Photographs by Lila Barth

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

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

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

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

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

As we spoke, a woman standing nearby interjected.

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

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

“You’re the leader?” she said.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I’m Turtleboy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if it isn’t?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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For a few years, Democrats were so regimented that one could almost forget Will Rogers’s well-worn quip that he was not a member of any organized political party but rather a Democrat. After Hillary Clinton’s ignominious loss in 2016, the congressional team of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer quickly took charge. They were mostly able to keep a fractious coalition together through Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term. Democrats won the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020. At the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, despite noisy complaints about the inconstancy of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the party managed to enact a huge legislative agenda.

That seems a long time ago now. The party was able to force Biden out of the 2024 race, but much too late. After Trump’s win, Democrats did a great deal of hand-wringing about what went wrong, but they don’t seem to have learned much. Their inability to find their footing was on painful display during last night’s non–State of the Union address. Not only could Democrats not figure out an effective response to Trump’s speech; they couldn’t even settle on one or two ineffective responses.

First-term Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan got the unenviable duty of giving the official Democratic Party response, and delivered a workmanlike, solid speech that, as my colleague Tom Nichols wrote, nonetheless “failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics” and thus felt a little irrelevant.

Ahead of Trump’s speech, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned his caucus not to become the story. It didn’t work. This morning, the bible of Washington conventional wisdom, Politico Playbook, declared that “the reaction in the chamber was the story.”

A few Democrats decided to skip the speech altogether, but not enough for the boycott to be apparent in footage or images from the House chamber. Dozens of women in Congress wore pink as some sort of protest, but the message was so vague as to be illegible as anything other than generic protest. Other members brandished little signs—I saw them variously mocked as church fans, auction paddles, or table-tennis paddles—with text including “FALSE,” “MUSK STEALS,” and “SAVE MEDICAID.” (They at least opted against brandishing egg cartons as a comment on inflation.) A group of Democrats invited laid-off federal workers to join them, but without the microphone, they didn’t have much way to draw attention to their guests. Representative Jasmine Crockett posted a lip-synch to “Not Like Us,” for some reason. The scene-stealer was Representative Al Green, a veteran showman who got himself ejected for heckling Trump a few minutes in.

None of this matters a great deal in the specifics. The State of the Union (and its off-year sibling) don’t tend to have much lasting political or policy import. But the image of Democrats sitting glumly in the chamber—a mostly passive audience for Trump, neither supporting him nor meaningfully resisting him—felt like a metaphor for their broader messaging struggle. If Green’s act, complete with a cane waved at the president, was a bit buffoonish, at least he looked like he cared.

My social-media feeds were flooded last night, as they have been over the past few weeks, with progressives wincing, groaning, and gnashing their teeth about Democratic fecklessness. This is not merely an online phenomenon, as MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem recently reported. Only one in five voters approves of the party’s leadership, and they’re underwater even among Democrats (40 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove).

Part of the problem may be that Democrats respond to each new crisis slowly. Jeffries seems to be eyeing the coming budget battle as his moment to flex power. Republicans are unlikely to be able to pass a bill that satisfies both far-right lawmakers and vulnerable moderates, which means they will need House Democrats’ help to pass a bill. As a matter of tactics, Jeffries may be right, but it’s a very old-school, procedural approach to a moment that Democrats are simultaneously trying to convince voters is chaotic and unprecedented.

During his speech last night, Trump claimed a historic electoral mandate, despite one of the narrowest wins in recent memory. Democratic leaders speak like they have accepted that as true. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have? Republicans have repeatedly lectured America—they control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government.”

Even insofar as Jeffries is technically right, Democrats’ best leverage is in motivating the roughly half of the country that voted against Trump. “No We Can’t” is a bad way to do that. That’s one reason that, as I wrote last week, the odds of a progressive equivalent to the Tea Party—a large grassroots movement that furiously opposes Republicans but also has little use for the Democratic establishment—are higher than ever.

If anything good comes from last night’s speech, perhaps it will be the hastening of the end of the State of the Union, a bloated, obsolete ritual. The president is required under the Constitution to report to Congress annually, but that has taken the form of a speech only since 1913. When I was a kid, the State of the Union felt majestic: a moment of comity and decorum, where the president and Congress sat on a mostly equal footing and the focus was on policy.

Those days are long gone. Hectoring—both by and directed at—the president is now standard. In a funny hot-mic moment before Trump started last night, Vice President J. D. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson were caught joking about how hard it is to sit through a long speech on the dais. “The hardest thing was doing it during Biden, when the speech was a stupid campaign speech,” Johnson said.

This is an ironic remark, given the strident, partisan speech that followed, but he’s not wrong: The State of the Union has become just another political rally. Several Supreme Court justices have already concluded that it’s not productive, seemly, or fun to be there, and they skip. Picking a low point of Trump’s speech last night is challenging—elevating himself above George Washington? Telling a debunked lie about Social Security beneficiaries? Reprised threats against Greenland and Panama?—but some of the most uncomfortable moments were a showdown between Trump and Senator Elizabeth Warren, whom he called “Pocahontas,” as well as Trump’s repeated, needless attacks on Biden.

It’s hard to think of any reason most Democrats would want to attend Trump’s State of the Union next year, where they will surely be browbeaten and used as partisan props but are unlikely to learn anything new about his policy agenda. That would be a much stronger and clearer message than anything Democrats tried this year. But then again, we haven’t seen the party unite much around its best interests lately.

Related:

Democrats are acting too normal. Democrats wonder where their leaders are.

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David Frum: Trump, by any means necessary Anne Applebaum: The rise of the brutal American Russia is not winning. What ketamine does to the human brain

Today’s News

Donald Trump paused auto tariffs for Mexico and Canada for a month, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. A divided Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s foreign-aid freeze, kicking the issue back to lower courts. The Trump administration paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine in an effort to pressure Ukraine’s government to cooperate with America’s plans for peace negotiations.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Coaching Is the New ‘Asking Your Friends for Help’

By Olga Khazan

These days, if a problem exists, there seems to be a coach for it. Having trouble focusing? An “executive function” coach might be right for you. Undecided about having kids? There’s a coach for that too. Too burned out to plan a “transformative” vacation? A travel coach can help you for $597 (a price that does not include the actual booking of the trip).

Discovering all these types of coaches made me wonder: Whatever happened to asking people you know for advice? So I set out to try to understand why people hire coaches and what they get from the experience.

Read the full article.

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The best way to dismantle the federal government, then repurpose it as a tool of personal power and ideological warfare, is to start with the soft targets. Entitlements and defense, which comprise more than half of federal spending and a large share of its fraud and waste, enjoy too much support for Elon Musk to roll them up easily. But nothing is less popular than sending taxpayers’ money to unknown people in poor, faraway countries that might be rife with corruption. Americans dislike foreign aid so much that they wrongly believe it consumes at least a quarter of the budget (in the previous fiscal year, aid constituted barely 1 percent). President John F. Kennedy understood the problem, and after creating the United States Agency for International Development, in 1961, he told his advisers: “We hope we can tie this whole concept of aid to the safety of the United States. That is the reason we give aid. The test is whether it will serve the United States. Aid is not a good word. Perhaps we can describe it better as ‘Mutual Assistance.’ ” At another meeting, Kennedy suggested “International Security.”

