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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.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart Media | YouTube | Pocket Casts

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.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart Media | YouTube | Pocket Casts

January 6 could have faded for Republicans as a day they’d rather not talk about. But then six months later, Donald Trump landed on a story that’s become useful to him. He started talking about Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer. Over a few weeks, Trump started spinning a new story: Babbitt was a martyr, and the people imprisoned for January 6 were political prisoners, and the villain was the Deep State, the same shady entity that denied him the presidency.

In this episode of We Live Here Now, we trace how Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, got Trump’s attention and may have changed the course of history as a result. Witthoeft never had anything to do with politics before her daughter was killed. But by her constant presence at January 6 vigils and rallies, she managed to create a new reality.

This is the third 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: I wonder what justice looks like and what happens if it doesn’t come.

Hanna Rosin: This is a question Lauren would ask Micki a lot.

Micki Witthoeft: I want to see somebody held accountable for my daughter’s death.

Nicole Reffitt: Exactly.

Witthoeft: You know, I want to see a lot of people held accountable for my daughter’s death and the way she’s been treated since then.

Ober: By whom?

Witthoeft: By people that consider her disposable.

Ober: What happens if no one is held accountable in a way that feels correct for you?

Witthoeft: Well, that’s a good question, Lauren. But I guess, then, I will just have to take my dying breath trying to bring that about.

Rosin: Micki has been in D.C., far from home, for a long time. She has four sons and two grandsons, one she barely knows because most of his life, she’s been 3,000 miles away on “Freedom Corner,” chasing this slippery justice—these somebodies to hold accountable, whatever “accountable” means. And then there’s Nicole.

Reffitt: Yeah, it looks like a very long road. My family is never going to be the same as they were prior to January 6 ever again. Micki’s family is never going to be the same. Ashli’s never coming back. But being here in D.C. and seeing what that looks like, we ask ourselves that all the time. You know, like, What are we doing? We say that a lot to each other.

Rosin: Lauren and I have that same question. What did they get done here? Seen one way, Micki Witthoeft and Nicole Reffitt have spent 700-plus evenings far away from their families to organize a small, fringey protest at the back of the D.C. jail. But seen another way, these two women diverted the course of history.

Or maybe both are true, because this is a very weird political era where fringe can merge with power, and suddenly the world is upside down.

I’m Hanna Rosin.

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

In this episode, we try and tease out how Micki’s personal mission and Donald Trump’s political mission collided with each other. Warning: Hanna and I do not land in the same place on this one, and we have our very own hot-mic moment debating things. So lucky for you.

In her previous life, Micki wasn’t all that political. But almost as soon as she learned her daughter died, politics came up. On January 7, she gave an interview to Fox 5 in San Diego.

[Music]

Witthoeft: I would like to invite Donald J. Trump to say her name out loud, to acknowledge the passing of his loudest and proudest supporter, Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt.

Rosin: It’s revealing that at her saddest, Micki thought to call on Trump. You can hear that and think, Maybe there’s a hint of a possibility here that she thinks he should take some responsibility for Ashli’s death.

There was another woman who died on January 6 at the Capitol: Rosanne Boyland, a Trump supporter who was around Ashli’s age. She was crushed by the mob just outside the Capitol. The day after her death, her brother-in-law squarely and publicly blamed her death on Trump and QAnon for leading her astray.

Micki, too, could have decided that Trump spread the lie that the election was stolen to soothe his wounded ego, which lured her daughter to D.C. and got her killed. But she didn’t. Something moved her in the opposite direction. And for thousands—who knows, millions—of people, the meaning of January 6 started to shift along with her.

Trump didn’t know Micki’s name on January 7, because back then, he was on the defensive. There were reports that some Republican leaders were going to ask him to resign.That never happened. Instead, they settled at: How about we just forget this whole January 6th thing? Just don’t mention it.

And then around July 4, 2021, in a series of speeches, candidate Trump took a bold left turn—actually, a right turn.

[Crowd noise]

Donald Trump: Wow, that’s a lot of people. Thank you.

Rosin: It started, as best as I can tell, at a rally. It was July 3rd—nearly seven months after the Capitol riots. It was a Saturday in Sarasota, Florida. Trump is hitting all his usual rally points, and then you can hear him reach for something new.

Trump: The Republicans have to get themselves a real leader. You got some great senators, but they have to get themselves a real leader. And by the way, who shot Ashli Babbitt? Who shot Ashli Babbitt?

Rosin: With an investigation into January 6 just getting underway, Trump tried a new tack.

