The Insurrectionists Next Door – The Atlantic

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

This story starts with, of all things, a dog walk. My partner, Lauren, and I were doing our usual loop—past the playground, onto Third Street—when we saw the car again. A black Chevy Equinox with Texas plates, a luggage rack, and, on the back windshield, an exuberant profusion of slogans: FREE OUR PATRIOTS; THE THREE PERCENTERS, ORIGINAL; and J4J6, among others. We’d seen the SUV parked in the same spot a couple of times over the summer and Googled the slogans (J4J6 = “Justice for January 6ers”), but assumed, based on nothing, that it must belong to someone’s parents who had come to help them move in for the school year and would soon go back home.

Our neighborhood in Northeast Washington, D.C., is mixed-race, mixed-income, and, like the rest of the city, about 90 percent Democratic. On a map someone made on TikTok that overlaid Washington neighborhoods with New York ones, Northeast D.C. equated to Brooklyn. Surely the Chevy wouldn’t even stay long enough to get dirty. But now here we were in early November and the car was still there, silently taunting us on our dog walk.

“There’s that fucking militia-mobile again,” Lauren said—loudly, because she is loud. Strong language, but perhaps justified: The Three Percenters—according to the National Institute of Justice, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Anti-Defamation League—are one of the largest (though loosely organized) anti-government militias, and adherents regularly engage in paramilitary training to combat perceived government “tyranny.”

But what Lauren had failed to notice was the puff of smoke curling out of the driver’s-side window into the darkening sky. Someone was in the car.

“Justice for January 6!” shouted a voice from inside. The voice, hoarse from smoking, sounded joyous and self-satisfied.

“Well, you’re in the wrong neighborhood for that, honey,” Lauren said, equally self-satisfied.

“We live here now,” Smoker answered. “So SUCK IT, BITCH.”

And that’s what launched us into all this. Not the “bitch” part; we probably deserved that for being such unfriendly neighbors. No, it was the “We live here now.” Who was “we”? Why were they living “here,” in Northeast D.C.? Why “now”?

The big event Smoker was shouting about—the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021—was by then almost three years in the past. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol had made its case to the American public and adjourned. The thousand-plus January 6 suspects were making their way through the federal court system. The marauders had done their damage, and justice was well under way. So what exactly did our new neighbors want? Our walk home was tense; unwelcome memories returned.

Read: What I saw on the January 6 committee

If you live in Washington, January 6 was not just some abstract chaos unfolding distantly in the nation’s capital. That afternoon I was at the optometrist, getting new glasses for my youngest child. The optometrist, normally a goofy Norman Rockwell type, came out of his office gray-faced, his equipment still strapped to his head. “There’s an attack on our city,” he said. “Everyone go home.” People were texting about guns and pipe bombs and what streets might not be safe to walk on, and we had no idea what would happen next. I rushed home, where I found my other two kids and some of their friends watching TV. They were very aware that what was playing out on the screen was happening 15 minutes from the house.

For the next few weeks, we lived under curfew. Streets were closed. Armed troops surrounded the Capitol. I remember biking around downtown D.C. and seeing stores boarded up, National Guardsmen everywhere, very few regular people on the streets, and thinking, Where am I? Lauren bought a baseball bat for protection. (It still sits by the front door, gathering dust.) So, no, we did not welcome supporters of January 6 insurrectionists creeping back to the scene of the crime.

After our exchange with Smoker last November, Lauren and I would pass the Chevy Equinox and wish it would just disappear. Instead, what happened was this: A couple of months and many halting interactions later, Lauren was invited to come to the house where Smoker and her compatriots live. We ended up spending the next year wandering through their world, an alternate universe blooming with new American heroes and myths, the main one being that January 6 was not a fire to be extinguished but embers with which to ignite something glorious. Our neighbors, it turned out, are luminaries in that world, hallowed martyrs whose mere existence inspires men to say they will fight and even die for their country—by which they mean they will fight and die for the rightful restoration of Donald Trump to office. Their names are invoked reverentially, albeit often strategically (which is not to say cynically), by self-described patriots, MAGA superstars, and Trump himself.

From the January/February 2022 issue: Trump’s next coup has already begun

By late summer of this year, we looked during our dog walks for our neighbors on their screened-in porch and waved hello as we passed by. Sometimes their kittens (Donald and Barron) peeked through the screen. We knew that the kittens were a source of joy for the house’s residents, but also that they made one of the women panic because she couldn’t stop worrying that a heavy door in the house would swing hard and kill them. Doors bring her nightmares.

Sometimes I wonder why Lauren and I chose to get closer to a group of people aiding and abetting the unraveling of our country. Journalistic curiosity? That was definitely a primary motivation. We are both podcasters, and we were thinking that we should start recording this experience. Anxiety about the future? When we discovered who they were, Trump was just starting to look like he had a serious chance of getting reelected president. (Our podcast series, We Live Here Now, starts rolling out on September 18.)

But there was another reason, one that crystallized for me only when I witnessed the following scene: I happened to be present when another D.C. resident I know, who was alarmed that champions of the J6ers had moved into the neighborhood and had tweeted some trollish things at them, ran into one of them in person. I expected some human instinct to kick in—maybe a moment of sheepish eye contact, or a neighborly nod. It didn’t. The troll said the exact same things to her face that she’d said on Twitter. They were very cruel things about her child—things no one should say to anybody, ever.

