Peter Lynch was found dead two months into his two years and eight months prison sentence.

Mike Solana has opinions. Here are a few of them: Building stuff is good. The media are unduly harsh on tech companies. Labeling things as “misinformation” is just an excuse to stifle speech. Donald Trump is “the greatest clown in human history” (though not entirely in a bad way), the court cases against him are “fake show trials,” and J. D. Vance would be “a great guy in the White House.” The siege of the Capitol on January 6 was a “riot” like many others the previous year. Also, the Capitol rioters should have been shot. (He later retracted this one.) Kamala Harris is a joke of a presidential candidate, but it’d be fun to get a drink with her and gossip about members of Congress. The Democrats are “no longer a free-speech party.” Fewer people should vote. Germany is “a very stupid nation,” but France is cool. Marvel movies are good. Cats are bad. The moon should be a state.

Solana has shared these views—and many more—on Pirate Wires, the newsletter turned website that he started in 2020, as well as on his podcast of the same name. He’s also prolific on X, where he lobs takes to his quarter-million followers and trolls his haters—mostly on the left—from behind his distinctive avatar, a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, and where Elon Musk regularly replies to his posts.

I was curious to see if the corporeal Solana matched the online version. When we met up at his favorite dive bar in Miami, where he lives, he did not disappoint, riffing on topics as varied as immigration (we need to slow it down to allow for assimilation), gay identity (it doesn’t make sense as a category), and his theory that the Marvel villain Thanos is a typical “environmentalist” because he wants to eliminate half the human population. Solana delivers his spiels with a sunny, earnest energy; with his large eyes and lively brows, he looks like a friendly Pixar dog. So it’s a bit jarring to hear him hold forth on, say, why liberals hate themselves.

For years, Solana played a supporting role in the tech world, serving as the chief marketing officer for Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s venture-capital firm. Solana calls Thiel his mentor, and says he owes his career to him.

Solana started Pirate Wires during the pandemic and has built it into a small media company covering tech, politics, and culture. After raising money from Thiel and Founders Fund, among others, in 2023, he hired a handful of staff. The Pirate Wires free daily newsletter now has 100,000 subscribers, mostly young men, according to Solana. (He would not disclose how many readers have signed up for paid subscriptions, which provide expanded access to the site.) It has become a must-read among Silicon Valley’s anti-woke crowd, including some of tech’s most influential figures, and a grudging should-read for journalists and some on the left trying to glimpse the thinking of the masters of the Thiel-verse.

Solana’s rise corresponds with the ascent of a new political ideology in Silicon Valley, one that mixes pro-tech, anti-media, and Trump-curious sentiments. To the extent that Pirate Wires has a thesis statement, it might be Solana’s pinned post on X: “I just want us to be fucking amazing.” From his perspective, the good guys are the ones trying to build stuff, while the bad guys are the ones getting in the way. These bad guys take many forms: regulators, censors, scolds, environmentalists, and “decels.” Solana doesn’t think the stuff the good guys build is always good. They can create phones that addict people, apps that spy on them, or—perhaps worst of all—generative-AI tools that refuse to show white people. But Solana trusts their motivations, and he thinks we should hear them out.  

“Technology is neither good nor bad,” he told me. “I think that it just changes the world, and there’s always a trade-off. And the question is, is it worth the trade-off? And I think most of it is.”

Solana rejects efforts to categorize his political views. He used to be a libertarian, then he was a Marxist, then he became libertarian again, only more so. Now he says he’s open to government taking a role in problem-solving—“I’m fine with taxes,” he said—and considers himself a pragmatist: “I just want things to work. I just want a new rail system. If I have to be left-wing, sure, I’ll be left-wing until the rail is finished. And then what else do I want? I want crime to be illegal. Is that right-wing? Okay, I’ll be right-wing then.” In practice, Solana articulates a politics that could be described as less pro-Trump than anti-anti-Trump. It’s often a matter of emphasis: Whatever the right might be doing wrong, the left’s reaction is worse.

Pirate Wires itself is a mix of opinion essays by Solana and others, interviews with major tech figures such as Jack Dorsey and Palmer Luckey, and reporting on tech and San Francisco politics largely from a left-critical perspective. Solana said his target reader is “a smart guy in tech or business, in his 20s or 30s, who feels a little disaffected by the conversations around him and craves community with like-minded people.” The message seems to be: We’re having more fun than you. Join us.

For now, Solana is juggling Pirate Wires with his day job at Founders Fund. To his detractors, this fact suggests that Pirate Wires is simply the house organ for Silicon Valley billionaires. But Solana stresses that the site is separate from the investment firm—Thiel has no editorial control—and says he wants it to be more than just an “anti-woke New York Times op-ed page.” “I want to be generating real news about the industry,” he said. Whether that’s possible while conducting friendly interviews with allies and taking orders from Thiel by day is an open question.

Solana’s favorite movie is The Matrix. He was 13 when it came out, in 1999, and what resonated most, besides its philosophy, was its portrayal of camaraderie. “I think everybody wants to feel like they’re in this secret crew with special knowledge about the world, right?” he said. “You’re looking at this dystopian environment and you’re thinking, Wouldn’t it be cool if I was there?”

Solana grew up in a cramped house on the Jersey Shore, the son of a teacher and an on-and-off construction worker. He got mediocre grades until senior year of high school, when, he said, he decided to pay attention in class and became an A student. “This feeling of being the smart one in class became super addicting,” he said. “I loved being better than everybody else.”

At Boston University, Solana grew irritated watching other kids coast. “I used to wreck people in class,” he said. This was his Marxist phase. Solana explains himself during that period as “a boy who realized he wanted to date other boys in the Bush years and needed a place to go where people said, There’s nothing wrong with you.” But then one day in class, he was arguing against property rights when he realized that he didn’t believe what he was saying. He turned back to libertarianism.

After college, Solana took an internship at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and then a job as an editorial assistant at Penguin Books in New York City. The imprint where he worked, TarcherPenguin, specialized in titles on metaphysics, the occult, and other offbeat topics. Mitch Horowitz, who was then Tarcher’s editor in chief and has written several books on the occult as well as hosting the Discovery series Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction, told me he felt an affinity with Solana. “I knew the experience of feeling like an outsider,” Horowitz said.

In 2009, Solana read an essay by Thiel called “The Education of a Libertarian,” in which Thiel lays out a vision for how to “escape” politics by means of the internet, outer space, and living at sea. (It’s the essay in which Thiel famously wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”) Solana reached out to the Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute—an organization dedicated to establishing semiautonomous ocean-based communities—and offered to work for free. He began organizing meetups in New York, and Thiel came to the first one. “He said he had a book he was working on but didn’t know anything about publishing,” Solana said. “I was like, ‘Great—I know everything about publishing.’”

[Barton Gellman: Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy]

Solana moved to San Francisco to work for Thiel, who needed help preparing to teach a Stanford class on start-ups. Solana and another young colleague would stay up late creating slides, download them onto two thumb drives, and commute separately from San Francisco to Palo Alto in case one of them hit traffic. The class was a digest of Thiel’s business philosophy—including the idea that monopolies can be good and “competition is for losers”—and became the basis for his best-selling book, Zero to One.

Solana wasn’t an obvious fit for Founders Fund. He felt intimidated being surrounded by experts in investing and engineering. But the company didn’t have a PR department, so Solana took up the task, in addition to organizing events and running the firm’s branding. He was also doing his own writing. In 2014, he published a sci-fi novel, Citizen Sim, and got a starred review in Kirkus Reviews. But he largely avoided writing about politics. “It felt much bigger than me,” Solana said of his fiction. “I didn’t want to poison that with my own opinions.”

That gradually changed after the 2016 election. “I was like, I’d follow this man to hell,” Solana said, of Thiel. “And then he endorsed Trump, and I did.” Solana was never exactly a Trump fan, but he found the left’s reaction to Trump’s presidency hysterical. “Trump’s purpose was the same as a court jester,” he told me. “He existed to throw the curtain back and point at the reality of what our government is and how it functions and what we’re capable of and what America is right now.” Solana started tweeting more, and his tweets were sharp and unvarnished. (“Imagine being as good at anything as germany is at fascism”; “journalists don’t miss gawker, they miss power.”) His follower count grew.

In March 2020, he created a podcast called Problematic and soon started writing a newsletter. Solana says the name Pirate Wires came to him as if it were a memory. (The protagonist in his sci-fi novel has a similar experience when discovering his powers.) It evokes various antecedents: pirate radio, digital piracy, piracy on the high seas—romantic rule-breaking for fun and profit. He stopped worrying about his political opinions hurting his career as a fiction writer: “I realized that this was my work.”

Illustration by Adam Maida

In June of this year, Solana published a manifesto titled “We Are the Media Now.” In it, he tells the familiar story of how, over the past two decades, news organizations went from comfortable businesses subsidized by classifieds to click-hungry digital-content machines reliant on display advertising. Their mistake, he writes, was a failure to control their distribution, which led to a collapse when Facebook and other social-media companies turned down the traffic spigot.

Solana says he’s designed Pirate Wires around the inbox. “That’s all that matters now,” he said. “If you don’t have distribution, you’re not a media company.” There’s an intimacy to being in a reader’s digital space, he says, which lends itself to a more personal form of writing. The challenge of the inbox is creating enough content without overwhelming the reader. For Solana, that means keeping it brief. The daily newsletter is three quick takes with no outbound links, so a reader can digest it and move on with their day. “You wake up; you read it; you’re like, Fuck yeah, fuck yeah, fuck yeah,” Solana said. Paid subscriptions are $20 a month or $120 annually—fairly steep for the amount of material you get.

The problem with most establishment media, Solana said, is they’re all doing the same thing. “The New York Times has a very distinct style that happens to be very popular,” he said. “The Washington Post, the L.A. Times—they’re just doing New York Times drag worse, much worse.” What makes Pirate Wires distinctive, he says, is its point of view, which leads it to report stories that liberal-leaning outlets might not.

Media coverage of technology goes through cycles. In the 1980s and ’90s, it was largely booster-ish. Steven Levy’s book Hackers valorized the “heroes of the computer revolution,” and Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine portrayed engineers as romantic obsessives. Wired magazine charted the rise of the personal computer and commercial internet with nerdy glee. The dot-com crash induced a brief bout of skepticism, but the following decade and a half saw a return to form as Google, Amazon, and Facebook ascended.

After Trump was elected, journalists turned a critical eye on the industry, and a thousand scandals bloomed: Cambridge Analytica, Uber’s efforts to evade law enforcement, alleged sexual misconduct at Google, the Facebook Papers. Theranos was exposed as a fraud and WeWork as a folly. “Move fast and break things” went from promise to threat, while start-ups pledging to “make the world a better place” became a punch line on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Also, Juicero.

