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In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Wars had broken and reshaped Du Bois’s world, and he had recently been one of the most prominent victims of the Red Scare, ordered to surrender his passport because of his Communist organizing. Yet here he was, preparing to deliver new insight and optimism to the audience before him.

“I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he told the crowd, recalling “the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta” and “the marching of the Ku Klux Klan.” But his recent travels had taken him to a place that had shaken him: the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis had razed the ghetto in 1943, slaughtering more than 50,000 people on the night before Passover to crush a rebellion by the Polish Jews being held captive there. When Du Bois got there, in 1949, the city was still being rebuilt. Speaking at the behest of Jewish Life magazine—now Jewish Currents—Du Bois said the visit had helped him reconceive the “Negro problem” as part of a larger constellation of global struggles against oppression. He had been cured of a “certain social provincialism” and sought a way for “both these groups and others to reassess and reformulate the problems of our day, whose solution belongs to no one group.” For Du Bois, the path forward was simple: solidarity.

Du Bois’s vision has been deeply influential in the decades since he delivered his “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” speech. Similar sentiments moved Jewish students to take buses to the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1964, and brought both Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali to oppose the Vietnam War. Solidarity spurred students and people of color to call for American divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, and has more recently brought Black activists to Standing Rock. The notion of global minorities and underclasses sharing common cause was provocative in 1952, but is now a constant in progressive circles, and has a special force among mainstream Black American institutions and politics, regardless of ideology.

But the past year has thrown Du Bois’s prescription into crisis. Most Americans expressed horror and sympathy for the Israeli victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel’s counterassault against Hamas in Gaza has killed thousands of civilians and caused a dire humanitarian crisis, all with the backing of the United States. As about 100 hostages still languish in captivity, the horror and sympathy remain. But the continued violence in Gaza has strengthened, among many, and especially among many Black observers, another feeling: solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many of the resulting protests against Israel’s conduct, and statements of empathy for Palestinians, have been met with censorship by universities and state governments, and with derision and dismissal by the media. This has been particularly true for expressions of solidarity that are based on the Black experience in America, which have often been disparaged as unsophisticated and inauthentic. “The identification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with America’s race problem was hardly made in America,” the historian Gil Troy argued in Tablet magazine. “It is a recent foreign import,” air-dropped onto a gullible populace.

Of course, the American South is not the Middle East, and there are limits to every comparison. But it is not simplistic or facile to, while acknowledging differences, also see structural similarities over time and space, or to believe that, in a world connected by language, finance, and technology, our systems and ways of being are related. The Black experience has been usefully analogized to the Jewish struggle over the years, and we have clear documentary evidence of the ways that systems of anti-Black and anti-Semitic oppression have been borrowed and translated from one to the other. To claim kinship between Black and Palestinian peoples is merely to apply the same logic. Solidarity means recognizing the parallels and shared humanity among the three groups, and working to create a world that does so as well.

But efforts to create that world are now in danger of being snuffed out. The dehumanization and marginalization of Palestinians in American discourse and media, as well as denunciations of the use of concepts such as “intersectionality” and “decolonization” in relation to Israel, among even liberal commentators, have dovetailed neatly with the ongoing conservative backlash against “wokeness” and Black history. All the while, anti-Semitism is worsening in America and beyond. The fate of multiracial organizing and democracy in America is inextricably bound up with the fates of people halfway around the world.

Can solidarity survive the onslaught in Gaza?

Left: A draft of W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” from April 1952. Right: Du Bois (Special Collections and University Archives / University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture).

First, some words about that onslaught. Israel responded to Hamas’s brutal incursion, in which assailants killed more than 1,200 Israeli citizens and captured hundreds as hostages, with an offensive that has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, an estimate from the Gaza Health Ministry. (Hamas runs the ministry, but the World Health Organization and the United Nations consider its numbers generally reliable.) As of April, nearly 23,000 of those fatalities were identifiable by names and identification numbers issued by Israel. According to some experts, if people who die from disease or injury, as well as those found buried in rubble, are included, the true toll could be much higher. War is war, and the great, unavoidable tragedy of war is civilian death. But unavoidable is not synonymous with purposeful.

