never have to parallel park at all. Already, if you live in Austin or San Francisco and want to avoid parallel parking downtown, you can order an Uber and be picked up by a driverless Waymo. But autonomous parking is much simpler to pull off than fully autonomous driving. When I pushed Greg Stevens, the former chief engineer of driver-assistance features at Ford, to give me an estimate of when nobody will have to drive themselves anywhere anymore, he would not say 2035 or 2050 or anything else. He said he would not guess.

“The horizon keeps receding,” he told me. Stevens now leads research at the University of Michigan’s Mcity, a huge testing facility for autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles. Most driving, he said—99.9 percent—is “really boring and repetitive and easy to automate.” But in the final .1 percent, there are edge cases: “things that happen that are very rare, but when they happen they’re very significant.” That’s a teen whipping an egg at your windshield, a mattress falling off the back of a truck, a weird patch of gravel, or whatever else. “Those are hard to encapsulate completely,” he said, “because there’s an infinite number of those types of scenarios that could happen.”

In many ways, people are still resisting the end of driving. One guy in Manhattan is agitating for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing human beings the “right to drive,” if they so choose, in our autonomous-vehicle future. It can be hard to predict whether people will want to use new features, Stevens told me: Some cars can now change lanes for you, if you let them, which people are scared to do. Most can try to keep you in your lane, but some people hate this a lot. And for now, self-driving cars are just not that much more pleasant to use than regular cars. On the highway, the car tracks your gaze and head position to make sure your eyes stay on the road the entire time—arguably more depressing and mind-numbing than regular highway driving.

Many people don’t want a self-parking car, which is why Ford has recently paused plans to put the feature in all new vehicles. I hate driving because it’s dangerous, but I am good at parallel parking, and I’m not ready to see it go. It’s the only aspect of operating a vehicle for which I have any talent. I don’t want to ease into a tight spot without the thrill of feeling competent. Parallel parking is arguably the hardest part of driving, but succeeding at it is the most gratifying.

If parallel parking persists for the simple reason that Americans don’t want to give it up, fully self-driving cars may have little hope. A country in which nobody has to change lanes on a six-lane highway or park on their own is a better country, objectively. I also spoke with Nicholas Giudice, a spatial-computing professor at the University of Maine who is working on autonomous vehicles with respect to “driving-limited populations” such as people with visual impairments or older adults. Giudice is legally blind and can’t currently drive a car. He said he would get in the first totally self-driving car anybody offered him: “If you tell me there’s one outside of my lab, I’ll hop into it now.”

Conventional parallel parking—sweating, straining, tapping the bumper of the car in front of you, finally getting the angle right on the 40th try—won’t have to disappear, but it could become part of a subculture one day, Giudice said. There will be driving clubs or special recreational driving tracks. Maybe there will be certain lanes on the highway where it would be allowed, at least for a while. “You can’t have 95 percent autonomous vehicles and a couple of yahoos driving around manually,” he said. “It will just be too dangerous.”

Am I a yahoo for still wanting to parallel park? I can mollify myself with a fantasy of parallel parking as not a chore but a fun little game to play in a closed environment. I can picture it next to the mini-golf and the batting cages at one of those multipurpose “family fun” centers. There’s one near my parents’ house where you can already ride a fake motorcycle and shoot a fake gun. My dad could drive me there with his feet up and a ball game on.

Tesla Cybertruck sales might stall out very soon

Quartz

qz.com › tesla-cybertruck-sales-reservations-waiting-list-1851674113

There’s no denying it, the long-delayed launch of the Cybertruck has been a sales success for Tesla. The angular behemoth has become one of the best-selling six-figure cars and it’s now the third-best-selling electric vehicle in America. That impressive run could be coming to an end, however, as it sounds like Tesla…

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GLP-1 Is Going the Way of Gut Health

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › health › archive › 2024 › 10 › glp-1-supplements-ozempic-buzzword › 680268

If you had come across the abbreviation GLP-1 a few years ago, chances are you’d have had no idea what it stood for. Intro to Greek lyric poetry? Low-level Great Lakes precipitation? A member of the 1990s rap group Get Low Playaz?

These days, the initialism is much more recognizable. The new blockbuster obesity drugs, made famous by Ozempic, are collectively known as GLP-1 agonists, for the hormone they mimic in the body: glucagon-like peptide 1. It’s impossible to hear about the voraciously in-demand drugs without encountering the term. GLP-1 is mentioned 10 seconds into a Good Morning America segment on Ozempic, and frequently turns up in publications as varied as Good Housekeeping and Rolling Stone.