Outside the context of social media, the exchange seemed jarring and unnatural, like suddenly seeing your dog talk. And I thought to myself, Not that. We can’t allow ourselves to morph into our nastiest online selves, in person, with our neighbors. Of course, the path Lauren and I ended up stumbling down—giving space and attention to some potentially destructive people—had its own perils. But not that.

THE HOUSE

I should probably say who these neighbors are, or at least tell you some salient facts we learned about them before we really knew them. They are three middle-aged white women who did not know one another before January 6, 2021, and who are rooming together in a white brick townhouse two blocks away from us. Their rent is paid by donors who support their cause. Smoker’s name is Nicole Reffitt. Her husband, Guy Reffitt, was the first person to be tried for crimes associated with January 6. He had come to the Capitol with a handgun in his pocket and an AR-15 stashed in his hotel room. He’d told his fellow Three Percenters that he intended to drag Nancy Pelosi out of the building by her ankles. His 18-year-old son, Jackson, turned him in to the FBI. At his dad’s trial, Jackson testified: “He said, ‘If you turn me in, you’re a traitor. And traitors get shot.’ ” (Around us, Nicole sometimes refers to Guy as “such a lovebug.”)

The second house member was Tamara Perryman, whose boyfriend, Brian Jackson, pleaded guilty to assaulting law-enforcement officers with a flagpole. She goes by Tami, but her online trolls call her Nazi Barbie on account of Jackson’s many swastika tattoos. (He got them during a previous stint in prison, when he joined the White Knights prison gang. His attorneys say that he has since denounced his membership in the group but cannot afford to remove his tattoos.)

The anchor of the house, of this whole universe, is Micki Witthoeft, known in the J4J6 movement as Mama Micki. She is the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by U.S. Capitol Police on January 6. Following instructions that she says Ashli gave to her in a dream, Micki has become a mother figure to hundreds of January 6ers who have been making their way through the D.C. courts and jail.

By the way, their house has a name, which Lauren discovered in HuffPost. She read Micki’s quote out loud to me: “We do have a team at the ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ which some would say was Hitler’s hideout.” Of course, the reason some would say that is because it was the name of Hitler’s hideout, or one of them. “But we’re American citizens,” Micki said, “and we won that war, and we’re taking back the name. So this is absolutely not an ode to Hitler.”

Micki rarely talks in any detail about the tragedy that landed her at the Eagle’s Nest. But she doesn’t need to, because those details are very publicly accessible. A handful of videos, available online, capture the moment from different angles. Ashli, who is small—5 foot 2—and the only woman in the scene, is at the front of a column of rioters. She strides down the hallway like she knows where she’s going. The rioters suddenly stop when they encounter a set of doors, with glass window panels, guarded by police. Through the window panels, you can make out in the near distance people walking across the hall. These are members of Congress, who, minutes earlier, were holding the vote to certify what the rioters consider a stolen election. They are now urgently being evacuated. Somehow the growing mob has ended up just outside the Speaker’s Lobby doors, with a direct sight line to these mincing traitors who are the target of their ire. Realizing this, their urgency grows.

The policemen guarding the door to the corridor, overwhelmed by the sheer number of rioters, abandon their post, leaving only indifferent wood and glass between lawmakers and the horde. But then in one video, a camera pans to the left and you can very clearly see two hands holding a gun on the other side of the door. “He has a gun, he has a gun!” someone yells. We’ll never know whether Ashli heard this; she is fused with the melee that’s yelling things like “It’s our fucking house! We’re allowed to be in here! You’re wrong!” and “Break it down!” and “Fuck the blue!” A rioter in a conspicuous fur-lined hat starts smashing a window panel. Then it happens. Ashli climbs through the window panel and ricochets right back down onto the ground, onto her back, bleeding from her mouth. Her hands are like claws grabbing at nothing and her eyes are blank. “She’s dead. She’s dead,” one rioter says. “I saw the light go out in her eyes.” There’s a sudden stillness, followed by a just-as-sudden light show of cellphones. Someone standing above her body introduces himself as being from Infowars, the far-right conspiracy-mongering site owned by Alex Jones, and offers to buy footage from someone else who was filming closer to Ashli.

Bits of all this footage will circulate, first among the rioters and then among the right-wing press. No headline ever explicitly reads “A Martyr Is Born,” but one might as well have, because that’s what was happening, starting in the hours after January 6. Early on, rumors spread that Ashli was only 25, then 21, then 16 when she was shot, pulling her further backwards into innocence. In fact, she was 35. Still, a young white woman in the prime of her life—a 14-year U.S.-military veteran, no less—shot dead by, as it turned out, a Black officer of the state. Pro-Trump message boards call her a “freedom fighter” and “the first victim of the second Civil War.” “Your blood will not be in vain,” one person wrote. “We will avenge you.”

Over the years, the myth will grow: She was polite, she was trying to help people, she was trying to stop the fur-hatted guy next to her from breaking the window. There will be books and posters and rap songs and T-shirts: Ashli Babbitt, American Patriot. Ashli Babbitt, Murdered by Capitol Police.

The officer who shot her, Lieutenant Michael Byrd, has described how, once his name was leaked to the right-wing press, he and his family had to move into safe housing on a military base because of the racist messages and death threats. The Capitol Police and the Department of Justice investigated him and cleared him of any wrongdoing.

