A passenger with disabilities was assaulted during a United Airlines (UAL) flight from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., earlier this week. KGO-TV (DIS), the local ABC affiliate in the San Francisco Bay Area, reports that the passenger, who is hard of hearing and non-verbal, was beaten by a fellow flyer so badly that…

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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.”

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

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

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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

[Music]

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

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

Ober: But you should have said hi.

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

I’m Lauren Ober.

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

[Music]

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

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

Rosin: What do you mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosin: Interesting. Okay. What do you mean?

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

So I went to see that life.

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

Ober: I mean, let’s get out. Let’s—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: Yeah.

Witthoeft: Are you ready now?

Ober: Not yet.

Witthoeft: Why?

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

Wilma: Oh, yeah. They do.

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

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

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

Ober: You want me to?

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

Ober: All right.

Wilma: It feels great.

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

Ober: You haven’t? Why?

Witthoeft: I don’t know.

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

Witthoeft: Check this out.

Ober: Wait. This is your Christmas book?

Witthoeft: Yeah.

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

Ober: Okay.

Witthoeft: There’s Ashli.

Ober: Oh my God. Cute.

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

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

Witthoeft: Yeah, they’re not bad.

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

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

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

Ober: What? Where?

Witthoeft: The little urn.

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

Witthoeft: That was a gift.

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

Witthoeft: Afraid so—’70s, you know.

Ober: Oh my god.

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

Ober: This is awesome!

Witthoeft: I like it.

Ober: This is great.

Ober: But that’s how it happened.

[Music]

Ober: Are these your books? Norah Ephron.

Witthoeft: Uh-huh.

Ober: Sheryl Sandberg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Witthoeft: Twenty-four years.

Ober: Ah, ah, ah, ah.

Witthoeft: I’ll be right here.

Wilma: Aye-aye.

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

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

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

Ober: Right. Right. Right. Right.

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

Ober: Oh, get out.

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

Ober: Wait. It goes all the way back?

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

Ober: Jesus. It’s really big.

Ober: The plot of land, not the house.

Ober: Okay.

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

Ober: All right.

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

Witthoeft: You just never fucking know, do you?

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

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

Ober: Oh wow.

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: Because the military is—

Witthoeft: Dangerous.

Ober: Dangerous. Right.

Witthoeft: And in particular, at that time.

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

Witthoeft: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Ober: Mm-hmm. Right.

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

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

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

That’s after the break.

[Break]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Witthoeft: I think so too.

Ober: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: Do you want that?

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

Ober: Why?

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

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

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

Witthoeft: Oh, I’m gonna miss ’em.

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

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

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

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

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

Witthoeft: It is what it is.

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

Malik was due to begin the US leg of his tour in San Francisco next week.

As the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, veers into open xenophobia, Vice President Kamala Harris faces a crucial decision about how to respond when she appears today on Univision, the giant Spanish-language television network. Trump’s attacks on immigrants in the past few weeks have grown both sweeping and vitriolic: He is blaming migrants for a lengthening list of problems, even as he describes them in more dehumanizing and openly racist language. As he amplifies these attacks, Trump has also explicitly embraced the kind of eugenicist arguments that were used to justify huge cuts in immigration after World War I, such as his claim this week that Democrats are allowing in undocumented immigrants whose “bad genes” incline them toward murder.

“Certainly, in my lifetime nobody as prominent as Trump has been this intentional, this racist, so consistently—and this all-inclusive in terms of scapegoating,” Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, told me. “We have certainly seen flare-ups in the past, with governors in different states—and even with Trump, of course, in his first term. But this is on another level. And it begs the question of what comes next.”

Harris so far has responded to this Trump onslaught cautiously, and in a tone more of sorrow than of anger. She has often labeled Trump as divisive in general terms. But when talking about immigration, she has focused mostly on presenting herself as tough on border security. She has almost entirely avoided any direct discussion of Trump’s most militant immigration ideas—particularly his proposal to carry out the mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants.