Trump: Who? Who shot Ashli Babbitt? I spoke to her mother the other day. An incredible woman. She’s just devastated like it happened yesterday. And it’s a terrible thing. Shot, boom, there was no reason for it. Who shot Ashli Babbitt? It’s got to be released.

Rosin: Four days later, he was talking about it again, this time at a press conference in New Jersey. At this point, the investigation was still not releasing the name of Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who shot Ashli.

Trump: But the person that shot Ashli Babbitt—boom, right through the head. Just boom. There was no reason for that. They’ve already written it off. They said, That case is closed.

Rosin: She was shot in the shoulder, not the head. But Trump wasn’t interested in details here. They’ve already written off Ashli’s murder. They said the case is closed. Who was “they”? Of course, the same people who stole the election.

Five days after that, Trump is on Fox News:

Trump: Who shot Ashli Babbitt? People want to know. And why?

Rosin: Now, the Big Lie could easily have faded away—just been recorded in history books as that moment when a man named Donald Trump tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power. But phew—democracy is resilient. The Department of Justice closed its investigation into Michael Byrd and said there was no reason to press charges. Problem solved.

But that’s not what happened. Ashli’s death became the most direct and vivid way to give the Big Lie new life. Trump invoked Ashli at rallies and on TV and in press conferences. He had landed on a powerful new strategy, and he worked it for the better part of a year.

Ober: Eventually, Micki landed in D.C., and within a month, she and Trump, who had both been talking about Ashli separately, were now talking about Ashli together. It happened in September 2022, when Trump called into the vigil Micki was hosting that night.

Witthoeft: You’re on livestream with different countries and our crowd outside. Thank you for calling, and you’re on. Go.

Trump: Okay. Well, Micki, it’s an honor to be with you. And to everybody listening, it’s a terrible thing that has happened to a lot of people that are being treated very, very unfairly. We love Ashli, and it was so horrible what happened to her. Micki, you’re asking me to just speak to everybody, but we cannot allow this to happen to our country. So God bless everybody. We are working very hard.

Witthoeft: Thank you for calling, President Trump. I know the men inside appreciate you, as I do as well.

Trump: And say hello to everybody.

Rosin: This is the moment their missions collided. Micki had asked for Trump to say her daughter’s name out loud, and he did. He said, “We love Ashli.” So when Micki and Nicole say to themselves, What did we get done on Freedom Corner?, this is a moment they can point to.

But many a grieving American mother has received a call from a powerful politician. It can be just a fleeting moment of political theater, or it can lead to something much bigger. In this case, I would argue that it’s the latter. And I can back that up based on what Lauren saw when she followed Micki to the biggest event on the conservative political calendar.

[Music]

Ober: In February of this year, I tagged along with Micki and the “Eagle’s Nest” crew to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. If Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, then CPAC is its Sundance. It’s been the premier Republican convention for the past 50 years. It usually happens just outside D.C., in suburban Maryland, and it’s become a place for conservative candidates to dry run new messaging.

Witthoeft: I think the check-in line is going to be a freaking zoo, because we don’t yet have our badges.

Ober: Yeah, but everything’s, like, electronic, so it seemed like they have enough spots.

Witthoeft: Yeah, but there’s a lot of old people, like me, that can’t work our shit.

Ober: Of course, the first thing I wanted to do when we got to CPAC was visit the vendor hall.

Ober (on tape): So now I’m in, like, Vendor Village area.

Ober: And I was not disappointed. There were folks hawking MAGA hammocks and vibration plates that shake your cellulite away and candles that smelled like freedom, allegedly. The drag queen Lady Maga was there, waving adoringly to her fan. And did I catch a glimpse of Mr. MyPillow himself, Mike Lindell? Yes, I did.

Ober: Also on offer—

Vendor: You wanna play some pinball?

Ober: I’m terrible at it.

Vendor: That’s okay.

Ober: But sure. Why not?

[Game noises]

Ober: A January 6 pinball game—

[Game noises]

Ober: What do I get if I win?

Vendor: You get a high score.

[Laughter]

Ober: —where I could get points for storming the Capitol.

Vendor: Save America. You made it to the Capitol.

Ober: Oh, like January 6.

[Game noises]

Ober: Okay, I wasn’t there to play Insurrection Pinball. I was there to observe.

As I followed Micki around the convention hall, it was clear to me that she was here to play a role. She was the living, breathing mother of the J6 martyr, complete with the costume: a T-shirt that read “ashli babbitt, murdered by capitol police, january 6, 2021.” Plenty of people recognized her. They did those sad, little pity smiles and asked for a handshake or a hug or a photo. More than a few people approached Micki and asked if they could pray for her.

