Aaron Judge snaps postseason slump, Yankees take 2-0 lead over Guardians in ALCS

University of Chicago professor Friedrich Hayek. | Getty Images There are few more influential right-wing scholars than the economist Friedrich Hayek — and few whose work is less compatible with the right’s ascendant Trumpian strain. Born in Austria in 1899, Hayek spent his career developing a wide-ranging libertarian social theory. Societies, for Hayek, emerge from the interplay of countless different systems and logics — creating an order so complex that no single entity, not even a government, can fully understand how it all operates. He believed that any attempt to transform such a thing by policy would invariably break part of this system, leading to unintended and often disastrous consequences. This isn’t a good argument against all government interference in the marketplace (as a shallow read of Hayek might suggest). But it is a powerful insight into how societies work, one that provides an especially clear explanation for why planned economies failed so badly during Hayek’s lifetime. It also helps us understand why there’s an authentic strain of right-wing resistance to Trump’s “tariffs and deportations” economic agenda — one that attentive liberals could learn from. Hayek’s “spontaneous order” and the case against regulation For Hayek, there were basically two different types of system or order. The first is an organization, meaning a top-down planned effort where one person or entity lays out the rules for everyone to follow. The second is a “spontaneous order,” a bottom-up system in which the rules are determined over time by enormous numbers of micro-interactions. Take, for example, the ecosystem of the American West. No one person set the rules by which bison, wolves, moose, prairie dogs, and the like breed and interact; in fact, no one dictated that this particular place needed to have those particular species at all. Instead, a system emerged out of thousands of years of interactions between flora and fauna, prey and predator. It has predictable rules and outcomes, but no hand at the tiller. Hayek believed that humanity operated in a similar, but even more complex, fashion.  Our own social order, according to Hayek, reflects centuries of interactions between hundreds of millions of different people and an impossibly diverse set of institutions, ranging from organized religion to different economic sectors to artist collectives. What we call “society” is the spontaneous order that emerges from individuals and organizations interacting and developing oft-unwritten rules that govern those interactions.  “The structure of human activities constantly adapts itself, and functions through adapting itself, to millions of facts which in their entirety are not known to anybody,” he wrote in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 1. Government, Hayek argued, plays a special role in spontaneous order: It “becomes indispensable in order to assure that [social] rules are obeyed.” The state both protects people’s rights to participate in their corner of the spontaneous order and, at times, can even guide the order toward adopting a different (and perhaps better) set of rules. What the state cannot do well, in Hayek’s eyes, is interfere with discrete and specific interactions inside the spontaneous order.  When the government issues “commands” telling people where and for how much they can sell their goods, for example, it is engaging in an enterprise that bureaucrats and politicians cannot and never will have sufficient knowledge to do adequately. Most economic regulation, for Hayek, is akin to the mass slaughter of wolves in the American West — a shortsighted move with destabilizing long-term consequences. (Recent efforts to reintroduce wolves have been an extraordinary success.)  “The spontaneous order arises from each element balancing all the various factors operating on it and by adjusting all its various actions to each other, a balance which will be destroyed if some of the actions are determined by another agency on the basis of different knowledge and in the service of different ends,” Hayek wrote. Hayek versus Trump It is very easy to take this pro-market line of thinking too far.  We know that certain elements of the economy, like the money supply, can in fact be effectively managed by governments. Hayek’s skepticism of government could bleed over into paranoia, as with his argument in The Road to Serfdom asserting that social democracy would invariably bleed into authoritarianism. In fact, he even went so far as to endorse Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile on grounds that its free-market policies were worth the loss of political liberty. Yet Hayek’s argument is essential to understanding why some government projects, like Soviet-style command economies, tend to fail so spectacularly. When an economic policy aims at fundamental transformation, one in which humans are put in charge of managing a vast swath of ordinary economic activity, the potential for the state to exceed the bounds of its knowledge is obvious.  Hayek did not believe that this was only a problem for socialists. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek argued that conservatives’ emphasis on preserving tradition and the nation inclined them toward dangerous forms of state control over society. “It is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism: to think in terms of ‘our’ industry or resource is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest,” he wrote. So despite unquestionably being a man of the right, Hayek rejected the label “conservative” for his politics (he preferred “liberal” on grounds that “libertarian” was too clunky). Conservatives, he argued, were dogmatic and nationalistic — useful allies against the left, but skeptical enough of liberty that they posed their own set of collectivist dangers. Were Hayek still alive, he would see the vindication of his concerns in the person of Donald Trump. The former president’s two most consistent policy proposals — deporting millions of migrants and imposing a 10-percent tariff on all foreign-made goods — are far more aggressive efforts at reshaping America’s spontaneous order than any tax-and-spend proposals offered by the Harris campaign. Each, in its own way, amounts to a fundamental revision of how the American state and economy operate. Indeed, there’s a reason that some of the most effective critics of Trump’s trade and immigration policies work for the libertarian Cato Institute. Hayek’s heirs, at least those who take his ideas seriously, understand that Trump represents something anathema to their tradition. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

