In October, Pirate Wires published one of its most popular stories to date: a feature about Heather Cox Richardson.

Richardson, or “HCR,” is an American historian and the most popular individual writer on Substack. Her nightly newsletter, Letters from an American, which recaps political news with context from history, has earned more than 2.7 million subscribers and made HCR one of the most influential voices in media. (Joe Biden, who she interviewed in 2022, has been photographed toting one of her books around.)

HCR is known as a neutral arbiter of history — a “distinctly unruffled voice” on the nation’s affairs, as The New York Times once wrote. But our story argued that she’s more of a critical watchdog of what she describes as the immediate “emergency” of Trump’s descent into fascism. Sometimes, she completely misstates facts — for instance, that Charlie Kirk’s shooter was right-wing, and that prominent Republicans only blamed “the left” to incite violence against their political enemies — to suit that narrative, misleading her very devoted, large readership.

After publication, a man contacted Pirate Wires claiming that Heather Cox Richardson played a “proximate” role in his divorce. The daily inhalation of her writing helped intensify his wife’s contempt for all Republicans (including him) and fear that the country was being taken over by malign actors. This culminated in bitter conflicts, isolation, and, eventually, their separation. What follows is his account of their story, based on interviews with me.

Per the source’s request for privacy, the story has been anonymized with false names — Tom and Kate — and his ex-wife was not contacted. But Pirate Wires is aware of their identities and reviewed documentation that confirms the key elements of his account.

— Blake Dodge

Tom was always a right-of-center guy. Wealthy, in tech, but never particularly partisan: “I was never a card-carrying anything.”

9/11 changed that. The smoke had hardly cleared before, he felt, the mainstream talking heads were suggesting that the US had essentially asked for it. Then, language changed. You weren’t supposed to say the word “terrorist” anymore.

“I was just appalled,” he told me.

He took positions he’s no longer proud of. He thought the Iraq war was “justified and wise.” But then, he started traveling for business. In the world’s capitals, nobody was particularly interested in the “global” war on terror. He came to feel something was “really wrong at home.” That the US, thanks to the “intractable muck of our divide,” was being left behind.

He stopped voraciously reading the news, embracing confusion: “I just let it all go.”

Mid-life came. He moved to a southern city and, for the first time, kept company with liberals. They were happy, smart, and nice.

“I really, really, really liked that because what I was seeing was, ‘Okay, this is better.’ I see a way, in my mind, to the two halves of the country actually getting along just fine.”

That’s when he met Kate.

Tom was a world traveler with a high IQ. He often had to hold back around “muggles.”

In Kate, a “hardcore liberal feminist” with a Ph.D. in history, he found a “fellow traveler” of the world’s philosophical terrain, he said. She had an easy, inherent joy, but she could also throw her weight around in conversations about geopolitics: “A rare kind of somebody.”

“We were discovering things about ourselves and each other and the world we lived in as a result of: ‘Hey, there’s this person that I’m really into and they think differently about stuff — isn’t that interesting?’”

They could’ve kept going on like that forever: arguing, sometimes bitterly, about if tax cuts were a murderous assault on the poor, but then starting over. Night-capping by the fireplace. Repeat.

ENTER: TRUMP

But in 2016, “Mr. Pussy Grabber” — meaning Donald Trump — “beats Hillary Clinton,” as Tom put it. And the marriage started to collapse.

Tom, who actually voted for Clinton, abhorred Trump’s lack of regard for civic institutions: “I’m like, ‘Eh, let’s not tear it all down. It’s a long way down from here. You should check your history.” But he thought the whole thing would blow over.

Kate, on the other hand, was apoplectic.

“It was the difference in emotional reaction between the two of us that started diverging things even more,” he said. “She was devastated, angry, wanting to join the pussy hat march, all this other stuff. And I’m like, ‘Jesus Christ, okay, whatever. Life goes on.’”

“Very different reactions, right?”

In 2019, Kate took the 1619 Project as absolute truth. In 2020, she believed the riots were justified by history. “Burning down cities because: reasons,” as Tom put it.

“No way no how is that okay. You don’t pick up a Molotov cocktail as a political expression. That’s just fundamentally wrong. And we got into shouting matches over that.”