USAID continued for the next six decades because leaders of both parties believed that ending polio, preventing famine, stabilizing poor countries, strengthening democracies, and opening new markets served the United States. But on January 20, within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze foreign aid. USAID was instructed to stop nearly all work. Its Washington headquarters was occupied and sensitive data were seized by whiz kids from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. One of their elder members, a 25-year-old software engineer and Matt Gaetz fan named Gavin Kliger, acquired an official email address to instruct the staff of USAID to stay home.

Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudo­nyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. “It felt like it went very authoritarian very quickly,” one civil servant told me. “You have to watch everything you say and do in a way that is gross.”

The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—­from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.

A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholar­ship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department.

But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.

With no workforce or funding, USAID’s efforts around the world—vaccine campaigns in Nepal, HIV-drug distribution in Nigeria, nutrition for starving children in Sudanese refugee camps—were forced to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who championed USAID as a senator and now, as the agency’s acting head, is its executioner) issued a waiver for lifesaving programs. But it proved almost meaningless, because the people needed to run the programs were locked out of their computers, had no way to communicate, and feared punishment if they kept working.

The heedlessness of the aid wreckers recalls Nick Carraway’s description in The Great Gatsby of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” An agency of 10,000 employees is shrinking to about 300 and, despite its statutory independence, being dissolved into the State Department. The veteran USAID official I spoke with foresaw a skeletal operation reduced to health and food assistance, with everything else—education, the environment, governance, economic development—gone. But even basic humanitarian programs will be nearly impossible to sustain with the numbers that the administration envisions—for example, 12 staff members for all of Africa.

“This is the infrastructure and architecture that has given us a doubling of the human lifespan,” Atul Gawande, the writer and surgeon who was the most recent, and perhaps last, head of the agency’s Bureau for Global Health, told me. “Taking it down kills people.”

Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg: Send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers. The assault provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy. It also demonstrated the radicalism of Trump’s view of America’s role in the world.

Every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama understood that American power was enhanced, not threatened, by attaching it to alliances, institutions, and values that the American people support, such as freedom, pluralism, and humanitarianism. This was the common idea behind Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. refugee program, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These weren’t simple acts of generosity. They were designed to prevent chaos and misery from overwhelming other countries and, eventually, harming our own. They expanded American influence by attraction rather than coercion, showing people around the world that the Leviathan could benefit them, too. Political scientists call this “soft power.”

Every president betrayed these ideas in one way or another, making U.S. foreign policy a fat target for criticism at home and abroad, by the left and the right. Kennedy used foreign aid to wage a bloody counterinsurgency in South Vietnam; Carter put human rights at the center of his policy and then toasted the repressive shah of Iran; Bush, claiming to be spreading democracy to the Middle East, seriously damaged America’s global legitimacy. USAID antagonized host governments and local populations with its arrogance and bloat. “We had a hand in our own destruction,” one longtime official told me. “We threw money in areas we didn’t need to.”

But the alternative to the hypocrisies of soft power and the postwar liberal order was never going to be a chastened, humbler American foreign policy—­neither the left’s fantasy of a plus-size Norway nor the right’s of a return to the isolationist 1920s. The U.S. is far too big, strong, and messianic for voluntary diminish­ment. The choice for this superpower is between enlightened self-­interest, with all its blind spots and failures, and raw coercion.

Trump is showing what raw coercion looks like. Rather than negotiate with Canada and Mexico, impose U.S. demands with tariffs; rather than strengthen NATO, undermine it and threaten a conflict with one of its smallest, most benign member countries; rather than review aid programs for their efficacy, shut them down, slander the people who make them work, and shrug at the humanitarian catastrophe that follows. The deeper reason for the extinction event at USAID is Trump’s contempt for anything that looks like cooperation between the strong and the weak. “America First” is more imperialist than isolationist, which is why William McKinley, not George Washington or John Quincy Adams, is Donald Trump’s new presidential hero. He’s using a techno-futurist billionaire to return America to the late 19th century, when the civil service was a patronage network and great-power doctrine held that “might makes right.” He’s ridding himself and the country of restraining codes—the rule of law at home, the rules-based order abroad—and replacing them with a simple test: “What’s in it for me?” He’s unilaterally disarming America of its soft power, making the United States no different from China, Russia, or Iran. This is why the gutting of USAID has received propaganda assistance and glowing reviews from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Transactional logic has an obvious appeal. Dispensing with the annoying niceties of multilateral partnerships and foreign aid brings a kind of clarity to international relations, showing where the real muscle is, like a strip-down before a wrestling match. Set loose, the U.S. might be strong enough to work its will on weaker friends and neighbors, or at least claim to do so. Trump’s threat of tariffs to intimidate Colombia into allowing deportation flights to land there was like the assault on USAID—an easy demonstration project. His domination of the propaganda sphere allows him to convince the public of victories even where, as with Canada, there was never much of a dispute to begin with. If NATO dissolved while the U.S. grabbed Greenland, many Americans would regard it as a net win: We’d save money and gain a strategic chunk of the North Atlantic while freeing ourselves of an obligation whose benefit to us wasn’t entirely clear.

It isn’t obvious why funding the education of oppressed Burmese students serves our national interest. It’s easier to see the advantages of strong-­arming weak countries into giving in to our demands. If this creates resentment, well, who said gratitude mattered between nations? Strength has its own attractive force. A sizable cohort of Americans have made their peace with Trump, not because he tempered his cruelty and checked his abuses but because he is at the height of his power and is using it without restraint. This is called power worship. The Russian invasion of Ukraine won Vladimir Putin a certain admiration in countries of the global South, as well as among MAGA Americans, while Joe Biden’s appeals to democratic values seemed pallid and hypocritical. The law of “might makes right” is the political norm in most countries. Trump needs no explaining in Nigeria or India.

Coercion also depends on the American people’s shortsightedness and incuriosity. Trump’s flood of executive orders and Musk’s assault on the federal government are intended to create such chaos that not even the insiders most affected understand what’s happening. An inattentive public might simply see a Washington melee—the disrupters against the bureaucrats. Short of going to war, if the U.S. starts behaving like the great powers of earlier centuries and the rival powers of our own, how many Americans will notice a difference in their own lives?

According to Rubio, the purpose of the aid pause is to weed out programs that don’t advance “core national interests.” Gawande compared the process to stopping a plane in midair and firing the crew in order to conduct a review of the airline industry. But the light of the bonfire burning in Washington makes it easier to see how soft power actually works—how most aid programs do serve the national interest. Shutting down African health programs makes monitoring the recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, and preventing its spread from that region to the rest of the world, nearly impossible. In many countries, the end of aid opens the door wider to predatory Chinese loans and propaganda. As one USAID official explained: “My job literally was countering China, providing develop­ment assistance in a much nicer, kinder, partnership way to local people who were being pressured and had their arms twisted.” When 70 Afghan students in central Asia, mostly women, had their scholarships to American universities suddenly suspended and in some cases their plane tickets canceled, the values of freedom and open inquiry lost a bit of their attractiveness. The American college administrator responsible for the students told me, “Young people who are sympathetic to the United States and share our best values are not only not being welcomed; they’re having the door slammed in their faces.”

