Sonay Kartal's dream run at Indian Wells continues as the British lucky loser beats Polina Kudermetova to reach the fourth round.

I loved the 1980s, when I was a college student, and I especially loved the music. Lately, I’ve been thinking of a classic ’80s anti-war song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a British new-wave band, whose lyrics were an angry ode to the airplane that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan:

Enola Gay

It shouldn’t ever have to end this way

Enola Gay

It shouldn’t fade in our dreams away

The Enola Gay was named for the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. It will not fade away: The plane and its mission will always have an important place in military history. But people working in the United States Department of Defense might have a harder time finding a reference to it on any military website, because of an archival sweep of newly forbidden materials at the Pentagon.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a massive review of DOD computer archives in an attempt to “align” the department with President Donald Trump’s directive to eliminate anything on government systems that could be related to DEI. At the Defense Department, this seems to mean scrubbing away any posts or images on military servers that might highlight the contributions of minorities, including gay service members. So far, according to the Associated Press, some 26,000 images have been flagged for deletion, including a photo of the Enola Gay, because … well, gay.

Of course, tagging for deletion images such as those of the Enola Gay is likely a mistake made by someone who plugged in gay as a keyword for a global find-and-mark command. The military, like other organizations, loves metrics, and the people in charge of executing the anti-DEI push almost certainly want to be able to show some sort of measurable progress on “eliminating DEI.”

But why not just focus on the president’s order to cancel current spending on such programs? As a former DOD employee, I had to sit through some DEI events, and in my view, they were not a great use of government time. I did not need a professor from a local college to come in and explain what cis means. (My first thought during that presentation was: How much are we paying for this?)

Hegseth and the Pentagon, however, don’t seem particularly focused on pruning all wasteful spending, because they’re actually spending money and investing hours of federal-worker time to indulge in a kind of gay panic in the DOD archives. This effort is part of a larger memory-holing exercise that includes not only getting rid of references to sexual minorities, but also eradicating racial and ethnic “firsts.” As the AP reported: “The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months—such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.”

It’s humorous to think that the Enola Gay got caught in a roundup of ostensibly pro-LGBTQ materials, but the whole business raises the question of the purpose behind deleting tens of thousands of images. There is something fundamentally weird about interpreting an order to get rid of DEI programs as a charge to erase pages of American history. What are the lethal warfighters of the Pentagon so afraid of?

The most likely answer is that they’re afraid of Trump, but the larger problem is that the MAGA movement—including its supporters in the military and the Defense Department—is based on fear and insecurity, a sense that American culture is hostile to them and that Trump is the protector of a minority under siege. Many members of this movement believe that the “left,” or whatever remains of it now, is engaged in a war on the traditional family, on masculinity, on American capitalism, on Christmas and Christians. They see DEI as one of the many spiritual and moral pathogens that threaten to infect fine young men and women (especially white ones) and turn them into sexually decadent Marxists.

They also seem to believe that the way to stop this is to engage in rewriting history so that impressionable young Americans don’t accidentally encounter positive images of Black or female or gay service members. After all, there’s no telling where that leads.

This trepidation reflects a lack of faith in their own children and their fellow citizens, and it is produced in the same bubble of isolation and suspicion that makes parents fearful of letting children move away, especially to go to college. Anxious parents in small towns might not know better, but an immense—and diverse—military organization of 3 million service members and civilians surely does. In the end, however, it doesn’t matter whether anyone in the DOD agrees or disagrees with this silly crusade: Orders are orders.

In 1953, when Stalin died, the other members of the Soviet leadership soon closed ranks against the chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, a vicious monster of a man who kept tabs on all of them. They put him on trial, shot him in a Moscow bunker, and did not speak of him in public again. After his execution, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were sent an article on the Bering Strait, with instructions to remove the entry on Beria and replace it with the new entry on the Arctic waterway. Many Soviet citizens did as they were told.

Today, no one needs to engage in such complicated methods. If Hegseth’s commissars want to replace the history of the Tuskegee Airmen with an article about the soil and weather in Tuskegee, Alabama, a functionary at the Pentagon can do it with a keystroke, while zapping away references to gays, to minorities, to women—perhaps with the hope that one day, no one will even remember what’s been lost.

Hitler regretted the deal he made with Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938. What he actually wanted was war—his goal was to conquer all of Czechoslovakia by force as a first step toward the conquest of all of Europe.

He didn’t imagine that the British and French governments would be so craven as to give him everything he publicly asked for, including the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the occupation of the Sudetenland by the German army. When they did, Hitler found himself trapped into accepting, but he was unhappy. Within five months he ordered the military occupation of all Czechoslovakia, in violation of the Munich Agreement, and six months after that, he invaded Poland.

Today the Trump administration is offering Vladimir Putin a Munich-like settlement for Ukraine. Trump’s negotiators have offered Putin almost everything he has publicly asked for without demanding anything in return. They may assume that if they give him everything up front, he will agree to a cease-fire and some kind of deal that will save face for President Donald Trump, allowing him to claim the mantle of peacemaker, just as Chamberlain did, albeit for only a few months.

Will Putin accept? At the moment, thanks to Trump’s anti-Ukraine maneuvers, he has the luxury of watching Washington and Kyiv wrangle over terms while he pummels Ukraine’s population and energy grid and brings the country closer to collapse. But so far, Putin has been clear about the terms he is willing to accept to achieve peace. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, his offer is this: nothing.

No security guarantee; no independent, sovereign Ukraine; perhaps not even a cease-fire. Putin’s goal, as it has been from the beginning, is the incorporation of Ukraine into Russia and the complete erasure of the Ukrainian nation, language, and culture. He will gladly accept Ukraine’s surrender whenever Kyiv is ready to concede, but short of that he is going to keep the war going until he takes everything.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

Let’s start with security guarantees. Putin has never agreed to them for Ukraine—in any form. Putin and his spokesmen have stated repeatedly that Moscow will never accept European troops on Ukrainian soil as part of a peace deal. To accept European troops in Ukraine is no different in Putin’s mind than to accept NATO—as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said as recently as last week.  

Nor is Putin’s refusal hard to understand. Any deal that put Western troops on Ukrainian soil would leave Russia in an objectively worse strategic situation than before the invasion. After three years of conflict, as many as 1 million casualties, and widespread economic suffering, Putin would have succeeded only in tightening the circle of containment around Russia, including the admission to NATO of Sweden and Finland; bringing hostile forces closer to Russia’s border; and substantially increasing even peacetime defense requirements. His broader ambitions in Europe would be blocked, perhaps forever. If Trump could see past the aura of his own dealmaking genius, he would see that for Putin to end the war with European troops on Ukrainian soil for any purpose would be a colossal strategic failure.

Putin has also rejected the idea of an international guarantee of Ukraine’s security even without troops on the ground. Early negotiations in 2022 broke down precisely over that point. Ukraine wanted an international commitment to come to Ukraine’s aid in the event that Russia launched another attack—something equivalent to the Article 5 guarantee in the NATO treaty. This would not have meant foreign troops on Ukrainian soil—or even any official relationship between Ukraine and NATO—but rather a commitment by signatory states to come to a “neutral” Ukraine’s aid if it was invaded. Putin rejected this, insisting on a Russian veto over any such action.

Putin has even insisted that Ukraine should not be permitted to maintain a military capable of resisting another Russian invasion. He has demanded strict limits on the number of Ukrainian forces and rejected any notion of allowing the U.S. or Europe to continue providing weapons to help Ukraine defend itself against future attack. In short, Putin’s unwavering demand in any peace settlement has been to leave Ukraine essentially defenseless.

Further, Putin has from the beginning demanded an end to the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a prior condition before any agreement. That he ever expected this demand to be met is doubtful: What nation agrees to the toppling of its government as the price for peace, except as terms of surrender? Yet he’s sticking to this demand. According to reports, Trump officials are right now working to force Zelensky from power and replace him with someone presumably friendlier to Moscow. Judging by the reaction of most Ukrainians to the ambush of their president in the Oval Office, this effort will not succeed. But the fact that Trump officials are trying shows that Putin has not budged an inch in response to Trump’s many concessions.

He has also not budged from his broader demand for “de-Nazification,” by which he means the suppression of Ukrainian as the official language of Ukraine, to be replaced by Russian, and of Ukrainian culture and nationalism, which Putin sees as tantamount to resistance to Moscow’s domination. If anyone wants to know what Putin hopes to do with Ukraine once he has control, they have only to look at what he is already doing in the territories Russia occupies, where Ukrainians are being forced to become Russian citizens, and any resistance leads to imprisonment, torture, and execution.

