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This is Anne Applebaum.

And this is Peter Pomerentsev.

And we're here with a guest today, The Atlantic's Hannah Rosen.

Hi.

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

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

Yeah, We Live Here Now Now is the story of my partner, Lauren Ogre, and I discovering that we had some new neighbors.

And it's about our effort to get to know these neighbors.

And it turned out that they were supporting the January 6th Insurrectionists.

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

I guess it started just like any other dog walk.

Hanna and I leashed up our pups and set out from our house on our post-dinner stroll.

It was early November of 2023, and I remember it was unseasonably warm.

We headed off down the hill from our house towards our neighborhood park.

A block past the park, Lauren spotted it.

A black Chevy Equinox with Texas plates.

We'd seen parked around the neighborhood.

Just a basic American SUV.

Except for the stickers that covered the back windshield.

Stickers we're very much not used to seeing in our mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood.

Our vibe is more like, make DC the 51st state and no taxation without representation.

These stickers were a combo platter of skulls and American flags.

There was a Roman numeral for three, the symbol of a militia group called the Three Percenters.

And the Pies de Résistance, a giant decal in the center of the back window that read, Free Our Patriots, J4, J6,

meaning justice for January 6th.

Lauren notices every new or different thing in the neighborhood, and this car was definitely different.

As we walked past it, Lauren said what she always said when we saw this car.

There's that fucking militia mobile again.

Right after I said that

moderately unneighborly thing, the passenger side window rolled down.

Cigarette smoke curled out of the car, and the person inside shouted, Justice for J6,

to which Lauren said, you're in the wrong neighborhood for that, honey.

And then the woman in the car said words I'm not going to forget anytime soon.

We live here now, so suck it, bitch.

Hannah, I've had confrontation experiences myself.

I was once at a dinner in Poland, this is a couple years ago, with old friends who suddenly started repeating a conspiracy theory about the government, and it happened to be the government that my husband had been part of.

And I tried to listen politely and go like, uh-huh, yeah, that's true, yeah, sure.

And then eventually I left the room.

And I'm not sure I could have lasted even that long with people who weren't old friends and were doing the same thing.

So we're not going to talk all about We Live Here Now, since many listeners may not have yet heard the podcast, but I do want you to tell me a little bit more about that experience of being shouted down in your neighborhood or more accurately being with your partner as she was being shouted down.

Were you never tempted to argue back?

Yeah, I mean, I really think it's an accident of how the interaction happened.

If it had happened at dinner, I guess you can tempt yourself like you just described.

You could never see these people again.

Like you could ignore them or shout them down and then choose to never see them again.

But because these people lived a couple of blocks away, I sort of knew I was going to see them a lot.

So maybe that muted my reaction.

My partner doesn't have a mute button, but I just kind of knew that I better take a step back and think about what I want to do because I was going to run into these people who, you know, happen to have malicious stickers and seemingly aggressive.

So I just kind of needed a minute to think.

what I wanted to do.

Without that pause, I'm not sure this story would have happened in the way that it happened.

And how did you build the relationship with them?

I mean, was there any kind of discomfort or danger involved when you first met them?

And then, but most importantly, how did you build trust?

I mean, how would they learn to trust you?

You know, it's interesting.

Once you decide to step into an alternative world, it's almost like you have to make the decision.

Most of the time, we just don't make that decision.

We're like, this is

cuckoo.

I'm not going there.

I don't share anything in common with these people.

Like, we don't even have a shared set of facts in the way we might have 15, 20 years ago.

So there's, there's just like, there's no beginning to this relationship.

For whatever reason, we closed our eyes and decided to step into that alternative reality.

And once you make that decision, you just do it very, very, very gingerly.

In this case, they happened to do a public event, which we knew was happening every single night.

And it's out on a street corner in D.C.

and it's public space.

So that actually gave us the freedom to show up at this public event.

It's outside the DC jail, and they're in support of the January 6th prisoners.

The detainees are all held in a segregated wing of the DC jail.

So they hold a protest every single night at the exact same time.