Now, of course, the wellness industry is trying to get in on the GLP-1 craze. Supplements that are labeled with the term are everywhere. A brand called Supergut, available at chains such as Target and GNC, markets a “GLP-1 Booster” powder. Lemme, a company owned by Kourtney Kardashian, sells a “GLP-1 Daily” pill. These GLP-1 supplements are marketed as an alternative to obesity drugs—even though they have little in common with the drugs. To the wellness industry, GLP-1’s actual significance doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much as its association with thinness. Stripped of all meaning, GLP-1 can be used to sell just about anything.

The obesity-drug boom makes GLP-1 seem almost miraculous. Semaglutide (sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro and Zepbound) are synthetic versions of GLP-1. They can quiet hunger and food cravings, leading to weight loss. Supplements suggest that they can do the same. Pendulum’s GLP-1 Probiotic gives users “the power to boost this powerful hormone.” Calocurb’s GLP-1 Activator offers “natural appetite management support.” GLP-1 Boost Tea, from Happyself, is “inspired by the benefits of Ozempic & Semaglutide.”

Ozempic isn’t the only way to boost GLP-1—the hormone kicks in after every meal. “Eating food will elevate GLP-1,” Richard Bloomer, a supplement expert at the University of Memphis, told me. When food reaches the small intestine, it triggers the release of GLP-1, leading to a feeling of fullness, and stimulates the release of insulin, which lowers blood sugar. GLP-1 supplements claim—correctly!—that a particular blend of nutrients can coax more GLP-1 out of the body. Metabolism Ignite, from a company called Veracity, includes green-coffee-bean extract, which was associated with a small uptick in GLP-1 in one study.

Here’s the catch: GLP-1 supplements are like Ozempic in the way that peewee football is like the NFL. The drugs reach “manyfold higher levels of GLP-1” than any food, Dariush Mozaffarian, a professor at Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, told me. Consider Lemme’s pills, which contain three plant-derived substances, including a lemon extract. In a 30-person, industry-funded study, lemon extract raised GLP-1 levels by 17 percent after participants took the extract for 12 weeks. In comparison, obesity drugs increase GLP-1 by more than 1,000 percent. The synthetic GLP-1 in obesity drugs lingers in the body for weeks after being injected; meanwhile, GLP-1 produced by the body is degraded within minutes, so hunger quickly returns.

GLP-1 products, for the most part, are just repackaging common supplement ingredients. Some are bacteria-based: Pendulum, whose chief communications officer is the actor Halle Berry, sells a product called GLP-1 Probiotic, not to be confused with pills from a different company, Codeage, called GLP-1 Probiotic+. Other brands that claim to boost GLP-1 are functionally just selling fiber: Supergut’s product, a powder that can be added to drinks or food, contains six grams of probiotic fiber, about the same as a pear.

At best, a GLP-1 supplement might expand on the effects of foods generally considered “good for you,” including unsaturated fats from avocados, nuts, flaxseed, and olive oil; some proteins, such as those from egg whites; and prebiotic fiber from certain legumes, whole grains, and fruits. These have all been shown to raise GLP-1, Mozaffarian told me.

But when one takes these supplements, increasing GLP-1 isn’t really the point. What people actually care about is the secondary effect of having high GLP-1—that is, weight loss. But again, that’s hardly guaranteed. Boosting GLP-1 through a supplement “doesn’t really mean a whole lot, because the half-life is so short—but even if it is elevated, we don’t really know if it’s going to cause any of those beneficial effects,” such as weight loss, Bloomer said. Certainly, consuming fiber helps you feel fuller for longer. But you don’t have to be a nutritionist to know that it won’t slim your waistline like the obesity drugs do.

In that sense, GLP-1 boosters aren’t so different from any old weight-loss supplement already on the market: They don’t reliably hold up to all the breathless marketing. GLP-1 is just the latest addition to the list of health terms that have been absorbed and watered down by the wellness space. Sometimes they’re jammed together on the label of a single product, as if doing so compounds their healthiness. The marketing copy for Pendulum’s GLP-1 Probiotic manages to fit in references to “metabolic health,” the “gut microbiome,” “postbiotics,” and “gut health,” together with the usual jargon related to GLP-1.

If you spend too much time looking at these products, all of these terms start to blur together. Probiotics, electrolytes, protein, adaptogens—does anyone really understand what these words mean, and more important, do they care? Maybe not. But the fact that something sounds healthy makes it good enough to sell products. People may not know what GLP-1 is or does, but it certainly seems like it has something to do with losing weight.