Everyone in the West seems to agree that there will be a cease-fire in Ukraine at some point. But one person who never talks about a cease-fire is Vladimir Putin. He does not talk about a cease-fire with his own people. He has at no time offered a cease-fire to the Ukrainians or the Americans. People assume he wants a cease-fire because his losses are staggering and his economy is suffering. But, as I and others have argued, Putin has to believe only that Ukraine is closer to collapse than he is, and that though he is suffering, the Ukrainians are suffering more. Trump’s latest moves to paralyze Ukraine’s defenses against missile and drone attacks by denying vital U.S. intelligence sharing can only bolster that assessment.

Putin might be tempted to strike a Munich-like deal with Trump just to strengthen an American president who seems determined to give Putin what he may never have imagined possible—a complete American capitulation in the global struggle, the destruction of the NATO alliance, the isolation of a weak Europe, and an open field for further actions to fulfill Putin’s overarching goal, which is the reconstitution of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern and Central Europe. This is where the Munich analogy breaks down, because whatever else Chamberlain’s appeasement was, it did not include changing sides in the ongoing European crisis and joining Hitler to carve up the continent.  

[Read: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

Yet Putin may calculate that he is getting that for free already. The damage Trump has done to NATO is probably irreparable. The alliance relied on an American guarantee that is no longer reliable, to say the least. But Trump is mercurial and could reverse course, at least partially, at any time. That’s a reason for Putin to seek victory as quickly as possible. He may never have a chance as good as this one to complete the task he set out to achieve when he launched his invasion three years ago.  

One thing is certain: Trump is no poker player. Thanks to his actions so far, Putin hasn’t had to reveal any of his cards. Trump claims to know what Putin wants, but his own actions show that he actually has no clue. One day Trump says Russia wants peace for reasons “only I know.” The next, he warns Putin that he’ll impose more sanctions. Putin must be laughing up his sleeve. He’s weathered American sanctions for the better part of three years now; more of the same is not much of a threat. If that’s the only card Trump intends to play, Putin will soon be cashing in, and Ukraine will soon be doomed. Neville Chamberlain believed that Hitler wouldn’t violate the Munich deal because Hitler respected him. Trump shares that delusion about Putin. We may all pay the price.

Updated: 2025-03-08 07:00:00
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the French senator Claude Malhuret gave a powerful speech about the implications for Europe of the reversal of American policy toward Ukraine. Malhuret is the former mayor of the town of Vichy as well as a doctor and an epidemiologist, and the former head of Doctors Without Borders. He is a member of the center-right Horizons party representing the district of Allier. The speech, whose dark urgency and stark rhetorical force made it a social-media sensation, follows, translated and adapted by The Atlantic.

Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.

The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.

This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.

[Read: How Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days]

I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.

That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.

And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.

What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.

Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.

At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”

We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.

[Read: Russia is not winning]

With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.

This will be costly. It will require ending the taboo on using Russia’s frozen assets. It will require bypassing Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself through a coalition that includes only willing countries, and the United Kingdom of course.

Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a recognition that France has been right for decades in advocating for strategic autonomy.

Now it must be built. This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate European Union membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile-shield and satellite programs.

Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump says is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb.The peace of collaborators who, for three years, have refused to support the Ukrainians in any way.

[Read: What Europe fears]

Is this the end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have finally stirred Americans into action. Poll numbers are plummeting. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.

The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

Picture a plastic shopping bag that some busy customer picks up in the checkout line of a store—say, the British supermarket Tesco. That shopper piles her groceries into the bag, takes it home to a flat in London, and then recycles it.

Although she’ll think about the bag no further, its journey has just begun. From a recycling bin in London, it is trucked to Harwich, a port town 80 miles northeast, then shipped to Rotterdam, then driven across Germany into Poland, before finally coming to rest in a jumbled pile of trash outside an unmarked warehouse in southern Turkey. It might eventually get recycled, but it just as likely will sit there, baking in the sun, slowly disintegrating over years.

For most plastic bags, this odyssey is invisible. To one particular Tesco bag, however, Bloomberg journalists attached a tiny digital tracker, revealing its months-long, transcontinental journey—“a messy reality,” the reporters wrote, “that looks less like a virtuous circle and more like passing the buck.”

The story of this plastic bag appears early in Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, a new book by the journalist Alexander Clapp. The book reveals many such journeys, tracking the garbage of rich countries along hidden arteries toward some of the planet’s poorest places. One dark side of consumerism, it turns out, is all of the discarded wrappers and old iPhones piling up or being burned on the other side of the world.

This dumping exacts a devastating environmental toll—leaching toxic contaminants into water, air, and food, and miring whole regions in growing fields of rubbish. It’s also reshaping economies, having birthed an informal disposal industry that now employs millions of people. Towns in Indonesia are buried in millions of pounds of single-use plastics; communities across India and Bangladesh are populated by armies of migrant laborers tasked with dismantling cruise liners and oil tankers by hand. To describe this dystopian reality, Clapp assembles a narrative that is part history, part sociology, part horrifying travelogue. The result is a colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world.

The focus of Waste Wars may be trash, but the book highlights a literal manifestation of a much broader global dynamic: Rich countries tend to pass their problems on to poorer ones. Consider, for instance, the nuclear refuse that the United States dumped among Pacific island nations during the Cold War, which threatens radioactive disaster even decades later. Consider the refugees consigned by the United States to Latin America, by the European Union to Turkey and Pakistan, or by Australia to the island of Nauru. Consider, of course, the most devastating consequences of climate change, such as the rising seas threatening island nations that bear little responsibility for global carbon emissions.

[Read: What America owes the planet]

Waste Wars shows how wealthy, developed countries are, today, not only removing wealth from poorer, developing countries (in the form of materials and labor) but also sending back what the late sociologist R. Scott Frey called “anti-wealth.” In fact, the very places that long supplied rubber, cotton, metal, and other goods to imperial viceroys now serve as dumping grounds for the modern descendants of some of those same powers. This disheartening reality augurs a future in which the prosperity of a few affluent enclaves depends in part on the rest of the globe becoming ever more nasty, brutish, and hot.

Toward the beginning of his book, Clapp describes a counterintuitive consequence of the landmark environmental laws passed in the United States in the 1970s. Statutes such as the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 banned scores of toxic substances, while others, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, made burying hazardous waste in U.S. soil much more expensive. A tricky new problem presented itself: what to do with all of the waste?

“America’s newfound commitment to environmentalism came with a little secret,” Clapp writes. “It didn’t extend to other countries.” As similar laws were passed across Europe and North America, a thriving, semilegal international waste trade soon sprang up. Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, wealthy nations exported such unloved materials as asbestos and DDT to impoverished nations like Benin and Haiti, which were desperate to develop their economies yet rarely possessed facilities capable of properly disposing of toxic materials. These countries faced a choice, Clapp writes: “poison or poverty.” By the end of the ’80s, more waste than development aid, dollar for dollar, was flowing from the global North to the global South.

This dynamic was historically novel, yet it emerged from practices stretching back hundreds of years. In early modern Europe, the filthiest trades (such as tanning) were branded nuisances and forced out of cities and closer to those living at society’s margins. Factories, industrial smelters, and dumps were likewise relegated to places where Black and brown people in the Americas, or the Roma in Europe, or Dalits in India, were legally or economically compelled to live. As the historian Andrew Needham has noted, the 20th-century population boom of southwestern U.S. metropolises, including Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, relied on coal both mined and burned on Navajo and Hopi land—coal that by the early 1970s was generating five times more electricity than the Hoover Dam. The air-conditioned comfort of the Sun Belt, in other words, depended on the despoliation of Indigenous land.

By the late ’80s, many developing nations had had enough. The leaders of Caribbean and African states united to draft the Basel Convention, a 1989 international agreement effectively outlawing the export of hazardous waste to other countries. Today, 191 nations have ratified the convention. (The United States is one of the only holdouts.) It’s a spectacular accomplishment—a testament to transnational organizing and solidarity—and also, as Waste Wars demonstrates, a hollow one.

The global redistribution of “anti-wealth” did not cease; in fact, Clapp writes, it “exploded” in the 1990s. The rub lay in a provision of the Basel Convention, which stated that an object sent from one country to another for reuse, rather than disposal, wasn’t waste but a thing of value. Quickly, waste brokers learned to refer to their wares with such euphemisms as “recovered byproducts.” Those on the receiving end of the garbage learned to extract whatever value they could from discarded cardboard and busted laptops—and then dump, burn, or dissolve in acid what remained.