Then comes November 2020, and Kate confronts her husband: “Are you going to join me in voting for Joe Biden?”

In fact, Tom now wanted to vote for Trump. Not unlike after 9/11, people on the left seemed to be losing their minds. He didn’t think defunding the police, canceling people, and burning cities down were good ideas: “It just all felt very witch burn-y to me,” he said.

But, empathically, he did not want to talk about it.

“I said, ‘You need to decide whether this is a marriage or a political party because that’s not okay. The voting booth is private for a reason. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. We’re married or we’re not.’”

After Biden won and passed the $1.9 trillion stimulus package, Tom said it would cause inflation that would haunt the administration later on. Kate, enraged, proposed a Cold War-type truce, he recalled: “I hate your politics. You hate mine. Let’s just not talk about it anymore.”

“I’m like, ‘Okay, cool. That’s good. That’s fine with me.’”

ENTER: HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Their truce had limitations, because “anything intellectual turned philosophical turned political,” as Tom put it.

And because Kate couldn’t help herself.

“Nothing exemplified that better than regularly pelting me with HCR messages,” Tom said.

In 2021, after her Ph.D. friends recommended Heather Cox Richardson, Richardson’s Substack, Letters from an American, became Kate’s dominant news source and marital leverage. The spoken policy was not talking about politics, but nobody said anything about merely forwarding some emails with a bit of commentary. Right?

In the assortment of HCR essays she forwarded to Tom over the course of two years (which I reviewed) — Biden was always the noble protagonist, refocusing the federal government’s powers on supporting ordinary Americans and pulling off the economy’s “soft landing” after Covid, among other heroic feats. Republicans, on the other hand, were always the evil-doers. They were on a decades-long march to undermine democracy; forever striving to win office without the popular vote; refusing to regulate gun ownership (even for crazy people) as kids continued getting murdered at school; denying the country’s systematically racist past (see: race-based exclusions to citizenship); using false electors to steal the election for Trump; embracing antisemitism to win votes from neo-Nazis; and pushing the “we’re being invaded by criminal immigrants” narrative to distract from unpopular positions.

Sometimes, in her forwards to Tom, Kate offered only urgent pleas: please read. Sometimes, a celebration (like when HCR landed a big interview) or a fleeting sign of hope (say, a bipartisan moment in Congress). But most often, her words carried the righteous indignation of the Old Testament God. Those fucking idiot Republicans were beyond saving. They were turning children into racists to preserve their racist legacy. Their lack of a moral compass was disqualifying. As the months passed, f-bombs, typos, and exclamation points multiplied proportionally to her rage, leading me to wonder — when she felt no return from the calmer dispatches, did she write these angrier ones in a furious hurry, at a stoplight, through hot tears? Eventually, she cast Tom himself among the damned. Why couldn’t he see? If he could still defend this dictator-enabling party, after all this, then she was simply at a fucking loss.

Months turned into years, the emails kept coming, and yet Tom mainly zipped up his trapper keeper, believing the marriage’s unspoken state of affairs was: “[Kate] was to reveal the truth to my ignorance with HCR as her chief tool in the effort, while I was to remain silent and offer no counter arguments,” he said.

It was only in forwarding his wife’s emails to me, way after the fact, that he finally said what he believed.

Sometimes, he sized up Heather Cox Richardson’s writing: “If you can figure out how HCR’s historical outtake connects to the contemporary story that picks up where it leaves off, please let me know,” he wrote about a Kate-sponsored HCR essay comparing 1964 KKK murders to a 2022 political ad. More often, he sized up his wife’s. Her arguments (“Racialist reductionism”), her rage (“Pretty emotional, this one”), and, mainly, her constant verbal assault reducing half the country to irredeemable assholes: “Wherein there are no good people on the right”; “Wherein Republicans have sold their souls to the devil,” and so on.

Eventually, Kate, emboldened by HCR, stopped talking to all conservatives — including, after a Trump-related argument, her mom and dad. The fallout extended to Tom’s world too: his closest friends, mostly conservative frat brothers, were now persona non grata. In fact, sometimes, in her HCR-forwarding, Kate invoked them directly: if they’re so patriotic, what do they have to say about this, or this, or this? Those notes stung the most, because his friends, having given love in the way that guys do (“They gave me shit”), saved Tom, a neglected only-child, from a “failed life,” he said. And because he saw them, fearing an altercation with Kate, less and less.

