This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Election Day is in a few weeks, but for millions of Americans, early voting in the presidential and downballot races is already under way. Over the next 19 days, how people vote in dozens of swing districts will determine which party takes control of the House of Representatives.

The race for the House looks like “a true toss-up,” my colleague Russell Berman, who covers politics, told me. (He also noted that the Democrats he’s spoken with lately are “cautiously optimistic”—and some actually seem “a touch more confident about retaking the House than winning the presidency.”) To take back control, Democrats need to pick up four seats from Republicans.

Abortion is a key issue that could determine the balance of power in the House, Russell explained, in large part because many of the most important races are happening in suburban areas where significant numbers of college-educated women are expected to turn out. Still, it’s unclear whether that issue will actually mobilize blue-state voters who have perceived less of a threat to abortion access. Immigration policy could also come into play; some Democrats are striking a more hawkish tone on the border, Russell said, following a strategy that helped Representative Tom Suozzi win George Santos’s former seat in a special election on Long Island earlier this year.

Below are five competitive House races that we’re keeping an eye on.

***

New York’s Seventeenth District

New York is famously a Democratic stronghold. But in the 2022 midterms, Republicans’ sweep of the state’s most competitive House races was a key factor that contributed to the Democrats losing control of the House. Now, just north of New York City in a district where 80,000 more Democrats than Republicans are registered, Republican Mike Lawler is trying to defend his seat against former Representative Mondaire Jones in a close race that may help tip the House.

Lawler, who is framing himself as a moderate Republican, has worked to tie Jones to the embattled Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and he’s tried to haunt Jones with his old progressive stances from 2020, when he won a House seat in the Seventeenth District. Democrats have spotlighted Lawler’s abortion views—he opposes abortion except in cases of rape or incest, though he does not back a national ban—as a weakness in his campaign. Immigration has been another point of contention because of the recent influx of migrants in New York; both candidates have swiped at each other’s record on the border.

Pennsylvania’s Tenth District

In Pennsylvania, a must-win swing state for the presidential candidates, a race between a MAGA Republican and a former news anchor could affect the balance of power in the House. Republican Representative Scott Perry is fighting to hold onto his seat against a challenge from Janelle Stelson, who became a local celebrity thanks to her decades on air. In a recent dispatch from the district, Russell described Perry as “the most vulnerable Trump loyalist in the House,” in part because of his baggage related to January 6 (he reportedly tried to install an attorney general who would help Trump stay in power).

Stelson carries little political baggage as a longtime news anchor and first-time candidate. A former registered Republican and self-identified centrist, she has taken a stronger stance on immigration than many Democrats, and she declined to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris until recently. But she’s largely aligned with her party on abortion: Stelson has said that the overturning of Roe v. Wade fueled her decision to run as a Democrat, and Perry recently said that he wouldn’t rule out voting for a national abortion ban.

Washington’s Third District

A rematch will take place between Joe Kent, a MAGA loyalist who has denied the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a vulnerable Democrat who won in an upset in 2022. That the Trump-backed Kent, rather than the district’s more moderate Republican incumbent, ran (and lost) in the district in 2022 was a “self-inflicted wound” that was “emblematic of how poor Republican choices and MAGA purity tests hurt the party in races up and down the ticket,” my colleague David Graham wrote at the time.

Washington’s Third District is a primarily rural area that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. In the House, Perez sometimes crosses the aisle to vote with Republicans on certain issues, including student-loan-debt relief, raising the ire of party loyalists. In July, she went where few Democrats did: Shortly after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, she released a statement that appeared to cast doubt on his fitness to serve the rest of his term.

Arizona’s First District

Republican Representative David Schweikert, who is seeking his eighth term in the House, is running against Democrat Amish Shah, an ER physician turned state representative. Arizona’s First District, with its large share of college-educated suburban voters, is considered a bellwether district in a state that could determine the outcome of the presidential election.

Republicans have framed Shah as “an extreme liberal,” sympathetic to socialism and raising taxes in a race where taxes and border security are key issues. But abortion is also top of mind for many voters—a measure that would codify the right to abortion in Arizona will be on the state’s November ballot—and Schweikert repeatedly co-sponsored a bill that would have banned nearly all abortions nationwide.

California’s Forty-Seventh District

California, like New York, is sure to go to Harris in the presidential race. But across the state, a handful of House races remain highly competitive. In Orange County’s affluent Forty-Seventh District, Democratic State Senator Dave Min and the Republican attorney Scott Baugh are facing off in a tight race that both parties have identified as a key target to win in 2024. The two candidates are vying to take over the seat currently occupied by Democratic Representative Katie Porter, who opted to run instead for the late Senator Dianne Feinstein’s seat (a bid that failed in part because a tech-backed campaign spent $10 million attacking Porter for being insufficiently crypto-friendly).

The number of registered Democrats and Republicans in the district is nearly equal, and Orange County’s growing Asian American and Latino populations have helped shift left the area once known as a conservative bastion. Min and Baugh will likely need to court the vote of independents to win, with a focus on the local issues including the economy and crime.

Related:

Seven Senate races to watch The New York race that could tip the House

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Israel has won the war, Franklin Foer writes. Can it win the peace? Ron Brownstein: Kamala Harris’s closing argument Donald Trump’s roomful of suspiciously friendly women Mike Pence is haunting this election.

Today’s News

Israeli forces killed Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s top leader, in southern Gaza, officials confirmed today. A grand jury in Georgia indicted the 14-year-old Apalachee High School shooter and his father on murder charges for a mass shooting last month that left four people dead. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed yesterday to pay $880 million to 1,353 victims of clergy sexual abuse, the largest single child-sex-abuse settlement involving a single Catholic archdiocese.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Eleanor Roosevelt was ahead of her time, Helen Lewis writes. The beloved first lady was as visible as her husband in the White House. Work in Progress: On the whole, Democrats are pro-EV and Republicans are not, Matteo Wong writes. Partisanship only partly explains the difference.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

A Calculator’s Most Important Button Has Been Removed

By Ian Bogost

I worry that the calculator we’ve known and loved is not long for this Earth. This month, when I upgraded my iPhone to the latest operating system, iOS 18, it came with a refreshed Calculator app. The update offered some improvements! I appreciated the vertical orientation of its scientific mode, because turning your phone sideways is so 2009; the continuing display of each operation (e.g., 217 ÷ 4 + 8) on the screen until I asked for the result; the unit-conversion mode, because I will never know what a centimeter is. But there also was a startling omission: The calculator’s “C” button—the one that clears input—was gone. The “C” itself had been cleared.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The AI boom has an expiration date. What is this “post-birth abortion” Donald Trump keeps talking about? Arthur C. Brooks: Why humility is the key to well-being What does that dog bark mean?

Culture Break

Dr. Sherif Abdallah Ahmed, Tanta, Egypt

Check out. These are the stunning results of the 2024 Small World Photomicrography Competition—a contest that invites photographers and scientists to submit images of all things visible under a microscope.

Read. Richard Powers’s recent novels have traded complexity for preachiness, but his latest is an effective twist on AI panic, Randy Boyagoda writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small, in the “Dear Therapist” newsletter. This month, she is inviting readers to submit questions related to Thanksgiving.

To be featured, email dear.therapist@theatlantic.com by Sunday, October 20.

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

People love underdogs. Researchers have time and again observed that the public, and perhaps especially the American public, is drawn to stories in which an average person, through some combination of luck and gumption, trounces a far more formidable opponent in a lopsided conflict. One of the most plausible explanations for this appeal is that underdog narratives stir our deep-seated desire for a just world, one where virtuous people actually get what they deserve. Personally, as a writer, I’m attracted to these accounts because they tend to be full of what William Faulkner once called “the old verities and truths of the heart” that stories need to succeed—that is, “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

My new book, Valley So Low, is something of an underdog story: It follows a small-time Knoxville lawyer who takes on the powerful Tennessee Valley Authority after a disaster at one of its coal-fired power stations sickens hundreds of blue-collar workers. Over the five years I spent working on it, I looked for inspiration in nonfiction books that took a similar shape. The ones that most resonated were immersive, carefully created works of journalism that followed ordinary Americans facing long odds—in the courts of law, in the workplace, or in their own neighborhoods. The authors of these books in many cases spent years collecting details to bring their characters to life on the page to a degree typically reserved for fiction. These seven standouts are each about everyday people pushing back against wildly difficult, often unfair circumstances. And, even though the protagonists don’t always win or come out ahead, exactly, they at least endure, which is often its own sort of victory.

Vintage

A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr

Most nonfiction books, even immortal ones, like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, rely heavily on scenes that the writer has reconstructed through reporting and research; that is, the writer typically didn’t witness the events described firsthand. A Civil Action—about a lawsuit against two giant corporations, Beatrice Foods and W. R. Grace, over water pollution in Woburn, Massachusetts, in the 1980s—is remarkable in that Harr seems to have been present for nearly every meeting, every hearing, and every round of drinks after each brutal day in court. Harr’s main character, Jan Schlichtmann, is an idealistic attorney representing eight families sickened with leukemia by chemicals that the two companies allegedly dumped into a river near their homes, poisoning their drinking water. Thanks to Harr’s efforts—he worked on the book for eight years, and often slept on Schlichtmann’s fold-out couch while reporting—A Civil Action illuminates, in cinematic detail, why regular citizens struggle to win toxic-exposure suits against corporate polluters: Even if the plaintiffs have compelling facts and a dedicated attorney, like Schlichtmann, the polluters almost always have more money, and money will buy you time. And when your clients are sick and dying, Schlichtmann learns, time is a powerful enemy.

[Read: Why the EPA backed down]

“The Escape of Mrs. Jeffries,” by Janet Flanner

Sometimes an obstacle blocking your path feels like a mountain, and other times the obstacle is, in fact, a mountain. Such was the case for Ellen Jeffries, a middle-aged American expat who was trapped in wartime Paris with no easy way to return to the States after her adopted country fell to Adolf Hitler. Fearing internment, she hatches an audacious plan: flee south through France, cross over the Pyrenees on foot to Spain, then finally catch a flight back stateside. Flanner, who was The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent for almost 50 years, thrillingly recounts Jeffries’s efforts to evade the Nazis on her trek to freedom, which include a harrowing nighttime river crossing before a mountain ascent to the relative safety of Spain. In relaying Jeffries’s story, Flanner pioneered a form of nonfiction writing that her New Yorker colleague John Hersey would later mimic to fame-making effect in his horrific 1946 story “Hiroshima,” wherein nearly all traces of the author’s reporting have been excised, leaving only a novelistic rendering of events. But Flanner, the world should know, did it first, in 1943. A stand-alone audiobook version of Jeffries’s story came out last year; you can also read it in Janet Flanner’s World or in The New Yorker Book of War Pieces.

Vintage

Anatomy of Injustice, by Raymond Bonner

Every wrongful-conviction story is tragic and pitiful, but the ordeal of Edward Lee Elmore is especially so, as Bonner’s tightly written account of his case makes clear. The book opens with the 1982 murder of a well-off elderly white woman, Dorothy Edwards, in Greenwood, South Carolina—a murder for which Elmore, an intellectually disabled Black handyman, is swiftly convicted and sentenced to death. But the story really gains momentum when a defense attorney named Diana Holt, whom Bonner profiled for The Atlantic in 2012, becomes convinced of Elmore’s innocence and decides to fight to win him a new trial. Holt has grit: She’s a former runaway who, in her youth, survived all manner of hellish abuse. Still, she struggles to overcome the fact that once a person is convicted in a court of law, not even exonerating new evidence guarantees that they’ll get off death row, never mind get another shot at justice. Elmore, through no shortage of legal miracles, eventually sees the outside of a jail cell, but it’s a victory tainted by the irrevocable wrongs done to him, which is why Bonner dares not call his release justice.