To illustrate the profound consequences of the global recycling economy, Clapp traveled to the Ghanaian slum of Agbogbloshie, where (until it was demolished a few years ago) a shadow workforce of migrants lived at the foot of a five-story mound of discarded electronics. On paper, these items weren’t all waste—some of them technically still worked—but most were dying or dead, and the laborers of Agbogbloshie dutifully wielded hammers to strip old televisions and smartphones of precious metals and incinerate the rest. Clapp highlights the particular irony of Agbogbloshie—a slum “clouded with cancerous smoke, encircled by acres of poisonous dirt”—occurring in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to free itself of colonialism. Despite the high hopes of its revolutionary generation, in some places, Ghana still experiences what Clapp calls “a story of foreign domination by other means.” More and more of these electronic-waste disposal sites are popping up around the world.

Yet the biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem. Derived from fossil fuels, plastic is cheap, convenient—and eternal. When, in the late 1980s, the public started to get concerned about plastic detritus, the petrochemical industry began promoting “recycling.” It was, mostly, public relations; plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle, and it’s hard to make a profit while doing so. But the messaging was effective. Plastic production continued to accelerate.

[Read: The cost of avoiding microplastics]

In the mid-1990s, China emerged as the principal destination for used cups, straws, and the like; the country’s growing manufacturing sector was eager to make use of cheap, recycled raw plastic. As Clapp reports, over the following quarter century, China accepted half the globe’s plastic waste, conveniently disappearing it even as air pollution spiked in its destinations in the country’s southeast. The plastic waste China received was filthy, much of it too dirty to be cleaned, shredded, and turned into new plastic.

The result was not only environmental catastrophe but license for unchecked consumption of cheap plastic goods that can take a few minutes to use but hundreds of years to decay. In the United States, plastic waste increased from 60 pounds per person in 1980 to 218 pounds per person in 2018. There is now a ton of discarded plastic for every human on the planet; the oceans contain 21,000 pieces of plastic for each person on Earth.

In 2017, citing pollution concerns, China announced that it would no longer accept the world’s plastic waste. “There was an opportunity here,” Clapp writes, for the world to finally tackle the problem of unsustainable plastic production. Instead, governmental and industrial leaders chose a simpler solution: “redirecting the inevitable pollution blight from China to more desperate countries.” In just two years, the amount of American plastic waste exported to Central America doubled; worldwide exports to Africa quadrupled, and in Thailand they increased twentyfold.

The international waste trade is a “crime,” Clapp concludes, and the refusal to address its root causes is a dereliction bearing “certain similarities to international failures to address the climate crisis.” Waste Wars demonstrates the mounting consequences of such inaction: Residents of wealthier nations are jeopardizing much of the planet in exchange for the freedom to ignore the consequences of their own convenience.

Photographs by Lila Barth

On overpasses and by roadsides they gather, holding banners and placards. In the early days, only a few people showed up, congregating at chosen times and scattered locations around Boston. But their cause has grown and their numbers have swelled. For Labor Day 2024, plans were made for “standouts,” as the organizers called them, in more than 70 places—all over Massachusetts, yes, but also in Ohio, Kansas, Florida, California, and elsewhere.

These assemblies are the most visible manifestation of what is usually referred to as the Free Karen Read movement. If in the fullness of time it will seem strange that such unity and passion should have been mustered in defense of a 45-year-old Massachusetts financial analyst and adjunct college professor accused of killing her police-officer boyfriend by backing into him with her car … well, not to these people gathered today. Young and old, and nearly always dressed in something pink, they joyfully express their shared belief to passing motorists through slogan: most often just FREE KAREN READ, though sometimes the signs convey more grandiose sentiments—LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL, STOP THE CORRUPTION, INJUSTICE THRIVES IN SILENCE. And some are impenetrable to anyone not already following the case’s legal intricacies and surrounding hoopla: BUTT-DIALS GALORE, COLIN WAS IN THE HOUSE, WHERE’S CHLOE?

In most assessments, a large part of the credit for how all of this has come to be—or, according to the haters and detractors (and there are plenty), the blame for it—belongs to a man named Aidan Kearney. I met Kearney early one May morning last year outside the Norfolk County Superior Court in Dedham, just southwest of Boston, a month into Read’s trial for, among other things, second-degree murder. It was raining, so we sought shelter on the steps of the Registry of Deeds, across the road. A gaggle of Free Karen Read protesters were already beginning to congregate a block or so away, though they were required to keep themselves outside a judge-ordained 200-foot buffer zone. Because of the pink dress code among FKR supporters, the effect is as if, at a seemingly random point on a Dedham street, a color filter kicks in.

Aidan Kearney poses with Turtleboy fans outside the courthouse. (Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe / Getty)

Kearney isn’t one for small talk, and he was soon in full flow. “It’s so obvious that she’s innocent,” he told me. “The critics will say ‘Oh, he’s like a cult leader—he’s brainwashing these people.’ I assure you, I am not that charming. These are educated people that are getting into this story because they’re not stupid. And they look at all the facts of this case, and they’re like, ‘It’s undeniable that this is a cover-up.’ ” He gestured toward the gradually swelling cohort in the distance. “These people are out here every day. Rain or shine, it doesn’t matter.”

As we spoke, a woman standing nearby interjected.

“Sorry, I’m not eavesdropping, but I’m eavesdropping,” she said, then asked us: “So are you with them?”

“I’m the leader,” Kearney said evenly.

“You’re the leader?” she said.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I’m Turtleboy.”

On the morning of January 29, 2022, not long after 6 a.m., the body of a 46-year-old man was found in the snow outside a house in the Boston suburb of Canton. His name was John O’Keefe, and he was an officer with the Boston Police Department. Three days later, an explanation was offered for how he had come to die there. It was reported that O’Keefe had been drinking early the night before with his girlfriend, Karen Read, and that, not long after midnight, she had driven him to a gathering at the home of another police officer, Brian Albert. Read said she’d dropped O’Keefe off in front of the house and driven away. But prosecutors were now implying that she had backed into him with her car. To Kearney, reading the news reports at the time, the story seemed clear enough. “I remember I was like, That’s sad for her,” he said. “And him. Because it was framed in the media as an accident—this horrible accident.”

Kearney is from Worcester, about an hour’s drive from Canton, and for the first 11 years of his adult life, he was a history teacher; he still rhapsodizes about how much he liked teaching lessons on World War II and the civil-rights movement. Eventually he would marry another teacher, and have two children. But he also became a kind of citizen-blogger, in the beginning mostly concentrating on Boston sports and matters around Worcester, at AidanFromWorcester.com. He wasn’t afraid to rub people the wrong way, specializing in calling out perceived hypocrisies, and gleefully relishing any chance to cut against political correctness.

As his audience and his reputation grew, these two roles, teacher and internet provocateur, proved incompatible. In an attempt to make his blogging anonymous, he adopted the name Turtleboy, but when the secret didn’t hold, his choice was made: He would be a full-time blogger.

As Turtleboy, Kearney made enemies aplenty, but he also gathered a lot of followers who liked what he was saying and doing, and the unfiltered way in which he did it. Before too long, he was making a healthy living via digital advertising and merchandise sales, as well as donations and subscriptions. When he first read about Read and the death of O’Keefe in early 2022, he sized up its possibilities as a story. Kearney is instinctively pro-police—“I’m a ‘Back the blue’ guy”—and the death of a police officer seemed like a subject with Turtleboy potential. “But I didn’t write about it, because I’m like, Well, I don’t really have a strong opinion on this,” he recalls. “It’s like: What a tragedy. This guy gets killed. I couldn’t imagine living with the guilt of accidentally running your boyfriend over and then not knowing it. And then I totally forgot about the story.”

In the summer of 2022, while Kearney wasn’t paying attention, the charges against Read were upgraded from manslaughter to second-degree murder. Evidence had emerged suggesting that the couple’s relationship had been fraught, and that Read and O’Keefe had been arguing; Read was now accused of knowingly hitting O’Keefe, with an intent to kill him. Kearney still didn’t take notice in April 2023, when the defense filing laid out a detailed counternarrative, arguing that Read was being framed, and that O’Keefe had actually been murdered by those in the house he was visiting.

