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The way Donald Trump talks about January 6 has evolved over time. Directly after the insurrection, he condemned the rioters, although he added that they were “very special.” For the next few years, he played around with different themes, implying that the protests were peaceful or that the people jailed for their actions that day were “political prisoners.”

But these descriptions are mild compared with the outrageous ways he’s been talking about January 6 in these weeks leading up to the election. Recently, he described the day as “love and peace” and upped the metaphor from political prisoners to Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Why is he leaning so hard into the political revisionism? And what exactly should we be afraid of?

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who has a unique view of that day. Raskin explains what January 6, 2025, might look like and what is historically unique about Trump’s claims. And I ask Raskin the question I’ve been pondering: When might it be appropriate to let January 6 go?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Over the last many months, I’ve been thinking a lot about January 6 and about how memory can become a weapon in an election. Just the other day at an economic forum in Chicago, candidate Donald Trump described that day as “love and peace.” Love and peace! Can you imagine? You wanna hear some sounds of “love and peace” from that day?

[Noises from January 6]

Rioter: Start making a list. Put all those names down. And we start hunting them down one by one.

Person on bullhorn inside Congress: We had a disbursement of tear gas in the Rotunda. Please be advised there are masks under your seats. Please grab a mask.

Rosin: In the last couple of weeks of the campaign, Trump has been really digging into this bizarre sentiment. He compared the jailed rioters to Japanese Americans who were held in internment camps during World War II. He reposted a meme, saying January 6 would go down in history as the day the government staged a riot to cover up a fraudulent election. He said, “There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns.”

Now, if you follow the work of Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, who was on this show just last week, you know what it means when a leader starts to rewrite history in such a shameless way. It’s a thing that wannabe dictators do and have always done.

But January 6 has also been on my mind because, for the past year, I’ve been spending a lot of time with people who are hard at work doing what Trump has been doing—distorting our memories of that day.

It started like this: Last fall, my partner and I were walking our dogs, and we passed a car in our neighborhood that had a bunch of militia stickers in the back window and a huge j4j6, which means “Justice for January 6ers.” And at first, we had a nasty altercation with the person in the car. And then we decided to get to know her and her friends.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. If you want to know how that attempt to get to know our neighbors worked out, you’ll have to listen to the podcast series we made about it. It’s called We Live Here Now.

This episode is about the bigger picture. We, in the U.S., have not had a lot of experience with this kind of real-time memory distortion. And there’s only one person I want to talk to about how that might play out in this upcoming election: Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, who was a member of Congress’s January 6 committee, and his memories of that day are more potent than most people’s. Raskin’s son, Tommy, had died by suicide about a week before, and in the months of sleepless nights that followed Raskin wrote a book called Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, which interweaves his son’s suffering with the nation’s suffering, which he believes drove thousands of people to the Capitol that day.

I started by asking Raskin what was foremost on my mind, which is what we should expect this coming January 6, 2025, which is when Congress will certify the next election. Here’s our conversation.

Jamie Raskin: I mean, I’ve been to Arizona, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, California, Colorado—and everybody is asking about January 6 and whether we will see a repeat.

But we will not see an exact repeat of January 6, 2021. For one thing, Donald Trump’s not president. Joe Biden’s president, which means, if you had a similar scenario unfolding, the National Guard would be there. Joe Biden would not be eating hamburgers and french fries and watching it on TV like an all-pro-wrestling match.

Rosin: And saying, So what?

Raskin: And saying, So what? And in general, we are physically fortified in a way we weren’t. We will have nonscalable fencing, and we’ll be ready for violence like that. But fundamentally, what was January 6, 2021? It was a certification crisis. It was an attempt to block the receipt of Electoral College votes in the so-called certificates of ascertainment sent in by the governors.

And we will see multiple certification challenges by Donald Trump, because they’ve already begun, in essence. They’re already suing. But it won’t happen at the end of the process, which is what January 6 is. They will happen at the beginning. They will be at the precinct level, at the county level, at the state level. They will try to dispute the authenticity and the veracity of the vote, and there will be challenges to, you know, any popular-vote majorities. And I’m assuming and hoping there will be many of them across the country for the Harris-Walz ticket.

Rosin: Okay. You started by saying people ask you, so clearly people are worried. And then you answered by saying it’s not going to be the same. So is your general answer to them, No need to worry? Like, Don’t worry. There won’t be violence? Is that how, like—do you feel secure? It will be okay?

Raskin: It will not be an instant replay of what happened on January 6, 2021. It will look very different. In some sense, the new crisis has already begun, with lies that are being told by Donald Trump about the hurricanes and about FEMA. This is equivalent to the lies he was telling about COVID-19 last time to try to condition his followers to accept his Big Lie about the election. And he’s already trying to undermine people’s faith and confidence in the electoral process in the electoral system.

So that part of it has already begun. When I’m out campaigning around the country, I say we have two urgent tasks: One is to win the election, and two is to defend the election. Because as we saw from the last time around, Donald Trump doesn’t remotely consider it over once the ballots have been tallied if he loses the election. And that, of course, is a hallmark characteristic of an authoritarian, and an authoritarian mindset. Authoritarian political parties don’t accept the results of democratic elections that don’t go their way.

Donald Trump, as far as I can tell, is not running what I would recognize as a real election campaign, which is about canvassing, door knocking, organizing people. I don’t see that happening. I see it happening on the Democratic side everywhere I go. I don’t see it on the Republican side almost anywhere I go. They’re running a campaign of raising a lot of money. A lot of it disappears into different mystery boxes, but basically, they’re running a campaign on TV and then getting ready to attack the election process.

Rosin: Yes. He says, Cheat like hell, in almost every state. If we lose these states, if we lose this state—Wisconsin, Michigan, whatever state—it’s because they cheat like hell.