[Read: Why are innocents still being executed?]

Blue Rider Press

Almighty, by Dan Zak

One night in July 2012, an 82-year-old nun named Megan Rice and two companions break into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This, as it turns out, proves to be pretty easy, even though the place is nicknamed “the Fort Knox of Uranium.” But exposing the ease of infiltrating Y-12, where the government produces and stores atomic-bomb fuel, is Rice’s main objective. She’s a member of the anti-nuclear group Plowshares, and in this dynamic, accessible book, Zak, a reporter for The Washington Post, unspools how Rice and other activists seek to end nuclear-arms proliferation through “actions” intended to scare the wits out of policy makers and the public by revealing the poor security at nuclear-weapons sites. Maybe then, the activists reason, nations will agree to decommission their warheads before they fall into dangerous hands. Toward the end, Zak shifts his focus to the lawmakers and military leaders who ultimately decide our nuclear-arms policies. In doing so, he details how emerging threats have reinforced Washington’s view that the best way to avoid the next major-power war is through stockpiling more warheads—and observes that the disarmament crowd’s desire for a nuclear-free world likely won’t be realized in our lifetimes, if ever, unless that dynamic changes.

Power to Hurt, by Darcy O’Brien

O’Brien, the son of Hollywood actors, had a knack for turning lurid crimes of the sort you might find on Dateline or 20/20 into something akin to art, and Power to Hurt is his crowning achievement. Published in 1996, the book follows Vivian Forsythe, a divorced young mother from Dyersburg, Tennessee, who, in a stroke of unimaginably awful luck, applies to work for local judge David Lanier. Lanier rapes Forsythe during a job interview, which O’Brien recounts in upsetting, unwavering detail. Afterward, Forsythe tells no one about the attack, because Lanier and his brother, the local district attorney, effectively control the county. But eventually Forsythe and Lanier’s other victims—and there are many, she discovers—meet an FBI agent and work together to bring down the old judge, a campaign that takes the better part of a decade and comes to involve the U.S. Supreme Court. Power to Hurt is ultimately less a true-crime book than a post-crime book in which victims summon radical courage to confront a monster.

[Read: ‘Nobody is going to believe you’: Bryan Singer’s accusers speak out]

The Last Cowboy, by Jane Kramer

Henry Blanton wants to be a cowboy—a real cowboy. Never mind that he already runs a ranch, and the job is not all that great: He’s an unhappily married foreman of a 90,000-acre tract in the Texas Panhandle. But, at age 40, he still dreams of becoming an old-time gunslinger who roams the open plain, like the heroes of the Western movies he watches compulsively. The problem, as Kramer captures in this sharp 1977 book, is that modernity has made the free-ranging life of Blanton’s dreams almost impossible: Barbed wire constrains the cattle; Eastern conglomerates control many of the ranches; and paychecks are piddly for hired hands like Blanton, whose struggles to get by eventually drive him to a breaking point. Kramer, who’s in her 80s now and seldom publishes new work, has become a name that only serious magazine lovers would recognize, even though she spent decades covering Europe for The New Yorker. That is a shame, because her journalism at its best, as it is in this book, is as textured and compelling as that of her better-known contemporaries, and she masterfully captures life at the edges of America.

Vintage

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson’s masterpiece begins roughly in the middle of the oppressive Jim Crow regime in the South, in the years leading up to and immediately following the Second World War, as three young Black people—a doctor, a sharecropper’s wife, and a fruit picker—flee the region for better jobs and possibly friendlier neighbors in the North or West. Her three characters stand in for the approximately 6 million other Black Americans who made similar journeys as part of the mass exodus that would become known as the Great Migration. Wilkerson spent 15 years writing and reporting her book on the subject, and the effort paid off: The New York Times recently ranked it as the second-best book of the 21st century. What makes the book remarkable is less Wilkerson’s sweeping history of the southern exodus (though she handles this deftly) than her granular reporting on her central characters, who each face unexpected hardships in their adopted new homes. The result is a tale about a too-frequently ignored chapter of American history that continues to shape our country’s present.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In March 2023, when Mark Milley was six months away from retirement as a four-star general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he met Bob Woodward at a reception and said, “We gotta talk.”

Milley went on to describe the grave degree to which former President Donald Trump, under whom Milley had served, was a danger to the nation. Woodward recounts the episode with Milley—who almost certainly believed that he was speaking to Woodward off the record—in his new book, War:

“We have got to stop him!” Milley said. “You have got to stop him!” By “you” he meant the press broadly. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” His eyes darted around the room filled with 200 guests of the Cohen Group, a global business consulting firm headed by former defense secretary William Cohen. Cohen and former defense secretary James Mattis spoke at the reception.

“A fascist to the core!” Milley repeated to me.

I will never forget the intensity of his worry.

For readers of The Atlantic, this will sound familiar: Milley’s warning about Trump as well as the steps Milley took to defend the constitutional order during Trump’s presidency were the subject of a cover story last year by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. As Goldberg put it in that story: “The difficulty of the task before Milley was captured most succinctly by Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster,” who served as the second of Trump’s four national security advisers. “As chairman,” McMaster said to Goldberg, “you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?”

Milley knows well the risks of criticizing Trump. The former president has reportedly expressed a desire to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who have criticized him, and he has even suggested that Milley should be executed. Since Milley retired, Woodward noted, the combat veteran who served three tours in Afghanistan has endured “a nonstop barrage of death threats,” which led him to install bulletproof glass and blast-proof curtains in his home.

I long resisted the use of the word fascist to describe Trump. But almost a year ago, I came to agree with Milley that Trump is through-and-through a fascist. He is not only unhinged in his narcissistic self-obsessions, a problem which itself renders him unfit for office; he is also an aspiring dictator who demands that all political life centers on him. He identifies his fellow Americans as “enemies” because they are of a different race, national origin, or political view. And he has threatened to use the powerful machinery of the state and its military forces to inflict brutality on those fellow citizens.

Of course, it’s one thing to hear such concerns from angry members of the so-called Resistance on social media, from liberal talk-show hosts, or even, say, from curmudgeonly retired political-science professors who write for magazines. It’s another to hear them from a man who once held the nation’s top military office.

Some observers question whether Milley should have said anything at all. I understand those reservations: I taught military officers for decades at the Naval War College, and I am familiar with the tradition—handed down from America’s first commander in chief, George Washington—of the military’s avoidance of entanglement in civilian politics. I, too, am uncomfortable that, while still on active duty, Milley spoke to Woodward about a presidential candidate. He could have waited a few months, until his retirement; he could even have resigned his commission early in order to be able to speak freely.

My own objectivity on the issue of Milley speaking with Woodward is strained by my strong feelings about Trump as an existential danger to the nation, so I checked in with a friend and widely respected scholar of American civil-military relations, Kori Schake, a senior fellow and the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“It’s a legitimately difficult call,” she wrote to me. She noted that resigning and then going public is always an option. She admitted, however, that for a general to throw his stars on the desk might be an honorable exit, but it’s not much use to the people remaining in uniform who must continue to serve the country and the commander in chief, and in general she sees the idea of simply quitting and walking out to be unhelpful.

So when should a general—who’s seen things in the White House that terrify him—raise the alarm if he believes that a president is planning to attack the very Constitution that all federal servants are sworn to protect? Schake thinks that Milley overestimated his importance and was out of his lane as a military officer: “The country didn’t need General Milley to alert them to the danger of Trump, that was evident if people wanted to know, and plenty of civilian officials—including General Milley’s boss, [Mark Esper], the Secretary of Defense—had already been sharing their concern.”

Schake is one of the smartest people I know on this subject, and so I am cautious in my dissent, especially because other scholars of civil-military affairs seem largely to agree with her. And like Schake, I am a traditionalist about American civil-military relations: Trump, as I wrote during his presidency, routinely attacked the military and saw its leaders as his opponents, but that should not tempt anyone in uniform to match his egregious violations of our civil-military norms and traditions.

A comparable situation occurred during the final days of President Richard Nixon’s time in office: Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger told the Joint Chiefs chair at the time, General George Brown, that any “unusual orders” from the president should be cleared through him. (The Constitution, of course, does not have a special provision allowing Cabinet officers to subvert the chain of command at will if they think the president is having a bad day.) Schlesinger’s actions arose from concern about Nixon’s mental state; four years earlier, Admiral Thomas Moorer, one of Milley’s predecessors as Joint Chiefs chair, was so worried about Nixon’s policies that he actually oversaw some internal spying on National Security Council proceedings.

And yet I understand Milley’s alarm and frustration. He was not grousing about a policy disagreement or trying to paper over a temporary crisis regarding the president’s capacity. He was concerned that a former American president could return to office and continue his efforts to destroy the constitutional order of the United States. This was no political pose against a disliked candidate: For Milley and others, especially in the national-security arena, who saw the danger from inside the White House, Trump’s continuing threat to democracy and national stability is not notional.

I also am somewhat heartened that a four-star general, when faced with what he sees as a dire peril to the nation, believes that the sunlight of a free press is the best option. But, more important, are people now listening to what Milley had to say? The revelations about his views seem to have been overwhelmed by yet more of Trump’s gobsmacking antics. As I was writing today’s Daily, news broke that Trump had added Nancy Pelosi and her family to his enemies list. (Paul Pelosi has already suffered a hammer attack from a deranged man stoked by conspiracy theories, a ghastly incident that some Trump supporters have used as a source for jokes; Trump himself has referenced it mockingly.)

All of this raises the question, once again, of what it will take, what will be enough, to rouse the last undecided or less engaged American voters and bring them to the ballot box to defend their own freedoms. Milley and other senior military officers are in a bind when it comes to talking about a former president, but telling the truth about Trump is a duty and a service to the nation.

Related:

How Mark Milley held the line Trump floats the idea of executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The man who’s sure that Harris will win A Trump loyalist on the brink Shoplifters gone wild

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier aired tonight at 6 p.m. ET. Italy passed a law that criminalizes seeking surrogates abroad, including in countries where surrogacy is legal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented the country’s Parliament with a “Victory Plan,” which aims to end the Ukrainian-Russian war by next year and calls for a NATO invitation for Ukraine.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Found Image Holdings / Corbis / Getty.

The Sunshine Staters Aren’t Going Anywhere

By Diane Roberts

Floridians regularly observe that Florida is trying to kill us. Venomous water snakes lie in wait for heedless kayakers paddling down the wrong slough. More people die of lightning strikes in Florida than in any other state. I-4, from Tampa to Daytona Beach, is the deadliest highway in the country. Mosquitoes the size of tire irons carry several sorts of fever and encephalitis, and the guacamole-colored algae infesting our waters can cause severe respiratory distress and liver disease. Despite claims of perpetual sunshine, the weather in Florida is often horrendous: 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 95 percent humidity.

Then there are the storms.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

GLP-1 is going the way of gut health. The secret of Trump’s economic message Afghan women have been brought back in time.

Culture Break

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Learn. This branch of philosophy just might transform the way people think about what they owe their children, Elissa Strauss writes.

Read. Feeld, the polyamory dating app, made a magazine, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. Why?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small, in the “Dear Therapist” newsletter. This month, she is inviting readers to submit questions related to Thanksgiving.

To be featured, email dear.therapist@theatlantic.com by Sunday, October 20.

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Illustrations by Ben Denzer

The splendor of the American big-box store lay before me, with its endless variety of shaving products in every imaginable size and color—a retail extravaganza, all of it locked behind Plexiglas. I needed a razor, and in order to obtain one at my neighborhood Target, I had to press a red button to summon a store clerk. Depending on where you live, you may know the drill. I waited in Aisle B45 with two women, one in front of the Dove deodorants, the other in the Old Spice section.

“I keep pushing, but no one comes,” said the Old Spice lady.