By that point, the story had more or less vanished from public consciousness: I couldn’t find a single mainstream-media mention of Read and O’Keefe in the six months leading up to the April 2023 filing. Even these new defense assertions generated only a smattering of stories in Massachusetts newspapers.

That week, Kearney was preoccupied with what, back then, was fairly typical Turtleboy fare. He’d faced down what he called “An Antifa Child Drag Queen Mob”; he’d interposed himself in a dispute involving parents who had claimed that their child was facing racist abuse at a cheer gym; he’d set up the latest installment of his annual Turtleboy Ratchet Madness competition, in which his followers would vote, round by round, to name the worst of the “ratchets”—hypocrites, spongers, and other miscreants—his blog had identified in the previous year; and he had documented, or intervened in, sundry other disputes, while also describing how he had been swatted twice that week, with the police arriving at his home to follow up on bogus reports from Turtleboy haters that Kearney was suicidal.

That was what Kearney’s life was like. More than two years earlier, after some personal turbulence had prompted him to reassess his approach, he’d announced a wish to change gears. “I still love the ratchet stuff and always will,” he’d said. “But at the end of the day I’m more interested in exposing people who actually matter, rather than going the Jerry Springer route … I don’t want [my kids] to grow up and think their father pays the bills by writing a vulgar, smut-filled blog. I feel like it’s possible to make the same points I’ve always made while avoiding usage of jizz donkeys and spunk guzzlers. Plus, my favorite stories are the ones that expose corrupt systems in power.” He had gone on to write some stories in that genre, but so far the adjustment appeared to have been modest. Now another chance presented itself.

At lunchtime on April 17, 2023, a retired police officer named Brian Johnson sent Kearney the following message on Facebook:

Hi, not sure if you’re following the case of Boston police officer, John O’Keefe death but here is a recent motion. John was a great guy. Started his career in Duxbury. His sister passed away and he adopted his niece and nephew. My sources tell me that Brian Albert, a Boston police K9 officer, is a loose cannon. His dog mysteriously disappeared and he’s since sold his house. It looks to me like the girlfriend was set up. Something’s not right.

Johnson attached a PDF of the defense motion, then followed up with: “Oops, I left out that John was found with bite marks.”

Kearney says that his reaction to reading the defense filing was: “Holy shit, this is story-of-the-century stuff.” Early that evening, as he worked on an article about the Read case for the Turtleboy blog, he posted on social media, as a preview, the first words he would write about it:

I am currently working on perhaps the craziest story I’ve ever written, involving a Boston cop possibly being involved in murdering another cop, followed by an elaborate coverup designed to frame the murdered cop’s girlfriend … My jaw is currently on the floor.

He tweeted that he hoped to have the story out that night.

A follower immediately contacted him. She explained that she’d been in touch with a confidant of Read’s named Natalie Berschneider Wiweke, and she connected them via Facebook. Throughout the evening, as Kearney continued to write, he bombarded Wiweke with questions and requests, and Wiweke, who seemed supremely well informed on the minutiae of the case, provided him with material.

A few hours later, Kearney published his post, several thousand words long: “Canton Cover-Up Part 1: Corrupt State Trooper Helps Boston Cop Coverup Murder of Fellow Officer, Frame Innocent Girlfriend.” (Two of the many ways that Kearney’s work practices deviate from conventional journalism are his speed to certainty, and his full-throated advocacy.) From this first outpouring, he was all in: “Karen Read is a completely innocent woman, wrongly charged by corrupt cops who would see her rot in prison in order to cover up a murder of a fellow officer.”

Top: Karen Read listens to testimony during her murder trial, May 13, 2024. Bottom: A photo of Read and the man she is accused of killing, the Boston police officer John O’Keefe, which the defense presented at trial. (Pat Greenhouse / The Boston Globe / Getty; John Tlumacki / The Boston Globe / Getty)

Going forward, there would now be two completely different and competing versions of Read’s story. The narrative conveyed in the prosecution’s public filings ran along these lines: After an evening of heavy drinking, Read set off in her car with O’Keefe, whom she had been dating for about two years, heading for an after-party. They were texted the address of their destination, 34 Fairview Road, by a woman named Jennifer McCabe, whose brother-in-law Brian Albert, a Boston police officer, lived there. Sometime after midnight, McCabe saw what she believed to be Read’s Lexus pull up outside the house, then, sometime later, pull away. Just before five in the morning, McCabe received a call from Read, distraught and hysterical, saying she was looking for O’Keefe. Read and McCabe soon met up at McCabe’s house, and headed out to search for O’Keefe. Along the way, Read asked McCabe, “Could I have hit him?” and mentioned that her car had a cracked taillight. Approaching 34 Fairview Road, Read spotted a body even though McCabe couldn’t immediately see it in the snow. She screamed and ran over, then began CPR; she also twice yelled at McCabe to Google How long do you have to be left outside to die of hypothermia? (Searches to this effect were found on McCabe’s phone.) One of the firefighters who responded to the emergency call spoke with Read at the scene and reported her saying, “I hit him, I hit him, I hit him.” O’Keefe’s autopsy determined that his death had been caused by a combination of blunt-force trauma to the head and hypothermia. Pieces of broken taillight subsequently found at the scene matched the missing pieces from Read’s Lexus.

O’Keefe’s teenage niece, who lived at O’Keefe’s home, where Read often slept over, reported overhearing O’Keefe tell Read a week earlier that their relationship was unhealthy and had run its course. Text messages between the couple that week further documented this strain. After Read left 34 Fairview Road that night, she had called and texted O’Keefe multiple times. In one voice message, she screamed that she hated him.

The prosecution’s implied narrative was clear: After an argument outside 34 Fairview Road, Read had drunkenly reversed her Lexus into O’Keefe, who had been sufficiently incapacitated that he didn’t move, and subsequently died of hypothermia. Her actions in the hours that followed were a combination of self-incrimination (“I hit him”) and cover-up.

Diving deep into the defense’s recent filing, complemented by his own supplementary research, Kearney laid out a very different narrative. He poured scorn upon the notion that O’Keefe’s stated injuries—“six bloodied lacerations varying in length on O’Keefe’s right arm … from his forearm to his bicep”; “cut to the right eyelid of the victim”; “two swollen black eyes”; “cut to left side of nose”; “approximately two inch laceration to the back of the head”; “multiple skull fractures”—were consistent with the impact from a reversing car. He also focused on what would become a talisman for those convinced of Read’s innocence: According to the defense expert called to do a forensic analysis of McCabe’s phone, McCabe had initially Googled the phrase hos [sic] long to die in cold at 2:27 a.m., several hours before she and Read returned to 34 Fairview and discovered O’Keefe’s body, and then had taken steps to delete this and other incriminating information from her phone. If true, this seemed impossible to square with the prosecution’s version of what had happened.

Presented as similarly complicating for the prosecution’s narrative was O’Keefe’s iPhone data from that night. According to the defense, the Apple Health app showed O’Keefe in the vicinity of 34 Fairview Road between 12:21 and 12:24, taking 80 steps and climbing the equivalent of three floors. (The Albert residence has three floors.) Between 12:31 and 12:32, O’Keefe apparently took 36 more steps. This also fits poorly with the notion that he was hit by Read’s car and never entered the house.

Kearney, drawing on the defense’s assertions, proposed an alternative version of events: Read had dropped O’Keefe off at 34 Fairview Road, then watched him enter the house from her car; when he didn’t answer her calls once inside, she left. By Kearney’s reckoning, there were 11 people already in the house. One of them was Brian Albert’s then-18-year-old nephew, Colin—a “notorious hothead” and “out of control meathead,” according to Kearney; Colin had appeared on social media after O’Keefe’s death with visible abrasions on his knuckles. Kearney suggested that soon after entering the house, O’Keefe got into a physical confrontation with Colin Albert, and that his uncle Brian, a trained mixed-martial-arts fighter, joined in. The altercation riled up the family’s German shepherd, Chloe, who in Kearney’s telling caused the injuries to O’Keefe’s arm. (The implication, which Kearney hadn’t yet spelled out, was that a fatally injured O’Keefe was then dumped outside on the lawn.)

All 11 people in the house, Kearney argued, must have either witnessed or been aware of the murder of John O’Keefe. It was McCabe, Kearney asserted, who suggested to Read that she might have hit O’Keefe, and falsely suggested that Read appeared to spot O’Keefe’s body before she could have realistically seen it. Echoing the defense’s case, Kearney argued that McCabe connivingly repeated the hos long to die in cold search on her phone so that she could pretend that this had been at Read’s request in the moment, all in an attempt to disguise the fact that McCabe herself had made that same search hours earlier, before Read even knew that O’Keefe’s body was lying in the snow.