Most Americans don’t want to believe that their government is taking life­saving medicine away from sick people in Africa, or betraying Afghans who sacrificed for this country. They might disapprove of foreign aid, but they want starving children to be fed. This native generosity explains why Trump and Musk have gone to such lengths to clog the internet with falsehoods and hide the consequences of their cruelty. The only obstacle to ending American soft power isn’t Congress, the bureaucracy, or the courts, but public opinion.

One of the country’s most popular programs is the resettlement of refugees. For decades, ordinary American citizens have welcomed the world’s most persecuted and desperate people—European Jews after World War II, Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, Afghans after the fall of Kabul. Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by U.S. and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.

Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans—­when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing U.S. weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. He had heard Trump criticize the Biden administration for leaving military equipment behind in Afghanistan. Because he had worked to prevent that from happening, he told me, “that gave me a hope that the new administration would value my work and look at me as a valuable person, a person who is aligned with all the administration is hoping to achieve, and that would give a chance for my kids and family to be moved out safely.” Biden’s ineptitude stranded the captain once; Trump’s coldheartedness is doing it again.

A sense of loyalty and compassion isn’t extraneous to American identity; it is at the core of national pride, and its betrayal exacts a cost that can’t be easily measured. The Biden administration created a program called Welcome Corps that allows ordinary Americans to act as resettlement agencies. (My wife and I participated in it.) In Pennsylvania, a retiree named Chuck Pugh formed a sponsor group to bring an Afghan family here, and the final medical exam was completed just before Inauguration Day. When resettlement was abruptly ended, Pugh found himself wondering, Who are we? I know what I want to think, but I’m just not sure. The sponsor group includes Pugh’s sister, Virginia Mirra. She and her husband are devout Christians and ardent Trump supporters. When I asked her early this month how she felt about the suspension of the refugee program, she sounded surprised, and disappointed—she hadn’t heard the news. “I feel sad about that,” she said. “It does bother me. It’s starting to sink in. With these people in danger, I would wonder if there would be an exception made for them. How would we go about that?” Her husband frequently sends American-flag lapel pins to Trump, and I suggested that he write the president about the Afghan family. “I will talk to my husband tonight,” Mirra said. “And I will continue to pray that the Lord will protect them and bring them to this country by some means. I do believe in miracles.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Era of Might Makes Right.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Trump administration is fully engaged in a drive to eliminate virtually any government activity or mention related to climate change—with a few notable exceptions. Take, for example, a single tax credit in Joe Biden’s signature climate law that may have the best chance of survival out of any climate-coded policy.

A provision in the Inflation Reduction Act, known as 45Q, enlarged a tax credit for any company willing to capture carbon dioxide. A version of this credit has been in place since George W. Bush’s presidency, and in its current iteration, it represents billions of dollars in federal incentives. If the Trump administration moves to keep 45Q intact, that choice would be an unusual vote of confidence from the president for a large government expenditure billed as a way to fight climate change. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

The politics of this tax credit are unusual in the climate world too. Both the oil industry and some climate-minded Democrats in Congress want to keep it. Among its opponents are environmental groups, as well as avid Donald Trump supporters in South Dakota and other states where carbon-capture infrastructure would be built.

Only in recent years has carbon-capture technology made a name for itself as a climate solution. But it was—and remains—primarily a way to produce more oil. The version meant to help mitigate climate change, by storing carbon in the ground virtually forever, might have made sense when instituted alongside many other climate policies. But as a stand-alone measure, carbon capture starts looking more like a handout to the oil industry.

The climate argument for carbon capture goes like this: If one ton of carbon is captured from an industrial process, such as a refinery, and then injected into underground formations, that’s theoretically one ton less carbon added to the atmosphere, where it would have warmed the planet. This process, however, is both expensive and unprofitable. The IRA tried to solve that problem with 45Q, which raised the maximum tax credit for every ton of carbon dioxide a company captured from $50 to $85, if the intent was to store it forever, or $60, if the intent was to produce more oil—which was carbon capture’s original purpose.

In the 1970s, after the OPEC crisis, the oil industry began to look for new methods to milk existing wells for all they were worth. One method was to inject carbon dioxide underground, where it would act as a solvent, liberating the more stubborn oil residues in otherwise-depleted wells. Today, some 4 percent of American oil is produced with this technique, and the majority of all carbon captured from any industry is used to produce more oil and gas.

The price difference in the tax credit was meant to boost the climate-solution version of carbon capture. But critics say the smaller credit, for enhanced oil recovery, is a generous subsidy to the oil industry, which also ends up with a valuable product to sell. And the product potential is enormous: The Department of Energy has said that, if carbon capture was used to its fullest extent to enhance oil recovery, the American petroleum industry could extract the equivalent of 38 years’ worth of the country’s current crude-oil supply.

45Q has many admirers: Oil-and-gas-industry giants such as Exxon and Shell are all in on carbon capture, and Doug Burgum, Trump’s interior secretary, is a big fan of the technology. Losing the credit—which represents billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars that the government is giving up in tax revenues—would be such a blow to the nascent industry that it “would effectively cut it off at the knees,” Jessie Stolark, the executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, told me. And if the credit does survive, it may benefit the oil industry even more: Republican senators just introduced a bill to raise the tax credit for enhanced oil recovery to the same level as the one for long-term carbon storage.

The tax credit also still has fans among Democrats who see it as a way for the country to cut down on its emissions. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, was an author of the IRA energy-tax package, and “is strongly supportive of this credit and is already working to defend it from Republican attacks,” Ryan Carey, a communications director with the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, told me. But many environmental groups think carbon capture and storage is a false solution. Although carbon capture and storage is widely said to be necessary to combat climate change in a world where burning fossil fuels continues, as of now, the technology to store carbon long enough to keep it out of the atmosphere permanently hasn’t been proved reliable at scale. Even projects held up as success stories encounter unexpected problems with keeping highly volatile carbon dioxide in place underground.

Communities in the path of carbon capture projects also worry about the safety of the pipeline expansion. To transport highly pressurized carbon dioxide from the places it would be captured—such as ethanol plants and refineries—to wells for storage, the country would need to build a lot of new pipelines. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless gas, and at high enough concentrations, it’s an asphyxiant. If a pipe were to burst, no one might know for a while. The gas is also heavier than air, so it would hug the ground and roll downhill, choking off the oxygen of whoever is in its path. (This happened in 2020, in Satartia, Mississippi; 45 people were hospitalized.)

Karla Lems, a Republican representative from South Dakota, voted for Trump and considers herself a conservative. She is among the most vocal opponents of a pipeline that the company Summit Carbon Solutions plans to build across her state and four others, to bring carbon dioxide from ethanol plants to a storage site in North Dakota. The company is attempting to use eminent domain to clear its way, which incensed Lems. “George Washington said freedom and property rights are inseparable,” she told me. She sponsored a bill now making its way through the state legislature to bar eminent domain for carbon projects. (For a while, Summit planned to put it directly through her family’s farmland, but the company eventually decided to site it on her neighbor’s land instead, she told me. Summit declined to comment for this story.)

To Lems, the 45Q tax credit is exactly the type of handout and government bloat that Trump promised to eliminate. “In my mind, this is a company that stands to make a lot of money from this project, which I believe is just a grift on the taxpayers," she told me. “It’s all a big boondoggle and a scam. We’ll see if the Trump administration can see it for what it is.” Chase Jensen, an organizer at Dakota Rural Action, which is also working to block the Summit pipeline, says many of his group’s dues-paying members voted for Trump and would see it as a betrayal if he decided to keep the tax credit. Many assumed Trump would be against it, given its presentation as a Biden-branded climate solution, he told me. But more than that, he said, “these folks hold property rights as one of the most core rights.” That those rights would be traded so that, as they see it, a corporation could make money would violate their deepest conservative values.