Six minutes passed. I pressed my button; my fellow shoppers pressed theirs. The Dove woman let out a dramatic sigh and left. Was a clean shave really worth all this? I looked at Old Spice; we shook our heads and departed. Result: three paying customers sacrificed to the War on Shoplifting.

By definition, most shoplifting is petty plunder—candy bars, baby formula, lipstick. But the small stuff adds up, as demonstrated by viral videos showing shelves of deodorant or cold medicine swiped into Hefty bags by thieves who can’t even be bothered to run away. Some people contend that all of the noise about shoplifting reflects mainly a race-tinged social panic, but the retail industry is not locking up its goods, annoying its customers, and closing stores because of a few viral videos. Companies are doing it because they’re seeing their goods walk out the door, costing them billions.

[From the March 2018 issue: The dark art of stealing from self-checkouts]

Big corporate retailers, mom-and-pop shops, cops, prosecutors, and lawmakers have tried everything to stop the thefts: get tough, be gentle, invest in new surveillance technology, turn pharmacies into fortresses. Nothing seems to work. At my Target in Washington, D.C., I counted 21 aisles of goods locked behind plastic, including toothpaste, body wash, underwear, earbuds, and air fresheners—all items that impulse thieves and organized criminals alike find desirable and easiest to resell, on the street or, more often these days, online.

Who is taking all of this stuff? And why has this age-old nuisance crime become so prevalent?

People steal because it’s easy and—with rare exceptions—free of consequences. David Kimmel, who resides at Northpoint Training Center, a former state mental hospital repurposed as a medium-security prison, in Boyle County, Kentucky, is one of those exceptions.

Kimmel is on his fourth tour in prison for shoplifting, for stealing a $12.88 doll from Walmart and $142.68 worth of ammunition from a Rural King store. This time, Kimmel faced a Kentucky prosecutor and jury who seemed determined to send a message. Each of Kimmel’s two charges was bumped up from a misdemeanor with a 90-day maximum sentence to a felony carrying up to a five-year penalty, mainly because he had already been banned from those stores for shoplifting (several previous instances of stealing from that Walmart, Kimmel told me, and one prior instance—stealing a lawnmower—from the Rural King). The jury didn’t think even that was enough, so they increased each sentence to 10 years. Finally, the jury recommended that Kimmel serve the two sentences not concurrently but consecutively, for a grand total of four decades.

Kimmel steals, he told me, because he’s a drug addict—pain pills, usually, or heroin and fentanyl. He is 39 now and has been shoplifting since he was 15. “I’ve done it hundreds of times,” he said. During all of those years, he was mostly employed—painting houses, doing construction. “I could make a living, pay rent and electric,” he said. “I couldn’t afford drugs.” He sold the stolen items at half their retail price to fences in a nearby parking lot, or on Facebook. He knows it’s not right, but “you ain’t hurtin’ nobody,” he told me. “It’s just from a big company.” If he were back on the street now, as an addict, he figures he’d still be shoplifting.

Kimmel appealed his conviction, and last year, the Supreme Court of Kentucky agreed that he should not have to serve his sentences consecutively. He told me his prison time was eventually cut back to 20 years. But the original sentence reflects how fed up many Americans are with shoplifting. At a rally last fall, Donald Trump announced that if he’s reelected, “we will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store. Shot!” At another rally last month, he said he could end shoplifting “immediately” with “one really violent day”— a “real rough, nasty day,” maybe even just “one rough hour”—during which police could take on criminals. Both times, the crowd cheered.

Whereas many on the right see the rise in shoplifting as proof of a nationwide moral collapse, many on the left deny that it’s even happening or that it is a meaningful problem. Shoplifting is one of the hardest crimes to measure, because only a tiny proportion of cases are ever reported to police. Thefts aren’t increasing in every city—in some, reported thefts have gone down—and viral videos of shoplifters-gone-wild don’t necessarily add up to a crime wave. But merchandise is disappearing off shelves at such high rates that stores have resorted to extreme measures to defend themselves—even at the risk of alienating paying customers. The surge, retailers and industry experts say, is real.

[From the November 2024 issue: How carjacking became a teenage pastime]

Shoplifting has soared over the past three years, according to a survey by Jack L. Hayes International, a loss-prevention consulting firm, of 26 big retail companies with, collectively, more than 22,000 stores. The study calculated the total retail losses due to theft to be $7.1 billion in 2022, up from $4.9 billion in 2019. Retailers say stores are closing because they can’t make up their losses, and because some employees are scared and don’t want to work there anymore.

When Mike Mershimer worked as a store detective in the 1980s and ’90s, the primary tools deployed against shoplifters were handcuffs, shame, and mockery. He’d see shoplifters swipe a belt or Air Jordans, and “I’d grab him, throw him on the ground, and cuff him,” he told me. Customers would ridicule the thief as Mershimer marched him out the door. “I never saw those shoplifters again,” he said. Today, Mershimer advises retailers and major brands on store security. Clients are looking for fixes, but though Mershimer can offer constructive advice, he’s well aware that there’s no simple solution. “I get a helpless pit in my stomach,” he told me. “I don’t know what to tell them.”

Guards aren’t the answer, he said. New engagement rules at many retail stores discourage police and security guards from using force to stop offenders—they can no longer grab and cuff shoplifters. Some chains, their lawyers eager to avoid injuries to employees, have made even chasing down shoplifters a fireable offense. In a recent video capturing a shoplifter rolling a cart of stolen items out of a D.C. supermarket, a customer berates the guard for not chasing the thief. The guard replies, “I’m just a visual deterrent,” a phrase now common in the retail-security industry. The criminals, Mershimer told me, “see them for what they are: nothing.”

Some businesses try to look tough by dressing the guards in black tactical gear or equipping them with a German shepherd or a handgun, but “you’re mainly intimidating your customers,” he said. “If I pull up in the parking lot and see that, I’m pulling out.”

Hardening the target—creating what the industry calls the “fortress store”—doesn’t work either. Adding physical barriers and locking away products “not only deters shoplifters; it deters legitimate customers,” Mershimer said. Ditto for limiting the amount of stock placed on display: A mostly empty shelf is more of a turnoff to real customers than to thieves.

Some stores have started locking their front doors, buzzing in only people who look like paying customers. But what does a paying customer look like? Door buzzers are invitations for a discrimination lawsuit.

Yet something has to be done, Mershimer told me. Twenty years ago, if someone swiped a pair of Levi’s, “you could stand the loss. You budgeted 2 percent for shrink. Now you can’t sustain these enormous losses. Now it’s a whole shelf of Levi’s.”

A senior executive at a national chain store was equally frustrated. He spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, because his bosses didn’t want the debate over shoplifting to tarnish the company’s brand. His stores lock up products even though they know it chases away paying customers and is an ineffective barrier against professionals. “They pop the locks; they melt the glass; they take the keys out of employees’ hands,” he said.

In the early 2000s, many cities and states began easing the consequences for shoplifting. Dallas police stopped responding to calls about thefts under $50 in value. In 2014, California voters approved a referendum reclassifying thefts of items worth $950 or less as misdemeanors.

Now the clamor for safer stores is pushing the pendulum back toward enforcement. In the past few years, states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Louisiana have ratcheted up penalties, especially for people caught stealing in a group. Next month, Californians will vote on a referendum that would toughen penalties for shoplifting, essentially undoing the reforms voters approved just a decade ago.

[Read: Why California is swinging right on crime]

Whether this will have an effect on thieves’ behavior is unclear. Shawn Hunter is 29 years old and has racked up more than 40 criminal charges in D.C., plus additional charges in Maryland and Virginia. Earlier this year, in a Target store in a wealthy section of D.C., two cops conducting a retail-theft surveillance operation watched Hunter stuff $54 worth of items into his bag and leave without paying. The officers stopped him just outside the door.

Hunter did not respond to requests for an interview, but I sat behind him in May in D.C. Superior Court as he waited his turn for a hearing. The judge called him to task for having missed a previous court date, but his lawyer explained that he had a good excuse: He’d failed to appear because he was in another courtroom on that same day, answering to yet another theft charge.

Hunter fidgeted throughout the hearing. The second he was dismissed, he jumped up, took the escalator two steps at a time, and burst out of the courthouse with a yelp of regained freedom.

Shoplifting is not a modern development; the term lifting dates back to a 1591 British pamphlet. In the years since, people have come up with plenty of theories about what drives shoplifters to steal. In Victorian Britain, shoplifting was seen predominantly as a female malady. The opening of department stores caused a moral panic—women with money and time to spare, London newspapers warned, were in danger of sullying their virtue and filling their days with petty crime.

When Rachel Shteir set out two decades ago to write a book on shoplifting, her idea was to plumb the roots of the early aughts’ apparent surge in retail thefts. She sold her book, The Steal, to her publisher on the back of a wave of attention devoted to the actor Winona Ryder, who’d been caught taking $5,500 of designer clothes and accessories from a Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. According to a witness, Ryder claimed to have been conducting research for a role as a kleptomaniac. Ryder’s attorney denied this and suggested that the actor had assumed that the Saks clerk knew what she had taken and would charge her later for the goods. There was a sense then that women “were stealing not because they needed to eat but because they were shopping addicts,” Shteir, now a professor at DePaul University, told me. Talking about shoplifting in those years often meant discussing mental-health issues such as borderline personality disorder.

Beginning in the late 1960s, and especially after the publication of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, a different conception of shoplifters emerged, one that continues to dominate on the intellectual and political left. In this view, oppressed people steal to assert their power in the face of a society determined to keep them down. In the 2012 article “Stealing a Bag of Potato Chips and Other Crimes of Resistance,” the sociologist Victor Rios argued that shoplifting was a reasonable act of defiance against a system that preemptively labeled young men of color as criminals. Stealing, he wrote, was a way of “fighting for dignity.”

The idea that theft was both a reflection of social need and a form of political resistance became more entrenched on the left after protests—and, in some places, looting—erupted around the country over the murder of George Floyd, in 2020. Some commentators explicitly lumped shoplifting in with looting as a justified expression of frustration and rage. As Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting, told NPR, looting “freaks people out. But in terms of potential crimes that people can commit against the state, it’s basically nonviolent. You’re mass shoplifting. Most stores are insured; it’s just hurting insurance companies on some level. It’s just money. It’s just property. It’s not actually hurting any people.”

This is not a popular perspective in the retail industry. Those who have studied shoplifting point out that retail theft has always been more common than people think, and not primarily among the poor or those who view themselves as politically oppressed.

[Read: Why people loot]

An estimated one in 11 Americans have shoplifted at least once. In one study, criminologists spent the spring of 2000 to the spring of 2001 monitoring surveillance video in a major national chain drugstore in Atlanta. They determined that about 20,000 incidents of shoplifting took place in that one store, compared with only about 25,000 larceny-theft cases reported to police in the entire city in 2001. The study used shoppers’ clothing, jewelry, and other markers to draw conclusions about their economic class, providing a rough profile of who steals. The result: The shoplifters were not disproportionately minority, male, and lower-class, as many experts had assumed. In fact, about a third were middle-class and nearly 40 percent were women, and white people were just as likely to steal as were Black or Hispanic people.

These days, industry analysts say they are seeing more middle-class shoplifters than they did pre-COVID, mainly because shoplifters think they won’t face significant consequences (which is likely correct). Men might treat themselves to home-improvement tools and video-game accessories. Women, many of whom are the primary shopper for their family, will pay for milk and eggs but then swipe luxury items that a tight budget can’t accommodate: high-end cosmetics, skin-care products, jewelry.

Retailers are also becoming more concerned about what is known as organized retail crime, which often involves ringleaders ordering up shopping lists of goods they’ve often already sold to customers online. The thefts are contracted out to professional boosters, who rip off home goods, hardware, clothing, and drugstore items from any point along the supply chain, including freight trains, delivery trucks, warehouses, and stores. No reliable statistics show what portion of overall thefts are initiated by organized rings, but estimates range from as little as 5 percent to half of all theft. Coordination online has made organized theft more efficient, but it’s a different kind of puzzle for law enforcement than the far more common, and more psychologically complicated, individual shoplifting.