So I’m trying to give listeners an accurate picture. There’s one picture: Oh, we’re just going to have violence the way we had before. There’s another picture, which is: It’s going to be fine. So I’m just trying to prepare readers, listeners for what is realistically the thing that you should be vigilant and watch out for and what might actually happen.

Raskin: Well, I think it’s going to be a fight to certify the actual election vote. And remember, this is something that, for most of our lifetimes, we’ve taken for granted: simply that people will vote and that the votes will be counted fairly—they will be tallied fairly—and then the majority will be translated through an electoral system that has integrity to it.

You know, the Trump methodology here is to attack the electoral system, to disrupt the electoral system, and then try to blame everything on his opponents. I mean, this is an absolute historical anomaly. And so we need to have clarity about what’s going on.

And we have to, as citizens in a completely nonpartisan way—we have to be defending the integrity of the electoral process against this kind of attack.

Rosin: He has said many times that he would pardon the J6ers. He could pardon the J6ers, right? There’s nothing, if he wins, that would prevent him from doing that.

Raskin: Certainly not under the Supreme Court’s decision. I mean, the pardon power would be a paradigm example of a core function of the presidency that the president could exercise without any fear of criminal prosecution. I mean, when Trump figures that out, he’ll probably end up selling pardons.

They came close to doing it last time, but there’s no reason he wouldn’t go on eBay and just start selling them under that rancid opinion issued by his justices.

Rosin: I didn’t realize you could do that. You probably just gave him an idea.

Raskin: Yeah. (Laughs.) But look—let me say something about that. They call the January 6 insurrectionists convicted of assaulting federal officers or destroying federal property or seditious conspiracy, which means conspiracy to overthrow the government, “political prisoners.” So they liken them to, you know, [Alexei] Navalny. They liken them to [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn or to Nelson Mandela. These were people who were fighting for freedom and democracy against authoritarian regimes. These people were fighting for an authoritarian coup against a constitutional democracy, and they’ve had every aspect of due process, and they’ve been convicted for their crimes against us.

A lot of the Trumpian revisionist assault on January 6 is internally contradictory. It’s just illogical. Half of the time, they’re saying that the people who attacked the police and who attacked the Capitol were not MAGA—they were antifa dressed as MAGA. Then the other half of the time, they’re down in the D.C. jail demanding the release of these alleged antifa fighters. Why are they demanding the release of the antifa fighters? It makes no sense. So there’s just incoherence replete throughout the propaganda assault on January 6. The point for them is to confuse people and to destroy the moral clarity of what happened, but it was perfectly clear what happened on that day.

There were people of both political parties and all political persuasions standing by the rule of law and acting under the Constitution, and then people trying to destroy the Constitution in order to overthrow an election and put Donald Trump back in power unlawfully.

Rosin: I mean, yeah. If you’re a student of autocracy, like The Atlantic is, the point is to say something, in some ways, as an autocratic leader that’s patently untrue and dare you to believe it as a loyalty test. I mean, that’s one, as Anne Applebaum—she’s been doing a series about that. It has really enlightened me on what the lies are about. They’re a test, you know? And so the more absurd they are—like, they’re about Haitians eating pets or whatever—like, the more ridiculous they are and the more you are willing to believe them, the more that seals the lock between the leader and the follower.

So that’s why I sometimes get a little despairing around, like, Well, we’re just going to keep telling the truth, because that’s not the game they’re playing, you know? So what does fact-checking and journalism and, like, recording things really help? Sometimes, you know, I feel that way about it.

Raskin: I mean, Trump’s lies are not about illumination or even contests over the facts. Trump’s lies are about coercion and obedience and submission of his followers.

Rosin: But that’s difficult. That’s difficult to counter. Like, how do you get in between it? The truth doesn’t really get in between it. The truth makes you an enemy.

Raskin: Well, when you look at the way that cult leaders operate, they tell lies all the time. Nobody really feels like it’s necessary to contradict their lies, because they’re so self-evidently ridiculous. And we can see the way that their lives are just meant to regulate and control their followers. And so it’s just a question of naming what’s actually happening.

Rosin: And continuing to do that, with some faith that the majority of people will eventually sort of drift over to the side of truth.

Raskin: Yeah, and also to make sure that a majority of the people are going to stand up for the facts, the truth, and for democratic institutions.

Rosin: Jack Smith’s case. Any thoughts about that?

Raskin: Well, Jack Smith is now paddling upstream because of the Supreme Court’s outrageous ruling that the president has immunity from prosecution for crimes he commits under the rubric of his office.

You would think those would be the worst kinds of crimes, but no. Those are presumptively immune from prosecution, and if they’re within his core functions of office, then they’re absolutely immune.

Donald Trump was never acting in his official capacity as president when he tried to overturn an election, simply because that’s not part of the president’s job. It’s not part of the president’s job to have anything to do with the presidential election. When he’s trying to set up counterfeit elector slates, he’s not involved with the Electoral College. That’s done at the state level, and the state legislatures do it. And then the results are sent in to the House and the Senate and the archivist. They’re not sent to the president.

When he called Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia, and said, Just find me 11,780 votes, or called other election officials to harangue them—that’s not part of the president’s job. He was calling as a candidate, not as a president. And as a candidate, he was acting as an outlaw candidate and really as a tyrant, somebody trying to topple the whole constitutional order.

You know, a tyrant, in the Greek sense of the word, is someone who rises up from outside of the constitutional order to try to attack the constitutional order. And that’s a pretty accurate description and definition of what Donald Trump has done.

[Music]

Rosin: There’s a last thing I want to talk to Raskin about, and it pushed against everything he had just told me: When is it time to start moving on from January 6? That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: In the year I spent reporting my podcast about January 6, I came across a very interesting idea for how to approach the memory of that day differently. It was in an essay by journalist Linda Kinstler called “Jan. 6, America’s Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion.” Kinstler’s argument—or at least one part of it—is that we are a culture saturated in memories.