But to many in Silicon Valley, the “techlash” felt like an overcorrection. The solution, according to some tech leaders: “going direct.” That is, bypassing news outlets and communicating directly with one’s audience, be it on X or one’s own website or podcast. Jason Calacanis, an investor and a co-host of the popular All-In podcast, told me in an email that he advises founders not to talk with journalists at “left-leaning publications”: “You’ll get slaughtered if you speak to The Atlantic, The New York Times, or NPR. Going direct allows you to reach more folks and avoid having your message distorted by an angry journalist looking to score points with their paid subscribers.” Calacanis added that he planned to post his responses to my questions on X, lest I misquote him.

Tech-insider media such as Pirate Wires might be considered a half step between the traditional route and going direct. Garry Tan, the CEO of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, says Pirate Wires is taking advantage of the “atomization” of media, in which readers have relationships with specific people rather than institutions. “Solana is a hybrid creature—he’s got one foot in the tech world, but he’s also just an actually good writer with a lot of access,” says Liz Wolfe, an assistant editor at Reason magazine who writes about tech. “A layperson could feasibly read Pirate Wires and understand what a whole bunch of people in Silicon Valley are talking about behind closed doors that I think frankly a lot of the tech press isn’t aware of.”

In “We Are the Media Now,” Solana implores tech workers to “give us information. Why are you sharing scoops with journalists who hate you?”

Mat Honan, the editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, told me he started following Solana for his media criticism. “Even when he was totally wrong or being an asshole, I thought he was funny,” Honan said. Ben Smith, the editor in chief and a co-founder of Semafor, told me he’s “basically a fan” of Pirate Wires. “It’s a valuable articulation of how a slice of powerful people in Silicon Valley see the world,” Smith said.

Solana does have blind spots, Smith added. “When Mike writes about the media, it reminds me of the way the media writes about Silicon Valley: These are plausible theories if you haven’t had much contact with the workings of an industry you’re writing about.”

As for Solana urging tech-industry readers to share information with him instead of with journalists who “hate you,” Smith said there’s a word for this: access journalism. “That’s a very classic pitch you hear every day in Washington,” Smith said. “I guess he’s really learning.”

“He’s a little bit of a bitch,” Solana told me, claiming that Smith had made condescending comments about him and Pirate Wires online. Smith said he didn’t know what Solana was talking about. “He should report that out,” Smith said.

In January 2022, Solana organized a summit called Hereticon. Billed as a conference for “thoughtcrime,” the event—held at the Faena Hotel in Miami Beach—featured speakers on topics including UFOs, cyborgs, sex work, hypnosis, polyamory, and eugenics. Mitch Horowitz, Solana’s former boss, gave a talk on why ESP is real. Grimes DJed, while Elon Musk bobbed his head in the background. According to attendees, there was an unofficial rooftop party with Jeffrey Epstein–themed decor. (Solana said he wasn’t aware of this party.)

“Heresy” is a recurring theme in Solana’s work. It’s likely what endeared him to Thiel, whose whole thing, according to Solana and others, is contrarianism. (Thiel did not respond to interview requests.) It also informs Solana’s views on tech. “Technology itself is a little bit heretical,” he said. “It’s fundamentally destabilizing of power.” Even if one form of technology becomes dominant, another will eventually come along to subvert it. And anyway, he thinks the media’s portrayal of Silicon Valley is largely a caricature. “I’ve never met a ‘tech bro,’” he said on his podcast.

Lately, however, the mainstream media has published plenty of positive tech coverage, including a string of sympathetic profiles of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey. In this environment, Solana’s plea for scoops from tech workers because the mainstream press “hates” them might not land in quite the same way. Which raises questions about what will make Pirate Wires distinctive going forward.

Solana told me he wants to do more original reporting. He has scored interviews with some of the biggest names in tech, including Jack Dorsey after his exit from Bluesky. Earlier this year, after Solana wrote an acid critique of Google’s Gemini AI image generator, a number of Google employees contacted him, yielding a follow-up article arguing that the company’s DEI-driven “culture of fear” makes it hard to ship good products. The two articles became the site’s most popular ever.

But unlike tech, reporting doesn’t scale—as media outlets have been learning the hard way for decades. It’s expensive and time-consuming. Another possible obstacle: Solana’s boss at Founders Fund. “I hate talking about Peter,” he said once when I mentioned Thiel. (We were sitting in the blindingly sunlit office of Founders Fund in Miami, and one of his Pirate Wires employees was working in a conference room down the hall.) In another conversation, Solana said his affiliation with Founders Fund has upsides and downsides. It opens doors and gives him insight into the worlds of tech and finance that other writers might not have. At the same time, if there were a scandal involving a start-up in the fund’s portfolio, he might not be the one to break the news. He also said he sometimes misses scoops because he agrees not to report on a portfolio company’s new feature. And although Thiel doesn’t have any control over what Pirate Wires publishes, Solana said, he’s not likely to commission a story that reflects negatively on his mentor: “There are a thousand places you can go to write a Peter Thiel takedown,” he said. “Should you expect that from Pirate Wires? No, of course not. He’s a friend of mine.”

Solana points out that he criticizes tech companies plenty. And this is true. But it’s almost always through a cultural or political lens. He mocked Google’s AI for its inability to generate images of white people. He derides attempts to moderate social media as “censorship.” A recent Pirate Wires series highlighted how political disputes among Wikipedia editors sometimes shape the site’s content. Solana seems less bothered by tech companies’ economic power. He has criticized Lina Khan’s crackdown on tech companies for alleged monopolistic behavior—“She really has a problem with people making lots of money,” he said on his podcast—and called VCs’ support for Khan a “self-own.” He dismissed congressional grilling of tech executives as punishment for “winning.”

[Kaitlyn Tiffany: What’s with all the Trumpy VCs?]

He saves his harshest words for the people trying to curb what they describe as “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation,” but which, Solana argues, is really just speech they don’t like. When Trump was kicked off Twitter and Facebook after January 6, Solana equated it to the president being “erased from the internet.” The 2022 suspension of the “manosphere” influencer (and now alleged human-trafficker) Andrew Tate from social-media platforms for misogynistic comments amounted to “Stasi shit.”

Part of the challenge for Solana is that journalism and free-speech crusading, although often aligned, are not the same thing. In June, Solana got a scoop when someone told him that a Trump-themed crypto token called $DJT had the backing of Donald Trump’s son Barron. If a traditional news outlet had been covering this story, it probably would have added some important context—particularly the fact that no one in the Trump family had confirmed on the record that the coin was in fact “official.”

Instead, Solana posted to the Pirate Wires X account: “Per conversations, Trump is launching an official token—$DJT on Solana. Barron spearheading.” (Solana is the name of a crypto blockchain; no relation to the man.) He also posted a link to the token’s location on the blockchain so readers could see that it indeed existed—and, if they wanted, buy it.

After the Pirate Wires post, the coin’s value skyrocketed. A frenzy ensued, as crypto enthusiasts tried to confirm Solana’s claim that Barron Trump was involved; many assumed that Pirate Wires had been hacked. Martin Shkreli, the infamous businessman who was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, came forward, announcing that he had helped create the coin along with Barron and a third person, and that the project had Donald Trump’s blessing. But Barron never confirmed his involvement, and the coin quickly tanked.

The whole affair had the trappings of a classic pump and dump. According to analyses of blockchain transactions, insiders—including one wallet that was also invested in another Shkreli crypto project—made millions off the announcement. (Shkreli declined to be interviewed for this article except on the condition that his criminal record not be mentioned.)

Did Solana’s anonymous source use Pirate Wires to profit from the announcement? I asked Solana if he’d considered the motives of the person who’d leaked him the Trump-coin information. “I don’t really care what their motivation was,” he said. To him, it was news because it said something about Donald Trump’s interest in cryptocurrency.

Solana told me that starting a media company has given him a greater understanding of the challenges facing traditional news organizations. “What I try and do is give people their flowers when they deserve them more,” he said. For example, he admired The New York Times’ early reporting on the second assassination attempt on Trump. In response, he started writing a post praising the newspaper for its coverage. “Then they published this piece calling out Trump’s ‘history of violent rhetoric,’ which to my ear implicitly blamed him for the assassination attempt, and I thought, Fuck! Goddamn it, I was wrong.”

Subscribe to Autocracy in America here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts

Hosts Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev talk with Hanna Rosin about the new series We Live Here Now. Rosin, along with her co-host, Lauren Ober, recently found out that their new neighbors moved to Washington, D.C., to support January 6 insurrectionists. Rosin and Ober decided to knock on their neighbors’ door. We Live Here Now is a podcast series about what happened next. Subscribe to We Live Here Now here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | iHeart

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Anne Applebaum: This is Anne Applebaum.

Peter Pomerantsev: And this is Peter Pomerantsev, and we’re here with a guest today, The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin.

Hanna Rosin: Hi.

Applebaum: And although our series, Autocracy in America, has wrapped up, there is still a lot to do and think about ahead of the 2024 election.

Pomerantsev: Hanna is the host of The Atlantic’s weekly show called Radio Atlantic, and she’s also just released a new podcast called We Live Here Now, a series.

Rosin: Yeah, We Live Here Now is the story of my partner, Lauren Ober, and I discovering that we had some new neighbors, and it’s about our effort to get to know these neighbors. And it turned out, those neighbors were supporting the January 6 insurrectionists.

Pomerantsev: At the end of this episode, we’ll include the entire first episode for listeners to hear. But we want to start with a little clip that gives you a sense of what first launched them into making the series.

Lauren Ober: I guess it started just like any other dog walk. Hanna and I leashed up our pups and set out from our house on our post-dinner stroll. It was early November of 2023, and I remember it was unseasonably warm. We headed off down the hill from our house towards our neighborhood park.

Rosin: A block past the park, Lauren spotted it: a black Chevy Equinox with Texas plates we’d seen parked around the neighborhood. Just a basic American SUV. Except for the stickers that covered the back windshield.

Ober: Stickers we’re very much not used to seeing in our mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood. Our vibe is more like, Make D. C. the 51st state and No taxation without representation. These stickers were a combo platter of skulls and American flags. There was a Roman numeral for three, the symbol of a militia group called the Three Percenters, and the pièce de résistance, a giant decal in the center of the back window that read Free Our Patriots, J4, J6. Meaning, Justice for January 6.

Rosin: Lauren notices every new or different thing in the neighborhood. And this car was definitely different. As we walked past it, Lauren said what she always said when we saw this car.

Ober: “There’s that fucking militia mobile again.” Right after I said that moderately unneighborly thing, the passenger-side window rolled down. Cigarette smoke curled out of the car. And the person inside shouted, “Justice for J6!”

Rosin: To which Lauren said—

Ober: “You’re in the wrong neighborhood for that, honey.” And then the woman in the car said words I’m not gonna forget anytime soon: “We live here now. So suck it, bitch.”

Applebaum: Hanna, I’ve had confrontation experiences myself.