The Israeli campaign has, as a matter of strategy, regularly and knowingly subjected Palestinian civilians to violence. The Israel Defense Forces have targeted Gazan health-care facilities as civilians were being treated and sheltering there, claiming that militants use the facilities and that hostages were held in them (an explanation that the U.S. State Department has backed up as credible). Israeli air strikes have devastated Palestinian refugee camps, including a strike in Rafah in May that killed dozens of civilians along with two top Hamas commanders.

The UN and the U.S. Agency for International Development have both concluded that Israel blocked shipments of food aid to Gaza, a finding that under both U.S. and international law should make continued weapons shipments to Israel illegal. (The Biden administration rejected the finding, but has since written a letter demanding that Israeli officials improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.) The IDF has struck the same UN-backed school building five times, saying it was targeting militants. According to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 129 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists and media workers have been killed, making this the deadliest period for journalists since the group began keeping records in 1992. Last month, Israel shipped 88 unidentified Palestinian bodies back to Gaza in the back of a truck. And earlier this month, the United States launched an investigation of allegations of widespread sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, months after video depicting an alleged sexual assault at the Sde Teiman detention camp leaked on social media.

Those who survive are facing the depths of deprivation. Almost 2 million people in Gaza are hungry or starving. For pregnant women, stress and terror are contributing to a spike in preterm births, and doctors describe seeing stillbirths, newborn deaths, and malnourished infants. Deteriorating public-health conditions have resulted in a wave of contagious skin diseases among children, and what the UN calls a “frightening increase” in Hepatitis A infections. The WHO is rushing to vaccinate Palestinians against polio after Gaza’s first confirmed case in a quarter century. This is a human catastrophe, documented and verified over the past year by the United States and other countries, the international diplomatic and legal community, nongovernmental organizations, reputable news outlets, and, not least, Palestinians themselves.

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov shows a steady drop in American sympathy toward Israel, and a corresponding rise in sympathy toward Palestinians; earlier polls have shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and want America to send humanitarian aid to Gaza in lieu of more weapons to Israel. Yet one demographic group that broke early in this direction was Black Americans. In a New York Times/Siena College poll taken in December 2023, Black respondents already overwhelmingly supported an immediate cease-fire, and were much less likely than white respondents to endorse any action that endangered more civilians. Altogether, Black respondents were more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel, and more likely than not to believe that Israel was not “seriously interested in a peaceful solution.” In a June CBS News poll, nearly half of Black respondents said they wanted the U.S. to encourage Israel to completely stop its military actions in Gaza, while only 34 percent of white respondents did.

These sentiments aren’t limited to young activists and leftists. Even moderate and legacy Black institutions have expressed them. In June, the NAACP called on the Biden administration to stop shipping weapons to Israel, arguing that the president “must be willing to pull the levers of power when appropriate to advance liberation for all.” In February, the Council of Bishops, the leadership branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called for an end to American support for Israel and an immediate cease-fire. Noting both the connection of Black folks to Palestinians and the historical linkages between the Black and Jewish plights—and the deep theological affinity of Black-liberation thought with the story of the ancient Jews—the AME statement said that “the cycle of violence between historically wounded peoples will not be dissolved by the creation of more wounds or through weapons of war.” The statement also accused the United States of “supporting this mass genocide.”

In January, more than a thousand Black pastors—representing congregations totaling hundreds of thousands of mostly working-class Black people—urged President Joe Biden to push for a cease-fire. The leaders made a pragmatic case: They feared that Black voters, typically reliable backers of the Democratic Party (and Biden in particular), might not show up to the polls in November if the deaths in Gaza continued. But they also made a moral argument based in solidarity: “We see them as a part of us,” the Reverend Cynthia Hale of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia, told The New York Times. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”

This sympathy toward Palestinians is shared widely across Black communities—by Black activists, commentators, clergy, and white- and blue-collar professionals of all age groups. Identification with the Palestinian cause stretches back well before the current conflict, showing up in polls as early as the 1970s. This solidarity is based on a number of factors, but the main one is obvious: Black people see what is happening to Palestinians, and many feel the tug of the familiar in their heart.

Attempts like Hale’s to analogize the experiences of Black people with those of Palestinians have often been met with a simple insistence that they are wrong; that they have confused things; that relations between Palestinians and Israelis are too complex to allow any comparison. In 1979, at the United Nations, the chief Israeli delegate, Yehuda Blum, chided leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil-rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, for calling for a Palestinian homeland. “Understandably, they are less knowledgeable about the Middle East conflict than other parties,” Blum said.