Why is shoplifting surging now? The coronavirus pandemic and social media are the two factors most often cited by researchers and industry executives.

At the very beginning of COVID’s spread, many categories of crime decreased, because people mostly stayed home and access to stores was limited. Shoplifting apprehensions reported by 22 major retail chains declined by 44 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to the Jack L. Hayes consultants. But since then, the numbers have soared far beyond their pre-COVID levels, reflecting persistent inflation, “less staff on sales floors,” and “thieves viewing shoplifting as a high-reward, low-risk endeavor,” their survey concluded.

Read Hayes is a former store detective with the scars to prove it. Back in the ’90s, his hands were repeatedly cut by shoplifters’ fingernails and pocketknives. These days, he runs the University of Florida’s SaferPlaces Lab, which develops and tests innovations in shoplifting prevention. He’s busier than ever. He told me he’d “seen surges before, but this is different—more significant, more widespread.”

He said that “everything changed” with COVID, “including how you think about other people. Everybody around you is a threat to your health and safety.” Store employees grew less willing to confront thieves, and lifters felt free to ignore shopkeepers’ efforts to halt them. People seemed “quicker to go violent” against clerks who did intervene.

“People just seem bolder,” Hayes told me. “We used to use shame as a deterrent, an informal sanction.” At some point, it stopped working.

Hayes told me that shoplifting has become more common among both casual thieves and hardened professionals. On one end of the spectrum, videos on social media showing young people how easy it is to steal items they’re not allowed to buy—cigarettes, beer—have gone viral, encouraging the curious to try their hand at it. On the other end, some people who formerly sold drugs are now drawn to big-ticket theft—power tools, TVs, laptops—because of the lower risk of punishment.

Thieves advertise their loot on Facebook and eBay, and trade tactical tips on Reddit as well as on more obscure sites. Online communities of pros and amateurs are occasionally shut down, but new ones pop up all the time. Many shoplifters are now trained by helpful online advisers to know precisely what to target. “They come into the store with a list,” the senior retail executive told me. “They want Prevagen or Maybelline. They know when our delivery trucks arrive; they know when we stock the shelves. They know when we’re lightly staffed.”

The internet isn’t just a place to garner tips. It has also, Hayes said, become a place “to showcase what you’ve stolen.” Videos of shoplifters committing their crimes and showing off their loot have become internet mainstays, both a reflection of evolving attitudes toward retail theft and an encouragement for new practitioners. Videos tagged #haul—some set to the tune of Ayesha Erotica’s “Real Messy Bitch” (“Yeah, I sca-a-am and I ro-o-ob, I’mma take everything that you go-o-ot … I love robbery and fraud, I’m a shoplifting god”)—feature slo-mo pans: energy drinks, candies, cleaning products.

The subreddit r/ShopliftersGoneWild, which has been around for two years and has 5,200 members, is run by a 53-year-old man in Florida who works from home for a medical company.  He asked not to be named, “because the internet is a crazy place.” He’s not a shoplifter himself; in fact, he’s quite derisive of lifters. His wife works in retail and has long provided him with a steady supply of shoplifting stories at the dinner table. He told me that he launched the forum “to be funny”; he enjoys watching thieves and their critics go at each other in the comments.

GoneWild Man, as I’ll call him, started off posting videos of encounters between clerks and thieves. But the subreddit morphed into a place where compulsive lifters talk about why they do it, and right-thinking Americans confront them with the damage they’re doing to their own community.

“Some people love the risk,” GoneWild Man told me. “It’s the same adrenaline rush as skydiving, but a lot cheaper and safer.” The lifters “try to claim ‘we only do it from the big boxes, not the mom-and-pops,’” he said. “They make themselves out to be the good person.” Or not: Some advise newbies to avoid problems by threatening store security guards that if they “touch me, I’ll sue” or—an enduring legacy of COVID—“I’ll cough on you.”

GoneWild Man often struggles with a “moral dilemma”: Should he shut down the subreddit, especially when he sees people encouraging crime by, say, offering instructions on how to remove security tags from expensive garments?

He says he likes that law-abiding people jump in, trying to talk lifters out of stealing more stuff. But he’s under no illusions that his subreddit is converting thieves into upstanding citizens. It’s hard to detect much shame among brazen lifters. He does, however, see some fear. Perhaps the most frequently asked question on the forum is: “Am I going to get busted?”

If there’s one thing retailers agree on, it’s that the courts will never make shoplifting a high-enough priority. The industry, therefore, devotes enormous energy to figuring out its own defense.

Kay Patel, an engineer for a tech company in Philadelphia, thought that owning a convenience store would be a rewarding side gig. What he didn’t count on when he bought the store last October was about $200 to $300 in goods walking out the door every day. “This place is definitely harder than I thought it would be,” he told me. “People came in and took whatever they wanted.”

Temple University’s campus police have a station down the block, and officers are in and out of Patel’s shop all day. (Patel draws them in with free coffee.) Shoplifters paid the officers no mind. Kids would run in, grab snacks, and bolt. “You can’t do anything,” one of them taunted Patel. He had a point. Patel can’t file an insurance claim without his rates shooting up. He doesn’t want his seven employees chasing or grabbing lifters, because it’s not worth the risk of violence. Patel had 16 cameras inside and outside the store, but his cashiers couldn’t monitor the screens while they rang up purchases.

On a drizzly, gloomy day in May, I watched as a 15-year-old boy strolled toward the exit of Patel’s store, sipping from a Big Gulp cup. From behind the counter, the cashier called to him: “Hey, kid!”

The kid wheeled around and held out his cup: “It’s just water.”

The cashier waved him on. Confrontation diffused. False alarm. What the kid didn’t know was that seconds before the cashier had called out to him, the cashier’s phone had buzzed with an alert. A few months earlier, Patel had installed a security-software product called Veesion—one of a slew of new programs that promise to catch thieves before they steal anything. The software, constantly scanning every aisle of the store, had captured the boy’s image and used AI to analyze his movements. “Gesture close to body,” said the alert, displaying an image of the boy holding his cup up against his chest.

Minutes later, another alert flashed on the cashier’s phone: “Very suspicious,” it said, showing a woman in the back of the store rummaging through her purse. The cashier looked up and saw the woman at the ATM machine. She’d been digging out her bank card.

The software picks up on the kinds of “suspicious cues” that the Atlanta-drugstore study found were the most accurate predictors of shoplifting behavior: people turning their head as they scan the aisles, nervously playing with products, looking for cameras or security tags. Alerts fly when people reach into their pockets, open their handbag, stick a hand inside their jacket. Patel says that Veesion alerts him and his employees 50 to 60 times a day, and about half are false alarms. In the week before my visit to the store, one alert was triggered by a man nonchalantly loading some 30 cans of Red Bull into his backpack. When the cashier confronted the man, he dropped the bag and left, Patel told me. This, he added, happens in many cases when a shoplifter is called out. He told me that his losses have fallen to maybe $75 a day.

Video and AI solutions are all the rage at loss-prevention trade shows. FaceFirst, for example, promises to “instantly detect habitual shoplifters” by running customers’ faces through a database of proven thieves. There’s talk of creating a surveillance network across the retail industry that would allow stores to share images of alleged or convicted shoplifters.

AI doesn’t get bored monitoring video, so it can watch the parking lot and alert store clerks if someone walks toward the shop carrying a crowbar. “Hey, manager, do you want to lock the front door?” the bot might ask. But such technologies also raise the creepiness factor and its more serious corollary: the potential that someone will perceive racial discrimination and take action against your business.

[Read: Defund facial recognition before it’s too late]

Still, the products keep coming. An Irish program, Everseen, recognizes when customers at self-checkout stations mis-scan products (for example, waving a barcode filched from some cheap product over the scanner instead of the one on the steak they’re putting in their bag).

Big home-improvement chains have developed power tools that remain deactivated until they’re purchased. Grocery chains in the U.K. are storing expensive meats in a case that opens only after checkout. Some supermarkets have shopping carts that jam if they approach the store exit without clearing the checkout lane—an extra security layer that may slow down shoplifters but can also make consumers “feel corralled,” says Emmeline Taylor, a criminologist at City, University of London who studies retail theft. Last year, Walgreens opened a store in Chicago in which most products have been removed from the open shelves and customers must order at a kiosk up front, whereupon a clerk retrieves their items from storage.

Barbara Staib, an executive at the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, has been at this for a quarter of a century. She’s seen fancy fixes come and go. “You can keep going with your technology and your solutions and all the innovation in the world, but if you don’t address motivations, you’re not going to get anywhere,” she told me. That could mean getting shoplifters into counseling, rehab programs, food-assistance services, and job-training classes. Sometimes, especially with casual thieves, a few hours of education about the impact that shoplifting can have on their own friends and family—raising prices, closing stores—can make a difference. Staib’s organization offers a four-hour course focused on sending shoplifters the message that their behavior isn’t harmless. It seems to help: A four-year study in King County, Washington, found that fewer than 6 percent of young people who finished the course were nabbed again for shoplifting.

Such efforts won’t stop organized retail crime, Staib conceded, but they might help the many occasional shoplifters who think thievery is no big deal. “These people you can educate,” she told me. “We can’t stop them; we have to get them to stop themselves.”

But the surge in shoplifting is one piece of a larger collapse of the social forces that once restrained wayward behavior at least as much as the law did: trust, guilt, and shame. It took a lot to get us to this point—huge technological and psychological disruption; the atomization of American life by the anonymity of the internet; the isolation imposed by COVID lockdowns, which eroded many people’s sense of empathy; a lack of consequences for stealing, attributable to reductions in policing and store staffing. It’s hard to see how better surveillance cameras and longer prison terms, let alone programs like Staib’s, could roll back such powerful changes in how we live.

Maybe GoneWild Man was right when he said, “It’s just okay to be a bad person now.”

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Floridians regularly observe that Florida is trying to kill us. Venomous water snakes lie in wait for heedless kayakers paddling down the wrong slough. More people die of lightning strikes in Florida than in any other state. I-4, from Tampa to Daytona Beach, is the deadliest highway in the country. Mosquitoes the size of tire irons carry several sorts of fever and encephalitis, and the guacamole-colored algae infesting our waters can cause severe respiratory distress and liver disease. Despite claims of perpetual sunshine, the weather in Florida is often horrendous: 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 95 percent humidity.

Then there are the storms. In three months, we’ve been hit by three hurricanes, of escalating severity: Debby, Helene, and Milton. Governor Ron DeSantis may have barred any mention of climate change from state statutes, but the seas are getting hotter and hotter, brewing the fuel that powers these bigger, badder storms. Towns from Siesta Key, on the Gulf, to Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic, are in pieces, roofs ripped off and thrown around like Lego pieces, boats snatched from their moorings and dumped onto people’s front yards. The damage is estimated in the billions; the storms have caused about 60 deaths in the state.

Many of us are asking the question that has long occurred to onlookers from elsewhere: Why on earth does anyone want to live here? What’s the fatal charm that entices hundreds of thousands of people to move to Florida every year and keeps them here?

To paraphrase Henry James—who visited Palm Beach County in 1905 and didn’t think much of the place—it is a complex fate to be a Floridian. Still, millions of us embrace the complexity, finding our own Florida in the kaleidoscope colors of the state. If you want a rich mezcla of food and music, we have that; if being near water uplifts your spirit, we have lakes, rivers, lagoons, bays, and beaches where the sand looks like icing sugar; if you want to fight against the “woke,” Florida is a good base of operations. For me, it’s the landscape of my childhood, my history, the place that made my family and made me, no matter how infuriating I often find it.