I was once at a dinner in Poland—this is a couple years ago—with old friends who suddenly started repeating a conspiracy theory about the government, and it happened to be the government that my husband had been part of. And I tried to listen politely and go like, Uh-huh, yeah, that’s true, yeah, sure. And then eventually I left the room.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Applebaum: And I’m not sure I could have lasted even that long with people who weren’t old friends and were doing the same thing. So we’re not going to talk all about We Live Here Now, since many listeners may not have yet heard the podcast, but I do want you to tell me a little bit more about that experience of being shouted down in your neighborhood—or, more accurately, being with your partner as she was being shouted down. Were you never tempted to argue back?

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, I really think it’s an accident of how the interaction happened. If it had happened at dinner, I guess you can temper yourself, like you just described. You could never see these people again. Like, you could ignore them or shout them down and then choose to never see them again. But because these people lived a couple of blocks away, I sort of knew I was going to see them a lot. So maybe that muted my reaction. My partner doesn’t have a mute button, but I just kind of knew that I better take a step back and think about what I want to do, because I was going to run into these people who, you know, happen to have militia stickers and are seemingly aggressive. So I just kind of needed a minute to think what I wanted to do. Without that pause, I’m not sure this story would have happened in the way that it happened.

Pomerantsev: And how did you build the relationship with them? I mean, was it, was there any kind of discomfort or danger involved when you first met them? And then, but most importantly, how did you build trust? I mean, how would they learn to trust you?

Rosin: You know, it’s interesting. Once you decide to step into an alternative world, it’s almost like you have to make the decision. Most of the time, we just don’t make that decision. We’re like, This is cuckoo. I’m not going. I don’t share anything in common with these people. Like, we don’t even have a shared set of facts in the way we might have 15, 20 years ago. So there’s just—like, there’s no beginning to this relationship. For whatever reason, we closed our eyes and decided to step into that alternative reality. And once you make that decision, you just do it very, very, very gingerly.

In this case, they happen to do a public event, which we knew was happening every single night, and it’s out on a street corner in D.C. And it’s public space. So that actually gave us the freedom to show up at this public event. It’s outside the D.C. Jail, and they’re in support of the January 6 prisoners. The detainees are all held in a segregated wing of the D. C. Jail, so they hold a protest every single night at the exact same time. So you know, you can steel yourself up every night and say like, Okay, tonight’s the night I’m going to go to the vigil, you know?

Applebaum: Can I actually ask you some more about that vigil? Because one of the things We Live Here Now does, it explores the way in which people can rewrite history, which is one of the things that happens. And you talk about how at the vigil, there are posters with faces of people who died on January 6. And each poster reads Murdered by Capitol Police, even though only one person was found to have died from a bullet fired by the police, And so there’s now a narrative that the people in jail are the good guys and the people outside of jail are the bad guys. I actually spent 20 years writing books about the history of the Soviet Union, and this is very much what autocratic regimes do: They change the way you remember history. They make heroes out of villains, and vice versa. And how, how did you see that happening and how did you come to understand how it worked? Why was it successful among the people that you were visiting?

Rosin: Well, that was one of the most remarkable experiences I had—is being that close to watching revisionism happen. Like, the nitty-gritty, going back and time and, Okay, when was the first time that Trump mentioned Ashli Babbitt?, who is the woman who was shot by the Capitol Police officers? Because initially, right after January 6, many—even Trump supporters—said, you know, The Capitol Police officer did a good job. You know, He did his duty. It was a terrible day. Like, if you look at things that happened in early January, everybody was sharing the reality of what happened on January 6. And then you watch how, slowly, kind of people peel away from that reality. Trump starts trying out lines at his rallies. Oh, Ashli Babbitt was murdered. He uses the words, “they,” a lot. You know, they killed Ashli Babbitt. They did this. And at that point, the Big Lie—the lie that the election was stolen—could have faded away, like it felt like a moment where it could have just been relegated to history, and then it’s like, all of a sudden, there’s this collective decision, Oh no, we’re going to revive this. And the way we’re going to revive it is by talking first about this martyr, and then about this group of people, and suddenly black is white and white is black.

And because these people who we got close to, they’re sort of innocents in this narrative. One of the main characters is Micki Witthoeft, who’s the mother of Ashli Babbitt. And just think about that. She’s a grieving mother. It’s as if her emotional-grief reality starts to align with Trump’s messaging in this perfect storm, and then all of a sudden, things that aren’t true seem, not just true, but righteous.

Pomerantsev: Tell me a bit about the myth, though, because on the one hand, it’s an alternative reality, which you described so well just now, but on the other hand, isn’t it quite American at the same time? I mean, I love when you talk about, you know, how they describe themselves as “saving democracy.” They’re the true patriots. I mean, as you encountered it, did you find it completely alien myth or something that actually sort of resonated with so many American stories about themselves: rebelling against Washington, the whole—

Rosin: Yes, I mean, one thing that I came to feel about the January 6 detainees, like, often it would pop into my head: them in costume, like, Okay, they’re, they’re sort of role-playing 1776 here, you know. Particularly, one of our episodes is about a jury trial. My partner was very randomly called onto a jury, as many people in D.C. are, and it happened to be a January 6 case. And not only that, but it happened to be one of these January 6 cases in which you feel that someone just kind of lost it for a day. You know, it’s a dad; he has five children; by a judge's count, extremely law abiding; been married for a long time. But then during that day, just kind of, you know, went nuts.

And as you get closer to what they did that day, you do feel like there was just a rush, like a rush of sort of feeling heroic, you know, feeling patriotic, feeling like you were saving the country, feeling like you have this incredible mission. And then I think, one thing that nobody predicted is that they did keep these guys in a segregated wing of the D.C. Jail, together. We don’t usually do that. I mean, Gitmo is the other place where we’ve done that. But the D.C. Jail is largely Black. And so these guys had a reputation at that day, if you remember, as being white supremacists, so they did not want to throw them into the D.C. Jail. But the result of keeping them together, I mean, you can imagine what happened.

Applebaum: So this is exactly the thing that I wanted to ask you about. I was very struck by one of the characters who you interview and describe. This is Brandon Fellows, who was a guy who was almost accidentally caught up in January the 6th. He entered the Capitol. He wound up smoking a joint in one of the offices in the Capitol. As a result, he was arrested. And because he was part of this group of prisoners, he was essentially radicalized. And that story of how the prisoners together radicalized one another, created a mythology around themselves, it reminded me of so many other moments in history when that’s happened, I mean, for both good and for bad. The IRA in British prisons radicalized; um, various jihadis and various prisons around the world are said to have radicalized that way too. But also the ANC in South Africa, who were together in a prison on Robben Island for many years. I mean, that’s how they created their cohesive movement. So it can work positively too. Weren’t you tempted to try and talk him out of it, where you—did you not want to say, “Don’t you see what’s happening to you?”

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, with him, that instinct was very powerful because, you know, he’s slightly older than my oldest child. And so I—so in his case, I did have the instinct of, like, trying to shake this out of him.

Like, “Don’t you see?,” like “You were in this—you were in this jail,” you know, and he was in this jail. He came in as a goofball. Then he came to see these guys as, like, fierce and tough. And by the end, he came to see them, as you said, Peter, as true patriots, so it’s not just that they were tough guys. It was like they were true and righteous and the next generation of founding fathers and he was just like, Nope, like you just don’t, you don’t get it. I’m deadly serious here.

Pomeranstev: So you didn’t build a coalition with them, you didn’t convince them, you don’t try to convince them to change parties. But you spent a year with them. What is it that you found meaningful in that interaction? And why is it meaningful for all of us to hear about it? I mean, it’s fascinating, but also what is the importance of doing something like this?

Rosin: I can only tell you about a limited importance, which is that over the last few years, I’ve started to read—as I bet you guys have—you know, what do you have, like, we all throw up our hands: We’re so polarized. We’re not even living in the same reality. We can’t talk to each other.

You cannot go into a conversation, as much as you deeply, deeply want to, with the intention of changing the other person’s mind. That is a losing strategy. Don’t do it. It’s so hard. It’s as hard in politics as it is in a relationship. It’s very hard because we all just want to do that. And so your only option is to just open your mind, hear what they have to say, be curious, ask questions, and that’s it.

Applebaum: And how do you do that without becoming angry?

Rosin: It’s— [Laughs.] I mean, that’s your, they just, because I’ve been to enough couples therapy [Laughs.] that it’s like, that’s your only option. And you almost have to do it with a leap of faith that there’s something human at the end of that.

Pomerantsev: So the meaning, in a way, is learning to just behave and interact in a different way.

Rosin: There are surprising kind of moments of non-nastiness that arise when you approach the world from that perspective.

Pomerantsev: I mean, I spend a lot of my time writing about propaganda and talking to people with all sorts of deeply warped beliefs, and at one point I realized that the only worthwhile question I could ask that would lead to a conversation that was human was, How did it start? How did you start believing in X?

Rosin:Yes.

Pomerantsev: And then you’d always get a very personal story.

Rosin: Yes.

Pomerantsev: Usually about some sort of trauma. I’m not saying that’s any kind of excuse, but it suddenly became a human story about how someone is making sense of the world.

Rosin: Yes.

Pomerantsev: And suddenly there was a person. Again, I never changed them. They’re still gonna do horrible things, but at least I knew they were a person. I don’t know. Maybe, in the long run, that helps us come up with better strategies to deal with it. But not immediately. It’s not a like aha moment.

Rosin: Yeah. It’s not a kumbaya. It’s just like, it really is a leap of faith ’cause as you’re doing it, you feel, Am I doing something dangerous? Like humanizing this propaganda? Like, Is this wrong, what I’m doing? And you just kind of live with that doubt and you keep asking questions, you know?

Pomeranstev: Yeah. But humans do lots of bad things. Humanizing doesn’t mean making it good; it just makes it human. You know, that doesn’t—it's like, Ooh, humanizing. Yeah, I think maybe the word humanizing needs to lose its positive aura. Humans are pretty awful.

Rosin: That’s a pretty good idea.

Pomeranstev: But they are human. [Laughs.]

Rosin: So what is the point of humanizing if you remove the positive aspects? Humanizing is good because …

Pomerantsev: You start to see the challenge for what it is rather than something esoteric. You know, it’s a real person doing real things. Therefore we can deal with it.

Applebaum: Hanna Rosin is the co-host along with Lauren Ober of the new six-part podcast series from The Atlantic called We Live Here Now. Find We Live Here Now wherever you listen to podcasts.

Pomerantsev: And we have the first episode here. Keep listening and, Hanna, thanks for talking with us today.

Rosin: Thank you both.

[We Live Here Now Episode 1: “We’re Allowed to Be Here”]

Lauren Ober: When the neighbor incident first happened, it didn’t really feel much like anything. Or maybe we were both too stunned to take it all in.

Hanna Rosin: It wasn’t until we started telling other people the story and they reacted that it began to feel like maybe we’d discovered something.