Already, the Summit-pipeline fight has “completely restructured” leadership in South Dakota, Jensen said; 11 Republican representatives who had voted for pro-pipeline legislation lost primary elections for state House and Senate seats. Jensen expects that the Trump administration’s stance on 45Q will be disillusioning for supporters who might have expected the president to side with people over corporations. “People are going to have to reconcile what’s happening,” he said. (Summit has said that the project would need “reassessment” if the tax credit were repealed.)

So far, the U.S. has relatively few carbon-dioxide pipelines—just 5,300 miles’ worth, compared with roughly 3 million miles of natural-gas pipelines. But the Department of Energy predicts that could grow substantially. Without the tax credit, much of that growth would likely be out of the question. With it, the administration could be setting itself up for a new fight that unites climate activists with aggrieved landowners.

In some ways, the politics of this fight look familiar: After the Obama administration failed to pass climate legislation in 2010, the climate movement started making common cause with conservative landowners in Nebraska and other states that the oil pipeline Keystone XL was set to cross. (Some of the same players are fighting the Summit pipeline now.) That fight continued through the entire first Trump administration, and ended only when Biden blocked the project. Now the Trump administration is reportedly looking at resuscitating that pipeline project too. In its first weeks, the second Trump administration has rerun the attacks on climate policy from its first go-round—leaving the Paris Agreement, stripping climate information from public view—but has also taken them further, culling any federal employees and programs that have a whiff of promoting environmental justice.

45Q presents a challenge: Conspicuously preserve a program billed as a Biden-era climate solution, or axe something with bipartisan support that the oil industry—which contains some of Trump’s most important business allies—wants to keep? Already, the administration has appeared to selectively protect at least one big Biden-era climate project in Montana—the expansion of a plant making sustainable jet fuel—after a Republican senator pressed the White House to release the funds. This administration might be skeptical of both big government and climate science, but that ideology can be bent for the right backers.

A friend of mine, an old-fashioned and very capable scholar, views analogies as the first step on the road to perdition—and, even worse, to political science. These days, he is right to scowl more than ever, because on top of watching Donald Trump trash precedent and common decency, launch initiatives that are likely unconstitutional, and behave vindictively and erratically, we also have to deal with a wave of ill-conceived analogies.

Even sober writers who know that the argument ad Hitlerum is always problematic are now using it. Or they invoke Benito Mussolini, or Viktor Orbán, or Hugo Chavez, or any of a number of other thuggish saboteurs and wreckers of democracy to help explain the current American moment. The words fascism and fascistic appear regularly. It is all terribly misplaced.

Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.

But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power. Its ideologues, such as they are, are reacting to what they think of as government overreach. They will abuse executive power to do it, but they want to eliminate bureaucracy, not grow it.

Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán—two of them soldiers with creditable war records, the third an activist against a dying Communist regime. Trump was a draft dodger by choice and a grifter by trade, and more important, he does not read. Unlike others in his orbit, he does not have ideas so much as impulses, whims, and resentments. He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

[Christopher R. Browning: A new kind of fascism]

Nor is the United States like other countries in which democracy has perished. America has nearly a quarter millennium of legitimate self-government under its belt, unlike, say, Weimar Germany, which never had a majority coalition of parties that favored democracy. The U.S. has not experienced in recent years anything like the slaughter of World War I, the murderous chaos of post–World War I Europe, or half a century under the Soviet boot. It is a continental empire, as the Founders called it, and they argued—correctly—that its physical vastness, the diversity of its population, and the multilayered nature of its government would form unequaled (if never impregnable) obstacles to the mob rule or the despotisms experienced by city-states. It is not only much older than the democracies that failed or faltered in Germany, Italy, and Hungary, but nearly an order of magnitude larger in physical extent.

MAGA ideology is itself difficult to define—it lacks a poet like Gabriele d’Annunzio or a propagandist like Alfred Rosenberg to explain it to the masses. In fact, it reflects disparate and divergent tendencies, including the divisions between Silicon Valley techno-futurists and old-fashioned nativists, libertarians and pro-lifers, isolationists and those who look to confront China. In some respects it is ugly indeed, but unlike the ethno-nationalist movements of the right, the MAGA movement has grown more racially diverse over time (although there are racists in it and Trump is perfectly willing to exploit racist tropes), and it is more hostile toward government than eager to expand it.

Nor is it anti-Semitic—just the reverse, in fact. The Jews are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of Western civilization, and the undeniable truth is that MAGA is not only pro-Israel but anti-anti-Semitic, and sometimes fervently so. For Jews (like myself) and philo-Semites who despise Trump and Trumpism, that is a jarring thing to admit. But if you cannot handle cognitive dissonance, you cannot think clearly about politics.

Analogies have their place, although they are most useful as a means of sharpening our understanding of what is different about the past (and the past is always different) rather than purporting to explain the present or predict the future. Sometimes, analogies help us ask the right questions as well.

But for the most part, they are a distraction. Trump and Trumpism, the servility of the Republican Party, and the flight from a values-informed foreign policy are all thoroughly American phenomena, and need to be understood in that way. History can help us see not so much where we are going as how we got here, and the nature and magnitude of the political challenges we face.

Some Democratic politicians, such as Representative Richie Torres of New York, understand this, which is why they are using the moment to reflect on how their party lost the working class rather than to bleat in unremitting outrage. But there is much more to be done. How did the presidency end up with such excessive powers vis-à-vis Congress and the judiciary? Why have so many Americans come to mistrust the government’s expertise and its ability to serve them well? What led them to put in office for a second time an odious and erratic felon? The answers will not be found merely in excoriating one administration or two. These problems have been long in gestation, and only by acknowledging that can we reckon with them.

The despicable parts of the Trump enterprise are best understood in an American context, too—not through the framework of Mussolini’s goons administering castor oil to intellectuals, but rather through the cruelties of Andrew Jackson, America’s ur-populist, who presided over the Trail of Tears. Or think of the Palmer raids in 1919 and 1920, the FBI snooping on Martin Luther King Jr. (among others, to the fascination of the Kennedy administration), loyalty oaths, Ku Klux Klan marches, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II—all of these help illustrate how America has gone astray in the past.

The personalities that so many find alarming in the Trump administration are best understood not as native variants of Martin Bormann and Nicolás Maduro, but as authentically American demagogues in the mold of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, not to mention business geniuses with wild and reprehensible ideas, such as Robert McCormick and Henry Ford. Indeed, it is only by seeing Trump’s subordinates and henchmen in their American context—in a land that has produced its share of racketeers, bullies, and thugs—that one can understand them at all.

For thoughtful patriots, the Trump moment needs also to be a reckoning with American history. We must come to accept that we are the country that was born with, and in some cases even embraced, the curse of slavery, but also with the principles that ultimately undermined it and which inspired the self-sacrifice of heroes who destroyed it. We despoiled much of our fabulous birthright of natural resources and beauty but also preserved huge swaths of it by creating the greatest national-park system in the world. We have supported dictators, and we have liberated nations. We produced Aaron Burr and George Washington, Preston Brooks and Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump and John McCain. Historical analogies cause us to stare out the window, when what we really need to do is look in the mirror.