Florida can be every bit as alluring as advertised. Despite the best efforts of drain-and-pave developers hell-bent on monetizing every square inch of potential real estate, it has areas of blazing beauty: the Everglades in early summer; saw grass lit by a pink and orange dawn; the turquoise waters of the Forgotten Coast; the millennium-old mounds standing in green dignity on the shore of Lake Jackson; the bald-cypress trees that were saplings when Augustus Caesar ruled Rome and 100 feet high when the Spanish arrived to colonize the land they named after Pascua Florida, the Feast of Flowers. Florida was multicultural before multicultural was cool, drawing immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula, France, Britain, Greece, Latin America, and the Caribbean, interwoven with the native peoples who survived my forebears’ arrival and the descendants of enslaved Africans brought in to work the rice and cotton plantations when Florida became part of the United States in 1821.

Politicians, condominium touts, and tourist-board boosters will tell you that Florida is paradise, a Garden of Eden at North America’s southeastern corner. Citizens of the upper 48 are sold a daydream Florida of poolside cocktails, low taxes, and conservative-leaning politics. They imagine a life spent tootling around on golf carts or lolling on pontoon boats, liberated from shoveling snow and having to pay for public schools and social services.

For them, Florida operates in a state of amnesia, promising an endless vacation wasting away in Margaritaville. If people actually faced the fact of climate change, we’d stop building on barrier islands; we’d retreat inland; we’d demand a halt to the destruction of mangrove forests and wetlands that mitigate storm surges. But that’s not happening, not while money’s to be made creating an illusion of paradise.

Read: Florida’s risky bet

As a teenager, I declared I’d move away and never live in Florida again. My issue wasn’t the hurricanes: We taped up the picture windows, filled the bathtubs with water and got on with it. It wasn’t the politics: Florida in the 1980s was a progressive state, determined to cure a pounding Jim Crow hangover. Mainly, I just wanted to experience places where college football wasn’t the biggest social event and not everybody knew your family.

So I left: first for university in England, where I stayed 10 years, then for academic jobs elsewhere in the United States. Yet here I am, right back where I was born, in Tallahassee. I chose to return, partly because Florida is congenitally eccentric, a story gold mine for writers, partly because of the startling loveliness of my part of the state, with its icy springs and red-clay hills, and partly because it’s where my kinfolk are. We’ve lived in Florida for more than 200 years; I feel a deep sense of ownership and responsibility.

Life here can be challenging. I teach at Florida State University, where, despite DeSantis’s efforts to legislate away all learning about race and gender as “woke,” faculty and students persist in fostering diversity and seeking knowledge. Yet several colleagues in my department are leaving, saying they refuse to raise daughters in a state that denies them reproductive freedom. Families with trans kids are also moving in order to protect them from repressive state laws that impede gender-affirming treatment.

You now can’t get an abortion in the state after six weeks. But you can buy pretty much any kind of gun and carry it concealed to the beach, church, or Walmart. As of last week, Florida had suffered 24 mass shootings this year.

Florida is also home to Moms for Liberty, whose self-proclaimed mission is to “protect childhood innocence.” I’m with the comedian Wanda Sykes, who says, “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit.”

Florida has a long history of focusing on the wrong shit, from defending slavery in the Civil War, to trying to drain the Everglades in the early 20th century to make the land turn a profit, to pretending climate change is not real despite regular flooding in the streets of Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Nevertheless, Florida’s stubborn refusal to accept certain realities is perversely fascinating. I kind of admire it—and enjoy living in a place that embraces the aspirational over the actual. I just wish that we could find a way to be more generous toward our people and our environment.

The right stuff to focus on would be fixing the insurance market—Florida has the most expensive premiums in the country—and doing something to move us toward sustainable energy. Yet the governor and legislature’s culture-wars obsession excludes dealing with these very large, very real problems. As a result, people whose lives have been wrecked by the hurricanes struggle to scrape together the money to rebuild their splintered houses, hoping next year will be different. And if they can’t afford to rebuild, a developer will come along and buy the place, restarting the cycle by putting up bigger and more expensive residences for new Floridians convinced that their beachside dream house won’t be smashed in next year’s storms.

So, ineluctably, people will keep leaving their old homes and heading south, craving the fiction that is Florida while ignoring its unsettling realities. Sometimes, I wonder if people move here to be absolved of the need to ever think again. Then again, who am I to preach? I can tell you all the reasons to leave, but I choose to stay. Spending so long on one patch of ground shapes the soul. I know where home is. And someone has to bear witness to the Florida that’s daily disappearing.

Of the many challenges I encountered as a parent of young children, the biggest was trying to answer the question: Am I doing a good job? I found plenty of people, drawing on expertise in biology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary history, eager to offer opinions and tips. Some of this information was useful. But none of it gave me what I really wanted—a big-picture vision of what it meant to be a “good” parent, or of what I fundamentally owed my kids.

Care is as much practical work as it is psychological, ethical, and spiritual. Yet parenting seemed to be missing in a substantial way from the sources that I and many other people use to understand their place in the world. Religion, classic novels, philosophy, even economics have long presented the intellectual and emotional work of parenting as a footnote to the human story, rather than as a major plot point. I craved a body of thought that treated parenting as worthy of serious inquiry and established care as central to our moral concerns. I wanted context for the epiphanies and perplexities I was experiencing daily. So I went searching. And, in due course, I found my way to a branch of philosophy known as care ethics.

A confession: I had little interest in philosophy before becoming a parent. My previous exposure to the subject had consisted of a few weeks of Philosophy 101, during which far-out theoreticals such as the “trolley problem” dominated the discussion. What, I wondered then, could gaming out what I would do in the unlikeliest of situations teach me about how to deal with the day-to-day conundrums of undergrad life?

But care ethics has made me something of a philosophy convert. In this system of thought, relationships in which one human relies on another, including those between parent and child, are treated with rigor and depth. Care ethicists spend their days contemplating subjects such as the essence of what it means to care well for another, and how this care intersects with people’s capacity to be “good” or to live what they might call “the good life”—or, to honor the way care ethics keeps the subjective nature of experience front of mind, “a good life.”

Care ethics is, in a sense, anti-trolley-problem philosophy. Abstract scenarios tend to focus on one moment. Care ethics focuses on moral matters that take place over time, just as relationships do. And it doesn’t shy away from the fact that the moral decisions people might make involving their spouse or children are probably different from those they would make involving friends or strangers. “There is so much gray area with care,” Maurice Hamington, a care ethicist and Portland State University philosophy professor, told me. “Care is sloppy and messy, and you get your hands dirty, and there is so much that constantly needs to be negotiated,” which is most likely one reason philosophers have historically avoided the subject. “It’s not the kind of philosophy that you can put on a bumper sticker.”

As many care ethicists are apt to point out, when people reflect on their life, burrowing around for what really matters and who they really are, the care they gave and the care they received is almost always top of mind. Yet philosophical reckonings with morality have long failed to acknowledge this. Thinkers have instead been preoccupied with defining right or wrong based on interactions between independents, two people who are essentially equals. But humans spend much of their lives in dependency relationships: We start as children dependent on parents, become adults who care for our children, move on to caring for our parents or other adults, and later become older and require care again. Not always in that order, not always with all the steps. But true independence is the anomaly, not the norm.

[Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?]

Care ethicists endeavor to confront the depths to which humans have needs, feelings, and bodies that break. Work in this area began with the psychologist Carol Gilligan, who in the late 1970s began questioning studies that had suggested that girls were less morally developed than boys. Gilligan’s research, featured in her 1982 book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, found that women and girls weren’t lacking in the ability to contend with moral questions, as earlier thinkers had argued, but that they instead had a different approach to figuring out right and wrong. When working through ethical dilemmas, girls, Gilligan found, were inclined to consider the particulars of relationships alongside big moral ideals and virtues. A girl might be more willing to lie to protect someone she cares about, for instance, while a boy might be more determined to tell the truth no matter the personal fallout, because he values honesty as an ethical principle.

Inspired by Gilligan’s work, some philosophers, most of them women, started considering the absence of care relationships in their own discipline—a field not coincidentally dominated by men. One of the first books to consider the moral dynamics of interpersonal caregiving was Nel Noddings’s 1984 work, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (the original subtitle used A Feminine Approach). Noddings—who had 10 children, described herself as “incurably domestic,” and began her philosophy career in her 40s—wrote that the care we receive as children serves as the foundation of our impulse to be good, and that this is something we might carry for the rest of our days. This represented a departure from much of the dry, objective reasoning by earlier philosophers, many of whom saw emotional relationships and domestic life as obstacles to clear-headed moral thinking.

Today, care ethics is in what Hamington, the Portland State ethicist, described to me as a “golden age.” More thinkers are working on care through various lenses, including the interpersonal, the political, and the spaces where the two meet. This development comes at a pivotal time, as American politicians, including Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and J. D. Vance, are not only debating the best ways to support parents and other caregivers but also talking about how their care experiences shaped their character and fitness to lead their country.

[Read: The GOP’s pro-family delusion]

A relatively recent attempt to integrate care into everyday thinking is the Social Science of Caregiving. The project, based at Stanford University, is led by the UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik, who has brought together economists, philosophers, biologists, and psychologists to better understand the nature of caregiving. It’s a subject “whose time has come,” Gopnik told me. One of the project’s big aims, she said, is to consider the ways in which government policies and culture rest on the assumption that people are independent, and to reimagine a social contract that acknowledges the ubiquity of dependency.

American society, in which support for caregivers lags far behind that in other developed nations, is not yet structured to reflect this ubiquity. I have learned from care ethicists that when a country truly supports parents and caregivers, when it treats care as a core value, it doesn’t just offer people relief in the form of rest and financial resources. It also increases and embraces the possibility that people might grow from the experience of caring for others—that they might see care, the giving and receiving of it, as an indispensable part of living “the good life.”

The more I put care at the center of my moral accounting, the more I started to consider it a clear and obvious part of a rich, meaningful existence—the kind of subject worthy of dinner-party conversations with my smartest friends. Many of the philosophers I spoke with felt the same. I’ve never come across a care ethicist who would argue that parenting and other caregiving inevitably make us better, more enlightened people. But many told me that they believe it can lead to substantial growth when accompanied with self-awareness and curiosity.

[Read: Lighthouse parents have more confident kids]

An important part of this process is learning to wrestle with vulnerability—one of care ethics’ core preoccupations. “Vulnerability is not really something discussed in other philosophical circles,” Daniel Engster, a University of Houston political philosopher, told me. This is because our capacity to be hurt or feel weak takes us out of the realm of abstraction—the stuff on which so much theory is based—and into the unruly complexity of human connection. “In care ethics,” Engster said, “vulnerability is not something to be shunned or ashamed of. It is a real moral concept.” Should a care ethicist ever be forced to come up with a bumper sticker, it would probably mention vulnerability.

Some care ethicists focus mainly on the care recipient’s vulnerability. In this view, my big ethical job as a parent is to pay close attention to my children, attempt to understand their needs and desires, and act accordingly; my agenda for them should not really be in the picture. Other ethicists, such as Engster, make room for parents’ vulnerability and desires. Engster believes that parents and other caregivers can play a role in determining a child’s needs, but that this must stem from deep engagement with that child and curiosity about who they are. “I like to think of good care as a dance,” he said. “Whoever is leading may have some idea of where and how caring should go, but it has to be constantly responsive to the one being cared for, trying to match their steps.”