Kearney also detailed the preexisting relationship between the lead investigator on the case, Michael Proctor, and the McCabe and Albert families; the defense’s evidence that the initial crime report was changed; and the fact that crucial pieces of taillight were recovered from the crime scene not on the morning of O’Keefe’s death but much later, after Read’s car was in police possession. He argued that the taillight was actually broken in an incident captured on O’Keefe’s Ring camera when Read, heading out to search for him in the morning, clipped O’Keefe’s car as she backed out. Kearney also noted that the Alberts had gotten rid of their dog, Chloe, four months after O’Keefe’s death and had then sold the house—“yet additional evidence of consciousness of guilt,” in the words of the defense. At the end of his article, Kearney recommended that “Trooper Proctor, Brian Albert, Colin Albert, and Jennifer McCabe should all spend [a] significant amount of time in jail, and two of them should be charged with murder.”

Those Kearney implicated would later dispute almost everything he suggested. During the trial, both Colin and Brian would deny that O’Keefe had ever entered the house that night or that they fought him. Brian Albert would testify that getting rid of Chloe and selling his home had nothing to do with O’Keefe’s death. Jennifer McCabe would deny deleting any calls or searches on her phone and any involvement in a cover-up, and would tell the court that she “never would have left John O’Keefe out in the cold to die.” For his part, Michael Proctor admitted to having a personal relationship with Brian Albert’s brother and his wife, but he denied that this influenced the investigation in any way.

Still, plenty of people found Kearney’s narrative compelling. “I published it,” Kearney told me, “and it, like, broke the website. I had to upgrade my servers.” His YouTube broadcast the next evening, in which he again went through this material, drew far more viewers than ever before. He had titled the initial article “Part 1” because he realized that this was one of those stories that might require more than a single dive; occasionally in the past, his blog had returned to an interesting story four or five times. But this story just kept going: As of this writing, his series about Read has nearly 500 installments, complemented by hundreds of lengthy YouTube broadcasts. “I rarely have time for anything else now,” he told me when we first met. “Every day, I’d wake up and I wouldn’t know what I was going to write about. Now I do. I’m going to write about Karen Read.”

As Kearney’s audience grew, he relentlessly seeded the idea that a great injustice was taking place, and Read was its victim. Kearney is not shy about taking credit for the effect he’s had. During Read’s trial, he would declare, “You never would have heard of this trial without me.”

Kearney’s detractors—there were many even before he started writing about Read, and they have grown in number and fervor since—point out that he was not the first person to write about the story, suggesting that he is taking credit for causing something when all he did was sail in its slipstream. Maybe. But there’s a solid argument that the whole public discourse around the trial—not just the heightened interest in it but the galvanizing of a small movement of people committed to defending Read against what they believed was an imminent injustice—was catalyzed mainly by his interventions.

Kearney likes to say that he is three things at once—a journalist, an activist, and an entertainer. Here are two particularly vivid examples of his rather unorthodox approach to covering the Read case.

First: On June 5, 2023, he turned up unannounced in the bleachers at a high-school lacrosse game where Jennifer McCabe and her family were watching their daughter play. “Why did you Google How long to die in cold, Jen?” Kearney asked, as he filmed everything. “I’m just curious.” McCabe sat there, a pained smile on her face, head turned toward the game, as Kearney repeated this question seven times. Told that he was bothering people, he retorted: “Well, they killed a cop. She’s a cop killer! These are cop killers! You know they’re cop killers, right?” When I asked Kearney what he was thinking as he filmed this, he replied, “This is great content. And also, I’m glad somebody’s saying something to her.”

Second: On July 22, 2023, he convened a “Rolling Rally,” in which he led a convoy of supporters on a tour of the Canton area, stopping at the crime scene, the police station, the courthouse, and the homes of those he claimed were implicated in John O’Keefe’s death, livestreaming all the while, and reciting the facts as he believed them through a bullhorn outside each property. Several dozen enthusiastic supporters can be seen on the video; Kearney has claimed that as many as 300 participated across the day. From the video footage, this Rolling Rally’s apparent atmosphere was less that of a vengeful mob than of a lively campaigners’ day out, though I imagine that distinction might seem moot to its targets. The first stop was the house Brian Albert had moved into after selling 34 Fairview Road. Standing outside, Kearney proclaimed through the bullhorn, “I do kind of feel bad for the neighbors. But, sorry, murderers moved in, so it’s unfortunate.”

Putting aside questions about the legality of these actions, it’s times like these when Turtleboy’s certainty is most striking. Especially when you consider just how deeply horrible these actions would be if he’s wrong.

The first time I met Kearney, we had the following conversation:

You’d agree that if Karen Read didn’t do this, then this is a horrendous thing that she’s been put through.

“Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, I mean, it goes without saying.”

But conversely, do you agree that if the people you’re pointing your finger at didn’t do it, then they’re being put through a pretty horrendous experience?

“Yeah, but there’s no way they didn’t do it. If there was any way possible that he was not killed inside 34 Fairview Road, I would not be taking the position I am. If I thought there was a 1 percent chance that he was not killed inside that house, I would not be taking the position I am. I’m 100 percent that he was killed inside that house.”

But to say that there’s a zero percent chance of the state’s narrative being true, or some version of it being true, is a pretty hard-core determination.

“I think it’s the most logical determination.”

What if it isn’t?

“I can’t answer that question, because it’s impossible for it not to be true. If I say, ‘Well, then I’d feel bad,’ then it makes the reader believe that I think this is a possibility. I don’t. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my whole life. I would literally bet everything I’ve ever owned on the fact that he was inside that house and beaten up.”

Kearney seems to have a traditional reporter’s dogged obsessiveness in search of evidence, sources, and telling details. But from the start, he has also frequently seemed to have the best information on the Read case, particularly about details that strengthened the defense’s argument.

In the second half of 2023, as the case drew more coverage and as Kearney’s role in both popularizing it and turning public opinion in Read’s favor gained notice, he was sometimes asked whether he was colluding with Read or her defense team. He would deny any direct dealings with Read. That denial was, Kearney now acknowledges, a lie. Not long after he was connected via Facebook to Read’s friend Natalie Berschneider Wiweke, in April 2023, he became aware that his source was more than simply well informed: She was channeling messages from Read—in fact, Kearney said Wiweke was “nothing but a copy-and-paste for Karen.” A few weeks after his first article, Kearney and Read began to communicate directly. Just how often they did so was revealed when Read’s phone was seized by state police in January 2024. Over seven and a half months, from May 7 to December 21, 2023, 189 calls, cumulatively lasting more than 40 hours, were logged between Kearney and Read. Beyond that were all the text messages and some calls they had exchanged on Signal.

“Yeah, I denied it,” Kearney told me. “Because I didn’t have her permission. She was an anonymous source.” He sees nothing to apologize for. “I’m a journalist writing a story,” he argued. “This is the subject of the story. She’s allowed to talk to me.” What this was, he maintained, was just him doing his job well. “I had the best source of information. She could give me information that no other journalist could get ahold of. And none of it was illegal.”

Yet even if everything Kearney has done is legal, many of his critics have suggested that he’s either knowingly or unknowingly being exploited by a murderer to sway public opinion and bolster her defense—that, as Kearney put it, “the dastardly Karen Read was like the grand puppet master of this whole thing.” Or maybe even, in a more nuanced way, that Read had managed to find a patsy smart and motivated enough—but also credulous enough—to carry her water farther than she could have ever dreamed possible. All she’d needed to do was sketch out a plausible framework within which she might be innocent; with his unstoppable drive, Kearney had filled in the gaps.

Kearney dismisses all such possibilities. He is adamant that he has neither accepted anything Read has told him uncritically, nor allowed himself to be steered into writing what she wanted him to write. “If anyone can show any evidence that Karen Read has been dishonest with me or is somehow hiding something, I will blast her,” he told me. “I would just rip Karen to shreds. But she always brings evidence to back up everything she’s saying.” (Read and her attorneys did not respond to requests to comment for this story.)