The wellness industry commonly uses sly marketing to sell products of dubious effectiveness, but there’s something especially unnerving about its attempt to move into the obesity-drug space. Demand for Ozempic and its kin is tremendous, but many people can’t access these drugs because of cost and supply issues. For people desperate to get on the drugs, GLP-1 supplements may seem like an easy substitute. They might even be convinced that these supplements are the better option: Supergut, according to its marketing, is “non-pharmaceutical, affordable, convenient, and comes with none of the unpleasant side effects” of the obesity drugs, “offering a sustainable approach to achieve lasting results.” Other brands use phrases such as “hunger quieting” and “curbs cravings,” borrowed directly from the Ozempic playbook. Like the obesity drugs themselves, GLP-1 supplements are meant to be taken continuously; most companies offer monthly subscriptions to their products (a six-month supply of Lemme’s pills, for example, costs $378).

At one point, it seemed as though the new obesity drugs would doom weight-loss supplements for good. The drugs spurred greater and faster weight loss, in a wider range of people, than any other product in history. In response, the supplement industry has rebranded its offerings to mirror the competition, down to the language it uses. GLP-1 supplements don’t even come close to the real thing. But they sure look like it.

What Really Happened Inside the ‘Patriot Pod’

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › podcasts › archive › 2024 › 10 › what-happened-inside-patriot-pod › 680257

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For various reasons, January 6 rioters have been held together in a segregated wing of the D.C. jail that they came to call the “Patriot Pod.” They developed their own rituals and inside jokes, and reinforced one another’s narratives. Over time, the expected happened: They became further radicalized. And through connections with right-wing media, they have attempted to recast themselves with terms such as political prisoner and hostage, which the presidential candidate Donald Trump has now adopted as his own.

In this episode, we follow a young rioter from the Patriot Pod who went into jail a mischievous goofball and emerged willing to die for the MAGA cause. We tell, for the first time, an inside story of exactly what happened within the pod, how it spread out to the world, and what this tight-knit group is planning for the future.

This is the fifth episode of We Live Here Now, a six-part series about what happened when we found out that our new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: In May of 2024, a new person was hanging around our neighbors’ house—a young guy, fresh out of prison, who was spending nights at the “Eagle’s Nest.” Around us, Micki referred to him as “the little boy.” His real name is Brandon Fellows.

[Music]

Rosin: Brandon had come to the Capitol on January 6 armed with a fake orange beard that looked like it was made from his mom’s leftover yarn and a weird knitted hat. He was having fun until someone in front of him started smashing a window with a cane, which prompted a cop to swing his baton, and then Brandon freaked out.

Brandon Fellows: I’m like, Oh my god. Holy shit. Holy shit. I said it, like, five times, and I’m just like, Yeah. They clearly don’t want us in there. That’s what I said in my mind. I’m not going in there. I’m not getting hit. I like my face. I’m not going to get hit. I’m not doing that.

Rosin: So Brandon just hung around for a while, did some people watching. Eventually, he wandered over to the other side of the building, where, according to him, he saw cops just kind of passively letting rioters inside. So he climbed through a window and ended up in Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley’s office with his feet up on the desk, smoking a joint.

I had this idea of Brandon as, like, the Seth Rogan of insurrectionists: goofball, high by noon, not exactly militia material.

Rosin: Are you Brandon?

Fellows: Yes.

Rosin: I’m Hanna. Hi.

Fellows: Nice to meet you.

Rosin: But the Brandon I met three years later looked different: totally beardless, conspicuously fit. He showed up at this Memorial Day march that Micki organized about a week after he was released from prison.

Lauren Ober: Hey, Micki. How far are you going?

Micki Witthoeft: To the jail.

Rosin: The counterprotesters were already trailing with megaphones, so Micki was strict. Stay on the sidewalks. Don’t cause trouble.

Witthoeft: I’m not interested in any kind of conflict.

Ober: But newly released Brandon was having too much fun to obey. A D.C. resident told him to get off his property. Brandon yelled back, “I was at the Capitol on January 6!” A group of guys in MAGA hats saluted him, “Political prisoner. Thanks for sticking it out!” Marchers cheered him on as he walked by, took selfies, asked questions.

Marcher: Did you feel like you were going to get your ass kicked from time to time, being in a D.C. jail? I mean, I would think that if you’re a white boy in D.C. jail, you’d be getting your ass kicked.

Fellows: It’s total culture shock. It’s crazy. But I survived. I only got into one fight.

Rosin: I was interested in Brandon because he was one of the only released J6ers who came straight back to D.C., a one-man experiment I could follow for what was coming for us on January 6, 2025, the day the next election is scheduled to be certified—especially if Trump loses.