We have videos and body cams and security cameras. Almost every inch of January 6 is recorded, which is a good thing for, say, a trial. But also, it makes it harder for us to forgive and forget. Back in the day, American political leaders called it “oblivion.” It was used in certain moments in American history, like after the Civil War, when obsessively remembering might just bring on more and more cycles of recrimination and vengeance.

So I ran this question by Raskin. He’s a constitutional lawyer and also a philosophical thinker. Might there ever be a time when oblivion might be the appropriate strategy for January 6?

[Break]

Rosin: All right—last thing: Whether he wins or loses, we have a culture to deal with, a culture of Americans, 30 percent of whom still think that the election wasn’t fair, was stolen in some way. So that’s with us. That’s the state of our nation right now, whoever wins and loses.

I’ve been reading about a—it’s a philosophical, legal, political theory of oblivion. Like, is there a time when cycles of recrimination or justice have to yield to something else? Is there ever a moment when you’re remembering too much? Does that make any sense to you?

Raskin: Mm-hmm. Well, it will be important for us always to remember these events and the facts of what took place. But I suppose, you know, human beings are made up of a mixture of thoughts and passions and emotions. And just like the passions and emotions have diminished somewhat from the Civil War, perhaps the passions and emotions around January 6 will begin to subside.

But at this point, with the republic still so much under attack, and with so many lies and so much propaganda and disinformation and revisionism out there, I believe that the passions and the emotion surrounding January 6 are still very much there, and they should be there until we can actually dispel this threat of authoritarianism in our country.

Rosin: So a potentially useful idea for healing, but just not yet. Is that where we land? Because I’m very taken—I find this theory interesting, that there’s a history post-Civil War of oblivion. You know, that it’s talked about by politicians: It’s time for oblivion. And right now, you know, we have video memories. Everything’s taped, recorded. So it’s very hard, actually, to do something like that.

Raskin: Well, thank God it’s all taped, and thank God there are videos, because you can see the way they’re lying about it, even in the face of the videos and the absolute factual documentation.

Look—I would say that historical memory is essential to establishing our values and principles for the future. One hopes that in the case of a society or a nation, that we’re not disabled by a memory the way that individuals can be disabled by a memory through post-traumatic stress syndrome or something like that. I’m hoping we’re able to integrate this into the true American story.

But as long as people are out there lying about January 6 and claiming it was really antifa or it was really the FBI or something, it’s going to be important for us to insist upon the facts and bring passion to the project of making people see the truth and remember.

[Break]

Rosin: That was my interview with Congressman Jamie Raskin. My thanks to him for taking the time to chat with me. Now, before we end, I want to share a bit from the other podcast I made recently, We Live Here Now.

I can’t say that we managed to convince our neighbors of our version of the truth. I hope you’ll listen to the entire series to hear what happened. It starts with the ridiculous way we met them, and it moves through a lot of characters in their alternate universe, including some J6ers who’d been just released from prison.

But here, I’m going to share with you something from the final episode of the series because it’s kind of in the spirit of oblivion. Even though we didn’t change their minds, something softened.

The two people you are about to hear are Lauren Ober—she’s my partner, who co-hosted the series—and Micki Witthoeft—she’s the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the only person shot and killed on that day. Micki is our neighbor. This is from Lauren’s final interview with Micki.

Lauren Ober: Is there anything that I don’t get? Is there anything that you need to clarify? Is there any critique or anything that you need to say before, you know, we’re done with our interviews?

Micki Witthoeft: I think the only thing I can say that I haven’t said to death, because this has been an ongoing—it’s been quite something. I don’t know—you might know more about me than—

But no. I think that people like you and people like me that admittedly come from completely different places in our upbringing, geography, experience, and way of looking at things—I think that if we can sit down and have a civil conversation and just see that you can meet in the middle, at least somewhere, you know, people don’t have to stand on opposite sides of the fence and throw stones. I didn’t mean to cry when I said that. Let’s do—(Claps.) take two!

Ober: I mean, why are you trying to pretend like you’re a hard-ass? (Laughs.)

Witthoeft: No, but it’s just—people don’t want to hear that shit all the time. Eww. (Mock cries.) Nobody likes that.

Ober: Well, I beg to differ. (Laughs.)

Witthoeft: It is what it is.

Ober: I beg to differ. I know I agree with you.

Rosin: You can listen to We Live Here Now anywhere you get your podcasts.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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For nearly a year, we’ve been participating in a DIY experiment in civility. We’ve gotten to know our new neighbors, who happen to be supporters of January 6 insurrectionists. One of those neighbors is Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed at the Capitol on January 6. We’ve learned a lot about their family lives, their heartaches, and their two new kittens. We’ve also listened to them—while in both public and private settings—repeat things that we, as journalists, and most Americans know to be blatantly untrue. And for the most part, we’ve followed the rules about how to talk across an epistemological chasm: Stay calm. Don’t try to change anyone’s mind.

In this final episode of We Live Here Now, the outcome of our homegrown experiment comes into focus. Lauren visits Witthoeft at her San Diego home and sees a softer side of her. Hanna talks to Representative Jamie Raskin, who has something essential in common with Witthoeft. And we contemplate what might be coming for us on January 6, 2025.

This is the sixth and final 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:

Lauren Ober: It’s been almost a year now of reporting on our neighbors—their routines, their regrets, their mission. And even though Micki has asked me, on countless occasions, what more I could possibly want to know about them, I had one final interview request. Perhaps the most contentious presidential election of our lives was bearing down on us, and I guess I felt like we should have a little closure beforehand.

