For three years, I was President Barack Obama’s Russia adviser on the National Security Council and, for two, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. In that time, no assumption drove me crazier than this one about Russian President Vladimir Putin: “He’s a transactional leader.” I heard this characterization dozens and dozens of times. And in my view, it expressed a fundamental misunderstanding of Putin’s thinking and intentions.

I first met Putin in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1990. He was in charge of international contacts for Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. I was working for the National Democratic Institute, an American NGO dedicated to advancing democracy abroad. Back then, Putin was already known as a dealmaker of the corrupt kind, using his government position to make money for newly emerging private companies and foreign investors. He’s been doing that ever since, and some observers believe that it has made him the richest man in the world. But these sorts of transactions, as important as they were to his rise, don’t define the whole of his project.

The Putin who has governed Russia this past quarter century is an ideologue. He has developed a strong set of ideas about how Russia should be ruled and what place it should occupy in the world. On these matters, he is not guided by rational cost-benefit analysis or dealmaking so much as by real animus against democracy, liberalism, and the West, together with a determination to resurrect the Russian empire.

For too long, we in the West have underestimated Putin’s global ideological vision as an animating force for his foreign-policy agenda. The tragic consequence is that today Putinism is advancing across Europe and the United States.

In the beginning, Putin was an accidental leader. After Russia’s 1998 financial crash, its president, Boris Yeltsin, and the oligarchs around him scrambled to find a viable candidate to run against the Communists in the 2000 presidential election. They settled on an obscure KGB agent, selecting Putin to become first prime minister in August 1999, then acting president at the end of 1999, and then the ruling elite’s choice to succeed Yeltsin in the March 2000 election. Voters ratified Yeltsin’s pick, not the other way around.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

At the time, Putin was not anti-Western. He had not joined forces with the neo-imperialist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, or the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. Rather, he had spent the ’90s working as a mid-level bureaucrat for pro-democratic, pro-Western politicians, first Sobchak in St. Petersburg and later Yeltsin in Moscow. So the failure to anticipate his pivot away from these people and ideas is understandable.

But Putin made his disdain for democracy clear early in his rule. (I wrote about his autocratic proclivities just three weeks before Russia’s 2000 election.) On other issues, he initially signaled continuity with the Yeltsin era. For instance, Putin expressed pro-Western positions, adopted free-market policies, cut corporate and income taxes, and even suggested that Russia should join NATO: “Why not?” Putin answered when asked this in 2000. “I do not rule out such a possibility … Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe … Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.” After the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, Putin fully embraced President George W. Bush’s idea of a global war on terror and even helped the U.S. open military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to support its war effort in Afghanistan.

Over time, however, Putin became less enamored with free markets and relations with the West. He began to gradually reassert state control over Russia’s economy and media. In 2003, for instance, he arrested Russia’s richest businessman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and handed Khodorkovsky’s oil company to one of his KGB comrades, Igor Sechin, because Khodorkovsky was becoming too active in supporting the political opposition. By 2003, all of Russia’s independent television networks—TVS, TV6, and NTV—were either shut down or had become state channels.

Putin initially reacted calmly to NATO expansion, announced in 2002 and completed in 2004, because he still sought cooperation with the United States. But then popular protest movements that the Kremlin came to call “color revolutions” brought democratic, pro-Western governments to power in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw the sinister, orchestrating hand of the United States and the West behind these “coups” in countries too close to Russia for his comfort. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin berated the U.S. for interfering in the domestic politics of other countries in the service of its own ideas. He asserted, “One state and, of course, first and foremost, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural, and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?”

Ideas such as freedom, democracy, and liberalism threatened Putin’s autocratic style of rule. Sure enough, in 2011, what happened in Georgia and Ukraine seemed poised to occur in Russia too. That December, Russia held a parliamentary election that was falsified in Putin’s favor, in the manner usual at the time. On this occasion, however, Russia’s election observers documented the irregularities, and political opposition leaders mobilized the biggest nationwide demonstration since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. At Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, Russian protesters chanted for free and fair elections—also for “Russia without Putin.”

[Read: The Putinization of America]

Putin was frightened, and so he pushed back hard. He blamed President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and me (I arrived as the U.S. ambassador in 2012, right as these demonstrations were taking place) for fomenting regime change against him and his government. He told his citizens that the U.S. sought the destruction of Russia as a country and was using “fifth column” agents such as Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov (both later allegedly assassinated by Putin’s regime) as domestic agents to achieve these goals.