And I could tell, even just from that march, that some new kind of energy was blooming in Brandon. No more weed. No more disguises. Postprison, his defiance had a different tone, which I picked up when I was following him at the march and I overheard him mention death a couple of times.

Fellows: Yeah. If it’s my time to die, it’s my time to die. I prefer not to, but life is beautiful.

Rosin: I’m eavesdropping, by the way. I got here at the time when you were like, I can die. There was something about death, and I was like, Huh?

Rosin: I sound awkwardly confused because I was confused. Why does a 30-year-old think it might be his time to die? Die for what? And why so dramatic?

I’m Hanna Rosin.

Ober: And I’m Lauren Ober. And from The Atlantic, this is We Live Here Now.

Rosin: Okay, to understand how Brandon went from “I’m not doing that,” on January 6, 2021, to “I’m ready to die,” in 2024—a little bit about Brandon: He’s now 30. He grew up in Schenectady, New York, born into a line of military men going back before the Civil War. He told me his grandfather was the main inventor of a gun that shoots 3,000 bullets per minute. His dad was an Army sniper. But Brandon was different.

Fellows: I kind of went through this emo phase. I had longer hair. I dyed it black, wore black clothes, like rock-band clothes.

Rosin: When he was 13, Brandon started wearing eyeliner, trying to impress the emo girls he was hanging out with. Usually, he would wipe it off before he got to his dad’s house, but one day he forgot.

Fellows: And he’s like, Is that eyeliner on your face? And I was like, No. Clearly it was. I didn’t wipe it off. And he’s like, Don’t lie to me. He hates lies. And I was like, All right. Yes. It is. And he’s like, Brandon—this is the actual language he said. He’s like, I cannot have fags in my house.

Rosin: He said what now?

Fellows: He said, I cannot have fags in my house.

Rosin: After this and a couple of minor domestic disputes, Brandon’s dad said he couldn’t stay with him anymore—like, ever—although they did make up three years later. We couldn’t reach his dad for comment, although his mom confirmed the events. He spent the rest of his teenage years living only at his mom’s house, until he didn’t want to do that anymore, and he found his own way to live.

Fellows: So I have two tiny houses almost at all times.

Rosin: Wait. You were a tiny houser?

Fellows: Yes. I’ve been a tiny houser since 2016.

Rosin: Okay.

Fellows: I have a veggie-oil-powered bus. It’s almost—it’s 85 percent carbon-neutral. Very cool.

Rosin: From his tiny houses and his veggie bus, Brandon ran a tree-trimming business and a chimney-cleaning business. He’d never been to a Trump rally, or any rally, but decided to go that day. It’s kind of unclear why. Just all these things he’d been annoyed about—COVID restrictions, small-business restrictions—it seemed more fun to be annoyed in a crowd.

The following morning, January 7, Brandon does what people do after a big event: brunch, at a campground with other January 6 tiny housers. Apparently, he’s not alone in the January 6–tiny houser Venn diagram overlap.

Anyway, it was at this brunch where he learned that a woman had been killed at the Capitol: Micki’s daughter, Ashli. Someone showed him a video, and he cried.

Which for Brandon, is something. He doesn’t express emotions in any easily readable way and almost never in public. You can hear that in the way he speaks. But that video of Ashli—it got to him.

Fellows: And that’s a reason why I showed back up on the eighth, to D.C. I came back. But nobody was there.

Rosin: Nobody was at the Capitol—just a vast field littered with empty water bottles and pepper-spray cans—so he went home. All the other people at the Capitol on January 6—they went home too.

And then the FBI began the largest manhunt in American history. Agents combed through thousands of hours of video and sourced leads from an anonymous group of online sleuths called the Sedition Hunters.

At home, in New York, Brandon noticed a new type of visitor to his LinkedIn profile: so-and-so from the FBI Albany field office, the D.C. field office. And then a cop showed up at his mom’s house, and Brandon began his journey back to D.C.

Fellows: It’s July 2, 2021, is when I reached the D.C. jail. So I walk through the center doors, and—I kid you not—within 15 seconds, I hear on the speakers, Something, something, something, medical staff, medical staff, stabbing victim.

Rosin: About a week later, he’s moved to a temporary cell and more of the same.

Fellows: I start heading over to this basketball court, interior basketball court. So the first probably, like, two minutes, I see this dude come up to this dude, and he says, Where’s my honey bun? And he, all of a sudden, starts stabbing a guy.

Rosin: Wait. You’re watching someone—

Fellows: Yep.

Rosin: With what?