[Music]

Ober: Now I’m trained, when I bike pass or drive past, to see: Is there anybody on the porch? And there hasn’t been.

Micki Witthoeft: Well, I saw you and Hanna walking your dogs about three days ago.

Ober: But you should have said hi.

Witthoeft: Well, I wasn’t sure if you wanted to be addressed in public by a wackadoodle cult leader, so I thought I would keep that hello to myself.

Ober: Despite Micki guaranteeing me, in no uncertain terms, that she would not be listening to the podcast, she has—every episode. And no, for the record, I did not call her a wackadoodle cult leader. I’ve just said some of her ideas are wackadoodle, and she sometimes looks like a cult leader. Anyway.

Ober: We are almost—we’re slightly more than a month away from a very consequential election in America. So where’s your brain now, looking at, you know, how close we are?

Witthoeft: Well, I think no matter how the election goes, I think there’s going to be a certain amount of chaos. You know, obviously, there’s going to be one side that is not happy. But our plan is to be here through the election, and then, you know, of course we want to be here to celebrate Donald Trump’s inauguration. But beyond that, Lauren, I really don’t know.

[Music]

Ober: Inside my brain are two dueling ideas. For me, for the people I love, for democracy, for our nation’s standing in the world, I want so much for Micki to end up disappointed when the election is all said and done. I want us to move on from the Big Lie. I want America to right its little ship and sail on to smoother seas.

But then there’s this truth: I like Micki. I like Nicole. Perhaps in spite of themselves, they are very lovable. During this year of knowing them, a tiny crack has opened up in us—me and Hanna, Micki and Nicole—and let a little sun in, just a sliver of light, enough to feel that we aren’t meant to live in this darkness forever.

Hanna Rosin: Something I’ve noticed, here at the endgame: Lauren can’t talk about this project anymore without crying. I’m surprised she got through that last section without crying. She knows that our neighbors stand for a version of America that we just don’t understand—one where January 6ers are victims, not traitors, where the government is out to get us all, and where Donald Trump is the one to make it all right. And yet, she can’t help but feel genuine affection for them.

Ober: Right now, our country is in a holding pattern. So Micki and I can live in a suspended reality where, maybe, Americans aren’t totally sunk. We aren’t a lost cause. She and I can go on being friendly and teasing, and we can see each other’s humanity and want the best for each other. But will that hold true the day after the election? And what about beyond? Will our delicate glimmer of connection mean anything then? God, I hope.

I’m Lauren Ober.

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

[Music]

Rosin: Recently, I biked up to Capitol Hill, just a couple miles from our neighborhood. I was going to visit with Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. If you spend too much time with people who are trying to whitewash January 6, as we’ve been doing, Raskin is the person to see for a reality check, because Raskin’s experience with January 6 is personal—under the skin, not unlike Micki’s. His son, Tommy, had died of suicide about a week before. And in the months of sleepless nights that followed, Raskin wrote a book, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, which is about Tommy and about January 6.

Jamie Raskin: When I finished writing it, people would say to me, Well, I’m glad you did that, but what did those two things have to do with each other? And to my mind, they’re absolutely inextricable. It’s all intertwined.

Rosin: What do you mean?

Raskin: Well, they’re both things that I lived through, but in trying to make sense of it, I suppose I’ve constructed a certain kind of narrative. I hope it’s not a narrative that’s disconnected from reality, but I see a lot of what was taking place in the context of COVID-19 and the darkness of that period and the isolation of that period and the way in which people were so atomized and depressed and isolated. And I certainly know that was the case for Tommy.

Rosin: On January 6, Raskin had planned to give a speech mentioning Tommy, and his daughter came to see it. Then she spent the afternoon hiding under House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s desk while rioters outside yelled, “Hang Mike Pence,” and her father worried about how she’d get out of there. So when anyone tries to say the day was “love and peace,” as Trump did last week, or that rioters are being unfairly punished, Raskin gets intense.

Raskin: He calls them political prisoners, which is a lie. And he calls them hostages, which is a lie.

A hostage is somebody who’s been illegally abducted by a criminal or a terrorist group and held for a financial or political ransom. What does it have to do with hundreds of people who’ve been prosecuted for assaulting officers and invading the Capitol and trying to interfere with a federal proceeding?

And most of them pled guilty. So how are they hostages? What makes them political prisoners? Suddenly they’re like Alexei Navalny, who died at the hands of Vladimir Putin? They’re like Nelson Mandela? I don’t think so.

Rosin: In the last few weeks leading up to this next election, Raskin has been touring the country, and everywhere he goes, he says people ask him, Are we gonna see another January 6? And he tells them, Not exactly. What we will see, he believes, is something less violent but more insidious: in state after state, countless challenges of legitimate election results. Trump, he says, is already laying the groundwork.

Raskin: The new crisis has already begun, with lies that are being told by Donald Trump about the hurricanes and about FEMA, and he’s already trying to undermine people’s faith and confidence in the electoral process, in the electoral system.

Rosin: For Raskin, January 6 was one tragic day. But the long-haul tragedy is the patient and diligent effort to spread misinformation every day and get new people to believe it—to be an evangelist for total falsehoods, which could be a way to describe what Micki’s been up to.

But if this series has taught us anything, it’s that if you look hard enough, you can find the tiny thread of connection between people who are far apart. And in this case, it’s right there. These are two parents who lost children just days apart, and both of their children’s deaths are forever intertwined with the same day in American history. So I brought up Micki with Raskin.

Rosin: We have had such an odd experience, where I would say getting to know them has both increased the humanity and increased the sort of sense of like, Wow, they are deep in, you know. It’s like both of those things at once.

Raskin: I told him about the very particular way she was moving through her grief. And he was reluctant to psychoanalyze, but he had thoughts.

