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Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesMAGA billionaire Elon Musk gave roughly $75 million to his pro-Donald Trump political action committee in just three months, making him one of the Republican movement's biggest bankrollers, filings with the Federal Election Commission showed Tuesday.Musk’s America PAC spent about $72 million in the same July to September reporting period, the filings said.The cash infusion from the out-and-proud MAGA loving Musk puts him in league with GOP megadonors like Miriam Adelson, who gave $95 million to her own pro-Trump super PAC in the same period.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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If you follow politics, you can hardly escape Allan Lichtman, the American University history professor known for correctly forecasting the victor of all but one presidential election since 1984. In a whimsical New York Times video published over the summer, the 77-year-old competes in a Senior Olympics qualifying race—and confidently declares that Kamala Harris will win the race (get it?) for the White House. You might also have recently seen Lichtman on cable news, heard him on the radio, or read an interview with him. In an era of statistically complex, probabilistic election models, Lichtman is a throwback. He bases his predictions not on polls, but rather on the answers to a set of 13 true-or-false questions, which he calls “keys,” and which in 2016 signaled a Trump victory when the polls said otherwise. He has little patience for data crunchers who lack his academic credentials. “The issue with @NateSilver538 is he’s a compiler of polls, a clerk,” Lichtman posted on X in July, as part of a long-running spat with the prominent election modeler. “He has no fundamental basis in history and elections.”Lichtman’s complaint isn’t just with polls and the nerds who love them. In his view, almost everything that the media and political establishment pay attention to—such as campaigns, candidate quality, debates, and ideological positions—is irrelevant to the outcome. An election is a referendum on the incumbent party’s track record. “The study of history,” he writes in his book Predicting the Next President, “shows that a pragmatic American electorate chooses a president according to the performance of the party holding the White House, as measured by the consequential events and episodes of a term.”[Anne Applebaum: The danger of believing that you are powerless]According to Lichtman, the standard account of how presidential campaigns work is a harmful fiction. “The media, the candidates, the pollsters, and the consultants,” Lichtman writes, “are complicit in the idea that elections are exercises in manipulating voters,” which stymies political reform and meaningful policy debate. That argument contains a touch of the conspiratorial, but there’s a big difference between Lichtman’s worldview and a conspiracy theory: His predictions actually come true. If Lichtman is wrong about how elections work, how can he be so good at foretelling their outcomes?One possible answer is that, in fact, he isn’t.Lichtman developed his method in 1981 in collaboration with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Russian mathematical geophysicist. Lichtman had a hunch, he told me, that “it was the performance and strength of the White House Party that turned elections.” He and Keilis-Borok analyzed every election from 1860 to 1980; the hunch bore out.Each of the 13 keys can be defined as a true-or-false statement. If eight or more of them are true, the incumbent-party candidate will win; seven or fewer, and they will lose. Here they are, as spelled out in Predicting the Next President:1. Incumbent-party mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections.2. Nomination contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.3. Incumbency: The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president.4. Third party: There is no significant third-party or independent campaign.5. Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.6. Long-term economy: Real annual per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the two previous terms.7. Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.8. Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.10. Foreign or military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.11. Foreign or military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.13. Challenger charisma: The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.Lichtman says that keys 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 13 are true this year: just enough to assure a Harris victory.Although some of the keys sound extremely subjective, Lichtman insists that they are not subjective at all—assessing them simply requires the kind of judgments that historians are trained to make. The charisma key, for example, doesn’t depend on your gut feeling about a candidate. “We are talking about the once-in-a-generation, across-the-board, inspirational, truly transformational candidates, like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan,” he told me.I can attest that applying the keys is challenging for those of us without a history Ph.D. The keys must be “turned” consistently from election to election without regard to polls, but in practice seem to be influenced by fluctuating public-opinion data. The Democratic nominee in 2008, Barack Obama, qualified as charismatic, but the 2012 nominee, who was also Barack Obama, did not, because of his diminished approval ratings. The “third-party challenger” key