Off the Record, On the Stand

Listener supported. WNYC Studios. I'm Julia Longoria. This is More Perfect. Today, we're gonna spotlight some Supreme Court reporting from a different corner of WNYC Studios. So can you go ahead and just introduce yourself? Yes. My name is Micah Lowinger, and I am a reporter with On The Media from WNYC. Micah reports on online communities, and he kind of backed into a Supreme Court story accidentally. It began while he was reporting on, of all things, hurricanes. So I had learned about volunteer storm relief. Volunteers would try and help each other out during a storm using an app. Walkie talkie app called Xello. You could go on Xello when a hurricane was approaching The United States, and you could hear people at first just kinda tracking, like armchair meteorologist style, like, what do we know about this storm? When's it gonna make landfall? And then once the storm was raging, these walkie talkie groups would actually do something really beautiful, and they would go out and they would save people from their flooded homes. You could hear all of this unfold in real time, in audio, on Xello. Micah started poking around the app and realized it was used by a lot of groups, not just do gooders during hurricanes. I started to see that a lot of the people who were most active had these very strange, far right insignias and usernames. And this is when I started to realize, like, oh, these are far right anti government militia groups. That's how Micah found himself listening in on a far right group on Xello on 01/06/2021. He witnessed something kind of remarkable. To all the boots on the ground in DC, we are praying stoutly for you, that you will get to accomplish what God has put you there for. I ended up capturing a recording of an Oathkeeper breaking into the Capitol that seemed to offer some evidence that some part of the violence that took place on January 6 was premeditated, that there was a plan. Godspeed and fair winds to us. Amen, sisters. Stay safe. I was hearing this, like, mysterious woman in this group. We have a good group. We got about thirty, forty of us. We're sticking together and sticking to the plan. She starts talking about the Capitol. She's moving towards the Capitol. We are in the mezzanine. We are in the main dome right now. We are rocking. And then eventually, she's inside the rotunda, and she's shouting, like, over, like, the cacophony of police and riders inside the rotunda. And she says, like Shoot people with paintballs, but we're in here. We're in here. Get it, Jess. Do your shit. It hit me, like, I am listening to somebody narrating themselves breaking into the Capitol. Micah reported on this. He did a piece on WNYC's on the media. He co wrote an article in The Guardian, and he was invited on to 60. And then he got an …