Raskin: I don’t think that grief is an emotion that, in its unadulterated form, has any real political content or meaning or motivation. And so I think what you’re talking about is something that is post-grief, which is trying to make meaning of a loss.

Rosin: Interesting. Okay. What do you mean?

Raskin: I mean, I assume she experienced just overwhelming grief and despondency and shock and sorrow to lose her daughter. Then after that shock is somehow metabolized, I assume she has to figure out what her daughter’s death means. What is the loss?

[Music]

Rosin: Raskin’s idea cracked something open for me. If we understand Micki as being in this process of figuring out what her daughter’s death means, well, it’s probably a long process, and it can shift.

Right now, Micki is painting one kind of picture of her daughter’s death—on a really huge, national canvas—where her daughter is a martyr, and millions of people are angry and grieving along with her.

Ober: But I get the sense that could be changing. On October 10, which would have been Ashli’s 39th birthday, Micki went to lay some flowers outside the U.S. Capitol. But unlike previous years, when Micki made it a public thing and announced that she’d be commemorating Ashli’s birthday, and then the haters came to troll her, this year was more quiet, private—no real fanfare, at least not until the Capitol Police came out and shooed her away. This time, Ashli wasn’t a symbol; she was just Micki’s daughter.

That makes me wonder if, instead of forever situating Ashli’s memory against the backdrop of January 6, Micki might be able to sketch a much smaller, more intimate portrait of her daughter, one that draws from Ashli’s life before she came to D.C. And then maybe she could use that smaller, more familiar portrait of Ashli to ease into a new future for herself, one that draws from Ashli’s life before she came to D.C.

So I went to see that life.

Wilma: Do you still wanna put your toes in the sand, sister?

Ober: I mean, let’s get out. Let’s—

Wilma: Yeah. Let’s—okay. Hold on. I’m gonna—

Ober: A couple of months ago, I invited myself to Micki’s hometown, San Diego, where she was staying with her best friend, Wilma. Micki told me she had to go back home to deal with some family issues—her father had recently died—and I asked if I could go visit her there for a few days. She unenthusiastically consented.

Wilma: I’ll pull over right here. Let’s see. Let’s see. Well, well—what the hell.

Ober: This is so wild that you can drive right up to the beach. Okay!

Ober: You might remember Wilma from a couple of episodes ago, the Wilma who pulled Micki from her grief cave and took her on a Mother’s Day road trip. After Ashli’s death, Wilma and Micki spent a lot of time on a blip of land in San Diego’s Mission Bay called Fiesta Island.

Wilma: There she blows. I’m going to roll the windows down, let some fresh air in here where we put our feet in the sand.

Ober: It’s a man-made landmass in a man-made bay popular with cyclists and dogs and people who like to fish. In this little dot of paradise, ospreys dive for their lunch and shaggy dogs chase frisbees.

Witthoeft: And then we’re turning these mics off, right?

Ober: Yeah.

Witthoeft: Are you ready now?

Ober: Not yet.

Witthoeft: Why?

Ober: Because I want to record the fish flopping out of the water there, and then I can be done.

Wilma: Oh, yeah. They do.

Witthoeft: There are some jumpers, now that you mentioned it. Do you see it right there?

Ober: Micki’s just watching the striped mullets leap out of the water and listening to Wilma encourage me again to stick my toes in the sand.

Wilma: Are you taking your shoes off and trying the sand out in the water?

Ober: You want me to?

Wilma: You’re going to go, Oh my gosh. This water is so warm.

Ober: All right.

Wilma: It feels great.

Ober: The Micki on this island isn’t wearing an Ashli Babbitt T-shirt or talking about politics. She’s tan, and she’s dressed for the beach. If January 6 or the “Patriot Pod” or the vigil are on her mind, she’s not saying. She seems calm, maybe even at peace. She seems like she fits here.

So now I know, this other Micki does exist. Could this version of Micki grieve her daughter’s death in a different way, a way that’s not mostly anger? The potential to exist in some lighter way might live here, on this coast.

[Music]

Ober: Lakeside, California, is a small cowboy town outside of San Diego. The high school mascot is a vaquero—“cowboy” in Spanish—and the town has a rodeo ring. It’s where Micki and Wilma lived nearly their whole married lives and raised their kids. Wilma’s still there, in a low-slung house on a loud street, with a trailer parked in the backyard that serves as Micki’s home away from D.C.

Ober: All right, so what is this here? What do we have? Layton by Skyline.

Witthoeft: It’s really weird that I name everything, but I haven’t named this.

Ober: You haven’t? Why?

Witthoeft: I don’t know.

Ober: Micki loves this place. She said doesn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her because she stays in a trailer home. It’s cozy, and it’s a source of comfort. Plus, it holds all her treasures.

Witthoeft: Check this out.

Ober: Wait. This is your Christmas book?

Witthoeft: Yeah.

Ober: She pulled out a photo album with Santa photos over the years.

Ober: Okay.

Witthoeft: There’s Ashli.

Ober: Oh my God. Cute.

Witthoeft: That’s Ashli, Roger, and Joey.

Ober: (Laughs.) Wait. Hold on. Oh my God. Wow. Oh my god. Good-looking kids.

Witthoeft: Yeah, they’re not bad.

Ober: I continued my self-guided tour and landed in the bedroom.

Ober: Did you decorate this? Did you put all these little bits and bobs in here? Little tchotchkes?

Witthoeft: Yeah. And that’s Ashli in the urn.

Ober: What? Where?

Witthoeft: The little urn.

Ober: Oh, next to the mini American flag and the MAGA—I have my sunglasses on.

Witthoeft: That was a gift.

Ober: Okay. All right. And then, wait. What’s—oh, that’s a mirror.

Witthoeft: Afraid so—’70s, you know.

