What Really Happened Inside the ‘Patriot Pod’

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

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

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

Rosin: Are you Brandon?

Fellows: Yes.

Rosin: I’m Hanna. Hi.

Fellows: Nice to meet you.

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

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

Micki Witthoeft: To the jail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m Hanna Rosin.

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

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

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

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

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

Rosin: He said what now?

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

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

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

Rosin: Wait. You were a tiny houser?

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

Rosin: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosin: Wait. You’re watching someone—

Fellows: Yep.

Rosin: With what?

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

Rosin: Were you genuinely freaked out?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosin: They’re just giving you stuff?

Fellows: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.