Ober: I guess it started just like any other dog walk. Hanna and I leashed up our pups and set out from our house on our post-dinner stroll. It was early November of 2023, and I remember it was unseasonably warm. We headed off down the hill from our house, towards our neighborhood park.

[Music]

Rosin: A block past the park, Lauren spotted it: A black Chevy Equinox with Texas plates we’d seen parked around the neighborhood. Just a basic American SUV except for the stickers that covered the back windshield—

Ober: —stickers we’re very much not used to seeing in our mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood. Our vibe is more like, Make D.C. the 51st state, and, No taxation without representation.

But these stickers were a combo platter of skulls and American flags. There was a Roman numeral for three—the symbol of a militia group called the Three Percenters—and the pièce de résistance: a giant decal in the center of the back window that read, free our patriots. j4j6, meaning, Justice for January 6.

Rosin: Lauren notices every new or different thing in the neighborhood, and this car was definitely different. As we walked past it, Lauren said what she always said when we saw this car.

Ober: “There’s that fucking militiamobile again!”

Right after I said that moderately unneighborly thing, the passenger-side window rolled down, cigarette smoke curled out of the car, and the person inside shouted, “Justice for J6!”

Rosin: To which Lauren said—

Ober: “You’re in the wrong neighborhood for that, honey.” And then the woman in the car said words I’m not going to forget anytime soon: “We live here now. So suck it, bitch.”

We’ll get to who that person is soon enough. But we’re not there yet. When we first encountered the woman from the car, we had no idea who we were dealing with. I just knew I was sufficiently put in my place. “Well, okay,” I remember saying to Hanna as we walked back home.

Rosin: I remember, after it happened, we walked away in total silence. That’s my memory—each of us looping in our own heads about something.

Ober: I remember being mad because I lost. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Right.

Ober: Because I didn’t get the final word, and because I just kept thinking, like, the whole combination of it felt bad to me. It’s like, Militia stickers. Justice for J6. We live here. You just called me a name. The whole thing was very out of place. And I felt it was a little destabilizing.

Rosin: Yeah, yeah. I walked home in a half hypervigilant-neighborhood-watch brain—like, Who lives here now? What are they doing here? Are we going to get into more of these confrontations?—and a half journalism brain, like, Who’s we? Where do they live? Why are there here now? Those were my two tracks when I was walking home.

[Music]

​Ober: I’m Lauren Ober.

Rosin: And I’m Hanna Rosin.

Ober: And from The Atlantic, this is We Live Here Now.

Most of the country watched January 6 from a safe distance: something happening in their Twitter feeds or on their phone screens. But for those of us living in D.C., it was happening in our backyard.

Donald Trump: I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

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.

[Music]

All Things Considered host Ailsa Chang: In Washington, D.C., a curfew has now taken effect from 6 p.m. Eastern tonight to 6 a.m. Thursday morning.

Ober: So we were actually left with the wreckage of that day. We were in a militarized city. We were living under a curfew. Streets were blocked off. The windows were all boarded up. And you felt like you were living, if not in a warzone, in a dangerous place.

Rosin: And there was National Guard everywhere. All the stores were closed, and there were very few regular people walking around doing regular things. And I was just thinking, Where am I? What city is this?

Ober: Right. I bought a baseball bat for protection.

Rosin: I remember that.

Ober: Which is why, two-plus years later, it felt like this whole period of time we’d rather forget was racing back. Donald Trump was looking like he’d be the Republican nominee, and a second Trump presidency seemed possible. Plus, we had a car with militia stickers lurking in our neighborhood.

Rosin: So no, we did not welcome January 6 supporters creeping back to the scene of the crime. But also, we wanted to know what they were up to.

[Music]

Ober: In the immediate aftermath of January 6, there were three names I associated with what happened at the Capitol: The QAnon Shaman, for obvious reasons; Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes because he seemed really dangerous, and also he had an eye patch; and Ashli Babbitt, who has everything to do with our new neighbors’ arrival in D.C.

Four people died that day, but I only remember hearing about Ashli. Maybe that’s because she was the only rioter killed by law enforcement.

Ashli Babbitt was a Trump diehard, so it’s not surprising she made her way to D.C. for the rally. She was a Second Amendment–loving libertarian. She wholeheartedly believed in MAGA and QAnon. During the pandemic, she was hostile about mask mandates and refused to get vaccinated. When California issued a stay-at-home order, she tweeted, “This is that commie bullshit!”

Rosin: The day before her death, Ashli tweeted in QAnon speak: “Nothing will stop us....they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon D.C. in less than 24 hours....dark to light!”

Ashli Babbitt: We are walking to the Capitol in a mob. There’s an estimated over 3 million people here today. So despite what the media tells you, boots on ground definitely say something different. There is a sea of nothing but red, white, and blue.

Ober: On the day of the riots, she seemed genuinely thrilled to be there.

Babbitt: And it was amazing to get to see the president talk. We are now walking down the inaugural path to the Capitol building, 3 million plus people. God bless America, patriots.

Rosin: More like 50,000 people, give or take. And a few thousand of them went into the Capitol—or, more accurately, broke in. When the mob of protestors breached the Capitol, busting windows and breaking down doors, Ashli was right there in the mix.

Rioter: There’s so many people. They’re going to push their way up here.

Rosin: There are four videos shot by rioters that capture this moment in its entirety: Ashli strides down a hallway like she knows where she’s going. She’s followed by other rioters, but they’re suddenly stopped when they come to a set of doors with large window panels. Through the windows, you can make out congresspeople being evacuated away from the growing mob. The crowd Ashli is with has accidentally landed at the bullseye, the actual place where these congresspeople were about to certify the election.

[Crowd noise]

Rosin: On the other side of the doors is a cop with a gun, although it’s unclear if Ashli can see him. She’s the only woman in a sea of men, and she’s small, and she seems to be yelling.

Ashli: It’s our fucking house. We’re allowed to be in here. You’re wrong.

Rosin: “It’s our fucking house. We’re allowed to be in here. You’re wrong.”

One of the rioters breaks a window, and then, out of nowhere, Ashli tries to climb through it.

[Crowd noise]

Rosin: The cop shoots.

Rioter: Oh! Oh, shit! Shots fired! Shots fired!

Rosin: She immediately falls backwards and lands on the floor. She jerks and convulses, and blood pours out of her mouth.

Rioter 1: She’s dead.

Rioter 2: She’s dead?

Rioter 1: She’s dead. I saw the light go out in her eyes. I saw the lights go out.

Rioter 2: What happened, bro? Tell the world.

Rosin: And then something happens right after she dies. It’s a detail I missed at first, but it turned out to be a spark for everything that would happen since that day. People around Ashli take out their cell phones and start filming.

Rioter 1: This individual says he actually saw her die. He actually saw her die.

Rioter 2: I’ll post that video. I have the video. I have the video of the guy with the gun, and they’re shooting her.

Rioter: Okay. I want to get with you. I’m with Infowars.com. I’m with Infowars.com.

Rioter 2: “Jayden X.” Have you ever heard of that?

Rosin: One person says he’s from Infowars and offers to buy footage from someone closer.

Rioter 1: I want to get your info right now if you got that shot.

Rioter 2: I have it all. I was right at the door.

Rioter 2: Okay. I need that footage, man. It’s going to go out to the world. It’s going to change so much.

Rosin: Even in the chaos they realize: A martyr was born.

Ober: Rumors spread immediately that the woman killed was 25, 21, a mere teenager. In actual fact, Ashli was 35. But the details didn’t matter. She was a young, white woman in the prime of her life shot dead by a Black officer. People were quick to point out that she was a veteran—a war hero, even—purportedly upholding her oath to defend the Constitution when she died.

On far-right, pro-Trump message boards post-January 6, Ashli was called a freedom fighter and the “first victim of the second Civil War.” One person wrote: “Your blood will not be in vain. We will avenge you.”

Rosin: People who came to January 6 thought they were saving our democracy from evil forces trying to steal an election.

Three years later, some of them still think that. And now, those same evil forces are keeping J6 “freedom fighters” in prison. Justice for January 6—that’s what those window stickers on the Chevy are about.

Ober: This conspiracy has gotten more elaborate over time: The insurrection was a setup, or, The prosecution of January 6 rioters represented gross government overreach, or, The government can turn on its own citizens, even kill them.

Rosin: A lot of the people who believe these things have taken their cues from one woman: Ashli’s mother. Her name is Micki Witthoeft.

Micki Witthoeft: Ashli was a beloved daughter, wife, sister, granddaughter, niece, and aunt. But beyond that, she was the single bravest person I have ever known. She was the quintessential American woman. Today is a dark day for our family and this country, for they have lost a true patriot. I would like to invite Donald J. Trump to say her name—

[Music]

Ober: It took us a minute, but with the help of some friends, we finally figured out that Micki was our new neighbor. I wasn’t sure what I thought about having Ashli Babbitt’s grieving mother come back to the place where her daughter was killed. Why was she here, in our D.C. neighborhood? What did she want? Was there some sort of future Jan. 6 on the horizon? It all felt just a little too close for comfort.

In the days after our run-in with the neighbor, I Googled ’til my eyeballs dried out. There were a lot of videos on social media that featured Micki but not a lot of solid information. I reported what I could find to Hanna.

Ober: Do you want to know what the house is called?

Rosin: What?

Ober: The Eagle’s Nest.

Rosin: Oh, stop. (Laughs.) What?

Ober: Yeah.

Rosin: No, we don’t have the Eagle’s Nest in our neighborhood.

Ober: What does the Eagle’s Nest mean to you?

Rosin: Some patriot thing.

Ober: No. Well, sure, one would think, Oh, it’s patriotic, right? American Eagle.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ober: It’s where all the eagles go. But do you know who else had a very particular property called the Eagle’s Nest?

Rosin: No.

Ober: Well, I’ll tell you. It’s Adolf Hitler. However, to quote Micki, who explained to HuffPost why they called the house the Eagle’s Nest:

Ober: She said, We call our house the Eagle’s Nest, which some would say was Hitler’s hideout. But we’re American citizens, and we won that war, and we’re taking back the name. So this is absolutely not an ode to Hitler.

Ober: Here’s what else I found out: The online videos of Micki didn’t exactly make me want to bring over a tray of homemade, “Welcome to the neighborhood” brownies. Lots of shouting and scowling and general unpleasantness.

Witthoeft: Why are you all here if you’re going to let that happen? He said, Why the hell are you all here?

Person 2: He said that to you? That was very unprofessional!

Person 3: They’re fascists.

Ober: In one clip online, Micki is being arrested for “blocking and obstructing roadways.” She was at a march to honor the second anniversary of her daughter’s death, and she walked into the street one too many times. The D.C. cops did not appreciate that, and they let her know it.

It wasn’t the only time she got into it with the cops. A year later—

Witthoeft: I try to show y’all respect. I’ve been arrested twice, and I’ve done it peacefully. That’s bullshit. Your man is bullshit. That’s bullshit.