To Micki, however, he will only ever be the man who murdered her daughter, who was left abandoned on the ground “to bleed out like a fucking animal,” or sometimes “bleeding out like a dying dog.” This isn’t true: Police started rendering assistance within seconds. One of the rioters pulled out a first-aid kit. Tactical officers yelled desperately for the rioters to clear a path so they could get Ashli to an ambulance. All of that is clearly captured on the videos. But Micki refers frequently to that image of her daughter lying on her back, bleeding out; it better correlates with Micki’s primary emotion since that day, which is uncontrolled rage.

The first news story that Lauren and I saw about Micki Witthoeft, new resident of D.C., ran in The Washington Post on January 7, 2023, months before we discovered that she was our neighbor: “Ashli Babbitt’s Mother Arrested on Capitol Riot Anniversary.” The photo showed a woman with shoulder-length gray hair and a beanie with an American-flag patch yelling as a member of the Capitol Police restrained her. He’d told her to get on the sidewalk, but she stayed in the street, blocking traffic. Cops handcuffed Micki, and had started frisking her when someone filming the scene shouted: “Micki, anything you want to say?”

“Uh, yeah,” she answered. “Capitol Police suck ass.”

THE CORNER

Lauren can be awkward, and also short-fused when tested. I’ve seen her get into squabbles at coffee shops, red lights, hotel lobbies. So when she told me, one night just before Christmas 2023, a few weeks after our first interaction with Smoker—whom we did not yet know was Nicole Reffitt—that she wanted to go down to the D.C. jail to check out the nightly vigil that Micki holds there, I was a little nervous. But she’s a professional journalist, and she scripted her opening lines to Micki on her Notes app: “Hi. I’m Lauren and I make audio documentaries and I heard about your vigil and …” I stayed behind, and waited. A couple of hours later, Lauren came back and gave me her report.

The vigil attendees, along with a cadre of true believers across the country, believe that the people in the jail are “political prisoners.” Every night at 7 o’clock, these “true patriots” hold a vigil for all of the January 6 defendants who are being detained there, awaiting either trial or sentencing. And every night, they get a few January 6 inmates on speakerphone, and then they join together in singing the national anthem and chanting “Ashli Babbitt, Ashli Babbitt” in a ceaseless drone. The evening usually ends with people singing along to a recording of “God Bless the U.S.A.,” by the conservative, Trump-supporting country singer Lee Greenwood.

I’ve since attended a few vigils—and watched a lot more of them, because every night, three or four loyalists stream them in full—so I can tell you what they are like. For starters, not much to look at. About a dozen people gather on a corner—they’ve named it “Freedom Corner”—wedged between an access road behind the jail and Congressional Cemetery, where people who live on Capitol Hill walk their dogs. A table with speakers is set up in front of an array of American flags. Leaning against the table are some crosses set up by the handful of Chinese American evangelicals who show up every night, as well as drawings of Ashli and others who died that day, including rioters who died of natural causes or possibly were trampled by the mob, and a Capitol Police officer who was assaulted by insurrectionists. (The drawings are on posters that say, inaccurately, Murdered by Capitol Police.) Another table has snacks and coffee. Some camp chairs are randomly strewn about. Micki paces back and forth, smoking, silently overseeing the event. It’s been the same every night since August 1, 2022. And I do mean every night, rain or 100-degree heat. I imagine some cemetery dog walkers must have looked over and wondered, What is this little fringe gathering? But these days, fringe has a way of rerouting history.

The J6ers in the D.C. jail are held together in a single segregated unit. 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.” But the consequences of putting them together were the same as they are when any group of extremists are housed together: They got more extreme. The groups of men who went through the jail suffered together, protected one another, and, in their ample free time, created a mythology—effectively a set of alternative facts—about who they were. They came to call their unit the “Patriot Pod.” Their surroundings told them one story: You are temporarily banished from decent society on account of crimes you have committed. But as they hung out together, they gradually built a different story about themselves: We are the decent society. It was the outside that was wrong. This view soon caught on more broadly, and right-wing media started to refer to the jail as the “D.C. Gulag.”

Every night, the men of the Patriot Pod call one of the Eagle’s Nest women’s cellphones, and every night, they broadcast those calls, featuring a mixture of comments from inmates and vigil attendees. Here is a sample from the first night Lauren was there, which, remember, was nearly three years after January 6.

To get an idea of these calls’ impact, think about the distance, in myth miles, traveled by the “Star-Spangled Banner” as sung by what’s now known as the J6 Prison Choir. If you’ve been paying close attention to the election, you’ve probably heard it. Donald Trump walks onstage at rallies to a version of the song mixed with his own voice reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The singing originated with the first batch of detainees brought to the Patriot Pod, in early 2021. D.C. was under COVID lockdown, and the detainees spent a lot of time in isolation, so this was their way of communicating. Every night just before 9 o’clock, someone would yell out the countdown to the singing—“Three minutes!”—which would echo down the hallway. They would sing together solemnly until they reached “and our flag was still there,” intoning “still there” with extra vigor. I asked Scott Fairlamb, who pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer and was held at the jail in 2021, why those words got such emphasis. “Because we were still there,” he said. It was a reminder, he continued, “that we stood up for what we believe in, that we were still patriots no matter who wanted to deem us as less than that. It was something that really kept up my morale, and my love of country intact.” When he recalled the singing, his voice broke, even though we were talking a year after he’d been released from prison.