When I first met him, Kearney brought up, unbidden, a related accusation. “This is the car they think Karen Read’s brother bought for me,” he said as we approached a 2023 Lexus RX 350, parked among the pink FKR battalion outside the courthouse. Read’s brother works for a Lexus dealership. Kearney said that his bank records were pulled to investigate, but that nothing was found, because there was nothing to find. (Kearney also tweeted a copy of his $59,186.56 purchase contract.) The reality, he said, is more prosaic: “I am making more money than I used to. But I’m not being paid by Karen Read. I’m being paid by people like you’re seeing there”—he gestured at the pink-clad crowd—“that buy T-shirts and donate and buy subscriptions and everything like that. I’m doing something and I’m doing it well, and it’s paying off.”

Kearney couldn’t have imagined all the repercussions this story would have for his own life. It is a peculiar irony that while Read has thus far spent only a single night in jail—on the night of her arrest, February 1, 2022, three days after O’Keefe’s death—Kearney, the loudest supporter of the Free Karen Read movement, has served 60 days behind bars during the unfolding of the case.

Exactly how that happened—well, that takes a little explaining.

Toward the end of August 2023, the Norfolk County district attorney, Michael Morrissey, issued a lengthy video statement that appeared to be a direct response to Kearney’s activities. “The harassment of witnesses in the murder prosecution of Karen Read is absolutely baseless,” he said. “It should be an outrage to any decent person—and it needs to stop.”

Kearney, predictably, was far from impressed. He livestreamed a response from his car as he watched Morrissey’s video. “No, it doesn’t need to stop—it needs to accelerate, baby … It’s not gonna stop; it’s gonna go a million times harder than it did before. Wooo!” Before signing off, Kearney added: “You are my enemy, Michael Morrissey—just know that. I will not rest until you are completely destroyed.”

Only later did Kearney come to see Morrissey’s video in a somewhat different light. “That was my one and only warning to cut the shit or else I was going to jail,” he told me. “That video was for me.”

On the morning of Wednesday, October 11, 2023, Kearney had just seen his two children onto the school bus when he was arrested, brought to court in handcuffs, and then released on bail. He would be charged with a list of crimes—most significantly, eight felony counts of witness intimidation, each carrying a potential 10-year sentence. (More charges were subsequently added.) Among the many episodes referred to in the charges were the lacrosse game and the Rolling Rally.

“It sounds very serious on paper,” Kearney told me. “But my attorney is just not the least bit worried.” In legal filings, his primary lawyer characterized Kearney’s work as “peaceful investigative journalism, satire, and political hyperbole.”

Kearney argued that these charges have been deliberately engineered to discredit him, “because my reporting has been so effective in galvanizing public support for Karen Read.” He elaborated: “The reason they charged me with witness intimidation isn’t to convict me. They know everything I’ve done is legal and free speech and protected. The reason is so that they can just point to me and say, ‘You believe that guy? He’s charged with 16 felonies. He’s a bad person.’ ”

The conventional legal advice, if you’ve been charged with something, is not to repeat or compound or talk about the alleged offenses, at least until the matter is resolved. This is not the Turtleboy way. Each time a new prosecution document has spelled out his supposedly criminal words and deeds, Kearney has gone through it on one of his live broadcasts, paragraph by paragraph, justifying everything. Partly this is business pragmatism—“I’m paid to talk, so I have to”—but he says it’s a matter of principle, too. The way Kearney sees it, when he confronts those who were at Brian Albert’s house that night, he is facing down those who abuse their power. “These people are all thugs and bullies and mean girls. And somebody, for once, is standing up to them.”

Kearney’s own case has been moving slowly through the courts; any resolution is not expected until later this year. This might quite reasonably leave one wondering how, then, Kearney has already spent 60 days in jail. The explanation requires a detour into Kearney’s sometimes messy personal life. His current career sat poorly with his wife, Julie. “She married a teacher,” he told me. Turtleboy “is not what she signed up for, and I get it.” Kearney was reluctant to clarify too much, but various stories he’s told about his life in recent years seem to involve relationships with other women. He has referred to “sneaking around, living this double life I shouldn’t have been living.”

Toward the end of 2023, Kearney was in a relationship with a woman named Lindsey Gaetani. Then they split up. The exact details of what took place between them are contested in court filings, and are also poisonously debated on social media to this day. (There is a fecund online ecosystem devoted to poring over Kearney’s perceived evils—the “anti-Turtleboy industrial complex,” he calls it. He says one of his lawyers told him, “I thought Alex Jones was the most hated client I ever had until I had you.”)

What is undisputed is that, some weeks after their relationship had notionally ended, Kearney visited Gaetani’s home. Each would offer a very different account of who initiated this meeting, and of what took place during it. Kearney says that she asked him over to discuss a summons she had received relating to the Read case, and believes he has evidence that suggests she was deliberately colluding with the police to entrap him; Gaetani alleges that he assaulted her. Kearney strongly denies this. Problem is, if you are already on bail when you face an accusation like this, your bail may be revoked, and that’s what happened.

On December 26, his 42nd birthday, Kearney was taken to Norfolk County Jail. Against his wishes, he was placed in isolation—“because of my high profile,” he told me. Kearney has been on Adderall for nearing 20 years, and now he had to do without; that adjustment was difficult: “I couldn’t stay awake during the day. And because of that, I couldn’t sleep at night.” He missed his son’s first basketball game. He missed his daughter’s cheer competitions. (He told his kids that he was away for work. “In a way, I was.”)

But Kearney says prison was not so bad. He ran five or more miles a day, and he read: To Kill a Mockingbird, which he hadn’t liked in high school but did now; The Happiest Man on Earth, about a centenarian Holocaust survivor; then 1984. He also began to build a relationship with a Read supporter named Meredith O’Neil, who’d sent him supportive messages. By the time he was released, they were a couple. Soon afterward, the assault-and-battery charge that had triggered his bail revocation was dropped. (It could still be refiled, but has not been as of this writing.)

“You put me in jail for 60 fucking days—big deal,” he declared on one of his broadcasts after he was released. “I lost 10 pounds … I got close to my parents. I built new relationships. I met a much better girl. Like, life is so much better now. It’s, like, one of the best things that ever happened to me. All I do is win. I hope they know that. Putting me in jail turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. So thank you, motherfucker.” And he raised two middle fingers.

That’s the face Kearney seems most comfortable presenting to the world. Still, his first night out of jail, when he went to bed on his wife’s couch for probably the final time (they have since divorced), and he couldn’t sleep, and he kept looking at his kids’ photos on the wall, and thinking about how he would never leave them again, he reconsidered everything. For the first time, he found himself wondering: Should he stop writing about Read? “Because look at what’s at risk right there,” he told me. “Like, I could lose them. Nothing’s worth that, you know? Should I just stop?”

He didn’t stop. The incessant episodes about the Canton “cover-up” and YouTube live broadcasts soon resumed. On Thursday evenings, Kearney does a private broadcast for members of his Turtle Club. (Cheapest membership level: $15 a month.)

Being Turtleboy has been very profitable for Kearney. Boston magazine recently estimated that he earns $45,000 to $50,000 a month. He doesn’t explicitly dispute this, but notes that he has operating expenses, as well as a quarter-million dollars in legal fees. To explain how Boston came up with those numbers, he told me the writer simply estimated a figure based on his roughly 2,000 paying subscribers. When I pointed out that he had other revenue streams too—his website advertising and a wide range of merchandise (you can get a Free Karen Read pet hoodie in a range of sizes and colors, and a pink Free Karen Read baby onesie), as well as potential movie and book deals—he said that he had no clear sense of what he was earning. “I’m not a money guy,” he said. “I’m a content guy.”

One evening last June, I joined Kearney as he prepared to deliver his Turtle Club broadcast from his girlfriend’s Boston apartment. Seconds before going live, he took his seat, slipped a Turtleboy cap on his head, and started streaming.

After more than an hour of monologuing, he started reading out what he calls Turtlechats: People send him money—typically $5 to $20, though sometimes more—and in return, Kearney reads out their questions or comments. There’s apparently an understood etiquette here, one best not to fall afoul of. Seeing one message, he said sternly to the camera: “You can’t send a dollar. If you send a dollar, I ain’t reading your shit. It’s insulting.”

In response, a message soon came through from someone named Ben taking exception to this, informing Kearney, “You lost me bro.” What happened next reflects something fundamental about Kearney. Instead of brushing off Ben’s message, Kearney escalated dramatically.

“Let me be very clear, Ben. I couldn’t be happier to lose you. I hope you never come back and watch any of my shows again. I actually fucking hate you with every ounce of my being, and I’d be proud to have you unsubscribe to the channel.”