Fellows: I couldn’t make out what it was, but I saw him stabbing him, and I saw some blood. And I watched that just with my jaw dropped, and I’m looking to my right, and I’m seeing these four payphones. And everybody’s just talking. They’re still talking to the person they’re on the phone with, like this happens all—like this is nothing. I was like, I gotta get out of here.

Rosin: Were you genuinely freaked out?

Fellows: I went to go do pull-ups immediately.

Rosin: For a lot of J6ers I’ve interviewed, intake at the D.C. jail is seared into their brains. Most of them had never been to jail before, much less the D.C. jail, which is notorious for its violence. I’ve heard of J6ers who cried in the transport van when they realized where they were going.

But intake is not where they stayed. The population of the D.C. jail is about 90 percent Black, and judges were importing a bunch of guys whose collective reputation was “white supremacist,” so they ended up housed in a segregated unit. The consequences of this were huge and sometimes absurd.

What resulted would eventually become known as the “Patriot Pod,” the place where groups of J6ers were imprisoned together, 20 to 30 at a time over three years. These are the people that Micki and Nicole held their vigil for every night over those two years.

By the time Brandon arrived in D.C., about six months after January 6, he already knew about the Patriot Pod.

Fellows: So we’re walking in, and I’m just imagining in my head. I’m like, Oh I’m gonna walk in to cheers. Like, oh another person like, Hey. We’re sorry this is happening to you. But hey—you know, you made it.

Rosin: There were no cheers, but there was plenty of goodwill. Plus, for Brandon, this was a who’s who of J6—people he’d read about or seen on YouTube during the endless hours he’d spent on house arrest.

Fellows: People started coming up to my cell and talking to me. One standout was Julian Khater, because he said, Hey. I’m the guy that they accused of killing Officer Sicknick. I’m like, No way!

Rosin: This was the crowd that Brandon was walking into: Khater, who pleaded guilty to assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon, and Guy Reffitt, Nicole’s husband, who came to the Capitol with a gun, and a guy named Nate DeGrave, who bragged about punching a cop.

Fellows: Tons of people started coming over, and they’re like, Hey. We’ve got commissary for you. We’ve got commissary. And I’m like, Oh. Okay. So that made up for the not cheering.

Rosin: Fellow J6ers came by Brandon’s cell and asked, Hey. You need a radio? Pen and paper? Need some extra clothes? They dropped off beef jerky, ramen, mac and cheese. Dozens came by just to introduce themselves and talk to the new guy. By the end of the day, Brandon had a stack of items outside his cell and a lot of new friends.

Rosin: They’re just giving you stuff?

Fellows: Yeah.

Rosin: I mean, this is like—this sounds like summer camp.

Fellows: I want to be careful to say that it’s summer camp because, you know, we’re not getting sunlight. We’re getting terrible food. We’re getting—yeah, okay, cool—getting camp food.

But it seemed like at that moment, despite all the terrible stuff going on, we had a good sense of community. At least that’s what I was feeling at first. And like, we were taking care of each other.

Rosin: And why do you think it was like that?

Fellows: We’re the same—like, we all are there for the one event. This isn’t like, you know, in the other wings, where it’s like, Oh, what are you in for? We all know the event we’re in for. We just, like, have different stories of what happened at that event.

[Music]

Rosin: Because most J6ers had no criminal records, the jail-ness of jail came as a shock to them. Their families were mostly far away. They couldn’t shave. Their cells stank. And this is all happening in the winters of 2021 and 2022, when COVID variants were running rampant, especially in jails. Sometimes they had to endure long stretches of solitary confinement. People told me that by day three of being confined, they could hear real disturbing moans coming from some of the cells.

During one nine-day stretch of COVID-induced solitary, Brandon kind of lost it. A fellow J6er, a guy named Kash Kelly, was on detail, which meant he could roam from cell to cell, and he came to Brandon’s rescue.

Fellows: Kash comes up to me, and he’s like, You okay, man? I’m like, Yeah. (Sighs.) And then he’s like, No. No. Are you really okay? And I start tearing up and bawling, because I was, like—I didn’t expect to. I just started bawling. And I, like, turned away from him. And he’s like, Oh, bro. Bro, you alright?

Rosin: The J6ers were going through hell, but the difference between them and the average person in D.C. jail—or, really, any American jail—is that they were going through hell together, so they could soothe each other with a reach out, some commissary, a well-timed joke.

Sometimes, they even found a way to have fun. When the COVID era died down and the men could spend more time out of their cells, they came up with one for the ages, one they’ll remember at a million reunions down the road. They called it The Hopium Den.