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Donald Trump has said, at different times, that he will pardon some, most, or even all of the January 6 insurrectionists. He’s also said at least once that he would do this on his first day in office, which is imminent. Given Trump’s past rhetoric about the incident (calling it a “day of love”) and the people who were jailed for acts they committed that day (“political prisoners,” “hostages”), his pardons can be understood only as part of his alarming—and alarmingly successful—attempt to rewrite the history of the day that nearly brought down our democracy. But what if the pardon were to come in a different spirit? That could move the country a long way toward healing.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we invite the author and scholar Linda Kinstler to talk about a centuries-old legal theory, embraced at calmer times in American history, of “oblivion.” When two sides have viciously different experiences of an event, how do you move forward? You do a version of forgetting, although it’s more like a memory game, Kinstler says, “a kind of collective agreement about how you’re going to move past something that is fundamentally irreconcilable.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: What if President Joe Biden had pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists—that is, the 1,500 or so people charged with federal crimes related to the riot?

And yeah. I said Joe Biden, not President-Elect Donald Trump.

This is an idea I’ve heard floated around these past few weeks. And on its face, it sounds illogical. Like, why on earth would the outgoing Democratic president pardon people who damaged property or injured law enforcement officers or plotted to overthrow democracy?

Trump has said many times that he will pardon the J6ers. He said he’ll pardon some of them or most of them, or even consider pardoning all of them, at different times. He’s said he’ll pardon them on his very first day in office, which is just in a few days.

Donald Trump: People that were doing some bad things weren’t prosecuted, and people that didn’t even walk into the building are in jail right now. So we’ll be looking at the whole thing, but I’ll be making major pardons.

Rosin: Right. So why would Biden do that, again?

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

The answer to that question requires you to zoom out to different countries and different periods of history to understand the long political traditions that pardons are a part of and what, at their very best, they could accomplish. And it matters who does the pardoning and their motive for doing it.

I myself did a lot of research on the January 6 prosecutions for a podcast series I hosted for The Atlantic called We Live Here Now. And as I was researching, I came across a couple of articles by author and journalist Linda Kinstler that helped me understand these cases and this charged political moment in a new way. Linda is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She writes about politics and collective memory, and she’s written for many publications, including The Atlantic.

She’s also working on a new book about the idea we’re talking about today, which is: oblivion.

[Music]

Rosin: Linda, welcome to the show.

Linda Kinstler: Thank you for having me.

Rosin: Absolutely. So the J6 prosecutions are, for the most part, unfolding at the federal courthouse in D.C., just a few blocks from where we are now. Linda, you attended some of these cases. I did also. What is your most vivid or lasting impression from these trials?

Kinstler: Oh, wow. I mean, I spent months—I mean, the better part of a year, actually—attending these trials in downtown D.C. And there are so many elements, as you have described, about the courthouse—namely, that it’s right across from the Capitol and overlooks the grounds upon which all of these crimes happened. And there were so many times I was walking through the halls of the courtroom. And some of them had little windows you can peer through, and almost on every single one—there was one day when you could see in the monitors in the courtroom, and you could see that they were all playing January 6 footage.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Kinstler: You know, different angles. You could hear the sounds of the footage that the prosecuting attorneys had assembled.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: [indistinguishable] We’re trying to make our way through all this.

Kinstler: And you really do get the sense there that in this building, this really pivotal event in history is being litigated and worked through in real time—kind of away from the public eye, even though these are open to anyone who wants to come see them.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: We need to hold the doors of the Capitol.

Rosin: A few of these cases have stuck with Linda, for different reasons. One was the hearing of a member of the Proud Boys: It was the juxtaposition of this violent offender and his young kids, who were playing around on the courthouse benches at his sentencing.

And the other was a woman, a nonviolent offender with no prior record.

Kinstler: She just kind of walked through the building and clearly made horrible, horrible choices that day, as many of them did who were there. And she repented before the judge. And the judge said, I’m choosing to view this as an aberration in your life, as a kind of lapse of judgment. And she cried.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: [indistinguishable] We’ve lost the line. We’ve lost the line. [indistinguishable] Get back.

Rosin: And did you feel—how did you feel in that moment? Did you feel like, Oh, there’s some injustice being done? Or not quite that?

Kinstler: No. I mean, I think this is justice, right? This is actually the levers of justice working. It is absolutely that these people broke the law, and they are being brought to court because they violated public order in different ways, so it is kind of like our ur-definition of justice.

But it’s a different question—and I think this is the one that has kind of been left undealt with in public, is: Okay. This is one version of justice, but this is not a kind of public reckoning with what January 6 was. And the, kind of, how these individual offenders are being treated and punished for what they did is not the same thing as, How is the country going to deal with what January 6 threatened to, kind of, the fabric of democracy? Those are two separate questions, I think.

Rosin: Interesting. So what you’re saying is: There is a legal process unfolding. The courts can do what the courts can do. But what you’re saying is the courts can only do so much.

Kinstler: Correct.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay.

Kinstler: Right. And there’s, in general, been an overreliance, I think, upon the legal process to deal with January 6 for, quote-unquote, “us”—for us, the public—in a way. And I don’t think there has been a broader conversation about what it means in the long haul.

Rosin: Okay. I want to take what you just said and compare it to the public conversation that is happening around these court cases—namely, from Trump, because we’re a few days from him taking office.

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages.

[Recording of “Justice for All” by the J6 Prison Choir]

Rosin: And the way he puts it is that the J6ers were treated unfairly, persecuted by the justice system; they’re hostages. He’s said this in many different ways, with many different degrees of passion throughout the course of his campaign.

Trump: Well, thank you very much. And you see the spirit from the hostages—and that’s what they are, is hostages. They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly, and you know that.

Rosin: What do you think of that argument, and how does that fit into what you are saying?

Kinstler: Yeah. On the face of it, what they are doing is manipulating historical terminology, right, for their political ends.

Rosin: So you don’t think they were unfairly—your argument is not at all that they were unfairly persecuted.

Kinstler: No, no. I mean, I think that they broke the law, and they should be punished for what they did. I think there’s a genuine argument you could have about which offenders should be facing jail time, but I don’t think that’s the conversation we’re having right now.

But I do think what this question raises is the fact that Trump himself has not been held accountable for what he did on January 6, right? And there were many efforts to do that. And my view of this whole process is that, historically speaking, we’re doing it backwards. Historically, it was the top people in power who oversaw the crime, who would be the first to be held responsible for what they had done.

In this case, we have almost the exact opposite, right? We have the lower-level offenders—the people who are easier to find, the kind of foot soldiers of Trump’s movement—who are being the ones hauled into court. And, obviously, we have seen: The efforts to prosecute Trump himself have sequentially collapsed and now are almost certainly not going to happen.

Rosin: Do you have an example in your head of a time when, historically, it unfolded in the correct way? Like, a way that promotes a sense of fairness and justice?

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of subject that has fascinated me for many years—is, like: How have societies worked through moments in which you have a population of perpetrators or people who have violated the public order, who nevertheless must remain in the country or the city in some way? How have you dealt with that?

