Hanna Rosin
Appearances
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
I just don't want to – you know, I don't want to be stupid about it. Like that is also part of the picture that at the very, very tippy top – are men. And that at some point you do encounter the mother penalty. And that is very real. Like the caretaking mother penalty still exists and is still around.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
That's the central question. Because You know, they're losing their position as head of the household. They're losing their economic privilege. That's all true. Like, that is happening. I guess the question is, what if you just said, so what? Like, what if that was okay? What if all those things were happening and you redefine them as necessary recalibration as opposed to an absolute disaster?
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Right. Like if you just shifted your brain 20 degrees, you could solve a lot of the problems.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Like, it feels crazy. Like, it feels like, what? No. Like, boys rule the world. That's a no. It's just hard to, it's hard to get our heads around.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
It starts way down in like when you're a kid or a teenager. So of those getting the best GPAs, two-thirds are girls. And of those getting the worst GPAs, two-thirds are boys. If you look at either poor white boys or poor black boys, they seem to suffer and be way more sensitive to poverty, injustice, and family disruptions than girls are.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
It breaks our usual story. So should you pay specific attention to boys? You probably should, or at least note that they are suffering and dealing with these circumstances differently than girls are. Hmm.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Look what happened. Is this crazy? The story of men and women, just to give us the gender binary for a minute, of the last 40 or 50 years is a story about the world moving very quickly and women doing a better job of – Like sort of keeping up with it with a lot of struggle.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Like think of it as an actual treadmill, like just the world moving more and more like the treadmills going faster and faster. And women are struggling, but kind of keeping up like they're just kind of adjusting or figuring out how to go to college or like if marriages and they figure out like how to take care of the kids and how to stay in the workforce.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
And men just not able to like shift or keep up. It's not about total numbers like men sinking, women rising. It's about women rising and men not quite able to rise or keep up. And so I think there's something real about that for men and the anxieties. There's something real about like I don't know who to be without the structures. I don't know – who to be in the world without marriage.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Or I don't know who to be in the world without the provider role or the husband role. It's like without these traditional man roles, I feel really discombobulated and lost. Whereas I think women have been rolling through the collapse of roles for like a century. Like the roles collapse and they just kind of like keep on moving. And there's lots of theories about why that is.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Because this is the big change that happened between the time I wrote the book and now. This is the biggest change that happened. People did not identify as aggrieved men. They just kind of lived that way and were embarrassed by it. So the Lukes... The Lukes who appeared in my book, I'll tell you about one Luke who appeared in my book.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
He lived in one of these towns, a little more rural, just like you described. And the factory shut down. This is totally typical white American story. It was a black American story sort of 34 years before in the cities. Then it became a white American story in the rural areas. And so Luke's wife was still working. She was still working in the schools.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
And she would put her paycheck down on the table, and then Luke would go cash that paycheck. And there was a sense of shame around it. Now, 15 years later, Luke is wearing a T-shirt saying, the end of men. Like, he's not embarrassed. He's like part of some big political movement slash community of like, we're aggrieved too. So that's what I watched happen in the 15 years where like,
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
The Lukes who were like quietly suffering started like really loudly suffering. And that upended our politics and our culture in so many ways.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
That's interesting. Because I bet underneath your question maybe is like, should I feel sorry for Luke? Is that what you're trying to... No, that's actually, that is not one of the questions that I have.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
I think it's the most... powerful, most concrete, and most persistent expression of generalized anxiety. I mean, I was at a Trump rally, and the number of times that people use expressions like, we don't want beta males, we want alpha males. I'm telling you, we want a world where men are men and women are women. And I'm thinking,
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
The world is changing really fast, like the world around gender and all over the place, because it's happening in urban places and rural places, like the way a younger generation thinks about what gender is and what their own gender is. It's really shifting radically and how that is just genuinely terrifying to people.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Or it just becomes like a split, like the country splits in two and one part of the country has really like rigid traditional ideas of gender and the other goes in like totally the other direction.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
I feel like I'm in some kind of Buddha mood or something. I mean, the immediate answer that comes to me is... Go for it. The world is... an unstable and scary place. And people have lost a lot of their grounding, whether because fewer people are getting married, because jobs are less stable, because the climate disaster, sort of for all sorts of reasons.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
And I think some people are grasping for stability kind of backwards outside themselves, like, make America great again, go back to the other time when things were like this and I recognized them and everything didn't seem out of control. And some people are looking for stability kind of inside themselves, like self-determination, who I am, my own identity.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
I get to decide, like, what I want to be, and I think that's very grounding and empowering. So I think everybody's experiencing similar instability and just looking for answers In different places. Yeah, finding their comfort in different ways.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Some of them live in my house, Brittany.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Did I make that up? I kind of made that up. No, I hadn't heard it before. I hadn't heard it before. Yeah, no, it just struck me as like why everybody feels the instability. You know, everybody feels shaken. All of it is a feeling of out of control-ness that you need a solution for. So it's like, where do you find your solution?