Ober: Oh my god.

Ober: It felt weird that we just glanced at the urn and kept on chatting.

Ober: This is awesome!

Witthoeft: I like it.

Ober: This is great.

Ober: But that’s how it happened.

[Music]

Ober: Are these your books? Norah Ephron.

Witthoeft: Uh-huh.

Ober: Sheryl Sandberg.

Witthoeft: [I Feel Bad] About My Neck I started to read.

Ober: Oh, great book. Yeah. [I Feel Bad] About My Neck, Nora Ephron—classic.

Ober: Anyway, I wanted to see more than just the inside of Micki’s trailer and the memories it held. So on one of the days I was visiting, Micki and Wilma took me on a little driving tour of Micki’s old life.

Ober: All right, I’m gonna record right now.

Witthoeft: Okay. Oh, my seat belt is right on the microphone.

Ober: I asked them if we could drive past the Witthoefts’ old house, the house where Micki raised Ashli. Micki was fine with it, but she didn’t want to come with us. She asked to get out of the minivan.

Witthoeft: I’m going to get out of the car at 7-Eleven, and Wilma will take you by the house. I just don’t have any desire to go by the house.

Ober: Mm-hmm. And this is the house that you lived in for how long?

Witthoeft: Twenty-four years.

Ober: Ah, ah, ah, ah.

Witthoeft: I’ll be right here.

Wilma: Aye-aye.

Ober: We dropped Micki off at the 7-Eleven, and Wilma and I continued driving towards the old Witthoeft homestead, which Micki lost in 2018 as the result of a family situation she didn’t want to get into.

Ober: So why do you think Micki doesn’t want to see the house?

Wilma: Because she really didn’t want to move from there. That was, you know—she lived there forever. Whoever wants to move out of a house you’ve been in for 20-plus years?

Ober: Right. Right. Right. Right.

Wilma: So, you know, I get it. I’m just gonna pull over there even though it says, “No Parking.” And this was Mick’s house right here.

Ober: Oh, get out.

Ober: The house was a narrow rambler with a small, brick porch and a giant California fan palm out front.

Ober: Wait. It goes all the way back?

Wilma: Uh-huh. It’s a fairly big piece of property.

Ober: Jesus. It’s really big.

Ober: The plot of land, not the house.

Ober: Okay.

Ober: It’s not a house you’d ever notice if you weren’t looking for it.

Ober: All right.

Ober: We swung around the block and headed back towards the 7-Eleven to collect Micki. I hadn’t turned her wireless microphone off, so I heard her say to herself as she stood in the parking lot—

Witthoeft: You just never fucking know, do you?

Ober: It’s true; you don’t. Because here I was, getting a driving tour of Ashli Babbitt’s childhood stomping grounds from her mother and her mother’s best friend.

Witthoeft: Okay. So yeah, the white house up on the hill—we lived there when Ashli was in kindergarten.

Ober: Oh wow.

Ober: We drove past the family home where Ashli kept the hog she had raised for ag class, and the high school where Ashli played water polo, and the middle school where Ashli once got made fun of for being poor. This tour of the old haunts allowed Micki to show me a different version of Ashli than the one I had in my head. I would have to try to see the Ashli that Micki saw.

There was Ashli the little kid gymnast, and Ashli the Brownie, and Ashli the flutophone player—whatever that is. And there was Ashli the tomboy, who roughhoused with the boys in their dusty cow town. Micki got a kick out of telling me how Ashli had no fear.

Witthoeft: She’ll go out there and snatch up that lizard that I don’t want to get, you know, and be out there playing hockey with the boys and riding motorcycles with the boys and never letting herself be second in line.

Ober: Then there’s the Ashli who loved her grandpa so much, she wanted to follow in his footsteps and join the military. Micki was so proud of her daughter’s bent towards service. But—

Witthoeft: I was always praying that she wouldn’t, because—

Ober: Because the military is—

Witthoeft: Dangerous.

Ober: Dangerous. Right.

Witthoeft: And in particular, at that time.

Ober: Mm-hmm. You were worried because that would have been in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Witthoeft: Yeah.

Ober: Right. So you were worried that she would join the military and then get deployed.

Witthoeft: Yes. And then she joined the military and got deployed.

Ober: Right. Right. What is making you emotional right now, can I ask?

Witthoeft: (Breath shudders.) I think it’s all the irony of all the time I spent worried about her safety and that it never crossed my mind that she would be killed in the way she was.

Ober: Mm-hmm. Right.

Witthoeft: To have her killed at a Trump rally at the Capitol was really just, to me—it’s surreal.

Ober: So one minute, you can be putting your toes in the sand, and the next minute, you’re drowning in the despair. This pendulum is punishing. It swings back and forth: San Diego Micki, D.C. Micki.

Maybe, over time, these two versions come closer together. But right now, they still feel miles apart. Today, D.C. Micki prevails. She’s not quite ready to leave the “Eagle’s Nest.” She has an election to see through.

That’s after the break.

[Break]

Ober: A few months ago, the Eagle’s Nest got some new residents. The two recent arrivals are much less political than Micki and Nicole, and they don’t have anything to do with the vigil—because they are cats.

Rosin: We can see the pair on the screened-in porch when we walk the dogs past the house: Two little, ginger-striped kittens scrambling up the porch furniture or peering out the screened window.

Ober: The kittens are called This One and That One, which, honestly, is better than Barron and Don, or George and Martha—the other names in the running. They came from a J6 supporter in rural Pennsylvania, and they seem to be fitting in well. Oliver, the dog, lets them climb all over him, and the Eagle’s Nest’s resident mouse seems to be cowed by their presence. Now, they have interrupted more than a couple of my interviews with Micki, but I’m willing to let that slide.