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.

Khazar Elyassnia, 38, has allegedly been partying and sleeping with Lee when her brother, Nima Momeni, 40, stabbed Lee to death in April 2023.

Aidan Hutchinson was having another strong season, recording 7.5 sacks prior to suffering a gruesome injury during a Week 6 game against the Dallas Cowboys.

Firefighters were seen working relentlessly to get the fast-moving fire under control but faced challenges while battling the inferno.

Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe or scripted series with countless spin-offs, reality TV has become more reliant on proven franchises as the industry becomes more risk-averse.

Meat producer BrucePac is recalling nearly 10 million pounds of meat and poultry products sold at Trader Joe’s, Target, Kroger and other retailers because they might be contaminated with listeria.

The trend of girls posting on TikTok about makeup is a toxic mix of two major plagues on children: social media and impossible beauty standards.

Visions of combo platters and glorious tacos filled my mind as I barreled down the 15. The only election reminder was a “Viva Trump” sign outside Victorville.

In the wee hours of Thursday morning Angelenos will get their first peek at a double whammy astrological delight — a Hunter's moon that's also a supermoon.

Some of the most important names in L.A. Latino politics were born in Arizona mining towns or traced their lineage there. I share those roots.

While misinformation hampers the federal response to the hurricane in North Carolina, people on the ground are finding officials competent and helpful.

Los Angeles City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto has decided not to prosecute Santos Leon and Karla Vasquez, a married couple who worked at the L.A. County Federation of Labor, where the conversation took place in 2021.

Elon Musk thinks humankind's only safety valve is to move multitudes to Mars. He has no idea how foolhardy and dangerous that would be.

Paying homage to victims of anti-Latino hatred is important, given Trump’s anti-immigrant slurs. But in El Paso, some are weary of the migrants passing through.

La Mutua, the nation's oldest Latino civil rights group is down to about 200 members, some middle-aged, but a new generation is trying to revive the group.

The people I spoke to know things aren’t easy and never will be — but they don’t sink into a doom spiral. They have faith in their communities and themselves.

Jess and Rich Fierro might not like to be called heroes, but they gladly wear the label of leaders — and they want to inspire other Latinos to do the same.

Han Kang's Nobel Prize was a surprise to many in South Korea. Here's what you need to know about 'her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life'

What's better than a road trip to show what I’ve known forever but that many Americans won't consider: Latinos are as American as anyone else, if not more so.

Do we want a dictator? Do we want to get rid of democracy? If you answer 'no' to both, the choice between Harris and Trump is clear.

Agriculture, which intersects with key issues — the economy, climate change and immigration — is a barometer of where a region and its people are heading.

Former facilities manager at Valley Christian Schools is being federally prosecuted for allegedly soliciting child pornography from students.

Experts say a new $22-billion plan to end homelessness in the city of Los Angeles reveals decades of underfunding and pitfalls of leaders' current approach.

Will Riverside County leaders erase the zoning barrier that separates industrial warehouses from rural homes in Mead Valley? Or is this the moment that the proliferation of distribution centers slows in the Inland Empire?

The Latino Youth Leadership Conference is an incubator whose alums include politicians, entrepreneurs, teachers, NASA engineers and members of various parties.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office declined to prosecute Prince George’s County police officer Braxton Shelton in the fatal shooting of Melvin Jay.