So, you know, you can steal yourself up.

every night and say like, okay, tonight's the night.

I'm going to go to the vigil, you know?

Can I actually ask you some more about that vigil?

Because one of the things we live here now does, it explores the way in which people can rewrite history, which is one of the things that happens.

And you talk about how at the vigil, there are posters with faces of people who died on January the 6th, and each poster reads, murdered by Capitol Police,

even though only one person was found to have died from a bullet fired by the police.

And so there's now a narrative that the people in jail are the good guys, and the people outside of jail are the bad guys.

I actually spent 20 years writing books about the history of the Soviet Union, and this is very much what autocratic regimes do.

They change the way you remember history.

They make heroes out of villains.

and vice versa.

How did you see that happening?

And how did you come to understand how how it worked?

Why was it successful among the people that you were visiting?

Well, that was one of the most remarkable experiences I had is being that close to watching revisionism happen.

Like, like the nitty-gritty, like going back and timing.

Okay, when was the first time that Trump mentioned Ashley Babbitt, who is the woman who was shot by the Capitol Police officers?

Because initially, right after January 6th, many even Trump supporters said, you know, the Capitol Police officer did a good job.

You know, he did his duty.

It was a terrible day.

Like, if you look at things that happened in early January,

everybody was sharing the reality of what happened on January 6th.

And then you watch how slowly kind of people peel away from that reality.

Trump starts trying out lines at his rallies.

Oh, Ashley Babbitt was murdered.

He uses the words they a lot.

You know, they killed Ashley Babbitt.

They did this.

And at that point, the big lie, the lie that the election was stolen, kind of could have faded away.

Like it felt like a moment where it could have just been relegated to history.

And then it's like all of a sudden, there's this collective decision, oh no, we're going to revive this.

And the way we're going to revive it is by talking first about this martyr and then about this group of people.

And suddenly black is white and white is black.

And because these people who we got close to, there's sort of innocence in this narrative.

One of the main characters is Mickey Withoff, who's the mother of Ashley Babbitt.

And just think about that.

She's a grieving mother.

It's like as if her emotional grief reality starts to align with Trump's

messaging in this perfect storm.

And then all of a sudden

things that aren't true

seem not just true, but righteous.

Tell me a bit about the myth, though.

Because on the one hand, it's an alternative reality.

which you described so well just now.

But on the other hand, isn't it quite American at the same time?

Only I I love when you talk about, you know, how they describe themselves as saving democracy, they're the true patriots.

I mean, as you encountered it, did you find it a completely alien myth or something that actually sort of resonated with so many American, I don't know, stories about themselves, rebelling against Washington?

Yes, I mean, one thing that I came to feel about the January 6th detainees, like often it would pop into my head, like them in costume.

I'm like, okay, they're sort of role-playing 1776 here.

You know, particularly, one of our episodes is about a jury trial.

My partner was very randomly called onto a jury, as many people in DC are, and it happened to be a January 6th case.

And not only that, but it happened to be one of these January 6th cases in which you feel that someone just kind of lost it for a day.

You know, it's a dad, he has five children, by a judge's count, extremely law-abiding, been married for a long time, but then during that day, just kind of, you know, went nuts.

And as you get closer to what they did that day, you do feel like there was just a rush, like a rush of sort of feeling heroic, you know, feeling like patriotic, feeling like you were saving the country, feeling like you have this incredible mission.

And then I think, you know, one thing that nobody predicted is that they did keep these guys in a segregated wing of the DC jail together.

We don't usually do that.

I mean, Gitmo is the other place where we've done that, but the DC jail is largely black.

And so these guys had a reputation at that day, if you remember, as being white supremacists.

So they did not want to throw them into the DC jail.

But the result of keeping these guys together, you can imagine what happened.

So this is exactly the thing that I wanted to ask you about.

I was very struck by one of the characters who you interview and describe.

This is Brandon Fellows, who was a...

a guy who was almost accidentally caught up in January the 6th.

He entered the Capitol.

He wound up smoking a joint in one of the offices in the Capitol.

As a result, he was arrested.