Stranger 1: Dear Lord, thank you for this woman that’s here. And thank you for her bravery, and for her taking this season of pain and turning it into something that’s for your glory, Lord. And we know that you are victorious, and you will surround her with your comfort and your peace, and you will infuse her with strength, and just bless this whole weekend and every interaction she has. And we know that all is done for the glory of you. In Jesus’s name, amen.

Witthoeft: Thank you, ladies.

Stranger 1: You’re welcome. Good work. Good work.

Witthoeft: Thank y’all.

Ober: Three-plus years into playing this role, I could see it was wearing on Micki. She looked exhausted. Throughout the conference, stranger after stranger approached Micki.

Stranger 2: I’m so sorry for your loss. These people will be held accountable.

Witthoeft: I sure hope so.

Stranger 2: Justice will be served.

Witthoeft: Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. I hope so.

Ober: Micki is gracious about it, but I’ve been around her long enough by now to know that there are other things bubbling under the surface.

Ober: This happens again and again and again throughout the three-day convention. And Micki is gracious about it, but I’ve been around her long enough by now to know that there are other things bubbling under the surface.

Ober: Is it tiring when people come up to you and they say, Oh, I’m so sorry? Like—

Witthoeft: That’s not tiring. There are certain phrases that I find offensive. And people don’t mean them offensively, but sometimes they—

Ober: Like what?

Witthoeft: Like, the one that always gets me is: It could have been me. I don’t like that when people say that to me. My response is, Okay, thanks. Nice to meet you. Bye.

Ober: Right.

Witthoeft: I mean, I try not to be rude, because I know people don’t mean it in a way to be offensive. It’s recognition of Ashli’s sacrifice on a certain level. So I don’t want to be offensive back at them, because I don’t feel like they mean to be offensive to me. So I just, you know, try to be as polite as possible and move on.

Ober: Right. Right.

Witthoeft: Try not to say, Yeah? Well, I wish it was, and it wasn’t my daughter, because that’s not appropriate either. But the truth is, I wish it was anybody else. So you know, I don’t know how you respond to that as—

Coffee! Big-ass sign right there.

Ober: Okay, that conversation ended a bit abruptly. Anyway, on the last day of CPAC, Hanna came, and we met up in the press section, which looked like it was more filled with right-wing TikTokers than actual traditional journalists. Hanna and I were eating snacks and waiting for Trump’s speech to start when something familiar came over the loudspeaker.

J6 Choir: O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light—

Ober: My first thought was, What is this garbage recording? Surely, the Trump campaign could have found a higher-quality rendition of our national anthem.

But then we realized why the song sounded like that. This was sung at the D.C. jail, the J6 prison choir, which Micki played every night at the vigil over the loudspeakers.

Trump: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

Ober: Mixed with Donald Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Rosin: This was the fight song for the “Patriot Pod” prisoners, the musical backdrop to Micki’s dream about Ashli. And now the possible next future president was taking it up as his own.

Trump: I stand before you today, not only as your past and hopefully future president, but as a proud political dissident. I am a dissident.

Rosin: And in this speech—the darkest one of his campaign so far—he vowed to get revenge.

Trump: For hardworking Americans, November 5 will be our new liberation day. But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day! Their judgment day.

[Crowd cheers]

Rosin: It would be an exaggeration to say Micki orchestrated this political moment. After all, she’d never really been into politics. Her San Diego life was just fine without mainlining Fox News. Maybe the more accurate way to say it is that between her dream and her enduring grief, she manifested this moment—where Trump and the J6ers became one—where Trump said over and over that if he became president, he would pardon the J6ers, basically, magically fulfilling Ashli’s vision in Micki’s dream.

Ober: The day after CPAC, we ran into Micki while walking the dogs and asked her what she thought of Trump’s speech. Apparently, she hadn’t seen it. The Eagle’s Nest crew left and went home before Trump even took the stage. When the politicians come in the room, she said, that’s when the bullshit starts.

Rosin: So the Micki–MAGA relationship—it’s pretty complicated. That’s after the break.

[Break]

Ober: If you ask Micki if she thinks all the jailed J6ers should be pardoned for their actions at the Capitol, her answer is probably not going to be the one you expect. More than once, Micki has told me that not everyone acted like a Boy Scout that day. So the more violent ones—or the folks who brought implements, like pitchforks, say—deserved to be punished. So Trump saying he’s gonna pardon all J6ers doesn’t really move her much. But she sees the utility of Trump talking about January 6. She can use him to bring attention to her cause, just like he has used her daughter as a campaign prop.