Officer: I wasn’t down here, so I can speak to how—

Ober: There were more than a few videos of Micki and her housemates getting into dustups with D.C. folks who didn’t seem to appreciate their presence in their city.

Person 1: Get the fuck outta here.

Person 2: Get the fuck off of me, bitch. Get the fuck off, the fuck off. Get the fuck off.

Person 3: Hey! We caught it on video.

Person 2: Stop fucking touching my shit.

Person 3: Get out of here, you pansy.

Ober: But later, in the same video, there’s this: Our new neighbors are getting harassed by anti-J6 protestors, folks who like to chalk the sidewalk with phrases like “Micki is a grifter.” There are a number of D.C. cops on the scene. I get tense just watching it. Finally, Micki snaps and screams at them.

Officer: I heard all the commotion. That’s why I got out. I can’t see—I didn’t see what happened out here.

Person 2: I had to beg him to get out of his car.

Witthoeft: You can tell your man that the reason I’m here is because three years ago today, y’all killed my kid. That’s why I’m here.

[Music]

Ober: Right. She’s a mom, and the police killed her kid. That’s why she’s here. She wants to make sure her dead daughter isn’t forgotten and that someone is held accountable for what happened.

And one way to do that is to maybe get yourself arrested, or at least show up everywhere—January 6 trials, congressional hearings, the Supreme Court, rallies, marches, my neighborhood.

Another way for people to take notice? A nightly vigil outside the D.C. jail, every single night for more than 700 nights.

Rosin: And we mean every night, in the rain or scorching heat. Without fail, Micki and a few supporters stand on what they call Freedom Corner and talk on the phone with the J6 defendants held inside the jail.

Ober: As I explained to Hanna:

Ober: Every night at 7 p.m., these apparently true patriots—

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ober: —come out, and they have a vigil for all of the January 6 defendants who are currently being held in the jail, either awaiting trial or awaiting sentencing.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ober: And every night, they get a January 6 inmate on the phone, and they put them on the speaker, and then they join in singing, like, the national anthem or “America the Beautiful,” and they’re chanting, like, “Justice for Ashli.” And the evening ends, often, with “God Bless [the U.S.A.],” Lee Greenwood.

Rosin: Who’s the “they”?

Ober: So there’s a small cadre of true believers who believe that the people in the D.C. jail are political prisoners.

Rosin: Interesting.

[Music]

Rosin: Interesting is a boring thing to say. I get that. But I was only just starting to put this whole picture together, that Micki and her friends were not in D.C. just to cause chaos. They were here to push a narrative that these people—the same ones who turned our city upside down—were victims of a colossal injustice. And also, that January 6 was actually a totally appropriate exercise of freedom and liberty.

And their version of the story was getting traction with some important people—actually, the most important person.

Trump: I am the political prisoner of a failing nation, but I will soon be free on November 5, the most important day in the history of our country, and we will together make America great again. Thank you.

Rosin: If our interactions with our new neighbors had unfolded more like the typical neighborhood showdown—my MAGA hat versus your dump trump sign—things might have been easier because that would be just straight-up neighbor warfare, pure mutual hatred.

Ober: But it didn’t happen that way. Instead, two opposite dramas unfolded: (1) We got an up-close, intimate view of how history gets rewritten. Call it the lost-cause narrative for the 21st century: A group of Americans immediately sets to work retooling the history of an event through tweets and podcasts and viral video clips, in a way that distorts collective memory forever.

Rosin: But then, (2) our new neighbors became real people to us. We also got an up-close, intimate view of them, their monumental grief, their sleepless nights, their deep friendship—things that make it harder to purely hate on someone.

Ober: This woman, Micki Witthoeft, is many things to many people—Mama Micki to the January 6 defendants, mother of a dead domestic terrorist to others. But to us, she’s something else—she’s our neighbor.

Ober: Do you want to hear something rotten?

Micki: I don’t know if I do, but I will.

Ober: After months of getting to know Micki, I felt like I needed to confess something. She had been telling me how people in the neighborhood had generally been nice to them, except for this one time. One of her roommates, Nicole, had been sitting in the car, and these two women walked by and said something totally rude, and—I know, you’ve already heard the story before.

Ober: Nicole sitting in the car—that was me. And I’m fully disgusted with myself and embarrassed. Like, because that’s not how I want to be treated, and that’s not how I want to think about people. But I did it.

Micki: Oh, well, I’m surprised you—I’m impressed that you admitted that to me. I really am. That’s going to be interesting when I tell Nicole.

Ober: Since that incident, I’ve spent a lot of time with Micki trying to understand her cause, her politics, and her anger. I’ve had many moments where I thought: What the hell am I doing, getting all caught up in their revisionist history of January 6? But what I can tell you is that Micki is not who I thought she was.

She is every bit as fiery as she comes off in speeches and confrontations with people who want her out of this city. After nearly a year of knowing her, I’m still terrified of her. I have never before in my life met a person with such penetrating eyes, and she wields them to great effect. If she is staring you down, I promise you, you will find no relief.

Ober: So the window rolls down, and I guess Nicole said, you know, “Justice for J6!” Right? Reflexively, in two seconds, I go, “Well, you’re in the wrong neighborhood for that.” Right? Now, I feel like you would appreciate that because sometimes things pop out of your mouth that maybe you didn’t think about. I am a person who is very guilty of that, as my mouth runs away with me.

So, I said that, and she goes, “We live here now. So suck it, bitch.” (Laughs.)

Micki: That’s my Nicole. (Laughs.)

Ober: And I was like, Well, okay.

[Music]

Rosin: When we first ran into the militiamobile, we didn’t know anything about Micki and her crew. We thought anyone could be living in that house, with that car. Maybe it was an actual militia headquarters with a cache of weapons in the basement. Maybe it was just some wacko whose patriotism had gone totally sideways.

Ober: But now, after nearly a year of reporting this story, we know so much more. And in the rest of the series, we are going to take you through this upside-down world we landed in—where we found ourselves talking conspiracies.

Micki: 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.

Ober: How you can suddenly find yourself joking with January 6ers about militias?

Nicole: If you’re going to come down here, you’ve got to know your militias straight.

Ober: You know, I can’t—there are too many splinter groups and, you know.

Nicole: There’s factions. There’s levels. There’s color coding. (Laughs.)

Ober: Listen. When the gay militia happens, I’m there, okay? When that happens. Until then—

Nicole: Well, we’re a country of militias, you know.

Ober: And wondering, What could possibly be coming for us?

Rosin: Like, how long are you going to stay in D.C.?

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

Rosin: That feels vaguely threatening.

Fellows: I could see why you would say that.

Rosin: That’s coming up on We Live Here Now.

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.

Nicole. And then did I say something like, Well, bitch, I live here now, or something?

Ober: Very close to that. “We live here now, so—”

Nicole: Get used to it?

Ober: No.

Nicole: Suck it? Fuck it?

Ober: No. You’re right on the “suck it.”

Nicole: (Laughs.) I don’t know.

Ober: “Suck it,” what? “Suck it,” who?

Nicole: Suck it, fascist? (Laughs.) So much more fascist than me. Don’t tell me what I said.

Ober: You said, “Suck it, bitch.”

Nicole: Oh! Okay. Okay.

Caelan Doris is named Ireland captain for next month's autumn series with Peter O'Mahony not yet back to full fitness.

Peter Lynch was serving two year and eight months after pleading guilty to violent disorder

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To a casual observer, Donald Trump’s claim about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs seemed like a bizarre or mistaken claim that ultimately fueled millions of memes, jokes, and racist insults. But to someone who knows what to look for, the story he told read as much more calculated and familiar. Making an outrageous claim is one common tactic of an autocrat. So is sticking to it far beyond the time when it’s even remotely believable. Autocrats often dare their followers to believe absurd claims, as a kind of loyalty test, because “humor and fear can be quite close together sometimes,” says Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist and co-host of Autocracy in America, an Atlantic podcast series.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Pomerantsev and Atlantic staff writer and co-host Anne Applebaum about how to detect the signs of autocracy, because, as they say, if you can’t spot them, you won’t be able to root them out. We also analyze the events of the upcoming election through their eyes and talk about how large swaths of a population come to believe lies, what that means, and how it might be undone.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. There’s something new unfolding in this election, something we haven’t seen in this country on such a grand scale. Kamala Harris said it bluntly at her acceptance speech at the DNC when she talked about how tyrants like Kim Jong Un side with Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris: They know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable, because he wants to be an autocrat himself.

[Applause]

Rosin: An autocrat. How do you know if a leader is vying to be an autocrat? It’s an abstract title hard to picture playing out in the U.S. But as I picked up in a new Atlantic podcast, Autocracy in America, if you know what you’re looking for, you can see it pretty clearly.

People who have seen it play out in other countries can tick through the list of autocratic tactics. At work. Right now. In the United States.

Applebaum: That was really the organizing idea of the show, was to tell people that stuff is already happening now.

Rosin: This is staff writer Anne Applebaum. She’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and co-host of Autocracy in America.

Her co-host is Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a scholar of propaganda and misinformation.

After I started listening to their show, I realized I was missing some very basic things—patterns that were easy to spot if someone pointed them out to you. So I wanted to get them to help me to understand the moment we’re in, both in this election and in American history.

Here’s my conversation with Anne and Peter.

[Music]

Rosin: So I think of the two of you as, like, detectives. You see patterns happening in the news and the election that the rest of us either don’t notice or don’t quite put together as patterns. So I want to, through your eyes, look at the current election. Have you detected any patterns or signs of the kind of current autocracy in America bubble up in the dialogue of this election?

Applebaum: So I was very struck by the famous “eating cats and dogs” phrase.

Donald Trump: In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets.

Applebaum: And everybody laughed at it, and they said, Ha ha ha. That’s very funny. And this struck me as an example of people lying in a way, even though everybody knows they’re lying, and the purpose of the lie was to demonstrate their power. We can lie. We can do whatever we want. We can say whatever we want about these people, and it doesn’t affect us.

And the fact that they never retracted it, despite the fact that people in Springfield were up in arms, and everybody who’s done any reporting—journalists have been to Springfield, have asked people, Are there any dogs or cats being eaten? And people say no.

It’s a way of showing power—so, We can lie, and everybody else is going to go along with our lie when we win the election.

Pomerantsev: You know, something that’s been much remarked upon in autocratic systems: truth and power sort of switch roles. You know, we think of truth challenging power and holding the powerful by account with the truth. When I lived in Russia—and my first book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, was all about this, how truth didn’t play that role anymore. Truth was about showing your loyalty, showing whose side you’re on—and, you know, subservient to power.

Applebaum: They’re creating around themselves a kind of alternative community, where, If you’re inside our world, we say whatever we want the truth to be, and everybody joins in.

Pomerantsev: And also, rubbishing the idea of truth. I mean, what comes with that is truth stops being about information and analysis. It’s about making a point, saying whose side you’re on. Even the more absurd the lie that you say shows even more, Look at my team. Look at my team. Look whose side I’m on.