And so in my work, the prototypical example comes from ancient Athens after the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, where you had a population of oligarchs—30 of them—who overtook the city, stripped people of their rights and properties, killed people unjustly, oversaw all of these abuses, and then were deposed by the victorious democrats. After the fact, there was a kind of general amnesty for most of the supporters of the Thirty. But the Thirty Tyrants themselves were made to choose between standing trial and exile from the city.

So in that case, you have this prototype of the people who are responsible having to account for their crimes—verbally and in, you know, a kind of legal system—while the lower level of people were offered a different set of choices.

And, of course, the reason this is so fascinating is because this becomes the blueprint for centuries of leaders after that: if you look at 1660, after the English civil war; it kind of comes after World War II, where there’s this question of, What do we do with Nazi perpetrators? How wide and deep should the justice run? And we know that denazification failed in many ways. So I do think, in our country, we are going through something like this, in a sense.

Rosin: Can we talk about Nazi Germany for a minute? I mean, I realize we always have to be careful when we’re making historical comparisons to Nazi Germany. But you threw out this sentence, Denazification didn’t work. There were, though, a lot of higher Nazi officials who were held accountable. So how can we use what happened in Nazi Germany to inform what you’re saying we have to figure out right now?

Kinstler: Right. So yes, of course. Saying denazification didn’t work is a huge, sweeping claim, and we can argue about that a lot. But what you had there was the Nuremberg trials—of course, what we think of as Nuremberg—did hold the top brass accountable for what they had done. And then you had many, many smaller, sequential trials, both in West Germany and in the former Soviet Union.

But what I often think of—and I want to be careful about making the comparison today, of course—but I have been thinking about this line that the philosopher Judith Shklar said, which was that why denazification failed, in many ways, was because the prosecutors mistook a group of individual offenders for a social movement. So in other words, they thought that by continuing with all these trials that they would squash the kind of violent, virulent sentiment underlying Nazism itself.

Rosin: Which holds some intuitive appeal because you think, I’m holding people accountable. That’s what we’re supposed to do as a society: hold people accountable.

Kinstler: Totally. And it feels good. It appeals to all of our liberal sensibilities about how order and justice are supposed to work.

Rosin: And particularly—you say liberal, because I think right now, we do have this divide where Democrats, or maybe the left, are trusting in institutions, and the right is a lot less trusting in institutions. So Democrats are putting their faith, in this case, in this institution—the court—to go through the paces and do the right thing.

Kinstler: Exactly. We are in a very legalistic society, in that we like to talk about courts and legal cases as solving political problems. And I do think we repeatedly have seen that over the last however many years—about, you know, Oh, maybe the courts will save us from Trumpism writ large. And we have seen, of course, that the legal system is just not capacious enough to do that for many reasons.

Rosin: That’s a really interesting and concise way of looking at it. We have been relying on Jack Smith, the cases against Trump, these January 6 cases, of which there are, you know, 1,500. What’s the gap? What does the legal strategy leave out?

Kinstler: I mean, so much, in that it’s just a legal strategy, right? It doesn’t—and I think I can kind of see this in the almost allergy that people have when talk of pardons comes up, for example, right? There’s this notion that if you pardon someone, you’re letting them off the hook. But that’s not what a pardon does. A pardon confirms the crime.

And I guess I’m saying there is this paucity of a wider understanding of what happened that day because it has become this legalistic football, right? Of, like, Who was standing where? Who was part of the mob? What does it mean to be part of the mob? Who was commanding them? Etcetera, etcetera. You get lost in all these details and all these individual cases. And, of course, this is the role of historians, to say, This is what that event did that day, and this is its lasting impact.

But that’s what I’m saying—that’s the gap, right? The gap is: What is the narrative of this event? How do you protect it from manipulation, particularly when the person who’s about to be inaugurated has been one of its kind of manipulators in chief? And I do think there are answers.

Rosin: Okay. Let’s just ground ourselves in the moment we’re in. (Laughs.)

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Let’s say, on day one, Trump does what he has many times said he’s going to do: pardon the J6ers.

Trump: I’m going to be acting very quickly.

Kristen Welker: Within your first 100 days? First day?

Trump: First day.

Welker: First day?

Trump: Yeah. I’m looking first day.

Welker: And issue these pardons?

Trump: These people have been there—how long is it? Three or four years?

Rosin: Is it possible that it accomplishes any of the goals of putting this to rest? Like, any of the goals of reconciliation?

Kinstler: I mean, reconciliation, I think, is a different question. I think it’s not going to accomplish that. I think the only sense in which it “puts it to rest,” quote-unquote, is that it will, as I said, confirm their crimes, right? A pardon does not erase what people did.

It’s unfortunate, in my view, that Trump will be the one to pardon them, because I do think there was an opportunity for the Democrats to extend a kind of grace towards some of the January 6 offenders—and by no means all of them—if they had been the ones to pardon them.

Rosin: Okay. You said that casually, and there have been a few law professors who floated that idea. It is, on its face, a kind of shocking idea. Like, when you read a headline that says, Should Joe Biden pardon the J6ers? it’s actually kind of hard to get your head around. What do you think of that idea?

Kinstler: Well, I think, first of all, historically, pardons have been almost a routine thing that any new ruler or president has done upon taking office.

Interviewer: Are you glad that you pardoned those people that went to Canada, the draft evaders?

Jimmy Carter: Yes, I am.

Interviewer: Why?

Carter: Well, it was a festering sore and involved tens of thousands of young men.

Rosin: Like, I was reading about Jimmy Carter, who pardoned draft dodgers, and thinking that, like, we can look in retrospect and say they were peaceful, and the January 6ers were violent rioters. But it must have been hurtful to a lot of people whose children, or who they themselves, went to Vietnam, didn’t want to. And it was quite controversial. So to what end does a new president pardon people?

Kinstler: Well, I mean, on the face of it, it’s a gesture of goodwill. But it’s supposed to say, We are all subject to the law, and let’s start on the right foot, etcetera, etcetera.

Rosin: So it sets a national mood.

Kinstler: Yeah.

Rosin: It sets a mood of, I’m the president for all of you. We’re all in this together. And the value of this country is mercy. Mercy is a value.

Kinstler: Yes.

Carter: So after I made my inaugural speech, before I even left the site, I went just inside the door at the national Capitol, and I signed the pardon for those young men. And yes, I think it was the right thing to do. I thought that it was time to get it over with—I think the same attitude that President Ford had in giving Nixon a pardon.

Gerald Ford: We would needlessly be diverted from meeting those challenges if we, as a people, were to remain sharply divided over whether to indict, bring to trial, and punish a former president who is already condemned.

Rosin: I was looking for historical precedent and read about George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion, because that was a fairly violent rebellion—and it was hundreds of people—and he pardoned some of them. And I was wondering if that was analogous.

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know about the analogy, but it is kind of an instance in which you have a violent community of offenders who nevertheless must remain in the country, right?

Ford: The power has been used sometimes as Alexander Hamilton saw its purposes: “In seasons of insurrection … when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth; and which, if served [sic] to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall.”

Kinstler: You can’t get rid of all of them. It wasn’t moral forgiveness. It was just a measure that allowed them to remain in the society in a way that wouldn’t cripple the society itself at this moment of extreme fragility.

[Music]

Rosin: So yes, there are presidential pardons. But if we can neither forgive nor forget something, we just may need something else to move forward: an act of oblivion.

That’s after the break.