Crucially, alongside these visions of what constitutes good care sit equally useful ideas about what good care is not. “Care is not altruism,” Hamington told me, pointing to one of the most damaging misunderstandings about parenting. For me, learning this distinction felt like the unfogging of a mirror, a sense of finally being seen and seeing myself clearly as a parent. By removing care from the realm of selflessness, I felt relieved of a certain variety of mom guilt—the kind that grows from the cultural pressure to suppress my needs while trying to meet the needs of my kids. Such pressure obscures one of the highest aims of good care, which is to model for children how to listen carefully to themselves and other people, the Penn State philosophy professor and ethicist Sarah Clark Miller told me. “If we are cared for in our neediness and vulnerability when we’re young,” Miller said, “we learn to make meaning in ways that help us weather the bad, amplify the good, and generally be humans who can connect well with others.”

[Read: How to quit intensive parenting]

In the child-rearing equation, our culture tends to see parents as the fixed factor and children as the variable factor. Children get to grow, while parents are expected to be a steady, stabilizing force. How boring. Care ethics helped me see myself as a variable factor as well. As a result, I feel not only liberated from a checklist approach to parenthood but also more able to see the challenges of parenting as a fulfilling intellectual and emotional exercise. As I help my children learn to make meaning of their own lives, I am discovering ways to make meaning in my own.

Today, if someone were to demand a definition of “good” parenting from me, I think I would start with Engster’s dance. Success isn’t meeting a set of external expectations, or maintaining a particular mood or Instagram-approved vocal register. Success is being present in the chaos of the exchange and accepting that my kids and I will have moments of knowing and not knowing, speaking and listening, holding on and letting go. Success is knowing that this dance is some of the hardest work I will ever do in my life, that I will not always be up for it, and that I will make plenty of mistakes. It also means owning these mistakes in front of my kids—because I, too, get to be vulnerable. Care, in other words, is real life. Important life. Understanding this has helped me to live what I would call a good one.

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For various reasons, January 6 rioters have been held together in a segregated wing of the D.C. jail that they came to call the “Patriot Pod.” They developed their own rituals and inside jokes, and reinforced one another’s narratives. Over time, the expected happened: They became further radicalized. And through connections with right-wing media, they have attempted to recast themselves with terms such as political prisoner and hostage, which the presidential candidate Donald Trump has now adopted as his own.

In this episode, we follow a young rioter from the Patriot Pod who went into jail a mischievous goofball and emerged willing to die for the MAGA cause. We tell, for the first time, an inside story of exactly what happened within the pod, how it spread out to the world, and what this tight-knit group is planning for the future.

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: In May of 2024, a new person was hanging around our neighbors’ house—a young guy, fresh out of prison, who was spending nights at the “Eagle’s Nest.” Around us, Micki referred to him as “the little boy.” His real name is Brandon Fellows.

[Music]

Rosin: Brandon had come to the Capitol on January 6 armed with a fake orange beard that looked like it was made from his mom’s leftover yarn and a weird knitted hat. He was having fun until someone in front of him started smashing a window with a cane, which prompted a cop to swing his baton, and then Brandon freaked out.

Brandon Fellows: I’m like, Oh my god. Holy shit. Holy shit. I said it, like, five times, and I’m just like, Yeah. They clearly don’t want us in there. That’s what I said in my mind. I’m not going in there. I’m not getting hit. I like my face. I’m not going to get hit. I’m not doing that.

Rosin: So Brandon just hung around for a while, did some people watching. Eventually, he wandered over to the other side of the building, where, according to him, he saw cops just kind of passively letting rioters inside. So he climbed through a window and ended up in Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley’s office with his feet up on the desk, smoking a joint.

I had this idea of Brandon as, like, the Seth Rogan of insurrectionists: goofball, high by noon, not exactly militia material.

Rosin: Are you Brandon?

Fellows: Yes.

Rosin: I’m Hanna. Hi.

Fellows: Nice to meet you.

Rosin: But the Brandon I met three years later looked different: totally beardless, conspicuously fit. He showed up at this Memorial Day march that Micki organized about a week after he was released from prison.

Lauren Ober: Hey, Micki. How far are you going?

Micki Witthoeft: To the jail.

Rosin: The counterprotesters were already trailing with megaphones, so Micki was strict. Stay on the sidewalks. Don’t cause trouble.

Witthoeft: I’m not interested in any kind of conflict.

Ober: But newly released Brandon was having too much fun to obey. A D.C. resident told him to get off his property. Brandon yelled back, “I was at the Capitol on January 6!” A group of guys in MAGA hats saluted him, “Political prisoner. Thanks for sticking it out!” Marchers cheered him on as he walked by, took selfies, asked questions.

Marcher: Did you feel like you were going to get your ass kicked from time to time, being in a D.C. jail? I mean, I would think that if you’re a white boy in D.C. jail, you’d be getting your ass kicked.

Fellows: It’s total culture shock. It’s crazy. But I survived. I only got into one fight.

Rosin: I was interested in Brandon because he was one of the only released J6ers who came straight back to D.C., a one-man experiment I could follow for what was coming for us on January 6, 2025, the day the next election is scheduled to be certified—especially if Trump loses.

And I could tell, even just from that march, that some new kind of energy was blooming in Brandon. No more weed. No more disguises. Postprison, his defiance had a different tone, which I picked up when I was following him at the march and I overheard him mention death a couple of times.

Fellows: Yeah. If it’s my time to die, it’s my time to die. I prefer not to, but life is beautiful.

Rosin: I’m eavesdropping, by the way. I got here at the time when you were like, I can die. There was something about death, and I was like, Huh?

Rosin: I sound awkwardly confused because I was confused. Why does a 30-year-old think it might be his time to die? Die for what? And why so dramatic?

I’m Hanna Rosin.

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

Rosin: Okay, to understand how Brandon went from “I’m not doing that,” on January 6, 2021, to “I’m ready to die,” in 2024—a little bit about Brandon: He’s now 30. He grew up in Schenectady, New York, born into a line of military men going back before the Civil War. He told me his grandfather was the main inventor of a gun that shoots 3,000 bullets per minute. His dad was an Army sniper. But Brandon was different.

Fellows: I kind of went through this emo phase. I had longer hair. I dyed it black, wore black clothes, like rock-band clothes.

Rosin: When he was 13, Brandon started wearing eyeliner, trying to impress the emo girls he was hanging out with. Usually, he would wipe it off before he got to his dad’s house, but one day he forgot.

Fellows: And he’s like, Is that eyeliner on your face? And I was like, No. Clearly it was. I didn’t wipe it off. And he’s like, Don’t lie to me. He hates lies. And I was like, All right. Yes. It is. And he’s like, Brandon—this is the actual language he said. He’s like, I cannot have fags in my house.

Rosin: He said what now?

Fellows: He said, I cannot have fags in my house.

Rosin: After this and a couple of minor domestic disputes, Brandon’s dad said he couldn’t stay with him anymore—like, ever—although they did make up three years later. We couldn’t reach his dad for comment, although his mom confirmed the events. He spent the rest of his teenage years living only at his mom’s house, until he didn’t want to do that anymore, and he found his own way to live.

Fellows: So I have two tiny houses almost at all times.

Rosin: Wait. You were a tiny houser?

Fellows: Yes. I’ve been a tiny houser since 2016.

Rosin: Okay.

Fellows: I have a veggie-oil-powered bus. It’s almost—it’s 85 percent carbon-neutral. Very cool.

Rosin: From his tiny houses and his veggie bus, Brandon ran a tree-trimming business and a chimney-cleaning business. He’d never been to a Trump rally, or any rally, but decided to go that day. It’s kind of unclear why. Just all these things he’d been annoyed about—COVID restrictions, small-business restrictions—it seemed more fun to be annoyed in a crowd.

The following morning, January 7, Brandon does what people do after a big event: brunch, at a campground with other January 6 tiny housers. Apparently, he’s not alone in the January 6–tiny houser Venn diagram overlap.

Anyway, it was at this brunch where he learned that a woman had been killed at the Capitol: Micki’s daughter, Ashli. Someone showed him a video, and he cried.

Which for Brandon, is something. He doesn’t express emotions in any easily readable way and almost never in public. You can hear that in the way he speaks. But that video of Ashli—it got to him.

Fellows: And that’s a reason why I showed back up on the eighth, to D.C. I came back. But nobody was there.

Rosin: Nobody was at the Capitol—just a vast field littered with empty water bottles and pepper-spray cans—so he went home. All the other people at the Capitol on January 6—they went home too.

And then the FBI began the largest manhunt in American history. Agents combed through thousands of hours of video and sourced leads from an anonymous group of online sleuths called the Sedition Hunters.

At home, in New York, Brandon noticed a new type of visitor to his LinkedIn profile: so-and-so from the FBI Albany field office, the D.C. field office. And then a cop showed up at his mom’s house, and Brandon began his journey back to D.C.

Fellows: It’s July 2, 2021, is when I reached the D.C. jail. So I walk through the center doors, and—I kid you not—within 15 seconds, I hear on the speakers, Something, something, something, medical staff, medical staff, stabbing victim.

Rosin: About a week later, he’s moved to a temporary cell and more of the same.

Fellows: I start heading over to this basketball court, interior basketball court. So the first probably, like, two minutes, I see this dude come up to this dude, and he says, Where’s my honey bun? And he, all of a sudden, starts stabbing a guy.

Rosin: Wait. You’re watching someone—

Fellows: Yep.

Rosin: With what?

Fellows: I couldn’t make out what it was, but I saw him stabbing him, and I saw some blood. And I watched that just with my jaw dropped, and I’m looking to my right, and I’m seeing these four payphones. And everybody’s just talking. They’re still talking to the person they’re on the phone with, like this happens all—like this is nothing. I was like, I gotta get out of here.

Rosin: Were you genuinely freaked out?

Fellows: I went to go do pull-ups immediately.

Rosin: For a lot of J6ers I’ve interviewed, intake at the D.C. jail is seared into their brains. Most of them had never been to jail before, much less the D.C. jail, which is notorious for its violence. I’ve heard of J6ers who cried in the transport van when they realized where they were going.

But intake is not where they stayed. The population of the D.C. jail is about 90 percent Black, and judges were importing a bunch of guys whose collective reputation was “white supremacist,” so they ended up housed in a segregated unit. The consequences of this were huge and sometimes absurd.

What resulted would eventually become known as the “Patriot Pod,” the place where groups of J6ers were imprisoned together, 20 to 30 at a time over three years. These are the people that Micki and Nicole held their vigil for every night over those two years.

By the time Brandon arrived in D.C., about six months after January 6, he already knew about the Patriot Pod.

Fellows: So we’re walking in, and I’m just imagining in my head. I’m like, Oh I’m gonna walk in to cheers. Like, oh another person like, Hey. We’re sorry this is happening to you. But hey—you know, you made it.

Rosin: There were no cheers, but there was plenty of goodwill. Plus, for Brandon, this was a who’s who of J6—people he’d read about or seen on YouTube during the endless hours he’d spent on house arrest.

Fellows: People started coming up to my cell and talking to me. One standout was Julian Khater, because he said, Hey. I’m the guy that they accused of killing Officer Sicknick. I’m like, No way!

Rosin: This was the crowd that Brandon was walking into: Khater, who pleaded guilty to assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon, and Guy Reffitt, Nicole’s husband, who came to the Capitol with a gun, and a guy named Nate DeGrave, who bragged about punching a cop.

Fellows: Tons of people started coming over, and they’re like, Hey. We’ve got commissary for you. We’ve got commissary. And I’m like, Oh. Okay. So that made up for the not cheering.

Rosin: Fellow J6ers came by Brandon’s cell and asked, Hey. You need a radio? Pen and paper? Need some extra clothes? They dropped off beef jerky, ramen, mac and cheese. Dozens came by just to introduce themselves and talk to the new guy. By the end of the day, Brandon had a stack of items outside his cell and a lot of new friends.

Rosin: They’re just giving you stuff?

Fellows: Yeah.

Rosin: I mean, this is like—this sounds like summer camp.

Fellows: I want to be careful to say that it’s summer camp because, you know, we’re not getting sunlight. We’re getting terrible food. We’re getting—yeah, okay, cool—getting camp food.