After his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin used ever more coercive methods to weaken opposition leaders, civil society, and independent media. In 2012, he closed down USAID’s operations in Russia—the very organization the Trump administration is shutting down today. Since then, Putin has consolidated his views and repressive policies, cracking down on the last remaining opposition after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

To justify this clampdown, Putin has evoked the defense of Russian sovereignty and conservative Christian values against the decadent liberal West. Not unlike other populists, he blamed international forces for Russia’s economic woes, but his real bread-and-butter issues were cultural clashes. He devoted obsessive attention to issues of sexual orientation, blaming the West for promoting homosexuality, LGBTQ identities, and other ideas he considers deviant and antithetical to Russian culture and traditions. As he bluntly claimed at the annual forum held by the Moscow-based Valdai Discussion Club in 2013, “Many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.”

Putin has also repeatedly attacked the liberal international order, calling it a setup to maintain American hegemonic rule over the entire world. He wants to return to a 19th-century-style world, in which a handful of great powers dominate their spheres of influence unconstrained by multilateral institutions, international laws, or global norms. If the Cold War’s central ideological struggle of communism versus capitalism was between states, this new ideological struggle of illiberal nationalism versus liberal internationalism is being fought primarily within states.

After consolidating power at home, Putin began to propagate his conservative, populist, autocratic ideas internationally, but especially in the developed world. To do so he invested heavily in several instruments of influence and used them in support of largely far-right movements across the West.

He allocated considerable resources to Russian state media operating abroad, including the flagship television network Russia Today, the Sputnik news agency, and armies of propagandists across all social-media platforms. Russia’s ideological efforts in this domain were so effective in Romania’s 2024 presidential election, for instance, that an obscure far-right presidential candidate, Cǎlin Georgescu, came out of nowhere and won the first round. The violation of Romanian sovereignty was assessed by intelligence services to be so acute that the country’s supreme court felt compelled to cancel the second round of the election.

Putin deputized the Russian Orthodox Church to nurture relations with like-minded churches in the West, including evangelical ones in the United States. He personally fostered ties between the Orthodox Church in Moscow and its counterpart in the United States, a union that later helped him win endorsement of his annexation of Crimea from many in the Russian diaspora. When I was the U.S. ambassador to Russia, I witnessed the Russian Orthodox Church’s aggressive courtship of conservative Christian leaders from the United States. In 2013, Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage traveled to Moscow, where he gave a speech opposing the adoption of children by same-sex couples—something Putin sharply limited by law that same year, leading the American conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh to remark on his radio show, “I have to tell you that it freaks me out that Vladimir Putin is saying things I agree with.” In 2015, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church hosted Franklin Graham, the CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, who praised Putin for “protecting Russian young people against homosexual propaganda.”

At the same time, Putin cultivated ties with illiberal populists across Europe. He shared with these leaders a rejection of liberalism, a commitment to traditional values, an embrace of national and ethnic identities, and a disdain for alleged constraints on sovereignty—whether those of the European Union on its members or of American “imperialism” on Russia. Putin’s closest ideological ally in Europe is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—the only EU leader who did not condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and who subsequently tried to block EU aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. No European leader has done more to weaken the EU than Orbán, and weakening the EU is precisely what Putin wants.    

In France, Putin has nurtured a relationship with the far-right politician Marine Le Pen, providing financial assistance for her 2017 presidential campaign and meeting her at the Kremlin that year in a public show of support. In turn, Le Pen enthused, “The model that is defended by Vladimir Putin, which is one of reasoned protectionism, looking after the interests of his own country, defending his identity, is one that I like, as long as I can defend this model in my own country.” In Italy, Putin has nurtured personal relations with the illiberal nationalist leader Matteo Salvini. Secret audio recordings revealed that Salvini’s Lega Nord allegedly participated in backroom deals with Russian operatives to receive funds from a Russian state-owned company. The United Kingdom’s Nigel Farage is a longtime Kremlin favorite thanks to his disdain for the EU; Putin’s government supported Farage’s Brexit campaign.

Shared anti-liberal and culturally reactionary values have also undergirded Putin’s relationships with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and nationalist-conservative-party leaders in Austria, Bulgaria, and Germany. More proximately, Putin has supported the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko for decades, helping his autocratic partner hang onto power despite mass demonstrations following a fraudulent election in 2020. In Georgia, Putin has linked up with the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose political party, Georgian Dream, has undermined democratic institutions and suspended the country’s accession talks with the European Union for four years. In Ukraine, of course, Putin’s man was Viktor Yanukovych, who also tried to turn his country away from European ties and ideas, only to lose power to a popular uprising in 2014.