But Harris will very likely face pressure to offer a more frontal response to Trump’s mass-deportation plan in a town hall she’s holding with Univision in Nevada. With most polls still showing Trump making gains among Latinos since 2020, many Democratic activists and interest groups focused on that community believe that a more forceful rejoinder from Harris to Trump’s intensification of his anti-immigrant rhetoric can’t come too soon.

“We are in the last four weeks of the election, and she needs to be really clear about showing the contrast,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration-advocacy group, told me. “It is a missed opportunity for [Democrats] not to lean more into the consequences of this mass-deportation slogan.”

Leon Neal / Getty

Some immigrant-rights activists and Democratic strategists believe that Harris is so focused on proving her strength on the border that she has become reluctant to criticize almost any element of Trump’s immigration agenda, out of concern that doing so would support his jackhammer portrayal of her as soft on the issue. This debate among Democrats about Harris’s approach to immigration is part of a larger internal conversation that is quietly gathering momentum. Some senior party operatives are privately expressing concern that Harris is spending too much time trying to reassure voters about her own credentials, and not enough making a pointed case against a possible second Trump term. This pattern was starkly apparent in her series of friendly media interviews this week. “Bring a bazooka to a gunfight, please, not a BB gun,” one worried Democratic pollster told me yesterday. Today’s Univision town hall will provide another revealing measure of whether Harris is advancing her case forcefully enough in the campaign’s final stages.

[Watch: The candidates’ policy differences]

Hostility to immigrants and immigration has been integral to Trump’s political brand from the outset. Yet, even by his standards, the volume and venom of Trump’s attacks on immigrants have amped up sharply during this campaign.

In recent weeks, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, have insisted that migrants are: stealing jobs from native-born Americans, spurring a national crime wave, driving up housing costs, spreading disease, committing voter fraud, and consuming so many Federal Emergency Management Agency resources that the government doesn’t have enough money to help hurricane victims in North Carolina and Florida. Despite protestations from local officials that the story is a fabrication, Trump and Vance have also insisted that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating residents’ pets.

The other claims have also been debunked. FEMA’s big reserves for responding to natural disasters are held in a congressionally appropriated account that is separate from the funds the agency has for resettling migrants. Violent crime, which rose immediately after the onset of the pandemic, has been declining, and some research suggests that undocumented migrants commit offenses at lower rates than native-born Americans. Despite Vance’s additional claim that Springfield, Ohio, has seen a “massive rise” in communicable disease, local records show that the county-wide rates of such diseases have declined over the past year.

Equally specious is the GOP candidates’ claim that all of the nation’s job growth is accruing to foreign-born workers. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provided by the White House show that nearly 4.5 million more native-born Americans in their prime working years (defined as ages 25 to 54) are employed today than when Trump left office. Contrary to the Trump-Vance claim, this demographic group has added more jobs during President Joe Biden’s term than foreign-born workers have; the share of native-born workers ages 25 to 54 participating in the labor force is higher now than at any point in Trump’s presidency. The latest unemployment rate for native-born Americans in these prime working years is lower than for comparable foreign-born workers.

More ominous even than the multiplying allegations against migrants may be the language Trump is using to describe them. He has said that they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing a formulation used by Adolf Hitler. In Ohio, he said of undocumented migrants, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” Later in the same speech, he called them “animals.” In Wisconsin last month, he said of undocumented immigrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” Removing some of the undocumented migrants, Trump mused last month, during another Wisconsin visit, “will be a bloody story.”

Earlier this week, Trump resorted to unvarnished eugenics, twisting federal statistics to argue that the Biden administration has let into the country thousands of murderers. “You know now, a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes,” Trump told the conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. “And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Hewitt chose not to challenge this toxic assertion.

Witnessing this cascade of allegations from Trump and Vance, Erika Lee, a Harvard history professor and the author of America for Americans, told me that she feels a weary sense of “déjà vu” about their anti-immigrant theme—“as if they have dusted off the well-worn playbook that generations of xenophobes have used before.” Nearly every major argument Trump is making, she says, has been made before by nativist campaigners during periods of anti-immigrant backlash.