News of the singing in the Patriot Pod is what first brought Micki to Freedom Corner, in the summer of 2022. Nicole’s husband, Guy, was in the jail at the time, and told her about it. So on the day of Guy’s sentencing, Nicole and Micki just showed up at 9 p.m. outside the jail and sang along with the detainees. That first night, they got into a scuffle with some of the prison guards but eventually achieved a rapprochement, and then figured out how to broadcast the song to the world. Soon, the choir had a nightly national audience.

Then comes March 25, 2023: Trump’s kickoff campaign rally for the 2024 election, held in Waco, Texas, a site that for the far right is a reminder that the government is willing to murder its own citizens. As Trump stands with his hand on his heart, the J6 Prison Choir mix gets broadcast through the speakers, and scenes of the assault at the Capitol play on giant screens. The anthem has a scratchy, lo-fi quality, but that only amplifies its power. If you haven’t watched the Waco video, you should. Your mind might resist, but your body will understand why people succumb to demagogues. Trump says:

To say that Micki Witthoeft orchestrated any of this would be absurd. Before her daughter died, Micki was a housewife from San Diego whose version of civic engagement was, as she says, “I vote. I pick up my trash. Yay me.” But by showing up in front of the D.C. jail night after night, she became imprinted on the national consciousness: Mama Micki holding in her arms her martyred daughter and sons. In January 2023, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene gave Micki a shout-out at a meeting of the House Oversight Committee, saying that Micki’s daughter had been “murdered” and “there’s never been a trial.” Representative Barry Loudermilk praised Micki’s work on behalf of J6ers. Representative Matt Gaetz showed up at the vigil one night, apologizing to those suffering inside. And in September 2022, Trump called in to the vigil: “It was so horrible, what happened to her. That that man shot Ashli is a disgrace … What they’re doing here, it’s a disgrace.”

“They”: The “deep state” had shot Ashli Babbitt and covered up what really happened. The same “they” responsible for the death of the Branch Davidians in Waco were the “they” who left Ashli, who could have been any one of us, bleeding out like a fucking animal.

That night in December 2023 when Lauren went to the vigil for the first time, she introduced herself to Micki. She noted that Mama Micki had a quiet but commanding presence—as though she was in charge of the space, almost like, as Lauren put it, “a cult leader who doesn’t need to say a lot.” But Lauren and I wondered what Micki got out of being around people who had never met Ashli but chanted her name, over and over, night after night. Maybe that was the point. For a grieving mother, a nightly vigil was a place to suspend herself in Ashli time, with no past or future. Micki had a husband she’d been married to for 35 years, plus four sons and two grandchildren, one of whom she barely knew, because most of his life she’s been 3,000 miles away, on Freedom Corner. “It’s been suggested to me that maybe therapy would help so I could let some of this anger go,” she once told Lauren. “I’m not ready to. It’s my anger, and I’m gonna hold on to it.”

One more detail about the vigil: It was cold that December night, so Micki offered Lauren coffee and blueberry pie. Lauren doesn’t drink coffee and she hates blueberry pie. Still, the pie was another kind of beginning.

THE BOAT

In the months after Ashli’s death, Micki lay in bed all day, aware of the metaphor she was inhabiting. She and her husband were living in a boat moored in San Diego Bay, so her bedroom was half-submerged underwater, like her entire being.

She hadn’t even known that Ashli had gone to D.C. for January 6. They’d lived only 12 minutes apart but hadn’t seen each other that Christmas or New Year’s. Fuggles, the family dog, was old and afraid of fireworks, so Micki had stayed home with him on New Year’s Eve. Besides which, Micki and Ashli’s relationship could be scratchy. What if she’d been less worried about the dog? What if she’d known Ashli was going? “But I just would have said, ‘Have fun, be careful, who are you going with,’ ” Micki says. “I didn’t realize what was going on in D.C. was gonna be such a big frickin’ deal!” What if she’d gone with Ashli? What if she’d chained her to a chair? Slosh, slosh, slosh, like that, for months.

For a while, all Micki could manage was to get out of bed once a day and make a phone call to someone in Washington, D.C., which for her was something. In the past, when Ashli would talk to her about mask mandates or lost ballots or whatever, Micki would say, “You know what, baby, go get ’em!” But Micki herself had no patience for politics. She was of the You can’t fight city hall so might as well live your life school. “I’m gonna sit on my boat. I’m gonna read my book. I’m gonna eat my popcorn. I’m gonna pet my dog. I’m gonna stick my feet in the water.” But now here she was, dialing the 202 area code every day, doing the Erin Brockovich thing: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Representative Darrell Issa, the general counsel for the Capitol Police … “Hello, my name is Micki Witthoeft, and I want answers about my daughter.” She kept a running log of names and numbers in what she called her death notebook. “I know it’s kind of a morbid thing to say, but that’s what it was.”

Then one day her best friend, Wilma, stopped by the boat and told her, “You have to get up, get in the shower, and get the fuck outside.” After that, Micki’s life took a Thelma & Louise–ish turn: The men, including her husband and sons, sort of fell away, and she allied herself with forceful women. Wilma suggested a healing Mother’s Day trip, and Micki chose Sacramento as the destination. They loaded up Wilma’s camper van with Ashli Babbitt bracelets and flyers that Micki had made. The trip was kind of a bust. No one in the state capital really wanted to hear about Ashli Babbitt and January 6. But then—a small miracle. On the way home, when they stopped one night at a campsite, Micki got a text from a friend. It linked to a video of someone in Washington named Paul Gosar, talking about her daughter. “It was my first glimmer of hope that somebody is paying attention,” Micki says.