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
I mean, it's funny because the traditional male-female stereotype is like the longer I am on this earth, the less it makes any sense to me, even though it's like so powerfully ingrained. I mean, the hierarchy between men and women is the most consistent hierarchy across history, across cultures, across continents. It gets replicated over and over and over again all the time.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Kind of men above women, men above women. Why? Like, why are the traditions this way? Like, I would ask the guys who I was reporting about in the book, like, why can't you just get a job teaching? Nope. Why can't you get a job in the hospital? Nope. That's woman's work. Why? Why? Like, what would you lose? Because if you think—one of the things about women is that they have—
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
You know, at the time, I felt like I had discovered something a little bit unsayable, that women were surpassing men. If you look at almost any category, race, demographic, income, men or boys in that category are doing worse than women or girls in that category. I mean, men are increasingly falling behind in all the measures that help you lead a successful life.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
for the last century, think about how many stereotypes of femininity they have busted through for one reason or another, like how you dress, if you work, if you're allowed to work when you're married, are you allowed to work when you have a small child? Are you allowed to be a boss to a man? Are you allowed to run a thing? Like, they've kind of trampled all of these old stereotypes. But men...
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
I can't say they're not shifting. They're definitely shifting. I mean, you know men down the generation shift. Let's take a father who's 30 in a certain social class. There are different expectations of fathers now, I think.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Yes. Way different. I do think maybe we can take some hope in that, that in the current moment, some of the stigmas around how you have to be as a man are fading away. Like in the things we talk about, like a Trump rally or January 6th, maybe there's some very loud theatrical ways in which they're not fading, but maybe there are some subterranean ways in which they are fading.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Like they're just, you know, what you are expected to do at home, how you can express yourself. I mean, I have to say I've been surprised at the different corners where I come to see men starting to recognize how important it is to understand your emotions, talk about them, how it holds you back if you can't. Like, that's the thing that's sort of trickling wider than I expected it to. Yeah.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
suffocated to a kind of... Oh, Brittany, that is really... I mean, I can't... That is good imagery because I have long been thinking like there is this sense where women are like hustlers and they're immigrants. They'll take any job. They go to the community college. I'm just talking statistically.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
Yeah, like they're just hustling. It's like, oh, I got to take care of the kid. Oh, I got to be a pharmacist. I got to go to school. I got to do this. I got to do this. And then all of a sudden they've strangled this tree in the middle that's kind of like stood still. You know, I think that's a really, really, really good imagery for this current moment.
It's Been a Minute
Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men
The only problem with that imagery is that the top leaves of the tree... Like if you take the tree still, it's like being strangled, strangled down at the bottom, strangled towards the middle. But then when you get to the very top, that center tree totally dominates the canopy. So that's how I'm going to complete your metaphor there.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jocelyn Frank. It was edited by Andrea Valdez, engineered by Erica Huang, and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm Hannah Rosen. Thank you for listening.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
So, Claudine, there's so much happening politically at this moment, but I want to step back and talk about the Palestinians themselves, the thousands who've had their lives basically upended during the war. I know many have left the country. What did Marwan tell you about why he decided to leave?
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
About a week ago, Israel once again cut off power, which is important because there are still 2 million people living in Gaza, and power helps bring them clean water. And clean water helps keep them alive. I'm Hannah Rosen, and this is Radio Atlantic. Over a year ago, we did an episode about a man named Marwan Bardawil.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
How did water work in Gaza before the war? Because I recall from talking to him that it wasn't easy, even the best of non-war circumstances, to keep water flowing.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
Right. So that was the baseline before the war. Then comes October 7th, and you've described the intense bombing campaign that destroyed a lot of the North. How did that situation look in the eyes of a water engineer?
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
So what did that mean for the people who were trapped in Gaza? Because there were still about 2 million people there. Like, how did that change their lives? Right.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
Now we're a few weeks into the ceasefire. Maybe it's a precarious ceasefire. It's not really clear. What's the current water situation?