But it seemed like at that moment, despite all the terrible stuff going on, we had a good sense of community. At least that’s what I was feeling at first. And like, we were taking care of each other.

Rosin: And why do you think it was like that?

Fellows: We’re the same—like, we all are there for the one event. This isn’t like, you know, in the other wings, where it’s like, Oh, what are you in for? We all know the event we’re in for. We just, like, have different stories of what happened at that event.

[Music]

Rosin: Because most J6ers had no criminal records, the jail-ness of jail came as a shock to them. Their families were mostly far away. They couldn’t shave. Their cells stank. And this is all happening in the winters of 2021 and 2022, when COVID variants were running rampant, especially in jails. Sometimes they had to endure long stretches of solitary confinement. People told me that by day three of being confined, they could hear real disturbing moans coming from some of the cells.

During one nine-day stretch of COVID-induced solitary, Brandon kind of lost it. A fellow J6er, a guy named Kash Kelly, was on detail, which meant he could roam from cell to cell, and he came to Brandon’s rescue.

Fellows: Kash comes up to me, and he’s like, You okay, man? I’m like, Yeah. (Sighs.) And then he’s like, No. No. Are you really okay? And I start tearing up and bawling, because I was, like—I didn’t expect to. I just started bawling. And I, like, turned away from him. And he’s like, Oh, bro. Bro, you alright?

Rosin: The J6ers were going through hell, but the difference between them and the average person in D.C. jail—or, really, any American jail—is that they were going through hell together, so they could soothe each other with a reach out, some commissary, a well-timed joke.

Sometimes, they even found a way to have fun. When the COVID era died down and the men could spend more time out of their cells, they came up with one for the ages, one they’ll remember at a million reunions down the road. They called it The Hopium Den.

On these nights, the men of the Patriot Pod gathered their chairs into a semicircle, their cozy amphitheater the site for the show. The emcee was a U.S. Special Forces vet accused of beating a police officer on January 6 with a flagpole. In jail, his fake mic was a mop.

The Hopium Den was a place where the J6ers turned the drudgery of jail into theater. For example, one guy took moldy bologna and rubbed it on another guy’s head and called it a hair-growth commercial. Another guy lifted his shirt up and ate coleslaw like a slob—apparently, he really loved the gloopy prison coleslaw. This was a roast. They rapped diss tracks, wrote mushy poetry to pretend they were gay.

I’ve heard about so many Hopium Den skits, sometimes the guys are snorting with laughter when they recount them to me. And I never understand why they are funny. But that only tells me that, as much as they were stressed and got fed up with each other sometimes, they still had a million inside jokes.

Nate DeGrave: Dear fellow Americans, I never thought I’d write a letter like this.

Rosin: It’s not easy to mark exactly when these individual J6ers became the Patriot Pod—became a unit—and when that unit became an important symbol to MAGA out in the world. One important early moment came in October 2021, when a guy named Nate DeGrave wrote a letter to a right-wing media site.

DeGrave: This is my cry for help. My name is Nathan DeGrave, and as a nonviolent participant at the January 6 rally, I spent the last nine months detained as a political prisoner in pod C2B at the D.C. D.O.C., otherwise known as D.C.’s Gitmo.

Rosin: In his letter, Nate described the conditions as “inhumane.” He said the J6ers were depressed and anxious from the “mental abuse we endure.” He complained about the guards. And then came the important part: He used the phrases “political prisoner” and “D.C.’s Gitmo”—phrases that would shortly be everywhere.

Nate sent the letter to a friend he knew at Gateway Pundit, a right-wing media site. And immediately, it caught fire. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted about it. Greg Kelly called. Tucker Carlson mentioned it.

DeGrave: It started to catch a lot of attention, and more and more people were adopting the same phrases and words that we were using to describe ourselves.

Rosin: Nate DeGrave was on the phone with his attorney right after his letter got published, and the attorney was watching the GiveSendGo, which is a Christian crowdfunding site. Lots of people in the J6 pod use the site to raise funds for legal fees.

DeGrave: I mean, it went from zero to, like, $20,000, $30,000 in a 10-, 15-minute period.

Rosin: What?

DeGrave: And then I just continued to climb from there. And I think at the end of the first day, I was at probably just north of $70,000.

Rosin: In one day.

DeGrave: In one day. It was amazing. I almost forgot for a moment that I was still in jail.

Rosin: The immediate virality confirmed something for them: Even though their surroundings—iron bars, broken toilet, curfew—told them one story, You are temporarily banished from decent society, that story, they were starting to believe, was not true. They were the decent society. It was the outside that was wrong. And maybe the key thing that confirmed this new truth for them was what happened with the song.

[J6 Prison Choir featuring Donald Trump, “Justice for All”]

Rosin: How did the singing start? Like, how did that tradition start?

Scott Fairlamb: It was right, I think, when I had come in that it started to take off. I’m not sure exactly who started it. It kind of just snowballed, you know?

Rosin: This is Scott Fairlamb, who pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer. Scott arrived in the Patriot Pod in March 2021.

Rosin: So it happened at a certain time every night?

Fairlamb: Every night at 9 o’clock, we would get everybody and make everybody aware at three minutes out.

Rosin: How?

Fairlamb: I would yell through the door, “Three minutes!” And everyone else could echo it: “Three minutes.” “Three minutes.” “Three minutes.” So everybody would be ready.

Rosin: Scott said at first, the singing started out hesitant, kind of quiet. They weren’t exactly choir types, plus you never knew if the CO on duty that night could get pissed about the singing. But night after night, they did it. And at first, in these early months of the Patriot Pod, it wasn’t for anyone. There was no audience. It was just for themselves.

Fairlamb: And then mid-song, you know, “And our flag was—” and then everybody would yell, “—still there!” You could feel the building shake.

Rosin: Why “still there”? Why those words?

Fairlamb: Because we were “still there.” It was a reminder.

Rosin: That what?

Fairlamb: That we stood up for what we believe in and that we were still patriots, no matter who wanted to deem us as less than that, and it was something that really kept my morale and my love of country intact.

Rosin: Like The Hopium Den, this singing had an element of theater. Unlike The Hopium Den, this particular ritual spread far and wide, from their little jailhouse community theater out to the political equivalent of Broadway.

If someone made the inspirational musical, here is how it would roll out: A group of men believe they’ve been betrayed by their country, and they start to taste despair. Without their love of America, who even are they? Then one day, one of them opens his mouth and warbles a patriotic tune.

[J6 Prison Choir featuring Donald Trump, “Justice for All”]

Rosin: One of the men—that’s Guy Reffitt—tells his wife about it—that’s Nicole. And one day, she meets a new friend, Micki, and they, too, join the singing.

Person on speaker: It’s 8:59. Let me say the one-minute warning—

Rosin: Pretty soon, they recruit a small, amateur choir. That’s the nightly vigil. They start livestreaming the singing every night, and someone hears it and has an idea: Take this song plus Trump’s voice, and you have magic.

[J6 Prison Choir featuring Donald Trump, “Justice for All”]

Rosin: Trump starts to use this recording as his campaign walkout song, the same song we heard at CPAC. It goes to No. 1 on iTunes.

At his first big official campaign event, in Waco, Texas, in March 2023, Trump goes big and theatrical with it.

[J6 Prison Choir featuring Donald Trump, “Justice for All”]

Rosin: Huge screens play dramatic scenes from January 6 as he speaks.

Donald Trump: Thank you very much, everybody.

Rosin: And curtain.

Ober: In all this singing and fraternizing, there was one person who was on the fringes. Some guys would bully him, get on his case because his cell was filthy. In the Patriot Pod, Brandon stood out for the wrong reasons, so he set out to fix that. That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: As Brandon spent more time fraternizing with these guys, he started to think more about one way he was not like them.

The way Brandon saw it, there was a bright line in the pod. On one side were him and a couple of other guys—the nonviolent guys, he calls them, who, when they saw trouble, ducked. And on the other, heroes: people like Nicole’s husband, Guy Reffitt, who’d brought an actual gun to the Capitol. Eight months into jail for Brandon, he wanted to be on the other side of that line.

Fellows: These guys are the real people, the real heroes. I’m not a hero. I’m just some idiot that took selfies inside and smoked somebody’s joint that was passed around. I was there to take selfies, and I just happened to get caught up in this crap. But these people were actually, it seemed, willing, though they didn’t use guns. And then I just started—my eyes started opening up.

[Music]

Rosin: Here was his clever idea: Some of the detainees had been given these iPad-like devices. The evidence being used against them consisted of videos, so they needed to watch them to prepare a defense. And Brandon noticed that on his device, the camera hadn’t been turned off.

Fellows: Bro, a cockroach just came out of that. Hold on.

Rosin: So he started to film.

Fellows: Do you see him moving around in there?

Rosin: He leaked those videos to Gateway Pundit, and on May 25, 2022, they published a story: “Exclusive Footage: Secret Video Recordings [Leaked] From Inside ‘The Hole’ of DC Gitmo.” It wasn’t “the hole,” just a regular cell, but whatever. It’s a better headline that way. Quote, “First footage ever released of cockroach and mold infested cell of J6 political prisoner.”

His fellow detainees were, for once, calling Brandon Fellows “brave.”

Fellows: I told them, Hey, guys. Here’s how we’re gonna sneak out future videos. Here’s how we’re gonna do this. I feel like I earned my respect, because, remember, some of them didn’t—some of them used to say, You’re not even a January 6er. Some of them used to say that because, you know, I didn’t do anything violent.

Rosin: Brandon couldn’t undo how he’d acted on January 6, 2021. But what he could do was pitch himself as the strategist of a future operation, whatever that operation might be.

By the time I met up with him, outside the jail, the clock was ticking. The upcoming election was close. And Brandon was strategizing. This time, some things were different: For one, he’s a mini celebrity. People from all over the world have offered him a place to stay if he needs it. He’s had job offers, one from one of the many J6ers who have run or are planning to run for public office. All the sudden, he seems to be everywhere.

In June, he popped up in my Twitter feed, going viral for making funny faces behind Dr. Anthony Fauci at a public hearing. And in July, this came up on our neighborhood text chain: D.C. Community Safety Alert. J6er Brandon Fellows in a MAGA group house called the Eagle’s Nest—yes, like Hitler—is bragging on Twitter about punching women at local bars.

Punching women at local bars? I’d known Brandon enough by now to think this was a little out of character. Or maybe I didn’t know Brandon. So first thing I did, of course, was watch the videos.

[Overlapping shouting, swearing]

Rosin: Best I can tell, here is what happened: The bar—which, by the way, happens to be a few minutes from my office—is packed for July 4. A woman sitting with her boyfriend says something about Brandon’s MAGA hat, which is hanging from his backpack. Brandon is there with another woman—I know her from the vigil—and she starts filming and taunting the woman and her boyfriend.

Woman: Oh my god!

[Shouting]

Rosin: Then it all breaks: The woman throws a punch, which lands on Brandon. He punches back. And then the boyfriend gets involved, and by the end, Brandon is pinning him down.

I can say this: Brandon didn’t start it. But I can also say this: The trolling escalated pretty quickly into a real fight. And so I suddenly felt more urgency to figure out what Brandon actually meant at that Ashli rally when he said he was “willing to die,” because in this bar incident, there was a very thin line between words and actual violence, which is, obviously, relevant to current events.

Rosin: Like, how long are you going to stay in D.C.? Like is this—do you have a plan here?

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

Rosin: Wow.

Fellows: Yeah. That was my plan.

Rosin: That feels vaguely threatening.

Fellows: I could see why you would say that, especially considering, you know, my feelings.

Rosin: About violence?

Fellows: Well, about how, man, I wish, after seeing all the chaos that’s happened in the world and to the country, how I wish people did more on January 6—instead of, like me, taking selfies and just smiling. I think it would have been better off if people actually would have actually been there for—like, more people would have actually been there for an insurrection.