In 2020, during the height of America’s purported “racial reckoning,” the Haaretz commentator Nave Dromi wrote that there were simply no commonalities between the struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians, claiming that Palestinians “don’t want genuine peace, in contrast to blacks in the United States, who do seek to live in peace with their American compatriots.” In 2021, in the pages of this magazine, the writer Susie Linfield said that the concept of “intersectionality” had been improperly applied to analogizing the Black and Palestinian struggles, in a way that can “occlude complex realities, negate history, prevent critical thinking, and foster juvenile simplifications.”

It is true that analogy has its limits for any political situation, and that, especially among journalists, nuance and context are crucial components of the arsenal of understanding. But often, regard for “complexity” in this particular conflict means treating its history as one hermetically sealed off from the rest of human experience, which in turn short-circuits any attempt to make common cause with Palestinians.

The short-circuiting has only accelerated since October 7. Shortly after Hamas’s attack, Rabbi Mark H. Levin wrote in The Kansas City Star that the argument that Black Americans and Palestinians have parallel experiences is “a popular but false analogy.” According to Alexis Grenell in The Nation, “When outsiders collapse the Palestinian cause into, say, the struggle for Black Lives or LGBTQ rights—while framing that position as virtuous because it’s ‘simple’—it’s not only wrong but counterproductive.”

Behind these objections is, perhaps, the very real fear of anti-Semitism—of Jews facing a unique scrutiny born not of compassion, but of hate. And it is indisputably the case that such singling-out does animate odious worldviews, that Hamas has justified its actions with anti-Semitism, and that the group has committed brutal and unspeakable acts. But instead of isolating Jews, solidarity actually situates the state of Israel within a much larger story, one in which brutality is all too common. And standing with oppressed people—including Palestinians, many of whom dream of a future without Hamas—does not require them to be universally righteous; this would in itself be a unique scrutiny.

Still, the fear of anti-Semitism has empowered those who would quell expressions of solidarity, and who were hostile to the idea long before October 7. In the past year, the insistence on Palestinian-Israeli relations as an inscrutable cipher, and the rejection of attempts to analogize the Black and Palestinian situations, have contributed to a broader aversion to multiracial organizing. In November 2023, the Free Press’s Bari Weiss made this argument explicit in an essay about college campuses: DEI efforts, she argued, were tantamount to “arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.”

Since the 1960s, student protesters have often borrowed from the logic and language of Black protest, and many left-wing organizers on campuses have compared the Black and Palestinian experiences. During the invasion of Gaza, as universities became the locus of pro-Palestinian protest, many on both the left and the right saw the activism as proof that students’ minds had been warped by left-wing orthodoxy. Universities targeted their own protesting students with police crackdowns, canceled commencement addresses, and conspicuously revised speech and conduct codes, while politicians sought to pass laws that would ban forms of free expression, including an executive order from Texas Governor Greg Abbott that requires universities to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that could reasonably see students expelled for criticizing Israel. Many ostensibly stalwart defenders of the First Amendment have found themselves tongue-tied.

This environment has invigorated people who were already calling for crackdowns on “wokeness.” The right-wing activist Chris Rufo used the backlash against student protests to try to oust administrators at elite universities who were too friendly toward diversity and other presumably leftist causes. Many other commentators have assailed DEI, decolonization, and critical race theory, often without taking care to define or assess how much currency in our discourse these terms actually have. The Black intellectuals who helped spin solidarity into real practice are often summoned, solely for the purpose of exorcism. All of these names and theories have been stripped of meaning and context and stewed down to a mush. The objective is not understanding or coherence, but convenience, turning solidarity into a Black bogeyman to destroy.

It should be noted that W. E. B. Du Bois was an early contributor to The Atlantic, and in 1901 risked his fledgling academic credibility to write a story for the magazine defending Reconstruction—when the magazine’s editorial leadership decried the era as a mistake. That essay became the cornerstone of Du Bois’s most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he first elucidated the concept of the “color line,” which animated his 1952 address in the Hotel Diplomat. It should also be noted that, like many other Black scholars, he saw a mirror of the Black experience under that color line in the historical plight of Europe’s Jews, and explicit links between Nazi policies and Jim Crow. As Hitler began to build the machinery of industrialized genocide, and much of Europe and white America refused Jewish refugees from Germany, historically Black colleges and universities continued to sponsor visa applications. The Black press, early and without equivocation, saw the brewing catastrophe for what it was.