And Vance was fascinating. You know, he’s a very fascinating character, something right out of some of the darkest Russian novels, because he kind of intellectualizes this, because he’s also a writer and someone who thinks about language a lot, clearly. And when he went on air and said, Oh yeah. I made this up, and I’ll keep on making things up. Because truth doesn’t matter. You know, something else matters.

J. D. Vance on CNN: If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

Rosin: And is it just because I’m (A) an American and (B) a journalist that I can’t catch up? Like, you both have so much foreign experience—living in foreign countries, watching autocracy—so you’ve digested this. Is it because it’s new to me that everything—like, every time Trump does it, I keep wishing for the facts to stop the momentum, and they never do, and somehow I can’t catch up? It’s just because we’re new, right? Because Americans just haven’t seen this before.

Applebaum: It’s not that new. I mean, it’s been going on since 2016. And in fact, I would say almost the opposite is true. I think most people—I mean, you may be an exception.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Pomerantsev: It’s because you’re a journalist, not because you’re an American.

Rosin: (Laughs.) It’s because I’m slow.

Applebaum: No. I think most people have got used to it. And I mean, the normalization of the lying and the normalization of the gibberish that Trump comes up with—all of that has become part of the background of politics in America and isn’t shocking the way it would have been. And imagine an election 20 years ago. I don’t know—imagine Bill Clinton going up on the stage and talking about sharks and electrocution and Hannibal Lecter. People would have been outraged, and he would have been thrown off the stage, and Who is this crazy person talking to us?

But we’ve now gone down a path where we’re accustomed to that way of speaking in public. More and more people have joined the former president in doing so. More and more people have got used to listening to that, and we’re in a different world now. Maybe you’re just still in the former world.

Rosin: But why are we laughing? I mean, what you’re saying is quite serious. Like, what you’re saying is that they’re using this pet story in order to sort of flex a kind of autocratic power, and we are just making memes and making jokes and laughing at Trump and saying how ridiculous it is that he’s doing this pet thing. But what you’re talking about is quite serious. So that’s where I’m saying maybe the gap is—like, we haven’t quite caught up—that actually it’s dangerous. It’s not funny.

Pomerantsev: I don’t find it funny at all, actually. I find it very, very sinister. One thing that we keep on coming back to in our show is in Eastern Europe, where there’s been a history of this, the response is often to look at the absurdity of it. A lot of the great Eastern European novels about autocracy are absurdist novels. But absurdism is very scary. I mean, in the hands of the sadistic and the powerful, it’s a terrifying tool. So I find humor and fear can be quite close together sometimes.

Applebaum: No. It’s one of the things you do when you’re afraid and also, especially, when you’re powerless. When democracy has failed completely, when you’re living in a completely autocratic society, then what do you have left? You can’t fight back. You can’t hit anybody. So you turn it into jokes.

Rosin: So that’s the level of Trump. I want to talk about this at the level of followers or people listening to Trump or, you know, the general populace, and tell you guys a story.

I’ve been to more Trump rallies in this election than I have in the last election. And one thing that happens is: I was reporting with an Atlantic reporter. His name is John Hendrickson. He covers politics, and he has a pronounced stutter. And this was at the time that Biden was still running, and Trump had declined to make fun of Biden’s stutter, and then Trump crossed that line in a certain rally. He started to make fun of the way Biden talks.

Trump: Two nights ago, we all heard Crooked Joe’s angry, dark, hate-filled rant of a State of the Union address. Wasn’t it—didn’t it bring us together? Remember, he said, I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-together. I’m gonna bring it together.

Rosin: And John Hendrickson wanted to go with me to a rally. So we thought we would get into some sticky ethical dilemmas, and we would have kind of difficult conversations with people about compassion and morality. And we did have some of that. But a lot of what happened is that people would say to us, That didn’t happen. Trump didn’t do that. Like, I just, again, wasn’t prepared for that.

[Music]

Rosin: The first time someone said it, I just said, Yes. He did, like a baby. And they said, Well, no. We don’t know—he didn’t, and so then I sort of stepped back and called up the video. And then there was a video of Trump doing what we said he had done. So then the next time someone said he didn’t do that, I just showed them the video, and they said, Well, we don’t—I don’t know where that video came from. I don’t know that that’s real.

And so I didn’t know what to do next. Like, when people just say, That didn’t happen, I just wasn’t sure where to go next. So what I did was go home and Google the term psychological infrastructure. And I don’t even know if that’s a thing, but just what has happened to our brains? And I wanted you two to reflect on this.

Applebaum: I mean, one of the things that happened to our brains—and I don’t think it’s only Trump supporters—is that the quantity of information that we all see every day is so enormous. And so much of it is either false or irrelevant, or somehow we learn to exclude it, that I think the old, slow process of thinking about what’s true and what’s not true—it’s hardly even relevant anymore. It’s not just Americans, actually. I mean, I think everybody has started to treat facts and evidence and truth differently. And I think that’s kind of where Trump comes from.

In the way that Hollywood produced Ronald Reagan and TV produced JFK, because they were the new forms of media, and they were the ones who were successful in that media, I think Trump is somebody who’s successful in the world of very fast video clips and takes, where you’re not paying any attention anymore to what’s actually true and what’s not, and what’s AI and what’s not, and what’s staged and what’s not. I think he’s just a beneficiary of that.

Pomerantsev: I always wonder: What is the permission structure that a leader gives their followers, especially when the leader has this really tight emotional bond with their followers?

The permission structure that Trump gives his audience, I think, is: He sticks a middle finger up to reality. It’s very nice to give a middle finger to reality. Reality, essentially, at the end of the day, reminds you of death. I mean, it’s a middle finger to death at some very deep level. That’s what Trump gives people. So he denies reality, so you can deny reality, so when Hanna turns up with her evidence, you can go, Eh, fuck that.

Rosin: Oh my God. That—

Pomerantsev: And that gives you a high.

Rosin: Peter, that’s so—I mean, that feels correct, because there is such a hostility towards the media in a Trump rally. And it is very fun for people in a Trump rally, because often the media has the power. Like, I have equipment. I have a microphone. I have a lot of things. It is such a high for people to give us the middle finger and just say, like, You have no power. You’re nothing. That is very much in that dynamic. So I wonder if there is just some pleasure in telling us that didn’t happen. And it doesn’t matter if you knew it happened or saw it happen or anything like that.

Pomerantsev: We know about the hostility to the media as a kind of, like, sociological strategy, but also, I wonder, actually, it’s deeper than that. By telling the people who represent knowledge and facts a big middle finger, it’s part of this bigger rebellion against reality.

Applebaum: You know, Trump, from the very beginning of his political career—one of the central things he was doing was attacking the idea of truth. Remember how he broke into our consciousness in the political world as a birther. You know, Barack Obama is not really the president. He’s an illegitimate president. He was born in Kenya.

Trump on The View: Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? I think he probably—

Barbara Walters on The View: Why does he have to?

Trump on The View: Because I have to and everybody else has to.

Trump on The Today Show: I thought he was probably born in this country, and now I really have a much bigger doubt than I had before.

Meredith Vieira on The Today Show: But based on what?

Applebaum: And the fact that he could build a community of trust around that idea was a beginning, for a lot of people, of a break with, as you say, the idea that facts are real and that there’s some structure of truth, fact-finding, journalism, etcetera that can back it up.

So I think this has been a deliberate thing that he’s done for a decade, is to try to undermine people’s faith in truth and faith in journalism and faith in all kinds of other institutions, as well. But he is aided by the nature of the modern conversation and debate, which has only become more chaotic, you know, with every passing year.

Rosin: Do you two think of the American mind as broken in some way? No. I’m serious. Like, where we journalists are playing a losing game, and the American mind is corroded?

Applebaum: I’m not sure it’s just the American mind.

Pomerantsev: That was a very diplomatic answer, Anne. Damn, that was good. That was good.

Rosin: I actually wonder about this. I actually wonder about this. I mean, that is a very unmelodic phrase I Googled, psychological infrastructure. But I did start to think of the world in this way. Like, Okay, there’s a transportation infrastructure. There are all these, you know—but then there’s a collective-consciousness infrastructure, and it’s being corrupted, you know. In the same way you can sort of hack into an electrical grid, you can hack into a collective consciousness. And it just seems terrifying to me.

Applebaum: It matters a lot who the leaders of your country are. I remember an Italian friend of mine telling me a long time ago, after Berlusconi had been the leader of Italy for a number of years, it actually changed the way men and women related to each other in the country, because Berlusconi was famous for having lots of young girlfriends and so on.

Suddenly, it became okay for married men to have much younger girlfriends, in a way that it hadn’t been before. So he kind of changed the morality because he was the top dog, so whatever he did was okay. And that suddenly meant it was okay for a lot of other people too. And I think Trump did something like that too.

He made lying okay. You know, If Trump does it, and he’s the president—or he was the president—then it’s okay for anyone to do it. We can all do it. And so I do think he had an impact on the national psyche, or whatever term you want to use.

Pomerantsev: Yeah. I think the question isn’t whether it’s broken or not. Clearly, something has snapped if 30 percent of the country think the last election rigged in some way.

So the question, Is it broken irrevocably? is actually the question. And the only thing I would say from seeing this in authoritarian regimes or regimes that go authoritarian-ish: It’s very shocking when you see people openly choosing to live in an alternative reality. It’s not that they got duped. They’re doing that because it’s part of their new identity.

It can also be thin because it is a bad identity. And actually, in their personal lives, they’re still completely rational. You know, they need facts as soon as they’re looking at their bank account. So it’s not all pervasive. This is just something you do for your political identity, for the theater of it, which means that it can change very fast, again, and change back again. So there is a thinness to it.

Rosin: But that’s hopeful.

Pomerantsev: That’s what I mean. That’s what I mean. So is it irrevocable? Not necessarily, is what I would say. But clearly something’s broken.

Rosin: After the break, Anne and Peter play out our near future—that is, what happens after the election—and Anne tries her hardest not to sound too dark.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay. So broaden out a little bit. What’s at stake in the election, as you two see it? This election.

Applebaum: I have to be careful not to sound apocalyptic, because it’s kind of my trademark tone, and I’m seeking to—

Rosin: It’s your brand. You’re trying to change your brand. (Laughs.)

Applebaum: I’m trying to tone it down. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay.

Pomerantsev: Just as things get really apocalyptic, Anne’s like, I’m going to be all self-helpy. (Laughs.)

Applebaum: I think whether the United States continues to be a democracy in the way that we’ve known it up until now—or at least since the Civil War or maybe since the civil-rights movement—is at stake.

I think, for example, the question of whether we will go on having, you know, a Justice Department that adheres to the rule of law and government institutions who act in the interests of the American people—rather than the interest of the president, personally, and his friends, personally—I think all of that’s at stake.