Kearney has brought the same hyper-incendiary instincts to his coverage of the trial. When I visited him last May, he had just been banned from YouTube for a week because of an online poll he’d posted asking his followers a question about the trial’s most recent two witnesses: “Who is the bigger piece of shit?” He told me he is just using his platform to say out loud what regular people watching the trial stream are thinking. “It’s guy-on-the-street talk,” he said, adding: “I’m rough around the edges, certainly. I have a potty mouth. My mother is always telling me to tone it down, and I’d like to. It’s something I’m working on.” Perhaps not that hard, though. Here’s a brief excerpt—not even the worst part—from his livestreamed commentary about the testimony of a witness named Julie Nagel:

This is a goddamn murder trial. There’s an innocent woman whose life is on the line. And all these townie fucking whores can do is get up on the stand and lie their fucking asses off. I hope you burn in eternal hell because that’s where you fucking belong, you stupid fat cow. You deserve to be fat and disgusting, because you disgust me.

But even as he’s delivering crude, derogatory commentary like this, he’s also providing cogent, detailed, and deeply knowledgeable analysis of the trial. This is a man who, on and off camera, can pivot in an instant from saying things like “townie fucking whores” to offering a deconstruction of subtle contradictions in testimony, or explaining how the last famous and controversial trial at the Norfolk courthouse was of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Italian anarchists convicted of murder and executed in the 1920s. “Sacco and Vanzetti didn’t have Karen Read’s lawyers,” he says.

As the prosecution presented its case at trial, Kearney appeared to grow even more confident that Read would be found not guilty. It was not hard to see things his way. Day after day, witnesses for the prosecution seemed to be brought to the stand less for purposes of showing how and why Read was responsible for O’Keefe’s death than to undermine the defense’s alternative theory that O’Keefe was killed inside 34 Fairview Road. I told Kearney that I assumed there must be some careful but as-yet-unveiled prosecutory plan at work, but Kearney was skeptical, never wavering from what he told me the day we met: “This is going to be the quickest acquittal you’ve ever seen.”

Kearney’s nom de blog comes from an infamous statue in the center of his hometown, one with its own messy history. The Burnside Fountain, now found on the southeast corner of Worcester Common, was built in the early 20th century, and features a bronze statue that the sculptor who was commissioned to construct it, Charles Harvey, named Boy With a Turtle. His design depicted a naked boy holding a hawksbill sea turtle. As he undertook the work in his New York studio, Harvey apparently heard voices, sometimes said to have come from the unfinished statue itself, telling him to kill himself. Heeding them, he went to the bank of the Bronx River and slit his throat. Another artist completed the statue.

Left: Free Turtleboy hats are among the abundant trial-related merchandise for sale. Right: The statue that inspired Kearney’s pseudonym, on Worcester Common, in Massachusetts. (Lila Barth for The Atlantic)

But that is not why Harvey’s final work became famous. It’s not entirely clear whether Harvey’s intention was to depict a boy riding a turtle upon the seas or to capture the moment of releasing a turtle into the wild. But one scenario easily comes to mind for many observers. As Kearney succinctly put it: “The statue obviously looks like a boy having sex with a turtle.”

The idea to use the name Turtleboy was not Kearney’s own. Inviting suggestions for what to call a new iteration of his blog in 2013, which at the time he intended to be anonymous, he considered “Word From the Woo” (Woo being a local term for “Worcester”) and “Jogger Blogger.” Then a follower proposed “Turtleboy Sports.” Kearney knew immediately that it was right—“What better name for a Worcester guy? Turtleboy!”

His followers soon became known by the name they have to this day: Turtle Riders. When I asked Kearney why, he said, “Well, it’s better than Turtle Fuckers.”

One day in the first week of June, a trial half day, Kearney and I arranged to talk at lunchtime while he drove back to Worcester to see his kids after school. But when he emerged from the courtroom, he asked whether I minded if we made a detour. Some Turtle Riders were gathering for lunch.

At first I couldn’t understand why they’d chosen a restaurant nearly half an hour’s drive from the courthouse. Then it became clear: The Turtle Riders’ chosen meeting place was the Waterfall Bar and Grille in Canton, the final place where Karen Read and John O’Keefe drank together on January 28, 2022. It’s where they mingled with Brian Albert and several others who would soon head to Albert’s home.

But that’s not all I would see on our drive.

“By the way,” Kearney said as we neared Canton, “do you want to see 34 Fairview Road?”

He took a left turn, and soon we arrived. “They say she was parked right here,” he said, “and that John just stood back there by the flagpole, and that she gunned it in reverse and hit him.”

Kearney is fond of experiments and reenactments, both for his own edification and to create content for his viewers. In September 2023, he had come here in his Lexus and tried to duplicate what the prosecution said Read did based on its interpretation of data from her fancier 2021 Lexus LX 570: abruptly reverse 62 feet and reach a speed of 24 miles an hour. Kearney said that despite multiple tries, his best “pedal to the metal” attempt couldn’t get him above 19 miles an hour. He pointed to a spot some distance from the curb. “That’s where John’s body was found.”

As we talked through various scenarios, a car pulled up in the middle of the street, right next to us.

“Oh my God!” screamed one of the two women in the car.

“Shut up!” screamed the other. “We were just fucking talking about you!”

They couldn’t believe what they’d chanced upon: Turtleboy, in the flesh, at the geographic epicenter of their obsession.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, in a way that seemed both friendly and designed to chill the temperature a little. When they asked for a photo, he got out of the car and posed with them.

At the Waterfall, he knew most of the people joining for lunch—maybe a couple dozen Turtle Riders who seemed to be part of some informal inner circle—and he didn’t grandstand at all. Instead, Kearney sat at the edge of the room, talking quietly with whoever came by but making no pronouncements. This wasn’t bullhorn Turtleboy.

On the next morning’s “bus-stop live,” he told the Turtle Riders about me and what I’d gotten to see while hanging out with him and his crowd: “He got a taste of Turtle World.” He said I’d seen “how cool these people are. And, the lies that have been spread about who we are and what we do—and that we’re dangerous and bloodthirsty, and, you know, intimidating witnesses. We’re not about that, man. We’ve never been about that.”

June 10, 2024—day 22 of testimony in the Read trial—began with Kearney tweeting photos of the gathered FKR protesters at dawn, with this message: “Sometimes I can’t believe I created this movement, but I’m really glad I did.” Early in the day’s proceedings, taking exception to the latest ruling by Judge Beverly Cannone—who, in Turtleboy world, is only ever referred to as “Auntie Bev”—he tweeted, “Auntie Bev is being extra cunty today.” One darkly comic measure of how much influence Kearney has had on this trial is that this affection for giving offensive nicknames to people he doesn’t like leached out of the sideshow and into the official trial record. One of the police investigators, Yuri Bukhenik, had been mischievously rechristened by Kearney as “Bukkake,” the term for a very specific multiperson sexual act; on the stand, a witness named Julie Albert, Brian Albert’s sister-in-law, referred to Bukhenik from the witness box as “Trooper Bukkake.” “Everybody in the courthouse looked at me,” Kearney said afterward. “It was so satisfying, because I’m like, ‘Oh, she listens to my show.’ ”

Kearney’s intemperate Auntie Bev comment was soon forgotten, because the time had come for the lead police investigator in the case, Michael Proctor, to take the stand. Another complexity in this case was that, unbeknownst to the jury, there had been a federal grand-jury investigation into the Read investigation—a step toward justice, if you’re a Read supporter, or a misguided fishing expedition that the Read side somehow manipulated into existence, if you’re not. And although no charges have been filed as a result of this grand jury, it unearthed material that consequently became available in Read’s trial—including some deeply problematic private text messages sent by the lead investigator.

After inviting Proctor to share the details of the police investigation, the state’s attorney led him through much of this problematic material. It was a remarkable spectacle—the prosecution guiding its own witness toward such unhelpful testimony—but presumably the attorney had calculated that all of this would have been even more devastating if first presented by the defense. Still, the effect of this material was incendiary: In a volley of texts to friends, family, and colleagues, Proctor had referred to Read as, among other things, “a whack job cunt,” “a nutbag,” and “retarded”; he’d also joked about looking for nudes of her on her phone, and mocked her medical history. “She’s got a leaky balloon knot,” he texted, presumably in reference to her Crohn’s disease. “Leaks poo.” Most of the crudest texts didn’t speak directly to Read’s guilt or innocence, but when combined with other unprofessional asides—“Nope, home owner is a Boston cop,” he’d texted to a friend, in a way that could be read as implying that Brian Albert was consequently beyond investigation—they appeared corrosive to the prosecution’s case.