For the past decade, however, Putin’s most important target for ideological promotion was not Europe but the United States. He courted like-minded conservatives within the U.S. as a strategy for dividing and thereby weakening Russia’s foremost enemy. The conservative populist Pat Buchanan was an early darling of the Russian right. More recently, several major MAGA influencers, including Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, have embraced the militant Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin as an ideological hero. Dugin is now a regular guest on American conservative podcasts, whose hosts frequently amplify their common ideas on social media. When Elon Musk publicly stated on X at the beginning of the month that the U.S. should quit NATO and the United Nations, Dugin echoed him. American and Russian nationalists share many common enemies these days, including the “globalists,” the “neocons,” the “gays,” and the “woke.”

Putin’s ideological promotion in the United States turned aggressive with the Kremlin’s direct meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Russian cyberintelligence officers stole thousands of emails and documents from Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff. They then publicized this content to embarrass the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and help the Republican Party’s candidate, Donald Trump. Kremlin surrogates, in both traditional media and social media, campaigned in support of Trump and against Clinton. The extent to which these Russian efforts affected the outcome of that election is hard to measure. That Putin tried is clear.

During his first term as president, Trump made his support for Putin, his ideas, and his style of rule explicit. He never once criticized the Russian dictator over his human-rights record or anything else, but instead praised him as a strong leader. Unlike previous presidents, Trump did not publicly meet with Russian human-rights activists or opposition figures, and he paid zero attention to the Russian-supported war in eastern Ukraine, which started in 2014 and continued throughout his term. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a cease-fire with Putin in 2019, Europeans were at the table, but Trump’s team was absent. Most shockingly, at a summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian dictator against his own intelligence community and would not acknowledge Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also refused to debrief his senior staff after his one-on-one with Putin at that summit; one official characterized his attitude as suggesting,“This is between me and my friend.”

Trump did not succeed in enacting Putin’s full ideological agenda during that first term, however. Some of Trump’s senior national-security officials slowed or even altogether stopped the president from achieving the objectives he and Putin shared—for instance, ending NATO. In an unprecedented divide between a president and his national-security team, the first Trump administration at times pursued confrontational policies toward Russia, including expelling its diplomats with ties to intelligence, sanctioning its companies, and sending a modest military package to Ukraine. Putin blamed the American “deep state” for Trump’s failure to deliver. Trump sometimes hinted that he agreed.

After a four-year interregnum, Putin’s ideological ally is back in the White House. This time around, however, Trump is no longer constrained by old-school generals trying to slow him down. And this time around, the ideological solidarity between MAGA-ism and Putinism has become even more pronounced. Putin’s ideologues and Trump’s ideologues are both militantly anti-Zelensky, anti-Ukraine, and anti-Europe. They each admire the other’s “strong” leaders. Russian nationalists have pushed for the destruction of the alleged American deep state; Elon Musk and his aides express agreement and are attempting to do just that.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Trump has now made the restoration of his personal relationship with Putin a top foreign-policy priority; negotiating an agreement to end the war in Ukraine is a secondary or tertiary concern. How else to explain why Trump has delivered to Putin multiple concessions without asking for anything in return?

After just a few weeks in office, the list of Trump’s concessions to Russia is truly extraordinary. It includes (1) intelligence sharing with Ukraine has been discontinued; (2) USAID assistance for Ukraine, including funding to repair its energy grid and for anti-corruption programs, has been discontinued; (3) U.S. funding for Russian civil society and independent media operating in exile has been stopped; (4) diplomatic relations with Moscow have been restored, beginning with a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago; and (5) in radical reversal of past policy, the United States voted with Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and a handful of other rogue autocracies against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, Trump has insisted that (6) Ukraine cannot join NATO; (7) Zelensky must give up territory to Russia; (8) no new military aid for Ukraine will be made available, even previously appropriated funding; (9) U.S. forces deployed in Europe might be reduced and will not participate in any peacekeeping mission in Ukraine; and (10) sanctions on Russia could be lifted, although Trump suddenly reversed himself last week when he said he was “strongly considering” new sanctions and tariffs.

To use Trump’s favorite metaphor for dealmaking, these are not clever “cards” played to shape a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Trump has secured nothing for either the United States or Ukraine by playing them. Instead, the concessions are meant to rekindle a personal relationship between Trump and Putin, anchored by a shared ideology. In all of American history, I cannot think of a more radical change in U.S. foreign policy in such a short period of time.

Many Russians reject Putinism. They remain liberal internationalists, not illiberal nationalists. However, these Russians have no ability to influence politics in Putin’s dictatorship. Many of them now live abroad.

Many Americans likewise reject Trump’s ideological mind meld with Putin. I am one of them; most Americans seem to share my view. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 81 percent of Americans do not trust Putin, and only 9 percent do. Unlike Russians, Americans still live in a democracy and therefore have the ability to influence their country’s foreign policy. The question moving forward is whether this overwhelming majority of Americans cares enough about this issue to try to do something about it, to try to slow Trump’s historic pivot of putting America on the side of the autocrats and against the democrats. To date, the answer is unclear.