cuts against the incumbent if a third-party candidate is likely to get 5 percent of the vote—but this is only knowable through horse-race polling, which we’re supposed to ignore, or after the fact, in which case it’s not a prediction.Lichtman insists that voters don’t change their minds in response to what the candidates say or do during the course of a campaign. This leads him to make some deeply counterintuitive claims. He has written that George H. W. Bush’s attacks on Michael Dukakis in 1988—which included the infamous Willie Horton ad—accomplished nothing, and actually hurt Bush’s subsequent ability to govern, because he already had enough keys to win and should have been focused on his policy agenda. He implies that JFK, who edged out Richard Nixon by less than two-tenths of a percentage point in 1960, would have won even if he had had the personality of, say, his nephew Robert, because he had eight keys in his favor in addition to charisma. And this past summer, Lichtman told anyone who would listen that Joe Biden should stay in the race, despite his difficulty completing a sentence, because replacing him on the ticket would mean the loss of the incumbency key. If Democrats persuaded Biden to drop out, he wrote in a July 3 op-ed, “they would almost surely doom their party to defeat and reelect Donald Trump.” (He changed his mind once it became clear that no one would challenge Harris for the nomination, thus handing her key 2.)Arguments such as these are hard to accept, because they require believing that Lichtman’s “pragmatic electorate” places no stock in ideological positions or revelations about character and temperament. Lichtman is unperturbed by such objections, however. All arguments against the keys fail because they suggest that the keys are in some way wrong, which they plainly are not. Lichtman has written, for example, that the infamous “Comey letter” did not tip the 2016 election to Trump, as poll-focused analysts such as Nate Silver have “incorrectly claimed.” How does Lichtman know the claim is incorrect? Because the keys already predicted a Trump victory. The proof is in the fact that the system works. This raises the question of whether it actually does.Going nine for 10 on presidential predictions is not as hard as it sounds. Only four of the past 10 elections were particularly close. Most campaign years, you can just look at the polls. Lichtman predicted a Biden victory in 2020, for example, but you probably did too.To his credit, Lichtman has made many accurate calls, in some cases well before polls showed the eventual victor in the lead. Even in 2000, the election that he is generally considered to have gotten wrong, the system worked as advertised. As he explains in Predicting the Next President, the keys “predict only the national popular vote and not the vote within individual states.” (Lichtman has devoted considerable energy to proving that the election was stolen in Florida by the GOP, and that he has thus really gone 10 for 10.)Lichtman’s most celebrated feat of foresight by far, the gutsy call that supposedly sets his keys apart from mere polls, was his 2016 prediction. Calling the race for Trump when the polls pointed the other way was reputationally risky. After Lichtman was vindicated, he was showered with praise and received a personal note of congratulations from Trump himself. “Authorities in the field recognized my nearly unique successful prediction of a Trump victory,” Lichtman told me in an email. He quoted the assessment of the political scientist Gerald M. Pomper: “In 2016, nine of eleven major studies predicted Clinton’s lead in the national popular vote. However, by neglecting the Electoral College and variations among the state votes, they generally failed to predict Trump’s victory. One scholar did continue his perfect record of election predictions, using simpler evaluations of the historical setting (Lichtman 2016).”Oddly, no one seems to have noticed at the time what seems in hindsight like an obvious problem. By Lichtman’s own account, the keys predict the popular-vote winner, not the state-by-state results. But Trump lost the popular vote by two percentage points, eking out an Electoral College victory by fewer than 80,000 votes in three swing states.Lichtman has subsequently addressed the apparent discrepancy. “In 2016, I made the first modification of the keys system since its inception in 1981,” he writes in the most recent edition of Predicting the Next President. In “my final forecast for 2016, I predicted the winner of the presidency, e.g., the Electoral College, rather than the popular vote winner.” He did this, he writes, because of the divergence of the Electoral College results from the popular vote: “In any close election, Democrats will win the popular vote but not necessarily the Electoral College.”