In the years leading up to the Warsaw Ghetto speech, Du Bois had been an ardent Zionist who believed that the creation of a Jewish state would lend legitimacy to Pan-African projects like Liberia, which had been founded as a colonial “promised land” for formerly enslaved Black Americans. But the Liberian project did not provide the promised liberation—indeed, it subjected local people to enslavement, subjugation, and war instead, all at the hands of a colonial elite and foreign companies—and Du Bois’s reluctance to acknowledge that failure was one of his great hypocrisies.

But in his later years, Du Bois followed his own logic to a more ecumenical approach, one that viewed all subjugated peoples as part of a connected global movement. This expansive view of solidarity, as embraced by many in the Black diaspora, did not require that groups have identical struggles or historical contexts in order to create common cause. Rather, it was based on the shared experiences of oppression, dehumanization, and lack of self-determination, especially at the hands of the American empire.

In this context, many Black observers witnessed years of Palestinian suffering, subsidized by American tax dollars and arms shipments—even as Black neighborhoods and schools were deprived of investment—and concluded that something familiar was going on. Many Black intellectuals criticized Israel for its role in conflicts with its Arab neighbors in the 1950s and ’60s, and for allying with apartheid South Africa. For those who were not scholars in foreign policy, there was a constant stream of news images showing meager conditions in Palestinian refugee camps, and forced or restricted movement. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote of his own trip to the region in 2002: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us Black people in South Africa.”

Arguments that the conflict is too complex to compare with other global systems—to the Black experience in particular—have always rung hollow, especially given that both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were often characterized by their defenders as too singular for outsiders to comprehend. In the 1960s, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency devoted to maintaining white supremacy, sent speakers across the country to deliver a set of talking points called “The Message From Mississippi.” In those remarks, the speaker would complain that “the North seemed to know all the answers to our problems without having and knowing the problem,” before explaining patiently that Jim Crow was necessary and right. But this kind of time-wasting and complexification did not stop the northerners who heeded the call to participate in Freedom Summer. They did not need advanced degrees in segregation to know that what they saw on the news was wrong.

One effect of the prominence of the war in Gaza in American media over the past year has been a belated demystification. The deluge of images of flattened buildings, dismembered bodies, and grieving families does not present a conflict that is singular or arcane, but one that is frustratingly, appallingly familiar. After the May air strike on Rafah, the videos and photos that emerged were horrific—and not the least bit “complicated.” The victims were not “human beasts,” as the Israeli general responsible for overseeing Gazan aid described Hamas militants and the Palestinian civilians who celebrated on October 7, but mothers and children, dazed and broken. They deserve the same empathy and protection as any other people, and have been denied it by a constant stream of dehumanization, including decades of rhetoric painting Palestinians as backwards, uncivilized, and incompatible with “Western” values. This is a tactic Black folks know all too well.

In November 2023, Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, a member of the governing Likud party, shared on social media his belief that the campaign had been “too humane,” and demanded that Israel “burn Gaza now no less!” Last winter, two members of far-fight ultranationalist parties—Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is a vocal proponent of illegal settlement and annexation in the West Bank, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader in the Jewish-supremacist movement—called for the expulsion of all of the residents of Gaza. Shortly after the Rafah strike, Nikki Haley, the former Republican candidate for president, visited an artillery post in Israel and wrote Finish Them on an artillery shell. Instigated by extremist leaders and unfettered by the law, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have engaged in a campaign of ruthless violence and dispossession against Palestinian residents, even as the Israeli military has ramped up operations there that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

Given all this, when Black folks who were raised on stories of lynchings and the threat of obliteration—stories of the Tulsa Massacre, of the quelling of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, of the Red Summer—look at Gaza, how could they not see something they recognize?

Rafah, May 5, 2024 (Hatem Khaled / Reuters)

When Du Bois gave his 1952 speech, Israel was a new state with an uncertain future. The Holocaust was not yet a matter of memory but a matter of present urgency, and across Europe, Jewish refugees still made temporary homes in displaced-persons camps. Du Bois had wept for victims of lynchings in the United States, and his grief was naturally extended to Jews who had lost family members, and who feared mightily about their ability to exist on this Earth as a people.