So the thing that I’ve seen happen in other countries is the politicization of the state and the politicization of institutions. And that’s what I think is very, very likely to happen if Trump wins a second term. And once that begins, it is very hard to reverse. It’s very hard to bring back the old civil servants who are, for better or for worse—I mean, maybe they’re ineffective or incompetent, but at least they think they’re acting in the interests of Americans.

Once you don’t have that culture anymore, it’s difficult to rebuild, and I’m afraid of that.

Pomerantsev: Look—America’s meaning in the world goes beyond its borders. It is the only superpower that’s also a democracy and talks a lot about freedom, though we unpack what it means by “freedom” in the show. There’s a real risk that a Trump victory is the end of America’s role doing that. For me, actually, the most sinister moment in the debates was when Trump looked to Viktor Orbán, the leader of Hungary, as his role model.

Orbán is not of great importance geopolitically. Hungary is a tiny country, but he’s a model for a new type of authoritarian-ish regimes inside Europe. And if America cuts off its alliances, if America makes possible a world where Russia and China will dominate—and there’s a real risk of that—then we’re into a very, very, very dangerous and turbulent future.

This is a moment when democracies really do hang together. The other side is very focused and very ruthless. Something that didn’t make it into the show was a quote from an interview that we did with Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist. He’s in Episode 2. But there was one line that didn’t make it into the show for editing reasons. But he sort of told us: What do the Kremlin elite call Trump?

And they call him Gorbachev, America’s Gorbachev, by which they don’t mean he’s a liberal reformer. They mean he’s going to bring the whole thing crashing down. It’s the end of America, and it’s Russia and China’s moment to dominate.

Applebaum: Yeah. And not just the end of America as a democracy but the end of American leadership in the world, the way that Gorbachev ended—

Pomerantsev: The project’s over.

Applebaum: The project’s over. That’s what they think.

Pomerantsev: Oh, they’re licking their lips.

Rosin: Let’s say Trump doesn’t win. Do all your worries fade away?

Applebaum: Some do. I mean, not having Trump as the leader—having him having been defeated in an election, especially if that election result holds and there is not another rebellion—that will force at least some part of the Republican Party to try to move on and find different language and different leaders.

But there will be a long legacy, even if he loses—so the legacy of people who’ve come to accept his way of speaking and his way of dealing with the world as normal, the legacy of people who believe that Kamala Harris is a Marxist revolutionary who’s out to destroy America, the legacy of violence in politics and the language of violence in politics. I mean, we’ve always had it, actually, in U.S. history. You can find lots of moments where it’s there, kind of rises and falls depending on the times. But we have a continued high level of threat, I think.

Rosin: Right. So it still requires a vigilance. It’s clear from this conversation why you two were motivated to make this series, Autocracy in America. Why does going back in history and doing this broad sweep—why is that useful? Why approach it in that way?

Pomerantsev: America is incredibly exceptional. But also, the things that play out here, you know, they have their precedence internationally and in history. And sometimes stepping back from the immediate moment is the way to sort of both understand it and also start to deal with it. You know, sometimes when you’re just in this—you know, the latest rage tweet or the latest, like, horrific TikTok video or something—stepping back, seeing the context, seeing the larger roots, seeing that it happens elsewhere is a way of then starting to deal with it.

I mean, that’s what a therapist will always get you to do. He says, Step back from the crisis, and let’s talk about the context. And the context is both uplifting in the sense that there have been ways to deal with this before but also—I mean, for me it was fascinating to understand how the story of autocracy in America is not just about Trump at all.

It’s a stable thing that’s been there all the time. The series, for me, was transformative in the sense that—I entered it, and I’m still in the process of making sense of it—I entered it very much with this idea that the story of America is the story of America outgrowing its lacks of freedoms and rights and getting better and better.

And by the end, I was kind of inching towards a revisioning, where it seems a country where the autocratic instincts and the democratic instincts are constantly competing, constantly at war with each other, and mitigated by things like foreign-policy. I mean, you know, Episode 4 is all about how America’s foreign policy choices in the Cold War, being for freedom, made it improve civil rights at home.

So all these factors influence the progress of democracy, the upholding of rights and freedoms. And it’s not some simple line. And that, for me, was actually quite—I don’t know. That was very new for me.

Applebaum: I think it’s also important that people stop thinking about history the way I was, essentially, taught in school, which is that it’s some kind of line of progress.

You know, The arc of history bends towards justice, or whatever way you want to put it—that we’re on some kind of upward trajectory, you know, and that sometimes we back down but, Never mind. It’ll keep going, because history isn’t determinative like that. It’s, in fact, circular. Things happen. We grow out of them. But then they come back. You know, ideas return. Old ways of doing and thinking—they don’t get banished forever. They reemerge.

And when you look at American history, just like when you look at the history of any country, actually, you find that. You find that old ideas come back, and I thought it was worth it, in this series, since we were talking about the present and the future, to also look at the way some of the same ideas and arguments had played out in the past.

Rosin: Well, Anne, Peter, thank you so much for making this series and for talking to us about it today.

Applebaum: Thank you.

Pomerantsev: Thank you for listening.

Rosin: Listeners, I urge you to check out the whole series, Autocracy in America. You’ll learn to spot the signs of autocracy in our past and right now. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

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

Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts

Freedom in the United States is a word that has had more than one meaning. It has meant freedom for some people and the repression of others. In a democracy, freedom also means the right to take part in politics. So how can that freedom best be secured?

This is the fifth episode of Autocracy in America, a five-part series about authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States and where to look for them.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Anne Applebaum: Peter, there is a word that we are hearing an awful lot in discussions of democracy. The word is freedom. Protecting freedom, for example:

Donald Trump: Never forget our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom.

Applebaum: Striving for freedom.

Kamala Harris: But us—we choose something different. We choose freedom.

Applebaum: Sometimes people use the word freedom aggressively, as Michael Flynn did here when he appeared on Infowars last December.

Michael Flynn: We’re moving towards the sound of the guns here, folks. And the sound of the guns is freedom.

Applebaum: Sometimes freedom is meant to be energizing, like when Oprah Winfrey addressed the DNC this summer.

Oprah Winfrey: The women and men who are battling to keep us from going back to a time of desperation and shame and stone-cold fear—they are the new freedom fighters.

Applebaum: But it’s unavoidable as an idea.

Peter Pomerantsev: Freedom seems to be a word that is embraced across America. I’ve seen polling research that shows that, even in this very polarized country, it’s one thing that people across the political spectrum care about. Even though we’re making a series about democratic decline, I have to say, I’m comforted by the fact that Americans love freedom. It means that autocracy is unlikely to get very far.

[Music]

Applebaum: That’s where you’re wrong, Peter. Freedom can be used against democracy. It’s happened before in American history, and it can happen again.

I’m Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Pomerantsev: I’m Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Applebaum: This is Autocracy in America.

Pomerantsev: This isn’t a show about the future of America. There are authoritarian tactics already at work, and we’re showing you where. There’s the rise of conspiracy theories, widening public apathy—

Applebaum: Yeah, and there are more and more politicized investigations, plans for the takeover of the state. And in this episode: the rhetoric of freedom.

Pomerantsev: Anne, the common conception—the one that I have, anyway—is that freedom is meant to be a good thing. Freedom is meant to be the same thing as democracy. Those two words—I hear them used interchangeably. Freedom means the Bill of Rights, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, the freedom to choose who rules you.

Applebaum: Not quite. There’s another equally old American version of freedom, which is freedom to defy the federal government—you know, the freedom to go out into the Wild West and make up your own rules.

Jefferson Cowie: One of the great sort of struggles throughout American history is: Where does freedom rest? The biggest fight over that was, of course, the Civil War. But I think the entire American history can be seen as a tension between local versus federal realms of authority, with regard to this slippery idea of freedom.

Applebaum: Jefferson Cowie is a historian. He teaches at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. In his book Freedom’s Dominion, he writes about a place called Barbour County, in Alabama, where the two different forms of freedom have come crashing into one another for two centuries now. He describes how white settlers in the 1830s refused to abide by treaties that the federal government had signed with Native Americans and, instead, would repeatedly steal their land.

Cowie: And so you have this really explosive moment where white settlers were promised, in some broad sense, access to land. They were denied it. And they took their claims of freedom against the federal government that was denying them the ability to take the land of other people—their freedom to steal land, basically.

[Music]

Applebaum: And then, after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, Barbour County also revolted against the federal government’s demand that freed slaves be allowed to vote. They staged this revolt in the name of freedom—their freedom to run their county the way they wanted to. Eventually, they unleashed terrible, horrific violence.

Cowie: And then on Election Day, 1874, as Black people came in from the countryside to vote, white people just pulled guns out of every nook and cranny of downtown Eufaula, Alabama—from sheds, from windows, from underneath porches—and opened fire on Black voters that were lined up to vote and shot them in the streets.

At least 80 were shot. Some say as many as 150. It’s a difficult number to come up with, but 80 confirmed, at least. And that ended Reconstruction violently, in what was essentially a coup d’état in the name of white freedom.

Applebaum: Then in the 1950s and 1960s, this version of freedom, the freedom to defy the federal government, emerges again.

George Wallace: And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

Applebaum: George Wallace, born in Barbour County, became governor of Alabama during the fraught civil-rights era.

Cowie: So the irony or the tension in that is: That’s the most iconic speech of George Wallace’s life. He only mentioned segregation one other time, for a total of four, but he invokes freedom or liberty two dozen times.

The more I dug into the local history and how local and state powers saw themselves in opposition to federal power and saw that their freedom was a local ability to control, to dominate, a freedom to dominate others—the land, the political power of others—then you realize, Oh, what Wallace is talking about is a very specific kind of freedom.

We allow the word freedom to work in the political discourse because it appears to be a kind of liberal value, but underneath it is actually a very powerful ideology of domination. And that’s what he’s really talking about there, because it’s at that moment that the federal government is coming in to take away their freedom to control the political power of Black people.

[Music]

Applebaum: Wallace advertised himself as a man of the people. He would say, I’m going to do stuff to help people: build hospitals, build schools, just like Huey Long a generation earlier. But at the same time, Wallace understood that the people in his part of the world also wanted to preserve segregation.

Cowie: He resists federal power in the late 1950s and eventually rides that to the governor’s mansion.

Applebaum: Jefferson Cowie explains Wallace’s style as a kind of neo-Confederate approach to freedom, and he didn’t use it only to appeal to people in Alabama or the American South.

Cowie: He talked about the flaming pioneer spirit of the West and the rock-ribbed patriotic freedom of New England, and he was casting a national vision, that this kind of anti-federal-government idea was a national agenda, and he could run for president, which he did many times.

Applebaum: This careful use of the term freedom did bring more people into the fold.

Cowie: Because if you’re running as a snarling racist, you only get so far, he realized. But if you’re running against the federal government, as freedom from the federal tyranny, now you have yourself a coalition, right? Now you have the anti-taxers. You have people who don’t want to deal with integrated housing. You have people who don’t, you know, want the federal government meddling in their lives. And now that’s a broader group that you can bring together.