The same question can be posed worldwide. Putinism resonates with millions in Europe, America, and other parts of the world. In Europe and the United States, Putin’s illiberal orthodox populism is more attractive than Xi Jinping Thought, which has some tepid followers in the developing world but very few fans in the developed world. For years, American national-security experts have rightly focused on addressing the rising threat from China, but wrongly neglected the threat from Russia, including this ideological menace.

In our new era of great-power competition between dictators and democrats, Russia is the generally junior partner to China in the axis of autocracies, except when it comes to the appeal of its style of governance. Xi, after all, has courted no ideological allies as powerful as the current president of the United States of America. And yet, the supporters of Putinism are not the majority anywhere—not even in Hungary.  

Right now, the transnational movement of illiberal nationalism is more organized, united, and strategic in its collective actions than the liberal democratic movement. But those in Europe and the United States who support liberal democracy should remember that they far outnumber those who embrace illiberal autocracy, and that they have a history of victory over the forces that oppose them. During the Cold War, political parties, trade unions, intellectuals, civil-society organizations, and even religious leaders forged transnational ties in defense of democratic ideas—remember the AFL-CIO’s embrace of Poland’s Solidarity movement? The global anti-apartheid movement? We can do these things again now.  

This is not the first time in history, or even in the past century, that democratic ideas appeared to wane as autocratic ideas appeared to surge. That happened in the 1930s. It happened again in the 1970s, when Marxist-Leninist regimes were seizing power in Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, and the practice of American democracy at home was inspiring few worldwide, thanks to the violent suppression of protesters, the assassinations of political figures, and the resignation of President Nixon.

The world democratic movement eventually recovered from those dark periods. It has to find its nerve and recover now. The challenge of fighting for democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law just got a lot harder because the president of the United States—a title that used to be synonymous with the leader of the free world—just switched sides. That puts the onus on those within the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world who still support these ideals to get organized if they are to prevail over Putin’s ideology of illiberal nationalism.

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.”

A few weeks before he started selling swastika T-shirts on the internet, I considered letting Ye back into my life.

It was inauguration weekend, and I’d been sitting in a restaurant where the bartender was blasting a playlist of songs by the rapper once known as Kanye West. The music sounded, frankly, awesome. Most of the songs were from when I considered myself a fan of his, long before he rebranded as the world’s most famous Hitler admirer. I hadn’t heard this much Ye music played in public in years; privately, I’d mostly avoided it. But as I nodded along, I thought it might be time to redownload Yeezus.

The bartender probably wasn’t making a political statement, but the soundtrack felt all too apt for the dawn of the great uncancelling—the sweeping return of various disgraced figures and discouraged behaviors to the public realm. Donald Trump, a convicted felon, was back in the White House and naming accused abusers, quacks, and even Mel Gibson to positions of honor. Trend forecasters were proclaiming that Trump’s reelection represented a cultural shake-up in addition to a governmental one, replacing the stiff moralism of wokeness with cowboy rowdiness and chic nihilism. Phrases such as “the boom boom aesthetic” and “dark mode” were being coined to describe the phenomenon of young people suddenly dressing like Patrick Bateman and availing themselves of the term retard.

Given this climate, I thought maybe I could loosen up and try that whole “separating the art from the artist” thing again. I’d not been boycotting Ye’s music per se, but for the past few years, the disgust caused by his conduct had ruined the pleasure of stomping around to “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.” Now I could sense something shifting. The second Trump administration’s flurry of disorienting news was already becoming soul-deadening. The bad actors who were reemerging seemed only energized by outrage. Exhaustion was supplanting my sense of ick.

A few weeks later, on Super Bowl Sunday, the ick came roaring back. That day, a commercial aired directing viewers to Ye’s online store, which he then updated to sell only one item: a white shirt with the black, swirling symbol of the Third Reich. When I pulled up the website to see for myself, I felt a few kinds of bad feelings. There was horror at the Nazism. There was embarrassment at the fact that I’d recently wanted to listen to this guy’s voice again. And there was the sinking, instinctual understanding of what Ye was doing: testing how numb America has gotten.

The shirt stunt was part of a sudden flurry of activity suggesting a Ye comeback campaign. He crashed the Grammys; he’s prepping an album; he’s hyping a cryptocurrency. All the while, he’s doubled down on Hitler talk—and asserted his kinship with the second Trump wave. “Elon stole my Nazi swag,” he joked in one X post, referring to the tech mogul’s alleged Sieg heil; “whit[e] guys have all the fun,” he wrote when Steve Bannon seemed to make a similar gesture. He’s been filming podcast videos with an influencer, Justin LaBoy, whom he calls “the culture’s Joe Rogan.” He has described his habit of parading around his wife, Bianca Censori, nearly nude as if she were a pet, in redpilled terms. “I have dominion over my wife,” he posted. “This ain’t no woke as[s] feminist shit.”