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
He's a water engineer in Gaza, someone who's regularly calculating inflows, outflows, reviewing plans, engineering new ideas to keep the Gazans with some access to clean water, regardless of peace, war, whatever's going on politically. And something about this bureaucrat trying day after day to keep the water on really captured the growing desperation of the war.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
Even the fact that they have a six-month plan seems really important to note because what that symbolizes is Gazans rebuilding for themselves as opposed to the other visions, which are the U.S. or somebody else doing it for them, right? Right.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
With every day that goes by, the ceasefire in Gaza, if we can even still call it that, seems increasingly fragile. Arab countries have offered a plan. American diplomats met with Hamas. But so far, no agreement and no consensus. For the people in Gaza, survival is getting harder by the day.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
Okay, so there's all this destroyed infrastructure, and there are competing visions for how to rebuild it. How does Marwan fit into all of this?
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
After the break, Marwan was right to be hopeful once, even though he wasn't working with all that much. What does it look like to push through this time around with even less? Claudine, Marwan's been working on water in Gaza for like 30 years. So he knows how to operate with very few resources, very little autonomy.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
But still, I bet in the early days, like during the Oslo Accords in the 90s, the spirit of his work was probably really different. Did you talk to Marwan about this? Like, was there a younger Marwan who had a lot of energy and enthusiasm and was very excited about Gazans building Gaza? Yeah.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
Like, he was just an ordinary guy trying to do a job that was hard before October 7th and continued to get more impossible by the day. When we finished that episode, Marwan was still in Gaza. Like thousands of Gazans, when the war began, he and his family were displaced from the north to the south.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
That's an exciting thing. You get to do the thing that you care about most, bringing water to people for your own people in your own country. That's a very powerful experience.
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
What is it about him that just, did you get any insight into that? Like, what is it about him that just is able to keep focused on the task in these impossible situations?
Radio Atlantic
Water Is Not Political
And then recently, Marwan made the difficult decision to move his family entirely out of Gaza and over to Egypt, where our executive producer, Claudine Abade, caught up with him to try and learn more about what leaving meant for him and for the future of water for the Palestinian people. Claudine, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
And then he was asked about officials on the January 6th Congressional Committee, including Liz Cheney, people who put the real facts of that day on the official record.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
A lot of the people who believe these things have taken their cues from one woman, Ashley's mother. Her name is Mickey Witthoff.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
What? Yeah. No, we don't have the Eagle's Nest in our neighborhood.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
Trump's desire to rewrite January 6th as a day of love and peace, as he said during his campaign, seems as strong as ever. The day Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter, Trump posted on Truth Social, does the pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J6 hostages who have now been imprisoned for years?
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
And we mean every night, in the rain or scorching heat. Without fail, Mickey and a few supporters stand on what they call Freedom Corner and talk on the phone with the J6 defendants held inside the jail.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
Interesting. Interesting is a boring thing to say. I get that. But I was only just starting to put this whole picture together. That Mickey and her friends were not in D.C. just to cause chaos. They were here to push a narrative. That these people, the same ones who turned our city upside down, were victims of a colossal injustice.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
And also that January 6th was actually a totally appropriate exercise of freedom and liberty. And their version of the story was getting traction with some important people, actually the most important person.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
If our interactions with our new neighbors had unfolded more like the typical neighborhood showdown, my MAGA hat versus your dump Trump sign, things might have been easier. Because that would have been just straight up neighbor warfare, pure mutual hatred.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
The New York Times reported that the Trump transition team is asking applicants for positions in the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies three questions. And one of them is what they thought about January 6th. Now, we don't yet know who Trump will pardon and if he will actually go after Liz Cheney or anyone else on that committee.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
But then, two, our new neighbors became real people to us. We also got an up-close intimate view of them, their monumental grief, their sleepless nights, their deep friendship, things that make it harder to purely hate on someone.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
But what we do know is that there are two very different stories being told about that day. On one side are Liz Cheney, Bennie Thompson, and dozens of Capitol Police officers, not to mention the millions of American citizens who are determined to remember that day for the violent attempt to subvert democracy that it was.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
When we first ran into the militiamobile, we didn't know anything about Mickey and her crew. We thought anyone could be living in that house with that car. Maybe it was an actual militia headquarters with a cache of weapons in the basement. Maybe it was just some wacko whose patriotism had gone totally sideways.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
Like, how long are you going to stay in D.C.?