In 1917, for instance, a Missouri journalist named James Murphy Ward wrote that the great wave of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century was taking jobs from Americans and threatening the nation’s religious traditions. Calling it a “foreign invasion,” he saw their importation as a Catholic plot to undermine the political influence of white American Protestants—this was the Great Replacement theory of his age. The title of Ward’s book would not seem out of place in a political debate today: The Immigration Problem; or, America First. And the most damning example of the immigrant menace that Ward claimed to find has an even more resonant contemporary echo.

“The Chinese laborers who have come to this country, we have been told, are not at all averse to a diet of rats,” Ward wrote, while “the writer himself has heard at least one of these aliens speak of little ‘pups’ as making ‘a fine soup.’”

[Adam Serwer: The real reason Trump and Vance are spreading lies about Haitians]

Harris’s response to Trump’s harsh turn on immigration has been constrained by the Biden administration’s difficulties with the issue. After Congress refused to consider Biden’s legislative proposal to combine tighter border security with a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s population of about 11 million undocumented immigrants, the administration struggled to respond to an unprecedented surge of migrants seeking asylum at the southern border.

The political pressure on Biden ratcheted up last year after Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, started transporting tens of thousands of migrants to northern cities, straining local resources and prompting loud complaints from some Democratic mayors and governors. Finally, in January, Biden endorsed a bipartisan Senate plan led by the conservative James Lankford of Oklahoma that proposed to severely restrict opportunities to seek asylum.

When Lankford’s Republican colleagues abandoned the plan after Trump denounced it, Biden moved in June to use executive action to implement some of its key provisions that narrow opportunities for asylum. The new rules have reduced the number of migrants seeking asylum by as much as three-fourths since late last year, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. But the political damage was done. Polls consistently showed that Americans: disapproved of Biden’s performance on the border in larger numbers than on any other issue except inflation; by a big margin, trusted Trump more than Biden to handle the problem; and were growing more open to Trump’s hard-line solutions, including building a border wall and carrying out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants already in the country. In July, Gallup found that the share of Americans who wanted to reduce immigration had reached 55 percent, the highest level since soon after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Republican groups, sensing a Democratic vulnerability, have spent heavily on ads portraying Harris—whom Biden early on appointed to deal with the root causes of migration—as weak on the border.

These headwinds have encouraged Harris to center her immigration messaging on convincing the public that she would be tough enough to secure the border. She has emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and as California’s attorney general pursuing “transnational gangs,” as well as promising to tighten Biden’s limits on asylum even more. She has also hugged the bipartisan Senate compromise that Trump derailed—similarly to the old political analysts’ joke about Rudolph Giuliani and the 9/11 terror attacks, a typical sentence on immigration for Harris is Noun, verb, Lankford.

Harris has coupled these promises of tougher enforcement with the traditional Democratic promise to “create, at long last, a pathway to citizenship for hardworking immigrants who have been here for years,” as she put it in Arizona last month during a set-piece speech on immigration. Yet she has almost completely avoided discussing Trump’s mass-deportation plan.

Implicitly, Harris’s agenda rejects any such scheme, because the longtime residents for whom she would provide a path to legalization are among those Trump would deport. Apart from a passing reference in a speech last month to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, however, she has not explicitly criticized the Trump plan; nor has Harris discussed at any length how the proposal would disrupt immigrant communities and harm the economy. When her running mate, Tim Walz, was asked directly about Trump’s deportation agenda during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month, he responded by talking almost entirely about the Lankford bill himself. Walz has called the language from Trump and Vance about immigrants “dehumanizing,” but Harris has tended to wrap Trump’s attacks on immigrants into a more generalized lament about his divisiveness.

[Paola Ramos: The immigrants who oppose immigration]

Amid the campaign sparring on immigration, Trump has seemed to be enjoying a double dividend: He has energized his core support of culturally conservative whites with vehement anti-immigrant language and has gained ground, according to most polls, with Latino voters, even as Latino communities would be the principal targets of his deportation plans. Although polls show Harris recovering much of the ground Biden had lost among Latinos, she is still lagging the level of support he had in 2020, particularly among Latino men.

Supporters at a rally for Donald Trump in the Bronx earlier this year.