Maybe Ye is saying what he truly believes. Maybe mental health is at play (he used to describe himself as bipolar; recently, he’s said the more accurate diagnosis is autism). Definitely, he’s trolling for publicity. In any case, he clearly believes this moment is ripe for him to capitalize on. And perhaps he’s right.

Conservatives who are proclaiming a golden age for America like to talk about the fall of “the regime,” a handy term to refer to any power center steered by liberals, including in the entertainment world. The idea is that we’d been living in a centrally planned culture of racially inclusive sitcoms and feminist pop stars, whose Millennial-pink kumbaya vibe was backed up by vicious online campaigns to shun the insufficiently woke. Now the entertainment regime is under assault through such means as Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and the Federal Communications Commission’s saber-rattling against broadcast networks. In the MAGA view, these efforts aren’t dictatorial—they’re liberatory.

This logic is credulous logic, conspiracy logic, that tends to downplay a crucial driver of culture: audiences’ desires. Certainly, the idea that 2010s entertainment was smothered by progressive politeness is overstated at best. The decade’s defining TV show was the brutal, T&A-filled Game of Thrones. Hip-hop was driven by young rappers whose music and personal lives defined the word problematic (Tekashi 6ix 9ine, XXXtentacion, Lil Uzi Vert). And, of course, Trump’s 2016 election delighted a whole new cultural scene: edgelords posting frog memes. The internet was undercutting old gatekeepers, turning culture—more than ever—into an unruly, competitive arena. If there was a regime, it was already weakening, not strengthening.

[Read: Kanye West finally says what he means]

Ye has long understood the crowd-pleasing potential of chaos over conformity. Though he once scanned as a liberal protest rapper—remember when he called out George W. Bush on live TV after Hurricane Katrina?—his misogynistic streak hardly made him a consensus figure. In 2016, he got into a spat with Taylor Swift by calling her a “bitch” in a song; the resulting brouhaha damaged her reputation more than it did his. Even after he started praising Trump in 2018 and called slavery a “choice,” he still drew major collaborators and successfully orchestrated hype for new albums.

It was only in 2022 that he pushed far enough to experience something like full-on cancellation, by going full-on anti-Semite. He posted that he wanted to go “death con 3” on Jews. He told Alex Jones, “I like Hitler.” He posted a swastika on X. Consequences piled up: Adidas exited their billion-dollar partnership with Ye; Def Jam, his label, severed ties; Elon Musk, of all people, banned him from X. Yet even then, his career continued: He released an unconvincing apology to the Jews, put out an album full of big-name rap collaborations, and landed a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1. In that song, “Carnival,” he compared himself to vilified men such as R. Kelly and Diddy. “This number #1 is for … the people who won’t be manipulated by the system,” Ye wrote on Instagram at the time.

“The system”—that term is pretty close to what people mean by “the regime.” Ye wasn’t wrong to suggest that important organizations had tried to marginalize him. But if someone booted out of the system can still hit No. 1, what does the system really count for? Maybe this: Even in a culture as fractured as ours has become, people intrinsically sense the existence of a “mainstream,” shaped by widely shared beliefs, norms, and urges. Powerful institutions stay powerful by catering to that consensus. After years of Americans becoming more socially progressive—after a decade in which gay marriage was legalized and Black Lives Matter gained broad-based popularity—it made some sense that, say, diversely cast Marvel movies would be the mainstream and the erratic Hitler-loving rapper would be subcultural.

Perhaps that’s not going to be true for much longer. “You are the media,” Elon Musk told his followers on X after Trump’s reelection, speaking to a platform that, under his watch, has become overrun by white supremacists. Seemingly every other day, a pundit proclaims that Trump is spurring a “cultural revolution.” The president may have been returned to office thanks in part to widespread dissatisfaction with grocery prices, but he was also helped by young people, typically our great trend-drivers, becoming more hostile to social-justice causes. And now here comes Ye, doing that thing you do when you think the masses will buy what you have to sell: film a Super Bowl commercial.

Vestiges of “the system” have, thus far, rebuked Ye’s swastika shirt. Two days after the Super Bowl ad aired, the e-commerce platform Shopify pulled the plug on Ye’s online store, citing a violation of its terms of service in a terse statement. Ye’s talent agency dropped him, and according to his own post on X, a few employees on his Yeezy design team quit. “Maybe one day they will understand why I had to do what I did, and one day they will forgive my method,” Ye wrote on X.