[Music]

[Break]

Rosin: Linda, you have researched and written about what’s called “an act of oblivion.” Can you lay out the basics of what that is?

Kinstler: Yes. So historically speaking, we see that there were either acts of oblivion, laws of oblivion, or articles of oblivion that appeared in peace treaties or as legislative measures or as kind of kingly edicts that were issued in the aftermath of revolutions, wars, and uprisings. And what they were, essentially, is a kind of resetting of the legal order, where they said—and this is generally happening in the, quote-unquote, “Western world,” but we also see similar measures elsewhere.

But what they would say is: Everything that happened prior to this law—whatever it was, whether hostility, war, killing, theft, etcetera—none of that can be litigated or spoken of, quote, “in public,” which often meant: You can’t bring a lawsuit after this measure is passed.

Rosin: So it’s not actual forgetting. It’s like a public declaration that we shall all forget together.

Kinstler: Right. And in some ways, forgetting isn’t even the right word. And the interesting thing to me is that the word oblivion is the kind of Roman invention that was used to describe it, that Cicero used after the fact, and that was kind of like his spin on it, right? And everyone is telling tales about how to make a democracy work or how to make a state or a kingdom work, right? Not all of these are democracies.

But, yeah, forgetting is, in some ways—it’s not really the correct description of what’s going on. It’s more of a kind of collective agreement about how you’re going to move past something that is fundamentally irreconcilable.

Rosin: Got it. It’s almost a funny word. Like, I’m gonna blast you into oblivion. It’s a very powerful word. I don’t know if it was meant as kind of campy—probably not—by the Romans. (Laughs.) But there is something kind of, like, huge about it, you know?

Kinstler: Yeah. Oblivione sempiterna: “eternal oblivion,” to kind of wash away everything. It’s a totally beguiling word, and it kind of connotes erosion, in English, and erasure. But there’s also, in other languages: in Russian it’s вечное забвение, “eternal oblivion,” right? Eternal forgetting, in a way.

Rosin: So it’s almost so grand and big that it’s not connected to the mundane act of, Oh, I forgot my keys.

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Like, it’s almost so big that it’s on a grand, national scale. Maybe it’s something like that.

Kinstler: Yeah, I mean, like, you’re always rescuing things from oblivion or losing things to oblivion. I mean, it is in a way, right? Because you’re burying something in oblivion. It’s a physical location, right? It’s a noun, oblivion. And so to me, I think of it as, Okay, you’re burying it, but you’re not forgetting where it is, right?

Rosin: Right.

Kinstler: It’s always there.

Rosin: So what’s the difference between what you just described and whitewashing, revisionist history—sort of what we’ve seen happen with January 6 and Trump calling it a “day of love”?

Trump: But that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions—it’s, like, hundreds of thousands—

Rosin: Like, sort of actively describing it as something it wasn’t. Can you compare those two modes?

Kinstler: Yeah. I would say they’re kind of fundamentally opposite, right? One is constructive, and one is malignant, right? Which is not to say that the two couldn’t be conflated. But for the sake of argument, the oblivions I have been looking at have been kind of, like, ideal types. Obviously, none of these, historically, ever work perfectly, right? It’s more about the idea that people wanted them to work, that there was this desire for reconciliation that would be operative.

And obviously, that’s not what you see at all in the language that Trump has been using and in the way he and his supporters have been framing January 6. Usually, I think, if we were to follow the framework of oblivion, what should have happened was that Biden—upon taking office and kind of restoring liberal order, we could say—would have passed an act of oblivion for the January 6ers that would have mandated that, kind of, Trump and his immediate circle would have to stand trial for their actions that day. And what we have been seeing with the lower-level offenders, that some of them would not have had to explicitly, as a kind of gesture of goodwill.

Rosin: A couple of challenges I can think of to using this approach with January 6: The first, surface one is just the sheer amount of documentation, YouTube videos. Like, what you’re describing—which is a clever act of forgetting or a memory game—I mean, if you’re a prosecutor working in the federal courthouse, this is a gift. You’ve seen these trials. Basically, what you’re doing at these trials is watching videos. Like, some Facebook video that somebody made, saying, Hey. I was at the Capitol. I did this—me. Nobody else did this.

Kinstler: Yeah.

Rosin: Literally, that’s what some of them say because they’re proud in that moment.

[Crowd noise, chanting from January 6]

Man: Whatever it takes. I’ll lay my life down if it takes. Absolutely.

Rosin: And then—I mean, there’s footage from everywhere.

Kinstler: Yeah.

[Crowd noise, overlapping screaming from January 6]

Rosin: So since you are talking about historical examples: What do you do with an era in which everything is über-documented?

Kinstler: Yeah. And it’s actually interesting. I was in a couple of trials where the judge, to the prosecutor, was saying, Listen. I’ve been to so many of these trials. You do not need to establish for me what happened on January 6 writ large. Like, I get it. Can you please fast forward?

But I guess what I’m talking about is not even about, Oh, you know, keep these videos from circulating, or, Don’t talk about what happened. It’s more about: Don’t expect the legal process to achieve something that cannot be achieved through law.

Rosin: Okay. That makes sense. You just have to accept the fact that the footage is everywhere. The footage is—in fact, maybe that makes what you’re saying more urgent. Because I do find, even with myself—like, if I hear a Capitol Police officer on the radio, if I watch that A24 movie that’s a documentary about January 6, it’s, like, right there all over again, and you just have to be, maybe, aware that that’s the age we live in.

Kinstler: Right.

Rosin: Second question I have is: I read your various articles you’ve written about oblivion. And it almost scared me, reading them, only because we live—this is the first era that I’ve lived through, as an adult, where I’ve watched the revising of history happen in real time. I don’t recall a president talking about facts the opposite of what I saw with my own eyes.

It’s a very bad feeling. So in that context, I feel nervous about even entering into a conversation about oblivion, memory games, or anything like that. And I wonder how you’ve squared that.

Kinstler: Oh my gosh, absolutely. This is what fascinates me, precisely because we are in this era of, kind of, historical revisionism, and we have been in for a long time. But the thing about acts of oblivion is that they actually, in my mind, consecrated what happened, right? They protected the historical record. They didn’t literally say, Oh this never happened. And in fact, what you see is that they’re often accompanied by records—like, historical accounts—of what happened, such that an act of oblivion was necessary, right? Like, Okay, actually, what happened here was a civil war or a tyranny or a revolution that totally wiped out the legal order, so we needed to do this extremely drastic thing if we were to reestablish democratic law.

The one that I often point to is: After the Revolutionary War, there were—because you did have the kind of legacy of British law, right—acts of oblivion came to the Americas from the European system. So there you did have, kind of, royalists who were subjected to acts of oblivion. It was individual states passing them over their royalist populations to allow them to remain, even though they had been defeated.

Rosin: So it was essentially an act of mercy saying, The royalists are going to live among us. They’re not going back. And what? How did it define—

Kinstler: It meant that they couldn’t be ostracized, essentially. They couldn’t be perpetually held accountable for what they had done, for everything that they had done against their neighbors, right? And often, it was a kind of very local, proximate question of, like, We’re not going to kick you out unless you want to be kicked out. That kind of thing.

Rosin: So you could imagine that kind of thing would be controversial at first. People would want vengeance. And so in the immediate, it would be difficult to swallow. But then in the long term, it would put things to rest. That’s the idea.