And because he was part of this group of prisoners, he was essentially radicalized.

And that story of how the prisoners together radicalized one another, created a mythology around themselves, it reminded me of so many other moments in hidden history when that's happened.

I mean, for both...

for both good and for bad.

I mean,

the IRA in British prisons radicalized.

Various jihadis in various prisons around the world are said to to have radicalized that way too.

But also the ANC in South Africa who were together in a prison on Robin Island for many years.

I mean, that's how they created their cohesive movement.

So it can work positively too.

Weren't you...

tempted to try and talk him out of it?

Were you, did you not want to say, don't you see what's happening to you?

Yeah, I mean, with him, that instinct was very powerful because, you know, he's slightly older than my oldest child.

And so I, so in his case, I did have the instinct of like trying to shake this out of him.

Like, don't you see, like, you were in this, you were in this jail, you know, and he was in this jail.

He came in as a goofball.

Then he came to see these guys as like fierce and tough.

And by the end, he came to see them, as you said, Peter, as true patriots.

So it was not just that they were like tough guys.

It was like they were true and righteous in the next generation of founding fathers.

And he was just like, you don't get it.

I'm.

you know, deadly serious here.

So you didn't sort of build a coalition with them.

You didn't convince them.

You don't try to convince them to change parties.

But you spent a year with them.

What is it that you found meaningful in that interaction?

And why is it meaningful for all of us to hear about it?

I mean, it's fascinating, but also what is the importance of doing something like this?

I can only

tell you about a limited importance, which is that over the last few years, I've started to read, as I bet you guys have,

you know, what do you have?

Like we all throw up our hands, we're so polarized, we're not even living in the same reality, we can't talk to each other.

You cannot go into a conversation as much as you deeply, deeply want to with the intention of changing the other person's mind.

That is a losing strategy.

Don't do it.

It's so hard.

It's as hard in politics as it is in a relationship.

It's very hard because we all just want to do that.

And so your only option is to just

open your mind, hear what they have to say, be curious, ask questions, and that's it.

And how do you do that without becoming angry?

It's, I mean, that's your, they just, because I've, you know, been to enough couples therapy that it's like, that's your, that's your only option.

And you almost have to do it with a leap of faith that there's something human at the end of that.

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

There are surprising kind of moments of non-nastiness that arise

when you approach the world from that perspective.

I mean, I spent a lot of my time writing about propaganda and talking to people with all sorts of deeply warped beliefs.

And at one point, I realized that the only worthwhile question I could ask that would lead to a conversation that was human was,

how did it start?

How did you start believing in X?

Yes.

And then you'd always get a very personal story, usually about some sort of trauma.

I'm not saying that's any kind of excuse, but it suddenly became a human story about how someone was making sense of the world.

Yes.

And suddenly there was a person.

Again, I never changed them.

They're still going to do horrible things, but at least I knew they were a person.

I don't know, maybe in the long run that helps us come up with better strategies to deal with it, but not immediately.

It's not a like, aha moment.

Yeah, it's not a kumbaya.

It's just like it really is a leap of faith because as you're doing it, you feel, am I doing something dangerous, like humanizing this propagandist?

Like, is this wrong what I'm doing?

And you just kind of live with that doubt and you keep asking questions.

Yeah, but humans do lots of bad things.

Why?

Humanizing doesn't mean making it good.

It just makes it human.

Yeah.

Well, that doesn't like, oh, human.

Yeah, I think maybe the word humanizing needs to lose its positive aura.

Humans are pretty awful.

That's a pretty good idea.

They are human.

So, what is the point of humanizing if you remove the positive aspects?

Humanizing is good.

We start to see the challenge for what it is rather than something esoteric.

So it's a real person doing real things.

Therefore, we can deal with it.

Hannah Rosen is the co-host, along with Lauren Ober, of the new six-part podcast series from the Atlantic called We Live Here Now.

You can find We Live Here Now wherever you listen to podcasts.

And we have the first episode here.

Keep listening.

And Hannah, thanks for talking with us today.

Thank you both.