The Holocaust is more distant in time now, but not much more distant than Jim Crow, which is to say that it is living history, and that the staggering pain of genocide—and the attendant anxiety about future erasure—remains an essential part of how those of us seeking to build a global moral community should understand the world. That requires understanding the shock and profound loss of the global Jewish community on October 7. Solidarity demands that right-minded global citizens reckon with the stubborn persistence of anti-Semitism in the world, and its resurgence in the past few decades.

Solidarity does not demand, however, that they endorse another massacre, or the continued subjugation of another people. In fact, it demands the opposite. “A truly intersectional approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Susie Linfield wrote, “would, of necessity, incorporate the Jewish people’s torturous history of expulsion, pariahdom, statelessness, and genocide.” This is undeniably true, and would then logically make an imperative of standing in solidarity with any group facing such circumstances.

The widespread backlash against that imperative is perhaps the chill in the air preceding the storm of the next four years, auguring a world of warring tribes, of us versus them. Trumpism, the ideology that backs the most authoritarian crackdowns on student protests and free speech, is hostile to Jews and Palestinians, and positions solidarity as the main enemy to a state built purely on the pursuit of self-interest. Already, this is a world where Palestinians are marginalized in the media and in policy, and one where neo-Nazis are emboldened and anti-Semitism continues to rise. Americans have always believed themselves to be at the moral center of the world, and here they have a case. The militarism and dehumanization endorsed by so many Americans are important exports, as are the American armaments that have killed thousands of Palestinian children before they could experience the wonder of learning to ride a bicycle.

This may all sound like an anti-war argument in general, and it is. Reeling from the horrors of the World Wars and the atomic age, Du Bois grew preoccupied with finding a solution to war itself. He came to understand that domestic systems of oppression and global wars shared a common root of systematized dehumanization, manufactured by the global color line. For Du Bois, true peace was the only way forward, and it required “extend[ing] the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples” across the world.

Several other Black leaders reached similar conclusions in their intellectual lives, ultimately linking global pacifism to the project of racial egalitarianism. In the years before his death, King, operating from his framework of the “three evils” of poverty, militarism, and racism, came out to oppose the Vietnam War. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government,” King said in his best-known denunciation of the war. He spoke specifically of Black empathy with the Vietnamese. “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met,” he said. “They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.”

What would Du Bois have said about the tragedy in Gaza? Over his long career, he worked to build a coherent philosophy on the basic principle of seeing all humanity as worth saving. He contradicted himself, made grievous errors, and often fell short of his own ethics in this quest. By the time he found himself speaking in the Hotel Diplomat, he’d amassed enough conflicting views to be his own best interlocutor. But he always professed, as found in his “Credo,” a belief “in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”

Du Bois’s guiding principle was not so different from the founding ethos of the abolitionist magazine that had helped catapult him to fame. In 1892, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of The Atlantic, gave an unambiguous definition of the American idea that his magazine contemplated: “emancipation.”

Emerson’s view was forged at a time when abolitionist arguments were censored in some institutions, abolitionists could be lynched if they journeyed to the wrong corner of America, and the supposed savagery and bloodthirst of the American Negro was the predominant moral argument for keeping him in chains. Emerson made a choice that was then bold and unusual among the white literati: to view Black people as humans, and to rebuild his philosophy around that conclusion. Emerson chose solidarity, and wrote against the scourge of slavery. He did so because emancipation, that American idea, demanded it.

Today, emancipation still demands much of us. It requires that we create a world in which the Holocaust could never happen again, which by definition means a world in which a holocaust could never happen again. It would also necessarily be one in which there would be no mass killings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, no famine in Sudan, no children held in cages at the American border, no steady procession of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, no killing of thousands of children in Gaza.

America is clearly failing miserably in that work. The ascendant political ideology gripping both parties views solidarity with suspicion, a suspicion that colors our global realpolitik. The United States remains committed to providing the bombs that kill children, even while—somehow—calling for a cease-fire.

“Where are we going—whither are we drifting?” asked Du Bois in 1952. On the one hand, we have solidarity. On the other, ruin.

Monday is the ICJ’s deadline for South Africa to prove, on paper, that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza.