On these nights, the men of the Patriot Pod gathered their chairs into a semicircle, their cozy amphitheater the site for the show. The emcee was a U.S. Special Forces vet accused of beating a police officer on January 6 with a flagpole. In jail, his fake mic was a mop.

The Hopium Den was a place where the J6ers turned the drudgery of jail into theater. For example, one guy took moldy bologna and rubbed it on another guy’s head and called it a hair-growth commercial. Another guy lifted his shirt up and ate coleslaw like a slob—apparently, he really loved the gloopy prison coleslaw. This was a roast. They rapped diss tracks, wrote mushy poetry to pretend they were gay.

I’ve heard about so many Hopium Den skits, sometimes the guys are snorting with laughter when they recount them to me. And I never understand why they are funny. But that only tells me that, as much as they were stressed and got fed up with each other sometimes, they still had a million inside jokes.

Nate DeGrave: Dear fellow Americans, I never thought I’d write a letter like this.

Rosin: It’s not easy to mark exactly when these individual J6ers became the Patriot Pod—became a unit—and when that unit became an important symbol to MAGA out in the world. One important early moment came in October 2021, when a guy named Nate DeGrave wrote a letter to a right-wing media site.

DeGrave: This is my cry for help. My name is Nathan DeGrave, and as a nonviolent participant at the January 6 rally, I spent the last nine months detained as a political prisoner in pod C2B at the D.C. D.O.C., otherwise known as D.C.’s Gitmo.

Rosin: In his letter, Nate described the conditions as “inhumane.” He said the J6ers were depressed and anxious from the “mental abuse we endure.” He complained about the guards. And then came the important part: He used the phrases “political prisoner” and “D.C.’s Gitmo”—phrases that would shortly be everywhere.

Nate sent the letter to a friend he knew at Gateway Pundit, a right-wing media site. And immediately, it caught fire. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted about it. Greg Kelly called. Tucker Carlson mentioned it.

DeGrave: It started to catch a lot of attention, and more and more people were adopting the same phrases and words that we were using to describe ourselves.

Rosin: Nate DeGrave was on the phone with his attorney right after his letter got published, and the attorney was watching the GiveSendGo, which is a Christian crowdfunding site. Lots of people in the J6 pod use the site to raise funds for legal fees.

DeGrave: I mean, it went from zero to, like, $20,000, $30,000 in a 10-, 15-minute period.

Rosin: What?

DeGrave: And then I just continued to climb from there. And I think at the end of the first day, I was at probably just north of $70,000.

Rosin: In one day.

DeGrave: In one day. It was amazing. I almost forgot for a moment that I was still in jail.

Rosin: The immediate virality confirmed something for them: Even though their surroundings—iron bars, broken toilet, curfew—told them one story, You are temporarily banished from decent society, that story, they were starting to believe, was not true. They were the decent society. It was the outside that was wrong. And maybe the key thing that confirmed this new truth for them was what happened with the song.

[J6 Prison Choir featuring Donald Trump, “Justice for All”]

Rosin: How did the singing start? Like, how did that tradition start?

Scott Fairlamb: It was right, I think, when I had come in that it started to take off. I’m not sure exactly who started it. It kind of just snowballed, you know?

Rosin: This is Scott Fairlamb, who pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer. Scott arrived in the Patriot Pod in March 2021.

Rosin: So it happened at a certain time every night?

Fairlamb: Every night at 9 o’clock, we would get everybody and make everybody aware at three minutes out.

Rosin: How?

Fairlamb: I would yell through the door, “Three minutes!” And everyone else could echo it: “Three minutes.” “Three minutes.” “Three minutes.” So everybody would be ready.

Rosin: Scott said at first, the singing started out hesitant, kind of quiet. They weren’t exactly choir types, plus you never knew if the CO on duty that night could get pissed about the singing. But night after night, they did it. And at first, in these early months of the Patriot Pod, it wasn’t for anyone. There was no audience. It was just for themselves.

Fairlamb: And then mid-song, you know, “And our flag was—” and then everybody would yell, “—still there!” You could feel the building shake.

Rosin: Why “still there”? Why those words?

Fairlamb: Because we were “still there.” It was a reminder.

Rosin: That what?

Fairlamb: That we stood up for what we believe in and that we were still patriots, no matter who wanted to deem us as less than that, and it was something that really kept my morale and my love of country intact.

Rosin: Like The Hopium Den, this singing had an element of theater. Unlike The Hopium Den, this particular ritual spread far and wide, from their little jailhouse community theater out to the political equivalent of Broadway.