After that, the signs intensified. She and Wilma drove to Arizona for Reawaken, a MAGA-supported Christian-nationalist festival led by Michael Flynn, the former U.S. Army general and short-lived national security adviser to Trump who spouts QAnon slogans. “It was kind of like a weird mix of political advocates and Christian-revival stuff,” Micki says. “And when they were singing ‘Raise a Hallelujah’ onstage, the air was just electric in there.”

Gosar kept publicly invoking Ashli. (Gosar is a far-right congressman from Arizona known for his association with white supremacists and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but Micki wasn’t really attuned to all that.) He tweeted a photo of Ashli in her Air Force uniform with the caption “They took her life. They could not take her pride,” a paraphrase of a lyric in the U2 song “Pride (In the Name of Love),” which is actually about Martin Luther King Jr. He described Michael Byrd as “hiding, lying in wait,” to kill Ashli. And then he invited Micki to be his guest at a conference in Phoenix. “She has given everything—her daughter,” Gosar said onstage. “We need answers.” He shouted her out to the crowd, calling her by the wrong name, “Mick Wilbur.” But still, she had been called.

THE BASEMENT

For a while, Micki tried to be home with her husband, Roger. But in the emotional state she was in, she knew she could not really be much of a wife. “It’s really hard to live with somebody who just wants to be angry,” she says. In August 2022, she got on a plane and left, with enough money to live in D.C. for a month and not much of a plan. With Ashli’s dream-words in mind (“These are the people you need to worry about”), she went straight to the courthouse, where Guy Reffitt was about to become the first J6er who’d stood trial to be sentenced. She was coming to support Guy, but she noticed his wife, Nicole, standing with her two daughters and looking very alone.

“She just had this defiant, strong-ass-woman look on her face, and I just knew she was somebody I could be friends with,” Micki says. Nicole instantly grabbed her hand. “I just felt that she needed that,” Nicole says. “And it’s just one of those things, you really can’t explain … Maybe we were so brokenhearted, and we could see that in each other.” Micki “just looked at me and I looked at her and it was just like, ‘Let’s go. They can’t do anything else to us.’” And so they moved in together.

After bouncing around a bit, they landed at the Eagle’s Nest, partly because it was only a 15-minute drive to the jail. What sealed Micki’s relationship with Nicole was the day it came time to put Fuggles down. “I was on the couch with Fuggles, and I couldn’t make it happen,” Micki says. She wanted to call the vet, but she couldn’t. So Nicole did it. “I just thought at that minute, I truly loved her. I do … I feel like the ladies in this house know me better than a lot of people that I’ve known for years in my life,” Micki says. Nicole has stayed in D.C. all this time, even though her husband is serving out his sentence in Texas.

If this were a different movie, it could lean more into its obvious feminist plotline: Two working-class American women who have only ever known themselves as mothers and wives realize what they are actually capable of. They cook for each other, clean for each other, become chosen family for each other.

At night, Micki has had panic attacks that take her breath away and dreams that make her weep. She can’t bear to sleep in a room by herself. So she and Nicole sleep in the basement of the Eagle’s Nest, their mattresses head to head. Nicole’s dog, Oliver, plops himself in between them like a canine headboard. Just hearing Nicole and her dog softly breathing, Micki says, is a comfort to her.

Men come through the Eagle’s Nest sometimes, but they never stay long. Micki’s kicked a few out. Too bossy, or too messy, or too obviously trying to make money off their plight. In the meantime, they’ve been improvising for themselves a first-rate civic education, covering all three branches of government. They attend trials at the federal courthouse, Supreme Court oral arguments, congressional hearings, campaign rallies. At many important events around the country, Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, gets invited onstage to say her lines, which generally run like this: “I think that this is a blueprint for what they’re doing to American people. My daughter was murdered by this government on January 6, 2021, as a result of her protest against the stolen election at the Capitol.”

By the time Lauren and I came around, Micki and Nicole had become more comfortable engaging with the “fake-news media,” so after a few months of interacting, we got along reasonably well. Lauren and Micki, especially, engage in lively debates about immigration, gun control, term limits, homelessness, gay rights, health care. Lauren eventually broached the topic of why Micki had told a vigil crowd that Michael Byrd “needs to swing from the end of a rope, along with Nancy Pelosi.”

Micki goes on to say that she doesn’t necessarily buy the idea of “white privilege,” because she and Ashli worked hard for what they have. Lauren gives a delicate but effective lesson on how white privilege works, and explains that having had to work hard doesn’t exempt you from it. Micki doesn’t respond directly, but judging from what she says next, she has heard Lauren, and even shifted a little.

When I listen to the recordings of these conversations, I recognize my partner as the quick, combative, sympathetic person she is. And I recognize raucous but nuanced debate of a kind I haven’t heard anywhere else in ages. When you read books about how we can come back from the brink of civil war, this is what they tell you: Don’t go into a discussion trying to change anyone’s mind. Just listen, and have faith that maybe the ice will start to melt a little. For their part, Micki and Lauren’s debates often end with:

All of this in a tone you would reserve for an exasperating friend. But then there are moments like this one:

Micki is referring here to the QAnon-fueled conspiracy theory that global elites kidnap children to drink their blood for its adrenochrome, a chemical compound that is supposedly an elixir of youth. What can you do with a moment like this? How do you breach this epistemic chasm of cuckoo?