There are other things about Micki that don’t necessarily track with MAGA lunacy. She thinks that healthcare shouldn’t be tied to employment and that there should be term limits for judges and lawmakers. She’s pretty pro-LGBTQ, since Ashli was bisexual. And once, we had a five-minute conversation about gun control where we almost—almost—came to a shared conclusion.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Micki is turning blue any time soon. She’s more like a populist libertarian who often says impolitic things, even harmful things—like the time right before I met her, when she said this about Lieutenant Michael Byrd.

Witthoeft: Michael Byrd needs to swing from the end of a rope, along with Nancy Pelosi.

Ober: Byrd is Black. Micki is white. Which she discussed when she brought up the comment to me.

Witthoeft: You know, I mean, there’s much talk about me saying Michael Byrd should be swinging from the end of a rope. It’s saying, Oh, look at her. She’s calling for a lynching. I am not calling for a lynching.

Ober: Her explanation wasn’t exculpatory by any means, and no one should be calling for anyone’s execution. But I wanted to hear Micki out. So we’re gonna let this run because she landed in a place I didn’t see coming.

Witthoeft: A hanging and a lynching are two different things. A hanging occurs after a trial and you’re pronounced guilty, and your ass gets hung. That’s how it happens. It’s happened. And it’s happened not just to Black people, specifically. Lynchings—most of them are Black people. But hangings—hangings are retribution for something that you got coming to you. And they used to do it right on the battlefield. If you got convicted of treason, they would either shoot you or hang you. And that’s the way I meant that. And I said it about Nancy Pelosi too, and she’s about as white-bread as you come, which is another thing when people start talking about white privilege. I am not that white-privilege person. I have never had money. Ashli doesn’t come from white privilege. She worked hard for anything she ever had, and so has my family.

Ober: Sure. I have worked hard for everything I have, and I also have an enormous amount of privilege, largely due to my race and economic status.

Witthoeft: I understand that Black people have been treated in a different way than white people have in this country for a long time—well, forever. But I thought that we were making huge strides in that, until, you know—until I came to this city, actually. But what I will say is: Being the parent of a child that was murdered under color of authority.

Ober: Yeah.

Witthoeft: It does make me—’cause you don’t know until you know—it does make me identify somewhat with Black and brown mothers who have been going through this for decades, because their children have been murdered under color of authority without any avenue for retribution, for years.

Ober: You can see how a Black mother whose child was killed by police would forever mistrust authority. Micki landed in the same place. Only for her, the mistrust was supercharged.

Witthoeft: When they killed Ashli, they took a lot more from me than my daughter. They took my whole belief in the system that runs America from me. Even though, you know, It’s a little bad; it’s mostly good. I don’t believe that anymore. And so in that process, I don’t know what I believe them capable of. Is it eating babies and drinking their blood? I don’t think so, but I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what they’re up to. I really don’t know what they’re up to.

[Music]

Ober: Years from now, when Micki and Nicole ask themselves the question, What did we actually accomplish in D.C.? they might come up with an answer that has nothing to do with Trump or Justice for January 6. These two women who had only ever known themselves as wives and mothers learned they could whisper in a president’s ear and whip up the media and become impossible to ignore. And they could’ve only done it because they walked out of that courtroom together, hand in hand.

One of the things I’ve been most surprised about is the depth of their friendship, which is only a couple of years old. Since Ashli died, Micki can barely sleep. She’s had panic that takes her breath away and nightmares that make her weep. She can’t bear to sleep in a room by herself. So she and Nicole share the basement of the Eagle’s Nest, their mattresses pushed head to head. Oliver, the dog, plops himself in between the two of them like a canine headboard. Just hearing Nicole and her dog softly breathe is a comfort to Micki.

Witthoeft: I’ve bonded with Nicole in ways that I’ve bonded with very few people. There’s really nothing about me that Nicole doesn’t—I mean, I’m sure there’s things, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t say to her. Maybe that’s because we sleep head to head, and we yap all night, but I don’t know.

Ober: Micki had no idea who Nicole Reffitt was when she showed up at Guy Reffitt’s sentencing in August of 2022. But their connection was almost instantaneous.

Witthoeft: If you believe in love at first sight, which I don’t really do—I believe in sexual attraction at first sight, but I don’t know about love at first sight. But I think if that’s possible, then friendship at first sight is. And when I first saw Nicole, like I said, I had never met her, and I knew instantly who she was. And she just had this defiant, “strong-ass woman” look on her face, and I just knew she was somebody I could be friends with.

Ober: There was one moment early on in their living together that kind of sealed the deal for Micki.

Witthoeft: But when I knew that we would be friends forever, oddly enough—why do you always make me cry, Lauren? Shit. It was the day my dog died. Because she, you know—I was on the couch with Fuggles, and I couldn’t make it happen. I was like, I just—I wanted to call.