Polls of the Latino community have consistently found that, like other voters, they are more concerned about the economy than immigration. Surveys also show a slice of Latino voters who, departing from the view among advocacy groups, feel that recent asylum seekers are, in effect, jumping the line—and this has moved them toward Trump’s hard-line approach.

But Carlos Odio, a Democratic pollster who focuses on Latino voters, says surveys show that support for mass deportation plummets among not only Latinos but also other voters when “people learn that Trump’s plans are to deport [undocumented] people who have been living and working here for decades.” So Trump is holding his elevated Latino support despite that opposition to mass deportation, Odio told me, in large part because most Latinos “don’t actually believe any of this stuff is going to happen”; they expect that the courts, Congress, or business groups would prevent him from pursuing widespread removals.

Odio, the senior vice president for research at the polling firm Equis, believes that Harris has run an effective campaign to regain much of Biden’s lost ground among Latino voters, but he thinks she could benefit from more forcefully targeting Trump’s enforcement agenda, including mass deportation and his refusal to rule out again separating migrant children from their parents at the border. (Given that nearly 4 million U.S.-citizen children have at least one undocumented parent, Trump’s deportation agenda could be said to amount to a mass family-separation policy as well.) “There has been such a desire to tamp down the border debate [that] there’s been less of an ability to pivot to other parts of the immigration debate that could be helpful,” Odio told me. Even conservative Latinos who moved toward Trump, he notes, overwhelmingly opposed his family-separation policies in an Equis post-2020 election survey.

Castro likewise thinks Harris’s overall approach to Latino voters has been sophisticated, but he worries that the reluctance that she, along with almost all other prominent Democrats, shows to challenging the mass-deportation proposal is “moving the Overton window” and normalizing the plan. “There’s not enough pushback on it,” Castro told me. “The consequence of not pushing back is that more people believe that something like mass deportation is a reasonable, moral policy choice, which is completely wrong.”

The history of immigration politics is that it tends to be what political scientists call a “thermostatic” issue, meaning that public opinion moves left when a president moves right (as happened under Trump) and right when a president moves left (as happened for most of Biden’s presidency). That pattern underscores the likelihood that enforcement of a Trump mass-deportation program—complete with TV images of mothers and children herded onto buses, even detained behind the barbed-wire fences of internment camps—would face much more public resistance in practice than polls suggest today.

Yet Lee, the Harvard historian, says that the previous eruptions of anti-immigrant agitation show how great a challenge the more explicit xenophobia that Trump has catalyzed could present in the years ahead. Although many scholars believe that xenophobia flourishes primarily during periods of economic distress, Lee says that a more common factor in the past “has been the effectiveness of the messenger and the medium.” For instance, she told me, the first great wave of 19th-century anti-Catholic agitation “spread through newspapers and newly available cheap novels”; then the anti-Chinese propaganda a few decades later “spread through even more newspapers and illustrated magazines.”

Those distribution systems for anti-immigrant ideas pale next to what we’re seeing today, Lee believes. “Now we have a 24/7 news cycle, organized networks pushing content, plus social-media platforms that broadcast xenophobia around the world as it happens,” she told me. “As a result, xenophobia today feels both frighteningly familiar and devastatingly more widespread and violent than other periods in history.”

Harris and other Democrats have tactical incentives to avoid a full-on confrontation with those sentiments in the final weeks before next month’s election. But the history of America’s experience with xenophobia indicates that Trump’s lurid attacks will only find a larger audience unless Harris, and others who believe in a more inclusive society, challenge them more directly than they have so far.

For years, Donald Trump has taken seemingly every opportunity to attack electric vehicles. They will cause a “bloodbath” for the auto industry, he told Ohio crowds in March. “The damn things don’t go far enough, and they’re too expensive,” he declared last September. EVs are a “ridiculous Green New Deal crusade,” he said a few months earlier. “Where do I get a charge, darling?” he mocked in 2019.