I’ve thought about this a lot, and come up with one generous explanation for why Micki would even consider that such a theory might be true. Bear with me here: Micki is not deluded about who Ashli was. She describes her daughter as someone people either loved or “felt the complete opposite” about. When Ashli was young, she was a tomboy who played with lizards, surfed, and rode dirt bikes. When she was 13, she announced that she would join the military one day, even though her nervous mother prayed that she wouldn’t. You get the impression that they didn’t have an easy, cozy mother-daughter dynamic.

“I love my daughter always,” Micki says. “I’m proud to be her mother always, but we’re two very separate people … Sometimes we saw things differently, and I’ll just leave it at that.”

Micki had had no idea how deeply taken her daughter was with conspiracy theories. Micki was just not interested in those kinds of conversations. She was not even on social media. So she had no way of knowing that on Twitter, Ashli was calling out judges and politicians as pedophiles, and using QAnon slogans such as “Where we go one, we go all!” Could looking into the global scourge of child trafficking be Micki’s way of figuring out what she’d missed? Of seeing what Ashli saw?

Death can make you obsess about unfinished business. Micki says that when her father died this year, she completed an intricate puzzle involving Chinese symbols that he’d left on a table, even though it took her hours and she had so much to do. When my own father died, my very unadventurous mother decided to jump out of an airplane, because the one thing my father had done entirely without her was serve in the military as a paratrooper. Exploring parts of your loved one’s mind or experience postmortem can be the only available way to move the relationship forward.

But a more straightforward explanation for Micki’s openness to adrenochrome conspiracies has to do with the state of our political culture. When you want to hold on to your anger, as Micki does, your tribe will feed you enough stories about them and what they are capable of to fuel that anger as long as you want or need. “When they killed Ashli, they took a lot more from me than my daughter,” Micki says. “They took my whole belief in the system that runs America from me. Even though you know it’s a little bad, it’s mostly good—I don’t believe that anymore. And so in that process, I don’t know what I believe them capable of. Is it eating babies and drinking their blood? I don’t think so. But I don’t know what they’re up to. I really don’t know.” In this way, the wound can stay open forever and ever … and bleed all over the country.

THE POD

In May 2024, a new person started hanging around the Eagle’s Nest. He was 30 and fresh out of prison, and Micki let him stay a few nights, meaning that an actual J6er was now down the block. Around us, Micki referred to him as “the little boy,” but his real name was Brandon Fellows. I’d been corresponding with him while he was in prison—talking to him now seemed like a decent way to explore something I’d been wondering about. Micki had been holding the vigil for more than 700 days. The Patriot Pod had been in existence for three years. People who had been convicted were starting to get released, and the next presidential election was only a few months away. What had all this amounted to? Where was the J4J6 movement heading? What might be bearing down on us on January 6, 2025?

When Brandon arrived at the Patriot Pod in August 2021, he was, in his own words, “the nonviolent guy.” He had traveled to the Capitol 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 outside the building 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. “Holy shit, holy shit,” he recalls saying to himself. “I’m not getting hit.” But eventually Brandon did go in, and ended up in some senator’s office with his feet up on the desk, smoking a joint. In my mind, I’d classified him as the Seth Rogen of insurrectionists. And I was curious whether his time in the Pod had changed him at all.

As soon as he arrived in his cell, he told me, he was starstruck. Brandon had spent the preceding few months under house arrest on his mom’s couch. She is a Democrat and would not talk to him about January 6, so he spent a lot of time processing the event through his phone. And now here they were, the people he’d read about or watched on YouTube. “People started coming up to my cell and talking to me. One standout was Julian Khater. He said, ‘Hey, I’m the guy that they accused of killing Officer Sicknick.’ I’m like, ‘No way!’ ” Brian Sicknick was a Capitol Police officer whom Khater had pepper-sprayed in the face on January 6. He’s the officer whose picture is up at the vigil along with Ashli’s. A medical examiner attributed his death to natural causes, but responsibility for Sicknick’s death has always shadowed Khater. (Khater pleaded guilty to two felony charges, for assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon.)

Fellow J6ers came by Brandon’s cell and asked, Hey, you need a radio? Pen and paper? Some extra clothes? They dropped off beef jerky, ramen, macaroni and cheese. A bunch came by just to introduce themselves, talk to the new guy. By the end of his first day in the pod, Brandon had a stack of items outside his cell and a lot of new friends. “We had a good sense of community … And we were taking care of each other … This isn’t like the other wings, where it’s like, ‘Oh, what are you in for?’ We’re all from the same event.” (Ordinarily, if even three people commit a crime together, the jail separates them.)

Many of the J6ers had never been incarcerated before, and jail came as a shock. The difference, though, between them and the average person in the D.C. jail, or any American jail, is that they were going through hell together. Proud Boys. Oath Keepers. Julian Khater. Guy Reffitt. And Brandon, the stoner with the goofy disguise. He had read about these guys. Maybe cosplayed as one of them on January 6. But now he was getting to know them, and that changed how he thought about them. “These guys are the real people, the real heroes,” he says he thought to himself. “I’m just some idiot that took selfies inside and smoked somebody’s joint that was passed around.”