As for that why: In his X posts after the shop was taken down, Ye said he started thinking about selling the T-shirts after seeing the swastika—an ancient symbol used peacefully in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions—on clothing in Japan. In his telling, the point is to shock people and show them how free they are to embrace things that society has coded as taboo. That’s also the rationale spread by his defenders. Myron Gaines of the Fresh and Fit podcast, a prominent manosphere outlet, posted that Ye’s “genius” Super Bowl stunt probably got “millions” of fans to buy the shirt—“not because we’re Nazis,” but because Ye was flouting “years of censorship.”

To reiterate: The rapper openly admires Hitler and demonizes Jews. He posted that he made the swastika shirts to show “that I am not under Jewish control anymore.” Gaines wrote that Ye has “revenge to seek for 2 years ago when the jews launched a campaign to cancel him.” So these non-Nazis … just happen to use Nazi imagery while spreading the idea that the Jews are a shadowy cabal that needs to be brought to heel. In late February, Ye posted that he’s no longer a Nazi; a few days ago, he wrote, “Antisemitism is the only path to freedom.”

The absurdity of these antics is so obvious that to expend effort condemning them can feel pointless. I sympathize with the rapper Open Mike Eagle, who posted a video calling Ye’s latest phase a “predictable meltdown nobody has time for.” He noted that Ye’s shock tactics were largely getting drowned out by the drama caused by the Trump administration, and by broader shifts in the attention economy. “Things have changed,” Open Mike Eagle said, addressing Ye. “All the counterculture jive that you used to say, that shit is all mainstream now. There’s just Nazis all over Twitter.”

Ye may well see an opportunity in the fact that what once seemed insane now can seem inane. The institutions that helped us make sense of what’s normal and what’s fringe, what’s upstanding and what’s contemptible, what’s true and what’s false, are weaker than ever. But cultural change never really did happen through the dictates of regimes—it happens through ideas and attitudes moving contagiously, person to person. We absorb how others behave, what they react to and what they don’t react to. Certain people will buy into Ye’s posture of rebelliousness, and maybe even buy his shirt, and maybe even wear it on the street. The rest of us should try clinging to our disgust.

Ask a Democrat about Merrick Garland, and they will likely mutter something impolite. But, for a brief moment, Joe Biden’s attorney general could trumpet a monumental achievement. In the course of prosecuting the perpetrators of January 6, he dismantled the nation’s two most potent right-wing paramilitary groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The groups fell into disarray, their finances collapsed, and local chapters folded. By convicting the leadership of these groups and dozens of their rank and file, Garland extricated a seditious menace from American politics.

That accomplishment lasted until the second day of Donald Trump’s presidency. With his signature, Trump freed Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, and Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, from prison. Using his most expansive presidential powers, Trump resurrected these moribund organizations. Perhaps some members of these groups will never return, having been chastened by their brush with the raw end of federal power. But by excusing their most egregious offense, Trump has effectively legalized their presence—and validated the most ominous worries about his symbiotic relationship with them.

Back in 2020, Trump famously intimated an alliance with the Proud Boys in his instruction to them, delivered when he was asked during a debate with Biden whether he would condemn nationalist and paramilitary groups: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” he replied. That phrase implied that he, in fact, was the group’s ultimate commander. And a few months later, on January 6, that phrase felt like more than just a clumsy answer to a moderator’s question. The Proud Boys, clad in orange beanies, led the assault on the Capitol that day. And in the months that followed, as investigators pieced together a narrative of the insurrection, they often presented circumstantial evidence raising the possibility that the group had coordinated its assault with the Trump White House.

Those suggestions of a shared plot were never substantiated. But the Oath Keepers, at least, believed that they were working at the president’s behest. On January 6, as a member of the group admitted to prosecutors, the Oath Keepers kept a cache of arms across the Potomac in a Virginia hotel room, to be deployed in the event that Trump signaled for help.

[Read: Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message]

The president didn’t give that signal, and he may never issue an official instruction to these paramilitaries. But he might not need to, because his pardons have earned him their undying allegiance. “Trump literally gave me my life back,” Tarrio told Alex Jones. Trump’s devotion to the paramilitaries—and to the destruction of their common enemies—binds them tightly together. It’s a swerve in the arc of the history of these groups: The Oath Keepers began as a militia committed to subverting government, but now the group might become something closer to an arm of it.

This relationship raises questions: What happens the next time Trump explicitly announces that one of his enemies deserves to die? What if Trump describes a group as a threat to his own security or to the American way of life? How will these militias respond? In the not-so-distant past, Latin American organizations with similar pedigrees furtively fulfilled the darkest wishes of right-wing leaders. (Two years ago, the deputy chief of a Colombian militia confessed to a litany of assassinations that he had committed on the state’s behalf during that country’s long civil war, as well as torture, sexual assault, and the massacre of unarmed civilians.)