When the neighbor incident first happened, it didn't really feel like much of anything.

Or maybe we were both just too stunned to take it all in.

It wasn't until we started telling other people the story and they reacted that it began to feel like maybe we had discovered something.

I guess it started just like any other dog walk.

Hanna and I leashed up our pups and set out from our house on our post-dinner stroll.

It was early November of 2023 and I remember it was unseasonably warm.

We headed off down the hill from our house towards our neighborhood park.

A block past the park, Lauren spotted it.

A black Chevy Equinox with Texas plates.

We've seen parked around the neighborhood, just a basic American SUV.

Except for the stickers that covered the back windshield.

Stickers we're very much not used to seeing in our mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood.

Our vibe is more like, make DC the 51st state and no taxation without representation.

These stickers were a combo platter of skulls and American flags.

There was a Roman numeral for three, the symbol of a militia group called the Three Percenters,

and the Pies de Résistance, a giant decal in the center of the back window that read, Free Our Patriots, J4, J6,

meaning justice for January 6th.

Lauren notices every new or different thing in the neighborhood, and this car was definitely different.

As we walked past it, Lauren said what she always said when we saw this car.

There's that fucking militia mobile again.

Right after I said that moderately unneighborly thing, the passenger side window rolled down.

Cigarette smoke curled out of the car.

And the person inside shouted, Justice for J6.

To which Lauren said, you're in the wrong neighborhood for that, honey.

And then the woman in the car said words I'm not going to forget anytime soon.

We live here now, so suck it, bitch.

We'll get to who that person is soon enough, but we're not there yet.

When we first encountered the woman from the car, we had no idea who we were dealing with.

I just knew I was sufficiently put in my place.

Well, okay, I remember saying to Hanna as we walked back home.

I remember after it happened, we walked away in total silence.

That's my memory, each of us looping in our own heads about something.

I remember being mad because

I lost.

Right.

Because I didn't get the final word.

Yeah.

And because

I just kept thinking like the whole combination of it felt bad to me.

It's like, it's like

militia stickers, justice for J6.

We live here.

You just called me a name.

You know, the whole thing was very out of place.

And

I felt it was a little destabilizing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I walked home in a half

hyper-vigilant neighborhood watch brain, like, who lives here now?

What are they doing here?

Are we going to get into more of these confrontations?

And a half-journalism brain, like, like, who's we?

Where do they live?

Why are they here now?

Like, it was, it was like, those were my two tracks when I was walking home.

I'm Lauren Ober.

And I'm Hannah Rosen.

And from the Atlantic, this is, we live here now.

Most of the country watched January 6th from a safe distance.

Something happening in their Twitter feeds or on their phone screens.

But for those of us living in DC, it was happening in our backyard.

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

Start making a list, put all those gates down, and we start hunting them down one by one.

We've got a dispersion of tear gas in the rotunda.

Please get by your mask under your seats.

Please grab a mask.

In Washington, D.C., a curfew has now taken effect from 6 p.m eastern tonight to 6 a.m thursday morning we're going to continue updating

so we were actually left with the wreckage of that day we were in a militarized city we were living under a curfew streets were blocked off the windows were all boarded up and you felt like you were living if not in a war zone, in a dangerous place.

And there was National Guard everywhere.

All the stores were closed and there were very few regular people walking around doing regular things.

And I was just thinking, like,

where am I?

What city is this?

Right.

I bought a baseball bat for protection.

I remember that.

Which is why two plus years later, it felt like this whole period of time we'd rather forget was racing back.

Donald Trump was looking like he'd he'd be the Republican nominee and a second Trump presidency seemed possible.

Plus, we had a car with militia stickers lurking in our neighborhood.

So, no, we did not welcome January 6th supporters creeping back to the scene of the crime.

But also, we wanted to know what they were up to.

In the immediate aftermath of January 6th, there were three names I associated with what happened at the Capitol.

The QAnon shaman for obvious reasons.

Oathkeepers founder Stuart Rhodes because he seemed really dangerous and also he had an eye patch, and Ashley Babbitt, who has everything to do with our new neighbor's arrival in DC.