The way Brandon was starting to see it, there was a bright line in the Pod. On one side were the nonviolent guys like him. When they’d seen trouble on January 6, they’d flinched. And on the other side were heroes—men like Nicole Reffitt’s husband, Guy, who’d brought an actual gun to the Capitol. Six months into his stint in the Patriot Pod, Brandon had decided that he wanted to be on the other side of the line.

Because a lot of the evidence against the detainees consisted of videos, they had been given access to laptops so they could watch them as they prepared their legal defenses. Brandon noticed that on his device, the camera hadn’t been turned off. Wanting to make his mark—among the guys in the Pod, certainly, but maybe also in the world at large—he started filming, with an eye toward exposing what he said were squalid conditions. He leaked the videos to the right-wing site Gateway Pundit, and on May 25, 2022, it published a story with the long headline “EXCLUSIVE FOOTAGE: Secret Video Recordings LEAKED From Inside ‘The Hole’ of DC Gitmo. First Footage Ever Released of Cockroach and Mold Infested Cell of J6 Political Prisoner.”

After Brandon leaked the footage, fellow detainees started calling him brave. “I feel like I earned my respect, because remember, some of them used to say, ‘You’re not even a January 6er,’ because I didn’t do anything violent.”

When Brandon was released this past spring, he’d planned on going back home to upstate New York. That didn’t work out. And, like Micki, he felt the pull of D.C. Demi-celebrity was more exciting than his regular life anyway. People from all over the world have extended invitations for him to stay with them. He’s had job offers, and people have asked him if he will run for political office. In June, he went viral on social media after making a pouty face behind Anthony Fauci at a public hearing. That got him a warning from his probation officer. Now he needs permission to enter any government building.

He also got a warning from Micki, but for a different reason. By this point in her evolution as an activist, she was seeking to avoid pointless negative attention on her, the cause, or the house. In July, people were urgently sharing this tweet on our neighborhood text chain: “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.”

The bar happened to be five minutes from my office. I wouldn’t say this made me feel scared, exactly, but it did make me extremely curious about what Brandon had planned for the coming months.

In the videos of the incident, a snide comment made by a woman about Brandon’s MAGA hat eventually leads to a thrown drink and then punches between Brandon and the woman and her boyfriend. Brandon, who is extremely fit post-prison, is quickly on top of the man, pinning him down.

Is this juvenile trolling that got out of control? Or something politically significant? Does one lead to the other? I had many questions. So I arranged to interview him.

Later, I called Brandon to ask if he even believed in democracy. In response, he asked if I’d seen the protesters outside the Republican National Convention holding signs that read Dictator on Day One. “I’d be down with that,” he said. “That’s what we might need,” and then he said something about George Washington that I don’t recall because I was at this point realizing that I should be taking him very seriously.

If ever you doubt the depth of feeling among the J6ers, listen to the vigil recorded on July 13, the evening of the assassination attempt on Trump. One of the detainees calls the gathering on Freedom Corner and describes the scene in the Patriot Pod when they saw the news on TV: “I had to hear fucking a bunch of us scream and yell and freak out and be trapped in this box with the inability to do anything except to basically run around like a trapped rat in a maze. And it was a very scary feeling.” And as he is talking, he is choking on the memory of that desperation, and starts to cry. “I’m just—I’m just really glad Trump’s okay. Because I didn’t know if he was … That shit really fucked me up … It would just kill me to know because, not only for the man who sacrificed so much for all of us, but just the country as a whole. Fuck the whole J6 thing and pardons; I don’t even care about that. I just talk about the status of our nation, and what it meant—and what it meant for us, for everybody, whether you’re MAGA or not.” [You have one minute remaining.]

“OUR HOUSE”

In mid-July, I went to visit Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland. One thing I learned from reading his 2022 book, Unthinkable, was that the revisionist history of January 6 began on January 6, when the representatives were called back to the House floor to certify the election. “I remember it so clearly,” he told me. Matt Gaetz rose and said something kind about Raskin, which touched him. And then Gaetz changed his tone and said he was hearing “pretty compelling evidence” that some of the violent people who’d breached the Capitol were not Trump supporters but members of antifa. He was saying this to his colleagues in Congress, who just hours earlier had seen the mob with their own eyes, who’d just had to barricade the doors of their offices against rioters brimming with rage and carrying Confederate flags and makeshift gallows and other inflammatory, insurrectionist iconography and yelling “Stop the Steal!” Raskin could already see where this was heading: January 6 was going to be folded into the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 election.

“There are lots of those micro lies that fit into the pattern of the Big Lie about the election,” Raskin told me. “So Donald Trump calls the J6ers ‘political prisoners,’ which is a lie, and he calls them ‘hostages,’ which is a lie.” These people have been prosecuted for assaulting officers and invading the Capitol, he went on. “And most of them pled guilty, right? So how are they hostages? What makes them political prisoners? Suddenly they’re like Alexei Navalny, who died at the hands of Vladimir Putin? They’re like Nelson Mandela? I don’t think so.”

David Frum: Don’t let anyone normalize January 6

In his book, Raskin refers to Trump’s Big Lie as “the new-and-improved Lost Cause myth.” In less than four years, January 6 has gone from a horror that even many hard-core MAGA supporters, and Trump himself, felt politically compelled to distance themselves from … to being an event that Trump makes central to his political message. January 6 has taken on sacred power; for many, like Brandon Fellows, it was the crucible that gave their lives meaning. It is the furnace that still fuels the Big Lie.

