"You Bore Me a Judas"

Bertolt Brecht’s short play The Informer takes place in a single room. It’s 1937 in Germany, and a schoolteacher and his wife are in a panic over their young son’s presence in their home — because he’s a member of the Hitler Youth, and they fear that he’ll report their discussions. They give him some money and send him outside, and then they sit there and wonder where he’s gone, spiraling down into a panic.

In Washington D.C., last week, a jury heard testimony against January 6 defendant Guy Reffitt, who has just been convicted on five felony counts for his presence outside the Capitol on that day. The star witness in Reffitt’s trial was his son. New York magazine is pretty thrilled with the whole thing, and reports the destruction of a family under the headline, “The Son Who Brought Down His Insurrectionist Father.” As the story explains, young Jackson Reffitt heard his father using “‘constitutionalist’ rhetoric about a popular uprising,” so he did what he had to do: “he used his cell phone that night to provide a tip about his father to the FBI through the bureau’s website.” Definitely use that tip line if you hear your own parents talking constitutionalist language, kids.

Here’s what happened next:

He later met with an agent at a local restaurant and, unbeknownst to his family, began providing information against his father while still living at home. One day, as Reffitt was proudly showing his GoPro video to his family and narrating the events, Jackson decided to download an app on his phone and record him.

New York concludes that the son secretly recording his father so he could turn the recordings over to his FBI handler gave the world “a truly stunning act of patriotism.”

A refugee from Nazi Germany told us a version of this story. Imagine what it would be like, Brecht suggested, to live in a world that had gone so far into the darkness that it threatened to turn your home into a place where you couldn’t feel safe in the presence of your own child.