Four people died that day, but I only remember hearing about Ashley.

Maybe that's because she was the only rioter killed by law enforcement.

Ashley Babbitt was a Trump die-hard, so it's not surprising she made her way to DC for the rally.

She was a Second Amendment-loving libertarian.

She wholeheartedly believed in MAGA and QAnon.

During the pandemic, she was hostile about mask mandates and refused to get vaccinated.

When California issued a stay-at-home order, she tweeted, This is that commie bullshit.

The day before her death, Ashley tweeted in QAnon Speak, Nothing will stop us.

They can try and try, but the storm is here and it's descending upon DC in less than 24 hours.

Dark to light.

We are walking to the Capitol in a mob.

There's an estimated over 3 million people here today.

So despite what the media tells you, boots on ground definitely say something different.

There is a scene of nothing but red, white, and blue.

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

And it was amazing.

We could see the president talk.

We are now walking down the inaugural path to the Capitol building.

3 million plus people.

God bless America, Patriots.

More like 50,000 people, give or take, and a few thousand of them went into the Capitol, or more accurately, broke in.

When the mob of protesters breached the Capitol, busting windows and breaking down doors, Ashley was right there in the mix.

There's so many people.

It's just, they're going to push their way up here.

There are four videos shot by rioters that capture this moment in its entirety.

Ashley strides down the hallway like she knows where she's going.

She's followed by other rioters, but they're suddenly stopped when they come to a set of doors with large window panels.

Through the windows, you can make out congresspeople being evacuated away from the growing mob.

The crowd Ashley is with has accidentally landed at the bullseye, the actual place where these congresspeople were about to certify the election.

On the other side of the doors is a cop with a gun, although it's unclear if Ashley can see him.

She's the only woman in a sea of men, and she's small, and she seems to be yelling.

It's our fucking house.

We're allowed to be in here.

You're wrong.

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

The cop shoots.

She immediately falls backwards and lands on the floor.

She jerks and convulses, and blood pours out of her mouth.

She's dead.

She's dead.

She's dead.

She's dead.

And then something happens right after she dies.

It's a detail I missed at first, but it turned out to be a spark for everything that would happen since that day.

People around Ashley take out their cell phones and start filming.

This individual says he actually saw her die.

He actually saw her.

I have the video.

I have the video of the guy with the gun and they're shooting her.

Okay, I want to get with you.

I'm at the boards.com.

One person says he's from InfoWars and offers to buy footage from someone close.

I want to get your phone right now.

We got that shot.

Okay, I need that footage, man.

It's going to go out to the world.

This is going to change so much.

Even in the chaos, they realize a martyr was born.

Rumors spread immediately that the woman killed was 25, 21, a mere teenager.

In actual fact, Ashley was 35.

But the details didn't matter.

She was a young white woman in the prime of her life, shot dead by a black officer.

People were quick to point out that she was a veteran, a war hero, even, purportedly upholding her oath to defend the Constitution when she died.

On far-right pro-Trump message boards post-January 6th, Ashley was called a freedom fighter and the first victim of the Second Civil War.

One person wrote, Your blood will not be in vain.

We will avenge you.

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

Three years later, some of them still think that.

And now, those same evil forces are keeping J6 freedom fighters in prison.

Justice for January 6th.

That's what those window stickers on the Chevy are about.

This conspiracy has gotten more elaborate over time.

The insurrection was a setup, or the prosecution of January 6th rioters represented gross government overreach, or the government can turn on its own citizens, even kill them.

A lot of the people who believe these things have taken their cues from one woman, ashley's mother her name is mickey withoff

ashley was a beloved daughter wife sister granddaughter niece and aunt but beyond that she was the single bravest person i have ever known she was the quintessential american woman Today is a dark day for our family and this country, for they have lost the true patriot.

I would like to invite Donald J.

Trump to say her name out loud.

It took us a minute, but with the help of some friends, we finally figured out that Mickey was our new neighbor.

I wasn't sure what I thought about having Ashley Babbitt's grieving mother come back to the place where her daughter was killed.

