Tim Levier, tied for the title of the longest-running reader on my ethics posts, recommended this sordid tale for a post, and I concur.
Jackson Reffitt told authorities about his dad’s involvement in the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and then testified against him. Guy Reffitt was sentenced to more than seven years in prison in 2022 on charges of civil disorder, obstruction of justice and other offenses, though he never entered the Capitol. His son testified for more than three hours for the prosecution in his father’s trial, revealing text messages his dad had sent after the 2020 election, promising that he and like-minded patriots would “rise up” and “shock the world” on January 6. Jackson tipped off authorities before the riot, then recorded his father’s comments about the riot after he returned home. The surreptitiously recorded tapes were crucial evidence in sending Guy to prison, along with videos recorded by Guy in which he talked about “taking the Capitol” and dragging Nancy Pelosi out of the building.
Now, thanks to President Trump’s pardons, Daddy’s coming home, and Sonny Boy is terrified. He told CNN his father was still involved in the militias and had no regrets about his actions on that fateful day. “I’m honestly flabbergasted that we’ve gotten to this point. I mean, I’m terrified. I don’t know what I’m going to do,” his son told CNN. “I’ve got as many precautions as I could recently …I’ve got a gun, I’ve moved and I’ve gotten myself away from what I thought would be a dangerous situation, and staying where I thought my dad could find me or other people that are going to feel so validated by these actions, by this pardon.”
“My dad once called me a traitor, and he said ’traitors get shot,’” he said.
Huh. I can’t imagine why he would say that.
If there ever was a case where the entry question for ethics analysis is critical, this is it: What’s going on here? It sure sounds like there is a long-running father vs. son conflict that the son chose to resolve by exploiting his father’s January 6 activities. Warning authorities that his father and presumably others were on their way to D.C. with possibly violent intentions is an ethics easy call: doing that was admirable, ethical, and the son’s civic duty. Actively gathering evidence against his father and ensuring his arrest, however, is very close to the line, and I am inclined to say crosses it into settling scores, getting revenge, and eliminating an unwelcome presence in Jackson’ life.
I was a featured ethicist on the Montel Williams Show years ago when the featured topic was whether a parent had an obligation to “rat out” a criminal child. I argued that there was such an obligation, both as a citizen and as a parent. Montel, amusingly, disagreed with me during the show but when the cameras weren’t rolling he told me he’d turn in his own son “in a heartbeat.”
However, the reverse scenario never came up: is it equally ethical for a child to turn in his parent? Certainly it is when the parent is a genuine threat to harm someone, including family members. Yet a parent’s obligations to a child are materially different from a child’s obligations to a parent. The enthusiasm with which Jackson sought to have his father locked up makes me wonder if this wasn’t an unusually ugly real life episode of “Family Ties,” the Eighties TV sitcom starring Michael J. Fox as a Reagan-supporting, Republican, capitalist teenage son of two former Sixties radicals.
oward the government.