If someone made the inspirational musical, here is how it would roll out: A group of men believe they’ve been betrayed by their country, and they start to taste despair. Without their love of America, who even are they? Then one day, one of them opens his mouth and warbles a patriotic tune.

[J6 Prison Choir featuring Donald Trump, “Justice for All”]

Rosin: One of the men—that’s Guy Reffitt—tells his wife about it—that’s Nicole. And one day, she meets a new friend, Micki, and they, too, join the singing.

Person on speaker: It’s 8:59. Let me say the one-minute warning—

Rosin: Pretty soon, they recruit a small, amateur choir. That’s the nightly vigil. They start livestreaming the singing every night, and someone hears it and has an idea: Take this song plus Trump’s voice, and you have magic.

[J6 Prison Choir featuring Donald Trump, “Justice for All”]

Rosin: Trump starts to use this recording as his campaign walkout song, the same song we heard at CPAC. It goes to No. 1 on iTunes.

At his first big official campaign event, in Waco, Texas, in March 2023, Trump goes big and theatrical with it.

[J6 Prison Choir featuring Donald Trump, “Justice for All”]

Rosin: Huge screens play dramatic scenes from January 6 as he speaks.

Donald Trump: Thank you very much, everybody.

Rosin: And curtain.

Ober: In all this singing and fraternizing, there was one person who was on the fringes. Some guys would bully him, get on his case because his cell was filthy. In the Patriot Pod, Brandon stood out for the wrong reasons, so he set out to fix that. That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: As Brandon spent more time fraternizing with these guys, he started to think more about one way he was not like them.

The way Brandon saw it, there was a bright line in the pod. On one side were him and a couple of other guys—the nonviolent guys, he calls them, who, when they saw trouble, ducked. And on the other, heroes: people like Nicole’s husband, Guy Reffitt, who’d brought an actual gun to the Capitol. Eight months into jail for Brandon, he wanted to be on the other side of that line.

Fellows: These guys are the real people, the real heroes. I’m not a hero. I’m just some idiot that took selfies inside and smoked somebody’s joint that was passed around. I was there to take selfies, and I just happened to get caught up in this crap. But these people were actually, it seemed, willing, though they didn’t use guns. And then I just started—my eyes started opening up.

[Music]

Rosin: Here was his clever idea: Some of the detainees had been given these iPad-like devices. The evidence being used against them consisted of videos, so they needed to watch them to prepare a defense. And Brandon noticed that on his device, the camera hadn’t been turned off.

Fellows: Bro, a cockroach just came out of that. Hold on.

Rosin: So he started to film.

Fellows: Do you see him moving around in there?

Rosin: He leaked those videos to Gateway Pundit, and on May 25, 2022, they published a story: “Exclusive Footage: Secret Video Recordings [Leaked] From Inside ‘The Hole’ of DC Gitmo.” It wasn’t “the hole,” just a regular cell, but whatever. It’s a better headline that way. Quote, “First footage ever released of cockroach and mold infested cell of J6 political prisoner.”

His fellow detainees were, for once, calling Brandon Fellows “brave.”

Fellows: I told them, Hey, guys. Here’s how we’re gonna sneak out future videos. Here’s how we’re gonna do this. I feel like I earned my respect, because, remember, some of them didn’t—some of them used to say, You’re not even a January 6er. Some of them used to say that because, you know, I didn’t do anything violent.

Rosin: Brandon couldn’t undo how he’d acted on January 6, 2021. But what he could do was pitch himself as the strategist of a future operation, whatever that operation might be.

By the time I met up with him, outside the jail, the clock was ticking. The upcoming election was close. And Brandon was strategizing. This time, some things were different: For one, he’s a mini celebrity. People from all over the world have offered him a place to stay if he needs it. He’s had job offers, one from one of the many J6ers who have run or are planning to run for public office. All the sudden, he seems to be everywhere.

In June, he popped up in my Twitter feed, going viral for making funny faces behind Dr. Anthony Fauci at a public hearing. And in July, this came up on our neighborhood text chain: D.C. Community Safety Alert. J6er Brandon Fellows in a MAGA group house called the Eagle’s Nest—yes, like Hitler—is bragging on Twitter about punching women at local bars.

Punching women at local bars? I’d known Brandon enough by now to think this was a little out of character. Or maybe I didn’t know Brandon. So first thing I did, of course, was watch the videos.

[Overlapping shouting, swearing]

Rosin: Best I can tell, here is what happened: The bar—which, by the way, happens to be a few minutes from my office—is packed for July 4. A woman sitting with her boyfriend says something about Brandon’s MAGA hat, which is hanging from his backpack. Brandon is there with another woman—I know her from the vigil—and she starts filming and taunting the woman and her boyfriend.