Why was she here?

In our DC neighborhood?

What did she want?

Was there some sort of future JN6 on the horizon?

It all felt just a little too close for comfort.

In the days after our run-in with the neighbor, I googled till my eyeballs dried out.

There were a lot of videos on social media that featured Mickey, but not a lot of solid information.

I reported what I could find to Hana.

Do you want to know what the house is called?

What?

The Eagle's Nest.

Oh, stop.

What?

Yeah.

No,

we don't have the Eagle's Nest in our neighborhood.

What does the Eagle's Nest mean to you?

Some patriot thing.

No.

Well, sure, one would think, oh, it's

patriotic, right?

American eagle.

It's where all the eagles go.

But do you know who else had a very particular property called the Eagle's Nest?

No.

Well, I'll tell you, it's Adolf Hitler.

However, to quote Mickey, who explained to HuffPost why they called the house the Eagle's Nest.

She said, we call our house the Eagle's Nest, which some would say was Hitler's hideout, but we're American citizens and we won that war and we're taking back the name.

So this is absolutely not an ode to Hitler.

Here's what else I found out.

The online videos of Mickey didn't exactly make me want to bring over a tray of homemade welcome to the neighborhood brownies.

Lots of shouting and scowling and general unpleasantness.

Why are y'all here if you're going to let that happen?

He said, why the hell are y'all here?

He said that to you?

that was very unprofessional

you're fashion in one clip online mickey is being arrested for blocking and obstructing roadways she was at a march to honor the second anniversary of her daughter's death and she walked into the street one too many times the dc cops did not appreciate that and they let her know it it wasn't the only time she got into it with the cops a year later

i try to show y'all respect i've been arrested twice and i've done it peacefully that's bullshit Your man is bullshit.

That's bullshit.

There were more than a few videos of Mickey and her housemates getting into dust-ups with DC folks who did not seem to appreciate their presence in the city.

But later in that same video, there's this.

Our new neighbors are getting harassed by anti-J6 protesters, folks who like to chalk the sidewalk with phrases like, Mickey is a grifter.

There are a number of DC cops on the scene.

I get tense just watching it.

Finally, Mickey snaps and screams at them.

I heard all the commotions when I got up.

I can't see you.

I didn't see what happened under his camera.

I had to beg him to get to the beach.

Get out of here.

You can tell your man that the reason I'm here is because three years ago today, y'all killed my kid.

That's why I'm here.

Right.

She's a mom and the police killed her kid.

That's why she's here.

She wants to make sure her dead daughter isn't forgotten and that someone is held accountable for what happened.

And one way to do that is to maybe get yourself arrested or at least show up everywhere.

January 6th trials, congressional hearings, the Supreme Court, rallies, marches, my neighborhood.

Another way for people to take notice, a nightly vigil outside the DC jail, every single night for more than 700 nights.

And we mean every night in the rain or scorching heat.

Without fail, Mickey and a few supporters stand on what they call Freedom Corner and talk on the phone with the J6 defendants held inside the jail.

As I explained to Hanna,

every night at 7 p.m.,

these

apparently true patriots

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

And every night, they

get like a January 6th inmate on the phone

and they put them on the speaker and then they join in singing like

the national anthem or America the beautiful and they're chanting like justice for Ashley and the evening ends often with God bless America, Lee Greenwood.

Who's the they?

So there's a small cadre

of

true believers

who

that

the people in the DC jail are political prisoners.

Interesting.

Interesting is a boring thing to say.

I get that.

But I was only just starting to put this whole picture together.

That Mickey and her friends were not in DC just to cause chaos.

They were here to push a narrative.

that these people, the same ones who turned our city upside down, were victims of a colossal injustice.

And also that January 6th was actually a totally appropriate exercise of freedom and liberty.

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

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

Thank you.

If our interactions with our new neighbors had unfolded more like the typical neighborhood showdown, My MAGA Hat versus your Dump Trump sign, things might have been easier.

Because that would have been just straight up neighbor warfare, pure mutual hatred.