With their powerful patron and newfound freedom, the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys stand poised to assert themselves as they never have before. Because they have no immediate reason to fear the Justice Department or the FBI, they have the latitude to move out from the shadows. Some examples from the past suggest their future: During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, they frequently made unwelcome appearances at marches carrying assault rifles, with the clear intent of intimidation. Intimidation is, after all, a tactic they share with the Trump administration, and it might be used to squelch the sources of resistance that hindered his first term.

Donald Trump didn’t just grant clemency to individuals; he exonerated their method, which substitutes fists and guns for persuasion and argument. These groups seek to impose their will on society through force. That is the very nature of paramilitary organizations, which mimic trappings of the police and army in order to become unaccountable, private versions of them, forces loyal not to a constitution but to a strongman. They are antidemocratic entities in service of antidemocratic ends. Now those entities and their approach have the blessing, and perhaps even the patronage, of the president of the United States.

The image that really got me on social media this week was a faded photo of a man and woman, standing on what looks like the front steps of their home. It’s a candid shot—both are focusing their attention on an infant cradled in the mother’s arm. It is likely one of the first photos of a new family, and the caption broke my heart: “This photo was blown into our yard during the Eaton Canyon fire. Anyone from Pasadena/Altadena recognize these people?”

The picture is perfectly intact, not singed or torn, yet it seems to represent an entire universe of loss. Staring at the photo, a piece of family history scattered by the same winds that fuel the Los Angeles fires, you can just begin to see the contours of what is gone. The kind of grief that cannot be inventoried in an insurance claim.

And then you scroll. A satellite photo of a charred, leveled neighborhood is sandwiched next to some career news. On Instagram, I see a GoFundMe for a woman who is nine months pregnant and just lost her house; it’s followed immediately by someone else’s ebullient ski-vacation photos and a skin-care advertisement. I proceed through the “For You” feed on X and find Elon Musk replying to a video where Alex Jones claims the fires are part of a globalist plot to ruin the United States (“True,” he said), and blaming the fires on DEI initiatives; then a shitpost about Meta’s content-moderation changes (“On my way to comment ‘retard’ on every facebook post,” it reads, with 297,000 views). I scroll again: “Celebrities Reveal How They REALLY Feel About Kelly Clarkson,” another post teases. This is followed by a post about a new red-flag warning in L.A.: The fire is not relenting.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

To watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem is to feel acutely disoriented. The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; next week Donald Trump will be president; the government is setting the fires to stage a “land grab”; a new cannabis-infused drink will help you “crush” Dry January. Mutual-aid posts stand alongside those from climate denialists and doomers. Stay online long enough and it’s easy to get a sense that the world is simultaneously ending and somehow indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous. A viral post suggests that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” You scroll some more and learn that the author of that post wrote the line while on the toilet (though the author has since deleted the confession).

Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article about watching footage of dead Gazan children on Instagram: “I am not a survivor or a responder. I’m a witness, or a voyeur. The distress I am feeling is shame.”

For those on the ground, these networks mean something different. These people do not need to bear witness: They need specific information about their circumstances, and they need help. But the chaos of our social platforms and the splintered nature of a hollowed-out media industry extend the disorientation to them as well. “This time, I’m a civilian,” Matt Pearce, a Los Angeles–based journalist, wrote last week. “And this time, the user experience of getting information about a disaster unfolding around me was dogshit.” Anna Merlan, a reporter for Mother Jones, chronicled the experience of sifting through countless conspiracy theories and false-flag posts while watching the fires encroach on her home and packing her car to evacuate.

As I read these dispatches and watch helplessly from afar, the phrase time on site bangs around in my head. This is the metric that social-media companies optimize for, and it means what it sounds like: the amount of time that people spend on these apps. In recent years, there has been much handwringing over how much time users are spending on site; Tech-industry veterans such as Tristan Harris have made lucrative second careers warning of the addictive, exploitative nature of tech platforms and their algorithms. Harris’s crusade began in 2016, when he suggested a healthier metric of “time well spent,” which sought to reverse the “digital attention crisis.” This became its own kind of metric, adopted by Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 as Facebook’s north star for user satisfaction. Since then, the phrase has fallen out of favor. Harris rebranded his effort away from time well spent to a focus on “humane” technology.

But the worries persist. Parents obsess over the vague metric of “screen time,” while researchers write best-selling books and debate what, exactly, phones and social media are doing to kids and how to prove it. American politicians are so worried about time on site—especially when its by-product, metadata, is being collected by foreign governments—that the United States may very well ban TikTok, an app used by roughly one-third of the country’s adults. (In protest, many users have simply started spending time on another Chinese site, Xiaohongshu.) Many people suspect that time on site can’t be good for us, yet time on site also is how many of us learn about the world, form communities, and entertain ourselves. The experience of logging on and consuming information through the algorithmic morass of our feeds has never felt more dispiriting, commoditized, chaotic, and unhelpful than it does right now.