Dozens of people who participated in the “Stop the Steal” rally, including some who ended up serving time for crimes committed on January 6, have run for political office—federal, state, and local. I have yet to encounter one who shies away from their actions on that day. Consider Derrick Evans, “J6 Prisoner running for U.S. Congress,” as the pop-up image that greets you on his campaign website says. One of the photos on the site shows him in a Rebels sweatshirt after being arraigned. Another shows him smiling in a sunny field with his wife and four small children. The juxtaposition of images suggests that the Lost Causification of January 6 is working: Storming the Capitol is something that a God-fearing, patriotic family man or woman does.

I had another reason I wanted to talk with Raskin: He and Micki Witthoeft had lost their adult children less than a week apart. On December 31, 2020, Tommy Raskin died by suicide. Unthinkable is about January 6 but also about Tommy. Raskin told me that people would ask him, “ ‘What do those two things have to do with each other?’ And to my mind, they are absolutely inextricable. It’s all intertwined.” Raskin believes that the story of Tommy’s demise began with the pandemic, when people were “atomized and isolated and depressed.” Ashli’s troubles were compounded during COVID—her pool-cleaning business struggled, and Micki says the combination of COVID lockdowns, mask mandates, and Ashli’s belief that the election was stolen made her very “angry and agitated.”

Although Raskin has his own experience with trying to integrate grief into a belief system, he was reluctant to psychoanalyze Micki. But when I told him that Micki has often said she’d rather be angry than sad, he took this as a clue. “I think what you’re talking about is something that is post-grief, which is trying to make meaning of a loss. I assume she experienced just overwhelming grief and despondency and shock and sorrow to lose her daughter. Then, after that shock is somehow metabolized, I assume she has to figure out what her daughter’s death means.” I asked him if he would ever try to talk with Micki about this, in the way Joe Biden often bonds with people over shared grief. He said, “I can’t imagine she would want to meet me,” but added that he would think about it.

Over the summer, Micki and Brandon Fellows “had words” about his antics. As the movement’s matriarch, Micki is used to setting the rules. But she has nurtured legions of sons who are used to breaking them. At some point, the kids just move on, and you’re left wondering what you should be doing. The movement she’s helped birth has escaped her full control, and seems to be seeking things—including, possibly, the restoration of Trump to the White House by violent means—that she doesn’t support.

Not that Micki is entirely clear on what she wants. What would justice for Ashli even look like? A public funeral procession? Michael Byrd in jail? What about Trump getting elected and pardoning all the J6ers? Would that be enough? After all, that’s what Ashli talked about in Micki’s dream. Lauren once asked Micki what would happen if no one were to be held accountable for Ashli’s death in a way that felt sufficient to her. “Well, that’s a good question,” Micki said. “But I guess then I will just have to take my dying breath trying to bring that about.”

At a press conference in August, Trump again said that the J6ers have been “treated very unfairly.” He has also continued to say that, if reelected, he will pardon them. Weirdly, it doesn’t occur to Micki that the person ultimately responsible for her daughter’ death is Donald Trump. His narcissism and pathological fear of losing are what set in motion Ashli’s fatal journey to the Capitol in the first place.

But the Big Lie’s hold on Mama Micki may be loosening. The last time Lauren and I went to the vigil, in July, only five people showed up. Tami, the third house member, has just moved out. “You know, I’m feeling real, real tired, to be honest,” Nicole Reffitt said recently. She also admitted that she felt guilty for having encouraged some of the J6ers not to take a plea deal and to stand up against the government instead. For many of them, that has meant more time in prison. “They could be at home, and instead they’re in jail.” About Micki, Nicole says, “I’m a ride-or-die person. I don’t have a lot of those people. But the ones I do have, it’s ’til the end. Micki is one of those people. Guy is one of those people.”

But Guy will get out of prison soon, and where will that leave Micki? Nicole’s family lives in Texas. Micki’s family—what’s left of it—lives in San Diego. Micki and her husband are separated now. She used to have a life there that she loved, riding horses, gardening, reading mystery novels. She loved being a wife and a mother. But she isn’t a wife anymore, and her remaining kids are grown, and she doesn’t have a place to stay. When she visits San Diego, she stays in her friend Wilma’s RV.

Lauren won’t necessarily admit this, but she worries about Micki. What happens to a nervous person who used to have some moments of serenity but who now fixates on wackadoodle things like her government coming after America’s children? Does she get stuck there or go back to riding her horses and dipping her feet in the water? Lauren has been watching her closely. At the nightly vigil, Micki no longer reacts with anger when the police instruct her to do this or that. In fact, she now tells her own people to stay calm and follow the rules.

This summer, Lauren asked Micki if she could ever imagine being, if not truly happy, then at least at peace, or maybe even being able to savor small moments of contentment. No, Micki said quickly, she doesn’t foresee contentment for herself, because she’s “just too damaged.” But then she told a story. A while ago, she and Nicole were driving. It was fall. “The leaves were all different colors, and Nicole was like, ‘Look at how pretty those leaves are. Look at this gorgeous [view].’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s dead fucking leaves, Nicole.’ ” But, she continued, “I do now enjoy the smell of a flower. I will walk up to a rose and put my nose right in it. So that’s, you know …” That’s not nothing.

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This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “The Insurrectionists Next Door.” Additional reporting by Lauren Ober. Rosin and Ober’s podcast about the Eagle’s Nest, We Live Here Now, can be found at www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/we-live-here-now starting September 18, 2024.

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