Ober: But she couldn’t. So Nicole called the vet and had Fuggles put down. That small kindness meant everything to Micki.

Witthoeft: I just thought at that minute that I truly loved her. I do.

[Music]

Ober: Now, because Nicole and Micki are often seen together, and because of that one hand-holding scene after Guy’s sentencing, the online haters have had a field day. Someone made a music video that mashed up their voices from the vigil with overtly sexual innuendo and patriotic imagery. It’s too crass for me to play for you here, but I’m sure you know how to Google, if you’re interested.

Recently, someone sent Nicole a cardboard mailing tube that said the words “oversizeddildos.com” plastered on the side. The tube was empty. Right after the mailer arrived, Micki texted me a photo. “Did you prank us?” she wrote. For the record, I did not. She wrote back: “I told you I hate it when the left is funny. There wasn’t anything in the canister. More empty promises.”

Ober: After I had a good laugh about the whole situation, I pushed Nicole to try to put a name to the love that they have for each other.

Ober: A lot of people’s intimate relationships can’t be defined. And so I could ask you, Okay, is it like you feel like a sister bond?

Reffitt: It’s more.

Ober: Is it like you feel, like—right. Like a—

Reffitt: It’s not sexual, but it is more.

Ober: Yeah. Like an intimate-partner bond.

Reffitt: Oh yeah. It’s definitely an intimate-partner bond.

Ober: Right.

Reffitt: I don’t even know what kind of love that must be, because I love Micki more than a friendship love. But you know, there’s not a lot of the sexual aspect of it. But there’s intimacy.

Ober: Mm-hmm. What does “intimacy” mean?

Reffitt: I don’t know. You can have intimate moments with someone while being fully clothed. You know, like, you can share very close feelings without touching anyone. So those are intimate moments, I think.

Ober: Like, give me an example.

Reffitt: Well, I’m not gonna tell you shit. I’m already telling you all this. I know, but like—

Ober: No. Because I’m just trying to understand.

Reffitt: I mean, I think this is—well, this is a level of intimacy. It’s a level that we’re having.

Ober: You and me?

Reffitt: Yeah. We’re being intimate. I mean, I’m being intimate with you.

Ober: Right. It’s not an equal exchange.

Reffitt: Exactly. Like, you’re not being intimate with me, but I absolutely am being intimate with you. So I’m being very vulnerable.

Ober: Mm-hmm.

Reffitt: But Micki is reciprocal. I mean, like, we’re sharing that.

Ober: Mm-hmm.

[Music]

Rosin: Would you say that you guys were friends?

Ober: I guess it depends on what your version of friend is. No. I mean, we’re neighbors.

Rosin: I pressed Lauren a lot about this. Obviously, she was a journalist, and it was her job to spend time with these guys. But had she become, like, friends friends with them? Is that a good thing? Is it dangerous? Sometimes we had fights about it. This one, for example—it’s the hot-mic moment we promised you.

Rosin: I feel so differently than you do about this. I don’t spend this much time with them. What I notice at the vigil is not what you notice at the vigil. I don’t think it’s fucking cute at all.

Ober: You think I think it’s cute? No. It’s fucking weird. But I also don’t think that it’s, like, shredding—

Rosin: No. I don’t think it’s weird. I think it’s absolutely destructive.

Ober: But, see, I don’t have any proof that it is. Like I don’t have proof that it’s destructive. I don’t have any notion that it’s any—

Rosin: How about Trump playing that song at Waco, Texas?

Ober: Of course, but it wasn’t about the J6—

Rosin: Who got that song into the public consciousness? Micki.

Ober: No, she didn’t, actually. She had nothing to do with it.

Rosin: Lauren, we just feel differently. To me, it’s like, I think Micki is a lovely, interesting, complicated person. And I think this mission that she’s on in D.C. is absolutely destructive.

Ober: Show me proof of destruction. That is not new. They have a platform—

Rosin: Okay, Micki didn’t cause it. Micki didn’t bring it into being. Micki created an audience for it. She brings Trump to them. She brings these politicians to them.

Ober: But it’s not—

Rosin: So you have to account for the things that Micki is supporting and laying out the red carpet for. Like, her ideology is meaningful.

Rosin: I dug in. This fight went on for, like, an hour and a half more. And by the end of it, nothing was resolved.

In our next episode: Lauren gets even closer to the action, and she asks herself whether she ruined a J6er’s life.

Marie Johnatakis: It was really surprising that they took him into custody then. And I just remember thinking, like, He’s not a danger. He’s been out this whole time. Can you please just let us? You know, we just need a little more help.

Ober: That’s on the next 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.

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.