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Anne Applebaum: This is Anne Applebaum.

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

Hanna Rosin: Hi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosin: To which Lauren said—

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

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

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

Rosin: Uh-huh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosin:Yes.

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

Rosin: Yes.

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

Rosin: Yes.

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

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

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

Rosin: That’s a pretty good idea.

Pomeranstev: But they are human. [Laughs.]

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

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

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

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

Rosin: Thank you both.

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosin: To which Lauren said—

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

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

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

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

Rosin: Right.

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

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

[Music]

​Ober: I’m Lauren Ober.

Rosin: And I’m Hanna Rosin.

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

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

Rosin: I remember that.

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Crowd noise]

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

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

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

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

[Crowd noise]

Rosin: The cop shoots.

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

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

Rioter 1: She’s dead.

Rioter 2: She’s dead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

Rosin: What?

Ober: The Eagle’s Nest.

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

Ober: Yeah.

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

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

Rosin: Some patriot thing.

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

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

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

Rosin: No.

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

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

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

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

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

Person 3: They’re fascists.

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

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

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

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

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

Person 1: Get the fuck outta here.

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

Person 3: Hey! We caught it on video.

Person 2: Stop fucking touching my shit.

Person 3: Get out of here, you pansy.

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

Ober: As I explained to Hanna:

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

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

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

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

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

Rosin: Who’s the “they”?

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

Rosin: Interesting.

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: Do you want to hear something rotten?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Micki: That’s my Nicole. (Laughs.)

Ober: And I was like, Well, okay.

[Music]

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

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

Micki: I don’t know what I believe them capable of. Is it eating babies and drinking their blood? I don’t think so. But I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what they’re up to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosin: That feels vaguely threatening.

Fellows: I could see why you would say that.

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

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

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

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

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

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

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

Nicole: Get used to it?

Ober: No.

Nicole: Suck it? Fuck it?

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

Nicole: (Laughs.) I don’t know.

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

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

Ober: You said, “Suck it, bitch.”

Nicole: Oh! Okay. Okay.

Last month, an energy think tank released some rare good news for the climate: The world is on track to install 29 percent more solar capacity this year than it did the year before, according to a report from Ember. “In a single year, in a single technology, we’re providing as much new electricity as the entirety of global growth the year before,” Kingsmill Bond, a senior energy strategist at RMI, a clean-energy nonprofit, told me. A decade or two ago, analysts “did not imagine in their wildest dreams that solar by the middle of the 2020s would already be supplying all of the growth of global electricity demand,” he said. Yet here we are.

In the United States, solar accounted for more than half of all new power last year. But the most dramatic growth is happening overseas. The latest global report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) notes that solar is on track to overtake all other forms of energy by 2033. The world’s use of fossil fuels is already plateauing (the U.S., for its part, hit its peak demand for fossil-fuel energy way back in 2007). Energy demand is still rising, but renewables are stepping in to make up the difference. “The really interesting debate now,” Bond said, “is actually: When do we push fossil fuels off the plateau? And from our numbers, if solar keeps on growing this way, it’s going to be off the plateau by the end of this decade.”

The advantages of solar speak for themselves. Solar can be built faster and with fewer permits than other forms of energy infrastructure, mostly because the panels are flat and modular (unlike, say, a towering wind turbine or a hulking gas-fired power plant). It’s also adaptable at any scale, from an individual erecting a single panel to a utility company assembling a solar farm. And now, thanks to remarkable drops in prices for solar panels, mainly from China, simple market forces seem to be driving an all-out solar boom. “This is unstoppable,” Heymi Bahar, a senior energy analyst at the IEA, told me.

Globally, some 40 percent of solar’s growth is in the form of people powering their own homes and businesses, Bahar said. Perhaps nowhere is this better illustrated than in Africa, where Joel Nana, a project manager at Sustainable Energy Africa in Cape Town, has been leading an effort to help countries regulate and integrate the explosion of small-scale solar. When Nana and his team started quantifying just how much new solar was around, “we were actually shocked,” he told me. In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts, Nana said. But in the first quarter of 2023, when researchers used satellite imagery to count all of the solar installations in the country, they estimated that solar was producing a combined 5,700 megawatts of energy—only 55 percent of which had been declared to the government. That story of rapid, invisible growth is being repeated across the continent. Kenya now has about 200 megawatts of rooftop solar installed, representing 9 percent of the country’s total energy use, Nana said. Namibia has about 96 megawatts of rooftop solar capacity in its system, he said—a whopping 15 percent of its energy mix. “It’s been happening for three or four years, maybe five years, completely off the radar,” Nana said.