But of late, the former president hasn’t quite sounded like his usual self. At the Republican National Convention in July, Trump said he is “all for electric [vehicles]. They have their application.” At a rally on Long Island last month, he brought up EVs during a winding rant. “I think they’re incredible,” he said of the cars, twice. To hear Trump tell it, the flip came at the bidding of Tesla CEO Elon Musk: “I’m for electric cars—I have to be,” he said in August, “because Elon endorsed me very strongly.” Not that Trump is unambiguously praising plug-in vehicles: He still opposes incentives to boost EV sales, which he repeated at his Long Island rally. The crowd erupted in cheers.

In America, driving green remains a blue phenomenon. Many Republicans in Congress have rejected EVs, with one senator calling them “left-wing lunacy” and part of Democrats’ “blind faith in the climate religion.” The GOP rank and file is also anti-EV. In 2022, roughly half of new EVs in America were registered in the deepest-blue counties, according to a recent analysis from UC Berkeley. That likely hasn’t changed since: A Pew survey conducted this May found that 45 percent of Democrats are at least somewhat likely to buy an EV the next time they purchase a vehicle, compared with 13 percent of Republicans.

If anyone can persuade Republican EV skeptics, it should be Trump—when he talks, his party listens. During the pandemic, his support for unproven COVID therapies was linked to increased interest in and purchases of those medications; his followers have rushed to buy his Trump-branded NFTs, watches, sneakers. But when it comes to EVs, Trump’s apparent change of heart might not be enough to spur many Republicans to go electric: His followers’ beliefs may be too complex and deep-rooted for Trump himself to overturn.

EVs were destined for the culture wars. “When we buy a car, the model and the brand that we choose also represents a statement to our neighbors, to the public, of who we are,” Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. Like the Toyota Prius in years prior, zero-emission electric cars are an easy target for Republicans who have long railed against climate change, suggesting that it’s not real, or not human-caused, or not a serious threat. EVs have been “construed as an environmental and liberal object,” Nicole Sintov, an environmental psychologist at Ohio State University who studies EV adoption, told me. Her research suggests that the cars’ perceived links to environmental benefits, social responsibility, and technological innovation might attract Democrats to them. Meanwhile, most people “don’t want to be seen doing things that their out-group does,” Sintov said, which could turn Republicans away from EVs.

Republicans’ hesitance to drive an EV is remarkably strong and sustained. The Berkeley analysis, for instance, found that the partisan divide in new EV registrations showed up in not only 2022, but also 2021, and 2020, and every year since 2012, when the analysis began. It remains even after controlling for income and other pragmatic factors that might motivate or dissuade people from buying an EV, Lucas Davis, a Berkeley economist and one of the authors, told me.

All of this suggests that Trump’s flip-flop has at least the potential to “go a long way toward boosting favorability” of electric cars among Republicans, Joe Sacks, the executive director of the EV Politics Project, an advocacy group aiming to get Republicans to purchase EVs, told me. If you squint, there are already signs of changing opinions, perhaps brought on more so by Musk than the former president. After Musk’s own public swing to the far right, a majority of Republicans say he is a good ambassador for EVs, according to the EV Politics Project’s polling. Tucker Carlson began a recent review of the Tesla Cybertruck by saying that “the global-warming cult is going to force us all to drive electric vehicles,” but admitted, at the end, that it was fun to get behind the wheel. Adin Ross, an internet personality popular with young right-leaning men, recently gave Trump a Cybertruck with a custom vinyl wrap of the former president raising his fist moments after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. “I think it’s incredible,” Trump reacted.

But ideology might not account entirely for Republican opposition to EVs. The other explanation for the partisan gap is that material concerns with EVs—such as their cost, range, or limited charging infrastructure—happen to be a bigger issue for Republican voters than for Democrats. The bluest areas, for instance, tend to have high incomes, gasoline taxes, and population density, all of which might encourage EV purchases. EVs typically have higher sticker prices than their gas-powered counterparts, and in urban areas, people generally have to drive less, ameliorating some of the “range anxiety” that has dogged electric cars. Consider California, which accounts for more than a third of EVs in the U.S. Climate-conscious liberals in San Francisco may be seeking out EVs, but that’s not the whole story. The state government has heavily promoted driving electric, public chargers are abundant, and California has the highest gas prices in the country.