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]

It is useful, then, to juxtapose this information ecosystem—one that’s largely governed by culture-warring tech executives and populated by attention seekers—with a true technological public good. Last week, I downloaded Watch Duty, a free app that provides evacuation notices, up-to-date fire maps, and information such as wind direction and air-quality alerts. The app, which was founded in 2021 after fires ravaged Sonoma County, California, has become a crucial piece of information infrastructure for L.A. residents and first responders. It is run by a nonprofit as a public service, with volunteer reporters and full-time staff who help vet information. Millions have downloaded the app just this month.

Watch Duty appears to be saving lives at a time when local-government services have been less than reliable, sending out incorrect evacuation notices to residents. It is a shining example of technology at its best and most useful, and so I was struck by something one of its co-founders, David Merritt, told to The Verge over the weekend: “We don’t want you to spend time in the app,” he said. “You get information and get out. We have the option of adding more photos, but we limit those to the ones that provide different views of a fire we have been tracking. We don’t want people doom scrolling.” This, he rightly argues, is “the antithesis of what a lot of tech does.”

The contrast between Watch Duty and broad swaths of the internet feels especially stark in the early days of 2025. The toxic incentives and environments of our other apps are as visible as ever, and the men behind these services—Musk and Zuckerberg especially—seem intent on making the experience of using them worse than ever. It’s all in service of engagement, of more time on site. Musk, who has transformed X into a superfund site of conspiracy theorizing, crypto ads, hateful posts, and low-rent memes, has been vehement that he wants his users to come to the platform and never leave. He has allegedly deprioritized hyperlinks that would take people away from the platform to other sites. (Musk did not deny that this is happening when confronted by Paul Graham, a Y Combinator co-founder.) He has his own name for the metric he wants X to optimize for: unregretted user seconds.

Zuckerberg recently announced his own version of the Muskian playbook, which seeks to turn his Meta platforms into a more lawless posting zone, including getting rid of fact-checkers and turning off its automated moderation systems on all content but “illegal and high-severity violations.” That system kept spam and disinformation content from flooding the platform. Make no mistake: This, too, is its own play for time on site. In an interview last month with the Financial Times, a Meta executive revealed that the company plans to experiment with introducing generative-AI-powered chatbots into its services, behaving like regular users. Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, says that this feature—which, I should add, nobody asked for—is a “priority” for the company over the next two years. This is supposed to align with another goal, which is to make its apps “more entertaining and engaging.”

This should feel more than disheartening for anyone who cares about or still believes in the promise of the internet and technology to broaden our worldview, increase resilience, and expose us to the version of humanity that is always worth helping and saving. Spending time on site has arguably never felt this bad; the forecast suggests that it will only get worse.

In recent days, I’ve been revisiting some of the work of the climate futurist Alex Steffen, who has a knack for putting language to our planetary crisis. The unprecedented disasters that appear now with more frequency are an example of discontinuity, where “past experience loses its value as a guide to decision-making about the future.” Steffen argues that we have no choice but to adapt to this reality and anticipate how we’ll survive it. He offers no panaceas or bromides. The climate crisis will come for each of us, but will affect us unevenly. We are not all in this together, he argues. But action is needed—specifically, proactive fixes that make our broken systems more effective and durable.

Clearly our information systems are in need of such work. They feel like they were built for a world we no longer inhabit. Most of them are run by billionaires who can afford to insulate themselves from reality, at least for now. I don’t see an end to the discontinuity or brokenness of our internet. But there are glimpses of resilience. Maybe platforms like Watch Duty offer a template. “I don’t want to sell this,” John Clarke Mills, the company’s CEO, told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday. He went further: “No one should own this. The fact that I have to do this with my team is not OK. Part of this is out of spite. I’m angry that I’m here having to do this, and the government hasn’t spent the money to do this themselves.” Mills’s anger is righteous, but it could also be instructive. Instead of building things that make us feel powerless, Mills is building tools that give people information that can be turned into agency.

There’s no tidy conclusion to any of this. There is loss, fear, anger, but also hope. Days later, I went to check back on the post that contained that photo of the man and woman with a child. I’d hoped that the internet would work its magic to reunite the photo with those who’d lost it. Throughout the replies are people trying to signal-boost the post. In one reply, a local news producer asks for permission to do a story about the photograph. Another person thinks they have a lead on the family. So far, there’s no happy ending. But there is hope.