A new report on Brett Kavanaugh's scandal-plagued confirmation only adds to the dishonesty and corruption at the Supreme Court.

Donald Tump has made a raft of campaign promises, on issues including the economy, immigration and the amount of water that flows through California.

'There's art in the desert and natural beauty that's rarely seen,' says a reader. 'It's magical, but you have to go there to know that.'

The world's richest man once said Donald Trump's character didn't 'reflect well' on the U.S. Now Elon Musk is touring the country, and spending big, to put Trump and other Republicans in power.

Director Sean Baker loves Los Angeles moviegoing. We interviewed him at Gardena Cinema about 'Anora,' his brassy romantic comedy that should be a breakout.

A rush of Instagram-approved products have flooded the NRT market over the last few years. They have a new audience in mind: vapers.

Vice President Kamala Harris has made lofty promises on issues including abortion, gun policy and immigration.

'I'm here because Donald Trump raped me.' Hollywood actors voice E. Jean Carroll's testimony in a new documentary about her civil trials against Trump.

A new indictment against a Chinese company and its executives highlights the complex international process through which fentanyl is created and then travels to get into American hands.

Michelle Chambers, who is running for California's 35th Senate District in South L.A., said she took a plea deal because she could not afford a lawyer.

The developers contracted to build housing on the VA’s West Los Angeles campus have said veterans have no interest in a hotel being built on the property, but leaked results of an internal survey show a large majority do.

Ever wondered if you could walk from Santa Monica all the way down the Southern California coast? Here's how to do it while staying in comfort every night.

One candidate will greenlight a 21st century sagebrush rebellion. The other will protect the public treasure of Utah's red rocks, mountains and deserts.

From "Black Echo" to his latest, "The Waiting," Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch books keep taking readers to the dance — partnered with a detective you can't help but root for, in an L.A. of risks and second chances.

The competing measures have drawn intense attention and are likely to drive voter turnout in a way that could even affect the outcome of the presidential race.

"It’s such a human experience, and that's what I really loved as a very sensitive, emotional person," Ámez says.

Trump's tariff plans could lead to economic isolation, affecting global markets and increasing costs for American consumers.