[Peter Wehner: This election is different]But the gap that Lichtman describes did not become apparent until the results of the 2016 election were known. In 2008 and 2012, the Electoral College actually gave a slight advantage to Obama, and until 2016, the difference between the margin in the popular vote and in the Electoral College tipping state was typically small. Why would Lichtman have changed his methodology to account for a change that hadn’t happened yet?Odder still is the fact that Lichtman waited to announce his new methodology until well after the election in which he says he deployed it. According to an investigation published this summer by the journalists Lars Emerson and Michael Lovito for their website, The Postrider, no record exists of Lichtman mentioning the modification before the fact. In their estimation, “he appears to have retroactively changed” the predictive model “as a means of preserving his dubious 10 for 10 streak.”This is a sore subject for Lichtman. Whether he got 2016 totally right or merely sort of right might seem like a quibble; surely he was closer to the mark than most experts. But a forecaster who changes his methodology after the fact has no credibility. When I brought the matter up with Lichtman in a Zoom interview, he became angry. “Let me tell you: It steams me,” he said, his voice rising. “I dispute this, you know, When did you stop beating your wife? kind of question.”Lichtman directed me to an interview he gave The Washington Post in September 2016. (When I tried to interject that I had read the article, he cut me off and threatened to end the interview.) There and elsewhere, Lichtman said, he clearly stated that Trump would win the election. Trump did win the election, ergo, the prediction was accurate. Nowhere did he say anything about the popular vote.Later that evening, Lichtman sent me a follow-up email with the subject line “2016.” In it, he described Emerson and Lovito as “two unknown journalists with no qualifications in history or political science.” As for their claims, he pointed once again to the Washington Post interview, and also to an article in the October 2016 issue of the academic journal Social Education, in which he published his final prediction.Here is what Lichtman wrote in the Social Education article: “As a national system, the Keys predict the popular vote, not the state-by-state tally of Electoral College votes. However, only once in the last 125 years has the Electoral College vote diverged from the popular vote.”This seemed pretty cut-and-dried. I replied to Lichtman’s email asking him to explain. “Yes, I was not as clear as I could have been in that article,” he responded. “However, I could not have been clearer in my Washington Post prediction and subsequent Fox News and CBS interviews, all of which came after I wrote the article.” In those interviews, he said nothing about the popular vote or the Electoral College.I got another email from Lichtman, with the subject line “Postriders,” later that night. “Here is more information on the two failed journalists who have tried to make a name for themselves on my back,” Lichtman wrote. Attached to the email was a Word document, a kind of opposition-research memo, laying out the case against Lovito and Emerson: “They post a blog—The Postrider—that has failed to gain any traction as documented below. They are not qualified to comment on the Keys, the polls, or any aspect of election prediction.” The document then went through some social-media numbers. Lichtman has 12,000 followers on Facebook; The Postrider has only 215, and the articles get no engagement. One hundred thousand followers for Lichtman on X; a few hundred for Emerson and Lovito.[Gilad Edelman: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]I ran these criticisms by Emerson and Lovito, who were already familiar with Lichtman’s theory of the case. After they published their article, he emailed them, cc’ing his lawyer and American University’s general counsel, accusing them of defamation.To the charge of being less famous than Lichtman, they pled guilty. “It’s true that a public intellectual who has been publishing books since the late 1970s and is interviewed every four years by major media outlets has a larger following than us, yes,” they wrote in an email. “But we fail to see what relevance that has to our work.” Regarding their qualifications, they pointed out that they each have a bachelor’s degree in political science from American University, where Lichtman teaches. (Emerson is a current student at American’s law school.) “As for this story on the Keys, we spent months reading and reviewing Professor Lichtman’s books, academic papers, and interviews regarding the Keys. If we are not qualified to comment at that point, he should reconsider how he publicly communicates about his work.”In a December 2016 year-in-review article, the journalist Chris Cillizza looked back on the stories that had generated the most interest for his Washington Post politics blog, The Fix. “The answer this year? Allan Lichtman. Allan Lichtman. Allan Lichtman … Of the 10 most trafficked posts on The Fix in 2016, four involved Lichtman and his unorthodox predictions,” Cillizza wrote. “Those four posts totaled more than 10 million unique visitors alone and were four of the 37 most trafficked posts on the entire WaPo website this year.”Americans love a prediction. We crave certainty. This makes the life of a successful predictor an attractive one, as Lichtman, who has achieved some measure of fame, can attest. But a professional forecaster is always one bad call away from irrelevance.Give Lichtman credit for making concrete predictions to which he can be held accountable. As he always says, the probabilistic forecasts currently in vogue can’t be proved or disproved. The Nate Silvers of the world, who have unanimously labeled the upcoming election a toss-up, will be correct no matter who wins. Not so for Lichtman. A Trump restoration would not just end his winning streak. It would call into question his entire theory of politics. We are all waiting to find out how pragmatic the electorate really is.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart Media | YouTube | Pocket CastsFor 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 Podgathered 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 andmore 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.

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