The opposite is true in many red states. For instance, many Republicans live in the South and Upper Midwest, especially in more rural areas. That might appear to account for the low EV sales in these areas, but residents also might have longer commutes, pay less for gas, and live in a public-charging desert, McDonald told me. California has more than 47,000 public charging stations, or 1.2 stations per 1,000 people; South Dakota has 265 public chargers, or less than 0.3 per 1,000 residents. “If you part all of the politics, at the end of the day I think the nonpolitical things are going to outweigh people’s decisions,” he said. “Can I afford it? Does it fit my lifestyle? Do I have access to charging?” In relatively conservative Orange County, California, 27 percent of new passenger vehicles sold this year were fully electric—higher than statewide, and higher than the adjacent, far bluer Los Angeles County.

Indeed, after the Berkeley researchers adjusted for pragmatic considerations, for instance, the statistical correlation between political ideology and new EV registrations remained strong, but decreased by 30 percent. Various other research concurs that political discord isn’t the only thing behind EVs’ partisan divide: In her own analyses, Sintov wrote to me over email, the effect of political affiliation on EV attitudes was on par with that of “perceived maintenance and fuel costs, charging convenience, and income.” McDonald’s own research has found that fuel costs and income are stronger predictors than political views. In other words, partisanship could be the “icing on the cake” for someone’s decision, McDonald said, rather than the single reason Democrats are going electric and Republicans are not.

From the climate’s perspective, Trump’s EV waffling is certainly better than the alternative. But his new tack on EVs is unclear, and it doesn’t speak to conservatives’ specific concerns, whether pragmatic or ideological. As a result, Trump is unlikely to change many minds, Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford who researches public opinions on climate change, told me. Teslas are a “great product,” Trump has said, but not a good fit for many, perhaps even most, Americans. He’s “all for” EVs, except that they’re ruining America’s economy. “Voters who are casually observing this are pretty confused about where he is, because it is inconsistent,” Sacks said. But they know where the rest of the party firmly stands: Gas cars are better.

Perhaps most consequential about Trump’s EV comments is what the former president hasn’t changed his mind on. By continuing to say that he wants to repeal the Biden administration’s EV incentives, Trump could further entrench EV skeptics of all political persuasions. The best way to persuade Republicans to buy a Tesla or a Ford F-150 Lightning might simply be to make doing so easier and cheaper: offering tax credits, building public charging stations, training mechanics to fix these new cars. Should he win, Trump just might do the opposite.

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

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

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Lauren Ober: I wonder what justice looks like and what happens if it doesn’t come.

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

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

Nicole Reffitt: Exactly.

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

Ober: By whom?

Witthoeft: By people that consider her disposable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m Hanna Rosin.

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Crowd noise]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five days after that, Trump is on Fox News:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump: And say hello to everybody.

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: Also on offer—

Vendor: You wanna play some pinball?

Ober: I’m terrible at it.

Vendor: That’s okay.

Ober: But sure. Why not?

[Game noises]

Ober: A January 6 pinball game—

[Game noises]

Ober: What do I get if I win?

Vendor: You get a high score.

[Laughter]

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

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

Ober: Oh, like January 6.

[Game noises]

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

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

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

Witthoeft: Thank you, ladies.

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

Witthoeft: Thank y’all.

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

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

Witthoeft: I sure hope so.

Stranger 2: Justice will be served.

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: Like what?

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

Ober: Right.

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

Ober: Right. Right.

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

Coffee! Big-ass sign right there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Crowd cheers]

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

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

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

[Break]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: Yeah.

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

Reffitt: It’s more.

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

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

Ober: Yeah. Like an intimate-partner bond.

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

Ober: Right.

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

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

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

Ober: Like, give me an example.

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

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

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

Ober: You and me?

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

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

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

Ober: Mm-hmm.

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

Ober: Mm-hmm.

[Music]

Rosin: Would you say that you guys were friends?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: But it’s not—

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

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

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

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

Ober: That’s on the next episode of We Live Here Now.

[Music]

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

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

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