Witthoeft: That’s the reason we share a room. It’s because both of us have spent—that’s going to show up on here. You’re gonna hear that.

Ober: Are your kittens—do they need to come in here?

Witthoeft: They know I’m in here, and everybody else is upstairs, and their bag of food is in here, but there’s food in their dish, so I don’t know. They just want you, Lauren.

Ober: I doubt that. But what I don’t doubt is the power of a baby animal to soften even the hardest of hearts.

Ober: I feel like maybe these cats are good for you, these kittens.

Witthoeft: I think so too.

Ober: Yeah.

Witthoeft: Even though I told myself I’m never going to get attached to anything on purpose again.

Ober: Wait. Why not get attached to something again?

Witthoeft: Just—it’s messy. When Fuggles died, it was really hard for me. And I just decided that maybe I don’t want to go through that anymore, ever.

Ober: Hmm. But it feels like maybe a pet’s a good thing.

Witthoeft: Yeah. Well, they’ve been good for the house, really, other than the fact that—I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but—I’m a little neurotic, and I’m like, Oh, look out. Look out. Look out. Look out. And I’m the one that propped the door open, because I have this horrible—like, this door’s going to swing down, and that door’s heavy, and you only get to make that mistake once when they’re this size.

So I think it’s going to be actually even a little bit more enjoyable when they put on a little stability.

Ober: I’ve often asked Micki and Nicole how long they plan on staying in D.C. I never get a straight answer. They have money to stay through Election Day and possibly Inauguration Day, depending on which way the vote goes. That’s largely thanks to a $50,000 donation from Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com and perpetuator of the Big Lie.

Micki and Nicole don’t feel ready to leave yet—the job isn’t done. But they’re beginning to assess their time here in D.C. Recently, Nicole told me she’s had some reservations. She suggests that there’s been a futility to all this, or maybe worse than futility.

Nicole: I don’t want to really get up and get out a lot anymore. I just feel like everything I’ve told everybody is just kind of a lie—that if you just keep fighting, that our system is going to work.

Ober: She means, specifically, that in the early days of January 6 prosecutions, when they were in fight mode, she steered families towards trials rather than plea deals. She counseled people that they should fight their cases and never give in, just like her family did.

Nicole: And so I feel like a big, fat liar. And I feel like I’ve persuaded people, maybe, to make wrong decisions when they could be at home, but instead they’re in jail. And I feel real culpable in that. And the only thing I still know to say is that, Well, yeah. We’re going to take this punch, but you still got to put your head down, and you just got to bowl forward.

Ober: This whole Eagle’s Nest operation—the vigil, the rallies, the constant presence in court and on Capitol Hill—it’s all the result of just bowling forward, head down, eyes clear. Nicole has told Micki she won’t leave her. Even when her husband, Guy, gets out of prison, Nicole and Micki will always be ride or die.

But at some point, don’t they get to live a normal life where some happiness can creep in here and there?

Ober: Do you want that?

Witthoeft: I think everybody wants that. I just don’t know if I see it for myself.

Ober: Why?

Witthoeft: It’s because I’m just too damaged, angry. I don’t really know. Maybe one day I’ll be picking flowers and smelling daisies. I don’t know.

Ober: Before we parted ways, I felt like it was necessary to give Micki a chance to react to anything Hanna and I reported. Up to this point, Hanna and I had been guiding the conversations, trying to get at the information we felt was important. It seemed only right to try and even the scales a bit.

Ober: Is there anything that I don’t get? Is there anything that you need to clarify? Is there any critique or anything that you need to say before, you know, we’re done with our interviews forever?

Witthoeft: Oh, I’m gonna miss ’em.

I think the only thing I can say that I haven’t said to death, because this has been an ongoing—it’s been quite something. I don’t know—you might know more about me than—

But no. I think that people like you and people like me that admittedly come from completely different places in our upbringing, geography, experience, and way of looking at things—I think that if we can sit down and have a civil conversation and just see that you can meet in the middle, at least somewhere, you know, people don’t have to stand on opposite sides of the fence and throw stones. I didn’t mean to cry when I said that. Let’s do—(Claps.) take two!

Ober: I mean, why are you trying to pretend like you’re a hard-ass? (Laughs.)

Witthoeft: No, but it’s just—people don’t want to hear that shit all the time. Eww. (Mock cries.) Nobody likes that.

Ober: Well, I beg to differ. (Laughs.)

Witthoeft: It is what it is.

Ober: I beg to differ. I know I agree with you.

[Music]

Ober: When I’ve told people that Ashli Babbitt’s mother is my neighbor, the first question is often, “What’s she like?” And I can answer that in a lot of different ways. I can say that she’s a conspiracy theorist who believes that the government is capable of anything. Or I can say that she’s a heartbroken mother whose grief has fueled a troubling movement. Or I can say she’s just like any other neighbor—she’s annoyed by the construction on the corner and the ear-splitting police sirens. Me too.

Recently, I had surgery, and she texted a few times to see how I was doing. When her son got jacked up in a motorcycle crash, I texted her to see how he was doing. Basic neighbor stuff.

Rosin: When we walk past the Eagle’s Nest now, we can see the kittens, who are now nearly full-grown cats, wrestling on the porch. Nicole’s Chevy has a new sticker on the back window—a stars-and-stripes “hang loose” symbol. And last month, one, two, and then three Trump-Vance signs appeared on their lawn. And I’m pretty sure I saw two in the windows also.

Ober: The neighborhood chatter about it has been civil, so far. This neighborliness, this connection—it’s fragile. I know that. But at least today, right now, it’s holding. And that’s not nothing.

[Music]

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

Rosin: 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.

The Atlantic’s executive editor is Adrienne LaFrance. Jeffrey Goldberg is The Atlantic’s editor in chief.