Woman: Oh my god!

[Shouting]

Rosin: Then it all breaks: The woman throws a punch, which lands on Brandon. He punches back. And then the boyfriend gets involved, and by the end, Brandon is pinning him down.

I can say this: Brandon didn’t start it. But I can also say this: The trolling escalated pretty quickly into a real fight. And so I suddenly felt more urgency to figure out what Brandon actually meant at that Ashli rally when he said he was “willing to die,” because in this bar incident, there was a very thin line between words and actual violence, which is, obviously, relevant to current events.

Rosin: Like, how long are you going to stay in D.C.? Like is this—do you have a plan here?

Fellows: Yeah. I plan to stay ’til, like, January 7. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Wow.

Fellows: Yeah. That was my plan.

Rosin: That feels vaguely threatening.

Fellows: I could see why you would say that, especially considering, you know, my feelings.

Rosin: About violence?

Fellows: Well, about how, man, I wish, after seeing all the chaos that’s happened in the world and to the country, how I wish people did more on January 6—instead of, like me, taking selfies and just smiling. I think it would have been better off if people actually would have actually been there for—like, more people would have actually been there for an insurrection.

Rosin: Best as I can tell, here was the evolution of young Brandon: When he arrived at the Patriot Pod a nonviolent J6er, he was a little starstruck. The violent offenders were, to him, hardcore. But when he left, they were more like exalted, not just hardcore but righteous— more like Founding Fathers.

Fellows: Who was it, Thomas Jefferson? He said something along the lines of—I think it was Thomas Jefferson—every 250 years or so, the tree of liberty will have to be—What is it? Like, we’ll have to have the blood of the tyrants and the patriots. Like, they’ll have to cleanse it. It’ll have to be cleansed with the blood of the patriots and the tyrants.

And that is such a scary thought. I don’t want that to happen. I think more people, as I continually point out, I think more people would have suffered if we didn’t have the Civil War and the Union didn’t win.

That’s how I kind of, like, view it. Like, All right, are we there? Do we need something like that in order to, like, save more lives? That’s how I view it. I know people disagree, but that’s what I look to.

Rosin: So what he’s saying is that sometimes blood has to be shed in the short-term to restore America to its original purpose in the long-term, or some illogical logic like that.

Fellows: This is all make believe, by the way. This is—

Rosin: I can’t tell with you what is make believe.

Fellows: No. No. No. I’m not making it up. I’m saying, though, I hope that it doesn’t come to this. You know, I’d be nice if Trump just got in, and if he just does what he did before, that’ll be a nice Band-Aid. We need something a little bit more intense, and I’m hoping it goes a little bit more intense.

Rosin: But there’s just a possibility that he will legitimately lose this election, like, at the ballot box.

Fellows: Yeah. I think at that point, you know, people might have to do something.

[Music]

Rosin: Donald Trump has been saying that he’ll only lose if Democrats cheat like hell. Brandon is taking that one step further: He’s saying it doesn’t matter if Trump loses legitimately or illegitimately. Either way, people might have to do something. So I guess now I had my answer—this is what Brandon meant when he said at the Ashli Memorial Day march, “It’s my time to die.”

Maybe the Brandons of the world just like to talk. Maybe the FBI will be better prepared. I don’t know. But I can tell you that a lot has changed since Brandon first showed up at the Capitol. The energy of these J6ers—it’s not shocked and naive, like it was four years ago. It’s more calculated and steely. This whole “cleansing with the blood of the patriots” thing that he’s talking about is not thinking of it as an accident that happened one day, when things got out of control. It’s more like a plan.

Ober: Soon after that incident at the bar where Brandon punched a woman, Micki and Brandon “had words” about his antics, mostly because she doesn’t like drawing that kind of negative attention to her house or her cause.

But these amped-up young patriots and the women of the Eagle’s Nest—they may be moving in different directions. That’s in our next and final episode of We Live Here Now.

[Music]

Ober: We Live Here Now is a production of The Atlantic. The show was reported, written, and executive produced by me, Lauren Ober. Hanna Rosin reported, wrote, and edited the series. Our senior producer is Rider Alsop. Our producer is Ethan Brooks. Original scoring, sound design, and mix engineering by Brendan Baker.

This series was edited by Scott Stossel and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Art direction by Colin Hunter. Project management by Nancy DeVille.

Rosin: Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. The Atlantic’s executive editor is Adrienne LaFrance. Jeffrey Goldberg is The Atlantic’s editor in chief.