Former congressman Denver Riggleman, who has split with the GOP over election denial, has crossed party lines before, backing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to the media before boarding Air Force Two after assessing the Hurricane Helene recovery response in North Carolina on October 5, 2024, in Charlotte, North Carolina. | Mario Tama/Getty Images Over the course of its last few terms, the Supreme Court has effectively placed itself in charge of the executive branch.  It’s given itself an extra-constitutional veto power over virtually any policy decision made by a federal agency. Even when it ultimately rules in favor of President Joe Biden’s policies, it often sits on those cases for months, allowing a lower court order to suspend Biden’s programs for as much as a year.  Meanwhile, the Court has done extraordinary favors for America’s only recent Republican president. Just look at the Republican justices’ decision to immunize former President Donald Trump from prosecution for criminal actions he committed while in office. The president, in other words, is increasingly subordinate to the courts. Yet, as the judiciary seizes more and more power, the battle over who gets to shape it grows increasingly lopsided.  Republicans enjoy an advantage in the Electoral College. Just how much is up for debate, but that advantage does mean that even if the American people hand Vice President Kamala Harris a modest victory in the popular vote this November, Donald Trump could still become president. He’d then get to nominate loyal Republican judges eager to implement his party’s agenda from the bench, much as he did during his first term. Even if Harris wins by a large enough margin to overcome the Electoral College’s Republican bias, she still may not get to have much of an impact on the judiciary. Her presidency — and specifically her ability to name judges — is likely to be restricted by a Republican Senate. For Democrats to control even a tied 50-50 Senate, one in which Vice President Tim Walz would hold the deciding vote if Harris prevails, they must not just win in every single blue and swing state Senate race this year, but also Senate races in at least two of the red states of Ohio, Florida, Montana, and Texas.  That could happen, but it would require the kind of unusually triumphant Democratic election year that the party hasn’t seen since at least 2008 and possibly not since President Bill Clinton’s landslide reelection victory in 1996. And that seems quite unlikely. A Harris victory could halt America’s slide into a MAGA-dominated future but it is unlikely to give her the power to reshape the judiciary in the way Trump was able to during his first term. The Electoral College and Senate malapportionment has completely warped the judiciary  During the Biden administration, the Republican Supreme Court wielded its power aggressively. It greenlit abortion bans in numerous red states. It abolished affirmative action at nearly all universities. It has turned itself into a printing press for court orders benefiting the Christian right. It’s given itself sweeping veto power over literally anything done by a federal agency that should be controlled by the president. And then there was that whole affair where the Republican justices said that Donald Trump was allowed to commit crimes while he was in office. Along the way, the Court has pulled new legal rules out of thin air, then used these newly invented rules to nullify many of Biden’s most ambitious programs. If the American people had voted for this agenda then it would be difficult to criticize the Republican Party for pushing it. But the electorate did nothing of the sort. After 2016, Trump was in a position to nominate three Supreme Court justices not because most Americans wanted him to be president but because enough Americans in the right places did. The Electoral College system means each American’s vote is not equal: Hillary Clinton, after all, won nearly 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, but still lost the presidency. Trump had a Republican Senate willing to put his choices on the bench because Republicans have an enduring advantage in the upper chamber, one that makes it more difficult for Democrats to control the Senate. Each state, regardless of population, gets two senators.  These antidemocratic features of the US Constitution have been with the United States almost from the beginning, but they have an increasingly pronounced effect today, largely because the parties have sorted based on population density. People in cities and other densely populated areas tend to vote for Democrats, while outlying areas become more and more Republican as they become less dense.  That means that a system that effectively gives extra representation to the most sparsely populated states will unfairly favor the Republican Party. In 2021, for example, when the Senate split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the Democratic “half” represented nearly 42 million more people than the Republican “half.”  Though the trend appears to be accelerating, this antidemocratic skew long predates the Trump presidency. Senate malapportionment has been one of the most consequential factors shaping US politics for decades. By some counts, if senators were distributed equally according to how the majority of Americans voted, Democrats would have controlled the Senate in every single year since the late 1990s. In that world, Democrats not only may have enacted more significant legislation, they would also almost certainly control the courts. Obama would have confirmed a justice to fill the vacancy created when Justice Antonin Scalia died in Obama’s last year in office, and none of Trump’s nominees would have likely been confirmed. Similarly, while Republicans probably would have still filled some Supreme Court seats during the 1990s and 2000s, it’s unlikely that they would have successfully confirmed an ideologue like Justice Clarence Thomas or an unapologetic GOP partisan like Justice Samuel Alito if Senate seats were distributed fairly by population. In a fair Senate, Republican presidents would have to negotiate with Democrats to choose moderate nominees in the vein of, say, Justices Lewis Powell and Sandra Day O’Connor. That is to say, the impact of recent population sorting is felt acutely in the courts. In all of US history, only three justices were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the nation’s populace. All three of them currently sit on the Supreme Court; they are Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s three appointees to the Court. What a broken Senate means for a potential Harris administration  In the event that Harris wins the presidency but Republicans capture the Senate, we only need to turn the clock back less than a decade to predict what is likely to happen. Obama’s final two years in office were the only two when Republicans controlled the Senate. And shortly after Scalia’s death in February 2016, Senate Republicans announced that they would confirm no one Obama nominated to fill that seat.  “This vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced at the time. (Four years later, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death allowed Trump to fill a vacancy in the final months of his presidency, Republicans abandoned the position they adopted in 2016 and swiftly confirmed Trump’s nominee.) The GOP’s blockade on Supreme Court confirmations should have surprised no one who watched the Senate closely because Senate Republicans had already imposed a near-total halt on all confirmations to federal appellate courts, powerful bodies that hand down precedential decisions that determine what the law is in multiple states at a time. In Obama’s last two years in office, he successfully appointed only two judges to the appellate bench, and one of these judges was confirmed to a highly specialized, relatively nonpolitical court that primarily deals with patent law. By contrast, President George W. Bush confirmed 10 appellate judges during his last two terms in office, during a period when Democrats controlled the Senate. Similarly, during Obama’s last two years in office, he appointed only 18 judges to federal district courts, the lowest rank of federal judge who enjoys a lifetime appointment. That compares to 58 judges during Bush’s final two years in office, according to data from the Federal Judicial Center. In Trump’s final two years in office, when Republicans controlled both the White House and the Senate, an astonishing 121 district judges were confirmed, including some infamously partisan judges like Aileen Cannon and Matthew Kacsmaryk.  President Biden, for what it’s worth, has confirmed more than 200 judges thanks to Democrats’ narrow majority in the Senate, including a total of 116 since the current Congress took office. Over his entire presidency, he’s filled 44 appellate seats. Without the power to confirm judges, Harris will have no way to dilute the influence of judges like Cannon or Kacsmaryk, and Republicans could easily refuse to confirm anyone to any judicial vacancy that comes open until the GOP regains the White House. Alternatively, Harris may be able to strike deals with Republicans to confirm a few of her preferred judges, but the GOP has a history of demanding a very high price to confirm even a single Democratic judge.  In 2014, for example, thanks in part to a now-weakened Senate process that allowed senators to veto anyone nominated to a federal judgeship in their state, Georgia’s Republican senators convinced Obama to nominate four Republican judicial choices — including a Republican appellate judge — in return for confirming only two Democrats. One of the Republican nominees was eventually dropped because his views on abortion, marriage equality, and the Confederate Flag offended Democrats, but Republicans still walked away with more confirmed judges than Obama did. Harris could very well find herself in a similar situation.  The problems for Harris likely wouldn’t stop there. Because Republicans continue to dominate the judiciary, Harris would likely spend her presidency watching her policies get struck down on dubious legal theories invented by GOP judges, much as the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness policy despite the fact that it was unambiguously authorized by an act of Congress. Democrats are starting to awaken to the threat of a Republican judiciary, but they haven’t yet found a solution to their constitutional problem Absent constitutional reform, Democrats have good reason to fear a Republican judiciary for decades to come. A malapportioned Senate means that Democrats are increasingly defenseless against the GOP’s efforts to control the bench. In recent years, however, Democrats have become more aware of a GOP judiciary’s power to thwart their agenda and have started to try to explore ways around it.  Historically, elected Republicans have viewed the courts as a favorable issue that rallies their base, while Democrats have behaved much more cautiously. Many Republicans credit Trump’s decision to delegate judicial selection to the Federalist Society, a bar association for right-wing lawyers, and to release a list of potential Supreme Court nominees during his 2016 candidacy, for giving him enough support to prevail in that year’s election. Biden, by contrast, began his presidency very reluctant to take on the courts. After many Democrats called for Supreme Court reform in the wake of the Senate’s disparate treatment of the Scalia and Ginsburg vacancies, Biden tried to take the wind out of the sails of reform by promising to appoint a commission to study the issue — and then filling the commission with Republicans and scholars who historically have not supported reform. But, as the Supreme Court’s polling numbers collapsed and as the Court outraged elected Democrats with opinions like its Trump immunity decision, Democrats have grown more aggressive. Biden proposed term-limiting the justices and imposing a binding ethics code on the Court, proposals also supported by Harris. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has a bill that would strip the Court of jurisdiction to enforce its immunity decision. One of the most ambitious recent Supreme Court reform proposals, from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), includes a number of very aggressive reforms. Wyden’s proposal would make every justice submit to a tax audit each year, require a two-thirds supermajority for the Court to overrule an act of Congress, and gradually expand the size of the Court to 15 seats. Yet, while these proposals show that Democrats are moving in a more court-skeptical direction than they were four years ago, they would not solve the structural problems with US democracy that gave us the courts we have today. And they have virtually no chance of passing, especially in a world where it is increasingly difficult for Democrats to win the Senate even when they convincingly win the national popular vote. Realistically, turning the United States into a nation where every vote counts equally — and where each voter is actually able to shape the judiciary — would require rewriting its Constitution. Until that happens, Democrats like Harris will struggle to win elections even when most Americans support them. And Democratic presidents will increasingly be at the mercy of Republicans in both the Senate and the courts.

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.

Letter writer wonders whether it’s really necessary for so many kids to be in therapy.