Kinstler: Yeah. And, I mean, there are a lot of failed oblivions. After the Civil War, a lot of the Southern states were, quote-unquote, “crying for an act of oblivion.” And it was a term that was circulating in the papers. And there’s this amazing quote from Frederick Douglass, who said, you know, I look in Congress, and I see the solid South enthroned, and the minute that that is not the case, we will join you in calling for an act of oblivion, but as long as they have not been held accountable, we cannot support this.

Rosin: Okay. So let’s move to the current moment. If you were King Linda—

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: So is what you would want an act of oblivion around January 6?

Kinstler: No. No. Because I would never be so bold as to say that. But I do think it’s a useful political concept. I think that there was a missed opportunity during the Biden administration to do something concerted—that wasn’t just the Jack Smith investigation—about it. I think there could have been something really meaningful done.

Rosin: Okay. So you’re not going all the way to saying, you know, an act of oblivion. But you’ve started to eke at little things. Like, what do you mean by Biden could have? I mean, we’re in the very, very last days of the Biden administration. But if he had pardoned some of the low-level offenders, would that have been in the spirit of oblivion?

Kinstler: Yeah. I think that would have been a really potentially transformative thing to do, because it would not have done anything to jeopardize the record of what occurred that day or what it meant to participate in it.

But we are going to move beyond it, and I think we will see the narrative of January 6 begin to settle in some way, right? And as always happens, the conspiracies about it will become part of the narrative of how this is told, right—not in a kind of whitewashing way, but just in, like, it shows how volatile it is and how manipulable.

And I think there’s been this debate about how to memorialize that day, whether it’s through a physical memorial, a memorial to the Capitol officers who died, or to anyone who died that day. I think those are the questions that we haven’t kind of figured out, really.

Rosin: I see. So there is a potential that, even though we’re not figuring them out now, they’ll be figured out in a sideways way through questions down the road—like, questions about how we will ultimately remember that day—not necessarily how we’ll remember it in this charged political moment, but how we’ll remember it 10, 20 years from now.

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, I was at the Capitol for the year anniversary of January 6 and watched all the ceremonies from the press gallery. And it just struck me how it was almost like a kind of nothing. You know, like how it was—

Rosin: What do you mean?

Kinstler: It was just so quiet, somber, of course. But there was no fan—you didn’t get the sense of the enormity of the event that was being consecrated, right? And it was almost like—and understandable because it was so close and so terrifying—there was this sense that we haven’t figured this out yet.

William Hungate: The Subcommittee on Criminal Justice of the House Committee on the Judiciary today welcomes the president of the United States, Gerald R. Ford.

Ford: As a people, we have a long record of forgiving even those who have been our country’s most destructive foes. Yet to forgive is not to forget the lessons of evil and whatever ways evil has operated against us.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

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Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. “I don’t need Facebook; I don’t need the internet; I don’t need anybody. I just need my heart,” he says. As he swims across the lake, seemingly unbothered by the cold, he continues: “I trust my immune system because I have complete trust and faith in its creator, in God. My immunity is part of the sovereignty of my being.”

This is Călin Georgescu, the man who shocked his countrymen when he won the first round of the Romanian presidential election on November 24, despite hardly registering in opinion polls and conducting his campaign almost entirely on TikTok, where the platform’s rules, ostensibly designed to limit or regulate political messages, appear not to have constrained him. On the contrary, he used the tactics that many social-media influencers deploy to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. Sometimes he added soft, melancholic piano music, imploring people to “vote with your souls.” Sometimes he used pop-up subtitles, harsh lighting, fluorescent colors, and electronic music, calling for a “national renaissance” and criticizing the secret forces that have allegedly sought to harm Romanians. “The order to destroy our jobs came from the outside,” he says in one video. In another, he speaks of “subliminal messages” and thought control, his voice accompanied by images of a hand holding puppet strings. In the months leading up to the election, these videos amassed more than 1 million views.

Elsewhere, this gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes. He twice met with Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue, who posted on X a (subsequently deleted) statement that “Romania will be part of Russia.” And at the same time, Georgescu praises the spiritual qualities of water. “We don’t know what water is,” he has said; “H₂O means nothing.” Also, “Water has a memory, and we destroy its soul through pollution,” and “Water is alive and sends us messages, but we don’t know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that “enter into you like a laptop.” His wife, Cristela, produces YouTube videos on healing, using terms such as lymphatic acidosis and calcium metabolism to make her points.

Both of them also promote “peace,” a vague goal that seems to mean that Romania, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, should stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders. “War cannot be won by war,” Cristela Georgescu wrote on Instagram a few weeks before voting began. “War destroys not only physically, it destroys HEARTS.” Neither she nor her husband mentions the security threats to Romania that would grow exponentially following a Russian victory in Ukraine, nor the economic costs, refugee crisis, and political instability that would follow. It is noteworthy that although Călin Georgescu claimed to have spent no money on this campaign, the Romanian government says someone illegally paid TikTok users hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Georgescu and that unknown outsiders coordinated the activity of tens of thousands of fake accounts, including some impersonating state institutions, that supported him. Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85,000 cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. On December 6, in response to the Romanian government’s findings about “aggressive” Russian attacks and violations of Romanian electoral law, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the election and annulled the results of the first round.

Given this strange combination—Iron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrow—who exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them? Tempting though it is to describe them as “far right,” this old-fashioned terminology doesn’t quite capture whom or what they represent. The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.

When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.

This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law.

[From the October 2024 issue: Kash Patel will do anything for Trump]

Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.) Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.

Among the followers of this new political movement are some of the least wealthy Americans. Among its backers are some of the most wealthy. George O’Neill Jr., a Rockefeller heir who is a board member of The American Conservative magazine, turned up at Mar-a-Lago after the election; O’Neill, who was a close contact of Maria Butina, the Russian agent deported in 2019, has promoted Gabbard since at least 2017, donating to her presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to Kennedy’s in 2024. Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor who has used his social-media platform, X, to give an algorithmic boost to stories he surely knows are false, has managed to carve out a government role for himself. Are O’Neill, Musk, and the cryptocurrency dealers who have flocked to Trump in this for the money? Or do they actually believe the conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas they’re promulgating? Maybe one, maybe the other, possibly both. Whether their motivations are cynical or sincere matters less than their impact, not just in the U.S. but around the world. For better or for worse, America sets examples that others follow. Merely by announcing his intention to nominate Kennedy to his Cabinet, Trump has ensured that skepticism of childhood vaccines will spread around the world, possibly followed by the diseases themselves. And epidemics, as we’ve recently learned, tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.

Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.

Rasputin’s influence produced, in turn, a kind of broader hysteria. By the time the First World War broke out, many Russians were convinced that dark forces—tyomnye sily—were secretly in control of the country. “They could be different things to different people—Jews, Germans, Freemasons, Alexandra, Rasputin, and the court camarilla,” writes Douglas Smith, one of Rasputin’s biographers. “But it was taken on faith that they were the true masters of Russia.” As one Russian theosophist put it, “Enemies really do exist who are poisoning Russia with negative emanations.”

Replace dark forces with the deep state, and how different is that story from ours? Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing. Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists—who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death—dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.

[Autocracy in America: The end of democracy has already begun]

For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma. The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of America’s Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inoculation. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders—Lincoln, Roosevelt, King—quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.

By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The New Rasputins.”

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