Kearney certainly thought so. “You can’t truly appreciate how OVER this trial is,” he tweeted from the courtroom, “unless you see the faces of the jurors while Proctor reads these text messages.”

Media coverage of the trial grew and grew, in tandem with a teeming online scrum in which Read’s innocence or guilt was incessantly debated. It was apparently easy to survey the same morass of evidence and then with fierce assurance come to completely different conclusions. Almost everyone seemed to be sure of the truth, and to think that anyone who didn’t agree with them was a fool.

As the trial neared its end, Kearney retained complete confidence that Read would be fully acquitted. But he was also clearly exhausted. “I’m kind of looking forward to it being over,” he had told me earlier. “I’m Karen Read–ed out. I enjoy the professional success I’ve had from it, but I don’t enjoy the stress that I’ve gotten from all these charges.”

Aidan Kearney at home outside Worcester, Massachusetts, where he blogs and livestreams on his various Turtleboy platforms about the Karen Read murder trial, October 2, 2024. (Lila Barth for The Atlantic)

Arguably the most significant testimony came in the trial’s final days. The prosecution’s vehicular-crash expert argued that O’Keefe’s injuries were consistent with impact from a reversing car (though his explanation of exactly how O’Keefe had been hit, and how his body had ended up where it was found, seemed murky), and its digital-forensics experts argued that the 2:27 time stamp associated with the words hos long to die in cold on Jennifer McCabe’s phone was actually tied to when the tab was first opened (to search for basketball scores), not when the potentially incriminating phrase was typed; they also testified that there was no evidence of deliberate data deletion. The defense pushed back hard.

On June 21, day 29 of testimony, just before 11 a.m., the defense began to present its case. Read’s attorneys called a snowplow driver who said that when he drove by 34 Fairview at about 2:45 in the morning, he saw nothing on the lawn where O’Keefe’s body was later found, suggesting that the body had been placed there afterward; a doctor who argued that the marks on O’Keefe’s arm were dog bites; a digital-forensics expert who maintained that the hos long … search did indeed occur around 2:27 a.m.; a forensic pathologist who testified that O’Keefe’s injuries were not consistent with being hit by a car at 24 miles an hour; and two accident-reconstruction experts who testified that the damage both to the car and to O’Keefe didn’t tally with the kind of collision proposed by the prosecution. Scarcely a day after it started, the defense rested.

Kearney, who had been studying the jury members’ reactions over the past few weeks, told me he thought there was a 70 percent chance that they would issue the inevitable not-guilty verdict after less than a day’s deliberation. There was just a 30 percent chance that they would need a second day, he said. No other outcome seemed conceivable to him.

But the first day passed, and then the second, and then the third. Now it was the weekend. And before the jury reconvened, two things happened. First, on Saturday, Kearney’s mother, who had pancreatic cancer, died. The second event, Kearney learned about only as jury deliberations resumed on Monday morning. A person contacted Kearney via Facebook to say that the police were at Kearney’s parents’ house in Worcester. Kearney called his father, who told him why: At 8:30 that morning, one of Kearney’s brothers had stepped out of the house and found a large turtle hanging by its neck on a rope from the porch railing. Dead. The turtle had “what appeared to be a gun shot wound on the back of the shell,” according to the police report, “and an exit wound … near its belly.” Kearney’s father, the police report went on to say, “explained that his son, Aidan Kearney, is Turtle Boy; a popular article writer. Mr. Kearney also mentioned that he and his family have been the victims of harassment for some time now due to his son’s occupation, but nothing to the extent of today’s incident.”

Kearney’s father sent him a photo. He immediately began speculating about who was responsible, throwing out different public accusations. “There’s no shortage of people who I think would do this,” Kearney told me. As of this writing, the dead-turtle investigation remains unsolved.

On Monday, after the jury had sent several notes suggesting that it was at an impasse, the judge declared a mistrial. Kearney was deflated. Though one can make a strong argument that, absent Kearney’s involvement, Karen Read would have been much more likely to have been found guilty, he took little succor in that.

A new trial was scheduled for this past January, then deferred until April. But in the weeks following the trial, an extraordinary thing happened. Read had been facing three separate charges. A number of jurors came forward to say that they had unanimously agreed to acquit Read on the most serious charge—second-degree murder—as well as the charge of leaving the scene of a crime; they had reached an impasse only on the lesser manslaughter charge (where a majority of them favored a guilty verdict). But during the court proceedings, no one had asked them if they’d reached unanimity on any of the individual charges. Read’s legal team argued that she could not be fairly tried again on these charges, as this would be double jeopardy; the prosecution argued that as no such verdicts had been officially recorded, double jeopardy did not apply. The issue is working its way through the courts.

After recovering from his initial dismay at the mistrial, Kearney carried on undeterred. He conducted new field experiments, explored new angles, and covered every new development. He got a juror to speak on the record about the deliberations. According to this juror, those who believed Read guilty of manslaughter focused on how drunk she’d been, and on the acceleration data from the car; those who believed her not guilty did not buy that O’Keefe’s injuries could have been caused by a collision with a reversing car. Many of the issues Kearney considered most important—the alleged 2:27 a.m. Google search, the Apple Health data suggesting that O’Keefe had gone into the house, Officer Proctor’s prior relationship with the Albert family—were apparently not central to their deliberations. “I’m in this world where I consume Karen Read content every day, and we all know it like the back of our hand,” he told me. “But the people deciding the case didn’t really seem to know it that well, if that makes sense.”

On a livestream shortly after speaking with the juror, Kearney let rip. Yes, the jury had unanimously taken murder off the table, but how could any sentient juror have believed what he now knew some of them did? If you were to question any of the jurors who voted guilty on the manslaughter charge about whether they would have staked their children’s lives on that verdict being correct, he asked rhetorically, what would they say? “Would you bet your children’s lives on that fact, that Karen Read’s guilty? Would you? Would you? Because I would bet anyone’s—like, literally anyone’s—life that Karen Read is not guilty and not think twice about it … I’m that fucking positive.” He couldn’t understand how the jurors who’d considered Read guilty of anything could think otherwise. “I hope they burn in hell, to be perfectly honest with you, those people. I really do. They’re fucking terrible people.”

Kearney and Read had stopped talking just before he was imprisoned, in December 2023, and some trial commentators had speculated that she was done with him. But on June 6 of last year, when I met him after court, he told me, “I actually talked to Karen for the first time in six months today,” and explained how he’d asked her a question outside court about footage of her car’s taillight, and she’d answered him with a big smile.

Kearney told me that he and Read resumed private contact a few days after that conversation in the street. The ice broke on June 10, the day of Michael Proctor’s catastrophic testimony. “I sent her a message on Signal, and I just said, ‘Good day. Now the whole world knows what an asshole he is.’ ” Read replied, concurring. “That reinvigorated conversation between the two of us,” he said. Now they’re back in more regular communication. “We just discuss various things about the trial and our thoughts on it,” he said. “My thoughts on it, basically.”

When Kearney sometimes talks about the cause of defending Read’s innocence as a kind of calling, he can sound jarringly grandiose. If he were to allow his arrest on “trumped-up, ridiculous charges” to cause him to back off, he told me one day, “I feel like I would be almost disrespecting everything our Founding Fathers believed in and risked their lives for. Our Founding Fathers were rich, all of them. And so they had the most to lose. People like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams. They could have just gotten along under British rule. They would have been fine. But … principles mattered with these people. And when they signed the Declaration of Independence, they knew that it was probably a 90 percent chance they had just signed their own death warrant. But it was worth it. It was worth it to abolitionists. To people like Martin Luther King. The great people in American history are the people who risked their own well-being for something bigger than themselves. I’m not comparing myself to them …”

People listening to that are going to say, “So you’re saying there’s a lineage: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Martin Luther King … Turtleboy?”

“Yeah, well, I think what’s happening with Karen Read is along those lines … Obviously this is a smaller scale. I’m not George Washington. But I just feel like you have to speak up about this.”

And so on he goes—fighting his own witness-intimidation charges while chronicling, with renewed intensity, each twist in the Karen Read saga. “I’m going to ride this out as long as I can,” he told me, “because it’s my thing.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Turtleboy Will Not Be Stopped.”

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