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
That feels vaguely threatening.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
That's coming up on We Live Here Now.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
Project management by Nancy DeVille. Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. The Atlantic's executive editor is Adrienne LaFrance. Jeffrey Goldberg is the Atlantic's editor-in-chief.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
On the other side, Trump, hundreds of January 6 prisoners, and probably millions of American citizens who don't know or care enough about that day to think it disqualified Trump from being elected. On many, many things, these two sides are far apart. But the people who inhabit those two sides, they're just people. And people can always find something in common.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
That's the spirit that drives what you're about to listen to. It's the first episode of a podcast series we made just before the election. It's called We Live Here Now. And it's driven by the deep and maybe even desperate belief that no matter who you're talking to and what they believe, you can always ask them the question, what are you going through?
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
The series takes you inside the jail, that supposed hellhole Trump mentions. And in a later episode, we talk to some of those January 6 prisoners who Trump wants to pardon, and we think seriously about how the justice system has treated them. But mostly, the series is about our neighbors. We discovered one day that they're on Trump's side of the January 6th divide. And that is putting it mildly.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
The podcast is hosted by me, Hannah Rosen, and my partner, Lauren Ober, who's also a journalist. This is the first of six episodes. You can find the rest on the podcast feed, We Live Here Now. Here's that episode.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
It wasn't until we started telling other people the story and they reacted that it began to feel like maybe we had discovered something.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
But back then, there was no TV, no Twitter, no Truth Social to speed up the process of revising history. A few days ago, Trump did his first post-election interview on NBC with Christian Welker. And by most accounts, his rhetoric seemed tempered. A typical headline about the interview was, "'Trump Pools on Taking Revenge Against Foes.'"
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
A block past the park, Lauren spotted it. A black Chevy Equinox with Texas plates. We'd seen parked around the neighborhood. Just a basic American SUV. Except for the stickers that covered the back windshield.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
Lauren notices every new or different thing in the neighborhood, and this car was definitely different. As we walked past it, Lauren said what she always said when we saw this car. There's that fucking militiamobile again.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
I remember after it happened, we walked away in total silence. That's my memory, each of us looping in our own heads about something.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
Yeah. Yeah. I walked home in a half hypervigilant neighborhood watch brain. Like, who lives here now? What are they doing here? Are we going to get into more of these confrontations? And a half journalism brain. Like, who's we? Where do they live? Why are they here now? Like, it was like, those were my two tracks when I was walking home.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
But there was one part about halfway through the interview when Trump did not seem so mellow.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
And there was National Guard everywhere. All the stores were closed and there were very few regular people walking around doing regular things. And I was just thinking, like, where am I? What city is this? Right.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
So, no, we did not welcome January 6th supporters creeping back to the scene of the crime. But also, we wanted to know what they were up to.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
The day before her death, Ashley tweeted in QAnon speak, Nothing will stop us. They can try and try, but the storm is here and it's descending upon D.C. in less than 24 hours. Dark to light.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
The South rewrote the history of the Civil War slowly. What we now know as the Lost Cause myth built steam over time, with lectures, magazine stories, and then statues and monuments, until eventually it became for some Southerners the official narrative of the war. Eventually, meaning like many decades later.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
The jail he's talking about is the D.C. jail. These people, he mentions, have been charged with crimes related to the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. And the big question Trump has just answered is whether he still plans to follow through with his promise to pardon those people who were convicted for the insurrection.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
More like 50,000 people, give or take. And a few thousand of them went into the Capitol, or more accurately, broke in. When the mob of protesters breached the Capitol, busting windows and breaking down doors, Ashley was right there in the mix.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
There are four videos shot by rioters that capture this moment in its entirety. Ashley strides down the hallway like she knows where she's going. She's followed by other rioters, but they're suddenly stopped when they come to a set of doors with large window panels. Through the windows, you can make out congresspeople being evacuated away from the growing mob.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
The crowd Ashley is with has accidentally landed at the bullseye, the actual place where these congresspeople were about to certify the election. On the other side of the doors is a cop with a gun, although it's unclear if Ashley can see him. She's the only woman in a sea of men, and she's small, and she seems to be yelling. It's our fucking house. We're allowed to be in here. You're wrong.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
She immediately falls backwards and lands on the floor. She jerks and convulses, and blood pours out of her mouth.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
And then something happens right after she dies. It's a detail I missed at first, but it turned out to be a spark for everything that would happen since that day. People around Ashley take out their cell phones and start filming.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
— One person says he's from InfoWars and offers to buy footage from someone close.
Radio Atlantic
“We Live Here Now” and Trump’s Retelling of January 6
People who came to January 6th thought they were saving our democracy from evil forces trying to steal an election. Three years later, some of them still think that. And now those same evil forces are keeping J6 freedom fighters in prison. Justice for January 6th. That's what those window stickers on the Chevy are about.