An extra special thanks to John Coplen and Dan Zak, without whom this series would not have been possible. And thank you for listening.

Many of this year’s most popular Halloween costumes make sense. One trend tracker’s list includes characters from Beetlejuice and Inside Out, thanks to the respective sequels that recently hit theaters. But at No. 2 sits a costume that’s not like the others: Raygun, the Australian dancer who went viral for her erratic moves during the Olympics earlier this year. Her costume—a green-and-yellow tracksuit—beat out pop-culture stalwarts such as Sabrina Carpenter, Minions, and Wolverine. Raygun is not a monster, or a book character, or any other traditional entertainment figure. She is, for all intents and purposes, a meme.

Halloween has been steadily succumbing to the chronically online for years now. As early as 2013, publications were noting memes’ slow creep into the Halloween-costume canon. A few years later, the undecided voter Ken Bone, who went viral during the October 2016 presidential debate for his distinctive name and midwestern demeanor, somehow went even more viral when the lingerie company Yandy made a “Sexy Undecided Voter” costume. Surely, it couldn’t get any weirder than that. Instead, meme costumes not only persist; they have become even more online. Today, participating in Halloween can feel like being in a competition you did not enter—one that prioritizes social-media attention over genuine, person-to-person interactions.

Costumes beyond classics such as witches or skeletons have long reflected pop culture; that the rise of meme culture would show up at Halloween, too, is understandable. But unlike traditional culture, which follows, say, the steady release of movies and TV shows, internet culture spirals in on itself. When we say meme in 2024, we’re not talking about a straightforward text graphic or even a person from a viral YouTube video. To understand a meme now, you must know the layers of context that came before it and the mechanisms of the platform it sprang from, the details of which not everyone is familiar with.

Meme enthusiasts, our modern-day hipsters, must dig through the bowels of the internet for their references to position themselves as savvy. It’s not enough to be Charli XCX anymore; you have to somehow embody “brat summer” instead. The meme costume is a reference to a reference to a reference—a singer in a Canadian funk band called My Son the Hurricane, for instance, but specifically from the viral video where she was teased (and then heralded) for her emphatic dancing; or the “me as a baby” puppet, a TikTok joke that spawned from people filming themselves to convince children that a video of a puppet named Tibúrcio was them as a baby. When seen in person, the costume-wearer will most likely need to offer a lengthy explanation for their pick. If, by the end, you do understand their costume, the effort probably wasn’t worth it, and if you still don’t, it’s somehow your fault that “Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal in the scene from The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent soundtracked by Cass Elliot’s ‘Make Your Own Kind of Music,’ but specifically in its context as a TikTok trend template” didn’t ring any bells in its real-life form (two guys standing in front of you at a party).  

[Read: Adult Halloween is stupid, embarrassing, and very important]

This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, terrible for in-person Halloween gatherings. As a rare monocultural touchstone, Halloween should be treasured for its offline traditions. Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa share custody of most of December; Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July have become, for some, political lightning rods. But a holiday for nothing other than dressing up and having fun (and eating candy) is October 31, every year, for everyone. In an era of declining socialization, the holiday gives Americans the opportunity for a shared physical place to be in and people to connect with, whether on doorsteps or at costume parties. For many, this can mean celebrating through children, whose simple and easily recognizable costumes embody the holiday in its purest playful iteration. Do it right, and adults, too, can have the pleasure of riding public transportation next to a grown man dressed as a bumblebee.  

The meme invasion threatens the spirit of Halloween. In my experience, an interaction with these meme hipsters—a moment that should be one of immediate recognition and joy—becomes a lengthy, borderline-inscrutable conversation I had no idea I would be saddled with when I tried to make small talk. Instead of connecting, I feel alienated, and not just because I don’t understand. Within seconds of embarking on these conversations, it becomes clear the costumes aren’t intended for my—or any other partygoer’s—consumption. They’re for our phones.

That’s where the costume will be appreciated, and where people can reenact the video required for it to make sense. That’s where the wearer can debut the outfit to an online community that needs no explanation for “JoJo Siwa’s ‘Karma’ dance” or “the concept of ‘demure.’” I, a fellow partygoer, become relegated to the backdrop of a social-media post.

But living life phone-first is what got Americans in this lonely, third-placeless crisis to begin with. If our costumes aren’t for the other people in this room, then what are we all doing here? In what way are we bonding? We’re not just hanging out less but also allowing the pursuit of internet points to ruin the rare times we do.

And yet I, in my pumpkin costume or celebrity getup, am made out to be the problem. Those who dress up as more traditional, recognizable characters get categorized online as somehow cringe, while those whose costumes require descriptions that would kill a Victorian child claim dominance. There is, of course, always the option to just not care what the internet thinks, but that’s starting to feel as delusionally obstinate as refusing to give up a landline phone or pointedly saying “Merry Christmas” in response to “Happy Holidays.”

To give in and play Halloween by the internet’s rules results in an inevitably stressful few weeks of fall. I have to come up with a costume that’s the exact right combination of referential and recent, something that happened online in the past few months but not something that everyone else is going to be. My costume has to signal something about me, whatever inside joke I’m part of, without being a reflection of my actual interests—boring! Even if I get this right, it’ll all be to spend time at a party that’s more “Instagram set piece” than it is “Halloween get-together.” If I opt out, I risk facing a Millennial’s scariest costume of all: irrelevance.

Exorcising the internet from Halloween, though, could resurrect the holiday’s true spirit: a cultural potluck at which all, whether Marvel or monster, are welcome. This isn’t to say that you can’t go as a meme—who am I to deny the Rayguns of the world?—but it is to say that we can drop the one-upmanship that results in a Sisyphean race for online notoriety. Like the ghosts and ghouls that adorn front lawns, Halloween can be brought back to life.