Rosin: Best as I can tell, here was the evolution of young Brandon: When he arrived at the Patriot Pod a nonviolent J6er, he was a little starstruck. The violent offenders were, to him, hardcore. But when he left, they were more like exalted, not just hardcore but righteous— more like Founding Fathers.

Fellows: Who was it, Thomas Jefferson? He said something along the lines of—I think it was Thomas Jefferson—every 250 years or so, the tree of liberty will have to be—What is it? Like, we’ll have to have the blood of the tyrants and the patriots. Like, they’ll have to cleanse it. It’ll have to be cleansed with the blood of the patriots and the tyrants.

And that is such a scary thought. I don’t want that to happen. I think more people, as I continually point out, I think more people would have suffered if we didn’t have the Civil War and the Union didn’t win.

That’s how I kind of, like, view it. Like, All right, are we there? Do we need something like that in order to, like, save more lives? That’s how I view it. I know people disagree, but that’s what I look to.

Rosin: So what he’s saying is that sometimes blood has to be shed in the short-term to restore America to its original purpose in the long-term, or some illogical logic like that.

Fellows: This is all make believe, by the way. This is—

Rosin: I can’t tell with you what is make believe.

Fellows: No. No. No. I’m not making it up. I’m saying, though, I hope that it doesn’t come to this. You know, I’d be nice if Trump just got in, and if he just does what he did before, that’ll be a nice Band-Aid. We need something a little bit more intense, and I’m hoping it goes a little bit more intense.

Rosin: But there’s just a possibility that he will legitimately lose this election, like, at the ballot box.

Fellows: Yeah. I think at that point, you know, people might have to do something.

[Music]

Rosin: Donald Trump has been saying that he’ll only lose if Democrats cheat like hell. Brandon is taking that one step further: He’s saying it doesn’t matter if Trump loses legitimately or illegitimately. Either way, people might have to do something. So I guess now I had my answer—this is what Brandon meant when he said at the Ashli Memorial Day march, “It’s my time to die.”

Maybe the Brandons of the world just like to talk. Maybe the FBI will be better prepared. I don’t know. But I can tell you that a lot has changed since Brandon first showed up at the Capitol. The energy of these J6ers—it’s not shocked and naive, like it was four years ago. It’s more calculated and steely. This whole “cleansing with the blood of the patriots” thing that he’s talking about is not thinking of it as an accident that happened one day, when things got out of control. It’s more like a plan.

Ober: Soon after that incident at the bar where Brandon punched a woman, Micki and Brandon “had words” about his antics, mostly because she doesn’t like drawing that kind of negative attention to her house or her cause.

But these amped-up young patriots and the women of the Eagle’s Nest—they may be moving in different directions. That’s in our next and final episode of We Live Here Now.

[Music]

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

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

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

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Across the country, Donald Trump’s faithful fans sport MAGA merch—much of it emblazoned with antagonistic slogans—and line up to cheer for their candidate in arenas and event centers. His rallies are a cultural phenomenon, giving him a platform to boost violent rhetoric and deliver gibberish tirades. I spoke with my colleague John Hendrickson, who has been writing campaign-trail dispatches, about the differences he’s observed between Trump and Kamala Harris rallies and what draws people to such events.

A Never-Ending Tour

Lora Kelley: What makes attending a Trump rally feel different from other political events?

John Hendrickson: Trump long ago turned political rallies into a dark spectacle. Mitt Romney had rallies; John McCain had rallies; George W. Bush had rallies. But they didn’t have this carnival-type atmosphere.

I think a lot of people go because they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Maybe you can trace it to the decline of social organizations and even church attendance. Going to a Trump rally, being part of the MAGA movement, offers a sense of community—for better or for worse.

Trump remains a singular force. There’s such a cult of personality around him. His rallies are technically part of the campaign, but they’re almost unmoored from the traditional confines of a campaign. They’re his lifeblood. It reminds me of Bob Dylan’s never-ending tour, which has been going on since 1988. Trump has more or less been on his own never-ending tour for the past nine years.

Lora: How does that atmosphere contrast with what you see on the Democratic side?

John: Trump paints a dystopian portrait that revolves around this idea of a migrant “invasion” that’s destroying the fabric of the United States. His slogan—“Make America great again”—is predicated on an imagined past. Harris has zeroed in on a simple idea of championing freedom, which, ironically, used to be a Republican talking point. Her campaign rhetoric, as a whole, is far more positive and optimistic than Trump’s, especially when she’s talking about basic things such as the economy. But her tone often changes when she gets to the threats Trump poses to more personal issues, such as abortion rights, or when she called him “increasingly unstable and unhinged” at her recent rally in Pennsylvania.

Trump has internalized that negativity sells. The events held by Democrats don’t necessarily have the same electricity as the MAGA rallies, unless a high-energy surrogate, such as Barack Obama, comes out. For all of the obvious horrors of Donald Trump, he has an ability to create this vortex as a speaker that his fans find enthralling—although he inevitably drones on and people reliably trickle out. And at last night’s town hall in Pennsylvania, he stood onstage and swayed to music for a while—one of the stranger things he’s ever done.

Lora: What kind of merch do you see at these rallies, and what does that tell you about the broader mood of the campaign?

John: Most of the Trump apparel isn’t produced by the actual campaign. It comes from independent vendors, like the people who sell T-shirts outside a concert. At any given Trump rally, I’ll see hundreds of different pieces of merchandise, and the messaging tends to be aggressive. The slogans are often taunting and feature variations of a shared theme: owning the libs. I have endless pictures of these shirts and stickers on my phone—“I Clean My Guns With Liberal Tears” was one I saw recently.

At Harris’s events, you may see a T-shirt with a silhouette of Trump that says “Nope,” or an abortion-rights-themed shirt that says something like “Hands Off My Body.” But in general, the Democratic slogans are far less antagonistic toward Republicans.

Lora: Have you noticed a shift in rhetoric and attitude from Trump or his rally attendees since Harris became the nominee?

John: Right after Harris took Joe Biden’s place, seemingly everyone—Trump, his surrogates, rank-and-file rally-goers—appeared lost as to how to attack her.

In these final weeks before Election Day, Trump and his followers are trying to paint Harris as incompetent, a liar, and someone who can’t be trusted. At the most recent Trump rally I attended, in Pennsylvania, Trump repeated forms of incompetent and incompetence over and over again. But the attacks can also be vague. I’ve heard some of his supporters try to claim that she’s an illegitimate candidate because she didn’t “earn” the nomination. Harris voters, for their part, often say that Trump is a threat to democracy and to their rights.

Lora: What value do these rallies bring to the candidates?

John: The candidates have to fire up their base and hope that the people who show up will go home and convince their friends and neighbors to vote. It takes a special kind of voter enthusiasm to put on a T-shirt, get in the car, and drive to a rally. Those people are more engaged than the average person who won’t take off from work or ditch another obligation to go hear a politician speak.

Harris has held some major rallies in the nearly 100 days of her campaign, drawing big crowds to arenas. But her events aren’t over-the-top like some of Trump’s. Later this month, Trump is going to stage a rally at Madison Square Garden, in Manhattan. He’s by no means going to win New York, but holding the event feels like he’s planting a flag: Look at me—I’m headlining Madison Square Garden.

Related:

The Trump-Obama split screen in Pennsylvania On the National Mall with the RFK-to-MAGA pipeline

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump breaks down onstage. Peter Wehner: This election is different. Inside the carjacking crisis

Today’s News

A Fulton County judge ruled that Georgia county election officials cannot decline or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance. In a letter to Israel signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the United States warned that it might restrict military aid if Israel does not take steps to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within the next month. A man from North Carolina was arrested on Saturday and accused of making threats against FEMA workers.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Here’s how to start your search for a new hobby—and how to deal with the likelihood that you’ll be bad at it initially, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty

Dogs Are Entering a New Wave of Domestication

By Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

In just a generation, we humans have abruptly changed the rules on our dogs. With urbanization increasing and space at a premium, the wild, abandoned places where children and dogs used to roam have disappeared from many American communities. Dogs have gone from working all day and sleeping outside to relaxing on the couch and sleeping in our beds. They are more a part of our families than ever—which means they share our indoor, sedentary lifestyle.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why does anyone care about the Nobel Prize? “Dear James”: Should I break up with my Trump-loving partner? Anne Applebaum: The danger of believing that you are powerless The transparent cruelties of Diddy’s entertainment machine Donald Trump’s fascist romp The question hanging over Harris’s campaign

Culture Break

Illustration by Clay Rodery

Watch. In the 25 years since Fight Club’s release, the film (streaming on Hulu) has burrowed deeply into American culture—and its insights remain apt.

Read. Sandra Cisneros, who wrote The House on Mango Street, defied the traditional roles of womanhood.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Editor’s Note: Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles a reader’s existential worry. He wants to hear about what’s ailing, torturing, or nagging you. Submit your lifelong or in-the-moment problems to dearjames@theatlantic.com.

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Dear James,

My partner of six years is smart and funny. I never get tired of talking with him. He makes me laugh until I can’t breathe. The sex is fantastic. We’re great travel partners.

The problem is that he is a Trumper. I feel that Donald Trump is a vile human in every way possible. I despise him and all he stands for with every fiber of my being. My partner doesn’t wear a MAGA hat, and he acknowledges that Trump has personal “flaws,” but he says he “likes his policies” and plans to vote for him … again. I’ve asked if there’s anything Trump might say or do that would dissuade him, and he can’t come up with anything.

Of course, we try to avoid political conversation, but we both follow politics and current events closely, and every few months, we end up in an argument that devolves to the same point, and I find myself questioning our relationship.

Am I being untrue to my moral convictions by staying in a relationship with someone who supports this person I find despicable?

Dear Reader,

This is easy.

Enjoy your Trumper! Embrace him; cherish him; show him how it’s done. Get your arms all the way around his Trumpiness, around all of its spikes and obduracies, and watch it dissolve in rolling billows of heavenly generosity.

And if it doesn’t dissolve, so what? The people we love: There’s always something wrong with them, because there’s something wrong with all of us. Your man could have poor hygiene, or a drug problem, or an incomprehensible hobby. He could be in weird chat rooms. He could have a deluded opinion of himself. One of the things Trumpers dislike about liberal types is how hissingly and superstitiously they recoil from anything outside their ideological parameters. MAGA folk, on the other hand, have a high tolerance for aberration, because … look at the guy. So prove ’em wrong.

Besides, the older I get, the more I think that a person’s opinions—political or otherwise—are the least important thing about them. The opinion-making portion of the brain is so vulnerable, so goofy, so effortlessly colonized by alien spores … It’s a write-off, really. How they live, how they make you feel—that’s the salient part.

Trumpism, in its pure form, I regard as a black wind from the bowels of chaos. But obviously, there are degrees of Trumpiness. And have you considered the possibility that his Trumpiness, and your non-Trumpiness, might be the secret sauce of your relationship? The key to his sense of humor, the erotic spark, the thing that keeps him interesting? And you’re good travel partners! As Walker Percy observed, if a man and a woman can drive alone in a car for two hundred miles, they should get married immediately. (Actually, he said, “… then there’s a good chance that they can be happily married.” But I prefer my version.)

There’s always this paradox about the loved one: You cannot take them for granted, and yet you must take them for granted. You need to keep in mind their rareness, and the singular circumstance of being with them, and the fragility of it—while at the same time falling backward like a dope into a state of total animal trust. And if you trust your man: There it is. Look no further.

Last thought: If you didn’t argue about Trump, you’d argue about money. Or God. Or how to load the dishwasher. And as for Trump himself: Don’t let him ruin another beautiful thing.

Wishing you (both) glorious trips through a regenerated America,

James

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