[From the March 2020 issue: Thy neighbor’s solar panels]

Solar seems to have passed a tipping point: In many countries, the low cost of the technology is propelling its own growth, despite little government help. In South Africa, businesses such as shopping malls and factories have historically run diesel generators to deal with frequent power outages. Many still do, but now others are saving money by installing solar panels. Electricity from a diesel generator costs about 10 rand per kilowatt-hour, Nana said; with solar panels, it plummets to about two rand. “It’s literally a no-brainer for a business owner,” he said. Businesses make up 80 percent of small-scale solar capacity in the country, according to his research. Soon, Nana hopes, arrays and batteries will become cheap enough that more homeowners across the continent will be able to afford switching to solar. And, as the journalist Bill McKibben has reported, some homeowners in African countries who have never been connected to the grid are getting electricity for the very first time via solar-panel kits, skipping over a fossil-fuel phase entirely.

Across the global South, solar is capturing unprecedented portions of the energy market. Pakistan, for example, imported the equivalent of a quarter of its total energy capacity in Chinese solar panels in just the first six months of this year. Many countries in the global South lack significant fossil-fuel resources, and importing them is expensive. “By far the easiest way to obtain economic growth in a country with a lot of sunshine and no fossil fuels is by exploiting your own domestic resources,” Bond said. Already, in countries including Brazil, Morocco, Mexico, and Uruguay, solar and wind make up a bigger share of electricity generation than it does in global-North countries. By 2030, RMI predicts, the global South will have quadrupled its solar and wind capacity.

That estimate doesn’t account for China, which is experiencing an unparalleled solar boom. In addition to supplying the rest of the world with panels, China installed more than half of the planet’s new solar capacity within its own borders in 2023, and the Ember report says it’s on track to add a similar amount this year. In 2023, the country more than doubled its own solar capacity year over year. “Nobody was expecting that it would be so high,” Bahar said.

[Read: Why America doesn’t really make solar panels anymore]

Last year, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP28, in Dubai, 132 countries and the European Union pledged to triple the world’s renewable-energy capacity by 2030. According to Bahar, it’s the only promise of the many made in Dubai that’s likely to even be close to fulfilled: The world is on track to add 2.7 times its renewable capacity by then, and 80 percent of that increase will come from solar. To make use of all this growth, the world will have to add much more storage and transmission capacity, neither of which are keeping up with solar’s pace. The IEA, where Bahar works, will advocate for new pledges on those two fronts at COP29 next month. A world that mostly runs on solar power will also need something else—such as hydropower, nuclear, or geothermal—to generate energy when the sun isn’t shining in the evenings and winters. Jessika Trancik, an MIT professor who models clean-energy development, told me that governments need to steer investments toward storage and alternate forms of energy to compensate for that inherent downtime. That way, the world can have a reliable energy mix when 50 or 60 percent of electricity generation comes from solar and wind. That may seem far off, she said—solar made up about 5.5 percent of global energy in 2023—but with the exponential growth of cheap solar, “before you know it, it’s upon you.”

For Africa’s quiet solar boom to meet its full potential, governments will need to regulate and subsidize the technology, Nana said. Federal departments in Namibia, Kenya, and Eswatini have largely ignored the ascendance of solar technology within their borders, Nana said. Yet in South Africa, he’s seeing bright spots. Last year, the government began providing subsidies for solar for the first time. This year, its updated energy plan acknowledged that small-scale solar will be the biggest player in the country in the next decade. If South Africa is any indication, a solar revolution will arrive in more countries in the coming years. It may even sneak up on them.

New Zealand win their first Women's T20 World Cup title with a comprehensive win over South Africa in Dubai.

Watch highlights as New Zealand beat South Africa with a comprehensive 32-run victory to win their first Women's T20 World Cup in Dubai.

New Zealand tighten their grip on the Women's T20 World Cup final with the dismissals of South Africa's Marizanne Kapp and Nadine de Klerk in consecutive balls.