Pomerantsev: So this is not what we traditionally think of as freedom—you know, the freedom to vote, to choose your representatives, the freedom to engage in politics. This is something much darker.

Applebaum: Yes—the freedom to dominate and to control in defiance of the law.

Cowie: What happened in Barbour County: The idea of civil rights and the idea of political participation were mobilized effectively in pursuit of the freedom to dominate.

Applebaum: Cowie worries that this idea of freedom can be used to break down democratic institutions.

Cowie: That’s the model that I’m afraid of for the future.

Applebaum: So what you’re saying is: We could elect somebody who would alter the political system.

Cowie: Oh yeah.

Applebaum: So it wouldn’t be that, you know, a dictator comes to power by driving tanks down the street and shooting up the White House but is, rather, elected with the consent of the voters.

Cowie: Right.

Applebaum: So does that mean that freedom to dominate could become a federal idea?

[Music]

Cowie: Absolutely. But my nightmare is that fascism comes to America, but it’s marching under the banner of freedom.

Pomerantsev: When he says, “the banner of freedom,” I have the image of the January 6 protesters, motivated by the Big Lie that the election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump, distorting that word.

Applebaum: Exactly. This was the way the word freedom was being used during the insurrection in 2021. Listen to how Michael Flynn addressed a crowd the night before the attack on the Capitol, in a speech at a place called “Freedom Plaza” near the White House.

Michael Flynn: One of the great things about being an American is our culture. In our DNA, we feel freedom! We bleed freedom! And we will sacrifice for freedom!

[Cheering]

Flynn: It is not something that can be taken for granted.

Applebaum: Cowie sees January 6 as yet another clash between different ideas of freedom.

But this time, the people who want freedom from the federal government are seeking control of the federal government, and they have the endorsement of the former president.

Cowie: The difference now is they’re beginning to capture federal authority, right? So these people who’ve been anti federal government are now tasting federal power. And this is something that people like John C. Calhoun from South Carolina and George Wallace from Alabama actually envisioned, that they could actually eventually take over the federal government, make it their own, and transform federal power into their own vision.

[Music]

Applebaum: “Transform federal power into their own vision”—that sounds like some of the things we’ve been talking about throughout this series. Tom Nichols reminded us of how easy it would be to subvert the military. We’ve seen how a congressional committee can be used to harass its chairman’s enemies, and, of course, the Justice Department could be used in the same way. We know how weak some parts of our system are; there is not a guarantee that the rest of it is stable.

Pomerantsev: This is not about the quirks of this or that presidential candidate. As Cowie makes clear, there’s an American autocratic tradition which has always been present, and it could easily come to dominate the federal government. Yet even as these forms of freedom seem to be winning public support, there is also another way of thinking of freedom in America.

That’s coming after the break.

[Break]

Pomerantsev: In the present day, we often hear about this idea of freedom as being synonymous with freedom from government—or, to be more precise, from democratic government, from checks and balances, from elected officials—that if Americans are just left alone, they’ll be free and achieve their best.

Timothy Snyder: The basic way that this argument about freedom is now run is that people say, The less government you have, the more free you are, which is fundamentally not true. If you have very poor government, the people are not free. People are then subject to arbitrariness and violence. They’re subject to the rule of the wealthy. Just taking away government and imagining people are free is a kind of magical thinking.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: Anne, you know Timothy Snyder. He’s a professor at Yale, and he’s written a new book, called On Freedom. He lays out a different way of thinking about the word.

Snyder: Freedom has been an axe, right? It’s been a blade which has been used to cut through things. And I’m trying to suggest that freedom should be more like a plow. Freedom should be a tool which allows us to cultivate things. Freedom should be something which justifies action.

Applebaum: So Snyder means that you are free to do something, not just free from something.

Pomerantsev: Yes. You live in a society that makes it possible to do things—to become educated, to be creative, to found a company, to be healthy—and that, not the absence of government, makes you free.

Snyder: I really think an argument for a lot of the things that people on the left want, in my view, correctly is freedom. But the argument is usually made in terms of justice or fairness or equality, and those are all good things. But both politically and, I think, morally, just in terms of the correct description, freedom is often very much more central.

Pomerantsev: But this year, Anne, freedom is more front and center. It’s being blasted out of loudspeakers at Harris-Walz campaign rallies.

[Beyoncé’s “Freedom”]

Applebaum: Yeah. At a campaign event earlier this year, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro used the word precisely 30 times in one speech.

Josh Shapiro: We believe in real freedom.

The task of defending our fundamental freedoms—it now falls to all of you.

It’s not freedom to tell women what they’re allowed to do with their bodies.

To do this hard work, to fight for our freedom—

—to freedom-loving Americans all across this great country.

[Music]

Applebaum: So now what you have is these competing ideas of freedom being put in front of voters in this election. Pete Buttigieg put it this way in an interview with MSNBC.

Pete Buttigieg: Yes. It’s important to make sure that people are free from overbearing government. But also, government is not the only thing that can make you unfree, and good government helps make sure you’re free from other threats to your well-being. Trump’s Republican Party has walked away from freedom.

Pomerantsev: I have to say, Anne, I really worry about this—about freedom becoming partisan. It means one party can try to claim a positive vision of freedom for themselves, and it also means the followers of the other party might oppose it reflexively, just for partisan reasons.

Applebaum: There is a similar argument to be made about the word democracy. A recent poll shows that word becoming partisan too, and that’s very dangerous.

Pomerantsev: I think one way to keep democracy is to make sure we use that word a little more carefully than we do now. I hear a lot of Americans say, Democracy is not working. And I know what they mean. We’ve been covering it throughout this series—a political culture of lies that makes people feel facts don’t matter, that you can’t tell fact from fiction, a justice system that people feel isn’t fair.

But that’s not democracy—that’s autocracy at work. Autocratic tendencies are to blame for this sense that democracy is not working. Even the word democracy is becoming so tainted for so many people that you have to almost avoid the term and really show how the growth of autocracy makes life worse for people every day.

At the local level in America, at the state level, you already have places where the outcome of elections are completely predictable. The districts have been so thoroughly gerrymandered that the same party wins ad infinitum. And that means the ruling party is no longer making decisions that matter for you, the voter.

Applebaum: Right. In many places across the U.S., these districts are so manipulated—they fail to reflect the voters so dramatically—that there are politicians who don’t have anyone bothering to run against them in races for state representative or state senate. So race after race is just uncontested.

David Pepper: In some states, like Texas, they literally call it a canceled election. It doesn’t happen.

Applebaum: Peter, I spoke with David Pepper, who’s written several books about how America is becoming less and less democratic. In a recent evaluation of elections in Texas, nearly 70 percent of races were uncontested, and in Georgia, it was about the same.

Pepper: It really changes the entire dynamic of those in power. I mean, think about the incentive system. If you’re in a kind of a competitive race, your incentive system in that kind of system is: You know you can be held accountable by the voters. You better deliver good public results, right? The public outcomes better be good, or you won’t get reelected. You have an incentive to be mainstream because if you were extreme, you’d lose.

Well, in these systems where you literally, for the most part, don’t face an election ever, or a competitive election ever, every incentive in that world is upside down.

[Music]

Applebaum: So autocrats and their enablers craft a dysfunctional system, the dysfunctionality, understandably, makes people disgusted or apathetic, and then they start clamoring for something different, something less democratic, because democracy seems so impossible, so incompetent.

Pomerantsev: When people choose not to engage—not to run for office or vote or participate—that’s actually just the beginning, because apathy, cynicism, and nihilism grow. And as they do, the appetites of those who want to degrade democracy and seize more power grow, too.

I’ve seen it in country after country. I saw it in Russia and Ukraine and Hungary. It’s no accident that Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident killed, would call his struggle “the final battle between good and neutrality.” He knew that apathy was the enemy.

Applebaum: I have been in rooms with activists from all over the world—from Venezuela, Hong Kong, Burma, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran—and this is what they talk about: how to inspire people, how to bring them together, and how to persuade them to care.

I’ve also been in crowds of demonstrators in Poland, as recently as a few years ago, surrounded by previously apolitical people who suddenly felt moved to carry signs in protest against the politicization of the judiciary. And I’ve watched a few people from those crowds go on to create organizations, to file lawsuits in international courts, to join political parties, and to help out in campaigns just because they thought this issue mattered, and they had to do something about it.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: But, Anne, these achievements—they don’t happen in a vacuum. People don’t just spontaneously go out and protest, and then great things happen. Movements take planning. You need to create coalitions—this is where a lot of people mess up. Ukrainians brought together urban liberals and rural conservatives in a common cause around fighting corruption, for example. America has had success with coalition building in its history. The suffragettes, for example, weren’t just radical women fighting for the right to vote—they found ways to embrace and engage conservative women and get them to join the movement too.

Applebaum: That’s right. At the time, there were large groups of conservative women—religious women—who disapproved of alcohol, who wanted the right to vote in order to push for local and then national prohibition. And even though the women who came together may not have all felt the same way about prohibition (and, of course, although prohibition ultimately failed), at the time they focused on what they did have in common: the goal to gain access to the ballot box. And partly thanks to that decision, women ultimately won the right to vote.

Pomerantsev: The answer to the authoritarian urge is not a democratic savior. The answer is going to be: lots and lots of people-powered movements working together, because that already is the essence of democracy and central to taking back—truly taking back—control.

Applebaum: That’s how you save democracy.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831, he was motivated by more than just curiosity. In his native France, a revolution that had been launched, like the American Revolution, with high ideals about equality and democracy had ended badly. Tocqueville’s own parents had nearly been guillotined in the chaos and violence. By contrast, American democracy worked, and he traveled across the country in order to understand why.

Applebaum: Peter, it’s one of the reasons I recently started rereading Tocqueville. Like us and like George Washington putting on his Cato play at Valley Forge or Madison or Hamilton, he was trying to understand how you prevent the decline of institutions, how you prevent the rise of a demagogue. And he found some answers in the traditions of local democracy, in what he called township institutions.

And above all, in what he called associations—the many organizations that we now call civil society—he believed that democracy could succeed not only because of the grand ideals expressed on public monuments or even in the language of the Constitution but also because Americans practiced democracy.

Pomerantsev: Right. They ran local government. They knew their elected officials, maybe attended council meetings and school-administration discussions. They voted.

Applebaum: Right. Because of this practice, this participation, this engagement, they preserved American freedom, not just for the most powerful but for everyone.

Pomerantsev: And of course, Tocqueville’s book had the title Democracy in America.

Applebaum: Autocracy in America is hosted by Peter Pomerantsev and me, Anne Applebaum. It’s produced by Natalie Brennan and Jocelyn Frank, edited by Dave Shaw, mixed by Rob Smierciak, fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Pomerantsev: Autocracy in America is a podcast from The Atlantic. It’s made possible with support from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy through powerful civic engagement and informed, inclusive dialogue.