But it didn't happen that way.

Instead, two opposite dramas unfolded.

One, we got an up-close, intimate view of how history gets rewritten.

Call it the lost cause narrative for the 21st century.

A group of Americans immediately sets to work retooling the history of an event through tweets and podcasts and viral video clips in a way that distorts collective memory forever.

But then, two, our new neighbors became real people to us.

We also got an up-close intimate view of them, their monumental grief, their sleepless nights, their deep friendship, things that make it harder to purely hate on someone.

This woman, Mickey Withoff, is many things to many people.

Mama Mickey to the January 6th defendants, mother of a dead domestic terrorist to others.

But to us, she's something else.

She's our neighbor.

Do you want to hear something rotten?

I don't know if I do, but I will.

After months of getting to know Mickey, I felt like I needed to confess something.

She had been telling me how people in the neighborhood had generally been nice to them, except for this one time.

One of her roommates, Nicole, had been sitting in the car, and these two women walked by and said something totally rude.

And I know you've already heard the story before.

The Nicole sitting in the car?

That was me.

And I'm like

fully disgusted with myself and embarrassed.

Like,

because

that's not how

that's not how I want to be treated, and that's not how I want to think about people.

But I did it.

Oh, well, I'm surprised you, I'm impressed that you admitted that to me.

I really am.

That's going to be interesting when I tell Nicole.

Since that incident, I've spent a lot of time with Mickey, trying trying to understand her cause, her politics, and her anger.

I've had many moments where I thought, what the hell am I doing?

Getting all caught up in their revisionist history of January 6th.

But what I can tell you is that Mickey is not who I thought she was.

She is every bit as fiery as she comes off in speeches and confrontations with people who want her out of this city.

After nearly a year of knowing her, I'm still terrified of her.

I have never before in my life met a person with such penetrating eyes, and she wields them to great effect.

If she is staring you down, I promise you you will find no relief.

So the window rolls down and I guess Nicole said, you know, justice for J6,

right?

Reflexively, in two seconds, I go, well, you're in the wrong neighborhood for that.

Right?

Now, I feel like you would appreciate that because sometimes

things pop out of your mouth that maybe you didn't think about.

I am a person who is very guilty of that as my mouth runs away with me.

So I said that, and she goes, We live here now,

so suck it, bitch.

That's my Nicole.

And I was like,

well okay

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

But now, after nearly a year of reporting the story, we know so much more.

And in the rest of the series, we're going to take you through this upside-down world we landed in, where we found ourselves talking conspiracies.

I don't know what I believe them capable of.

Is it eating babies and drinking their blood?

I don't think so.

But I'll know.

I mean, I'll know what they're up to.

How you can suddenly find yourself joking with January 6ers about militias.

If you're going to come down here, you've got to know.

You know, I can't.

There are too many splinter groups.

There's factions, there's levels.

Listen.

There's color coding.

Listen, when the gay militia happens, I'm there.

Okay, when that happens, until then.

I'm a country of militias and wondering what could possibly be coming for us.

Like, how long are you going to stay in DC?

I plan to stay till like January 7th.

That feels vaguely threatening.

I could see why you would say that.

That's coming up on We Live Here Now.

We Live Here Now is a production of The Atlantic.

The show was reported, written, and executive produced by me, Lauren Ober.

Hannah Rosen reported, wrote, and edited the series.

Our senior producer is Ryder Alsop.

Our producer is Ethan Brooks.

Original scoring, sound design, and mix engineering by Brendan Baker.

This series was edited by Scott Stossel and Claudina Bade.

Fact-checking by Michelle Soraka.

Art Direction by Colin Hunter.

Project Management by Nancy Deville.

Claudina Bade 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.

And then did I say something like, well, bitch, I live here now or something?

Very close to to that.

We live here now, so

get used to it.

No.

Suck it.

Fuck it.

Nope.

You're right on the suck it.

Suck it what?

Suck it who?

Suck it fascist.

So much more fascist than me.

Don't tell me what I said.

You said suck it, bitch.

Oh, okay, okay.