He wrote me a 500-word email about their character. They were involved husbands and fathers, public servants, and men of faith who were not “MAGA,” per se.

“You’d never see any of them wearing one of those hats,” he said.

The ghosts of everything Tom didn’t tell Kate, in my inbox, above forwards of forwards of Heather Cox Richardson.

ENTER: THE TWITTER FILES

Here’s the thing. While Kate was reading Heather Cox Richardson, Tom was reading the Twitter Files.

The series of stories in 2022 and 2023, based on documents that Elon Musk shared with a handful of reporters after buying Twitter, showed that its content was controlled more than anyone knew, both because of the left-leaning, internal hivemind — and because of external pressure from the FBI. The sixth and seventh installment of the Twitter Files showed the FBI regularly tried to suppress accounts spreading concerning or “unsafe” information (including credible reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop) — even when they were tiny and satirical.

Tom found the documents to be “five-alarm fire frightening,” he said.

“‘Anybody who’s not terrified of what’s happening here, right now, needs to actually pick up a fucking history book because this ends really badly’ — is what I’m thinking.”

Leading up to the 2024 election, if Trump was door #1 — a vulgar, self-interested wrecking ball who wanted to “burn it all down,” yet possessed at least a flicker of patriotism — Tom found door #2 to be more unacceptable, he said: a violent faction that denied reality (laws, borders, gender) and seemed willing to sacrifice the First Amendment to advance its worldview.

“I’m like, these are my choices? I guess I’m going to go with ‘burn it all down’? And see if we can fix it later? But the trajectory that we’re on, there’s going to be nothing left to fix. We’re going to lose fundamental freedoms, and you probably aren’t getting ‘em back unless you have a revolution after that.

“If you actually take away the First Amendment, that’s not coming back unless you take it with force of arms. Why would it? You know what I mean? You’re going to surrender that power to the government and they’re just going to grant it back to you? I don’t think so. So I was never comfortable with Trump. Still not. Give me another alternative.”

THE SHOWDOWN

A week after Trump won the 2024 election, Kate was well and fully freaked out.

She’d given up on the HCR forwarding. So we don’t know for sure if she was reading HCR. But it seems likely. And HCR, in the days following Trump’s victory, was on a tear, comparing (directly and indirectly through quoting other people) Trump and his plans to the Taliban, Stalin, southern elites leading up to the Civil War, and Christian nationalist dictator-type figures like Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán.

Kate, meanwhile, believed that “the dark night of fascism was going to incipiently fall,” Tom said — “like January 6th times a million.” She pictured a literal Trump-led authoritarian takeover, with Christian nationalism and The Handmaid’s Tale riding on his coattails. She wanted to know their plan for getting out of the country when Nazis started rounding people up, he said. She — a woman who “hasn’t had two seconds for the Second Amendment the whole time we’ve known each other” — researched what kind of weapon would be best for self-defense.

One night, a bit concerned about the weapon research, Tom tried to lower the temperature of his wife’s distress, leading to a showdown.

Tom, figuring his vote was more likely to determine the outcome of his marriage than the election’s, voted for Kamala Harris. But in a rare move, during that confrontation, he challenged Kate directly: “What if I hadn’t?”

“And she said, ‘Well, of course I’d divorce you.’”

Heartbroken, pissed, she wanted to know: Wasn’t he worried about the direction of the country?

“And I’m like, ‘I’ve been worried about the direction of the country for a while. About a lot of things. And not all of ‘em are things that have to do with Trump.’”

He laid out the free speech thing.

Kate pressed him: What was he talking about?

“I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t think the news sources that you’re reading would tell you the stories that I’m talking about.’”

Tom thought about Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss. The independent journalists, all Substackers — his Heather Cox Richardsons, in a sense — who broke the Twitter Files.

But he didn’t get the opportunity to talk about any of it. Kate started packing a bag, saying she wanted half their stuff.

Within a few days, Tom hired an attorney. He’d lost confidence in his ability to “keep this situation stable,” he told me.

“If I’m going to simply suggest that she take in other news sources, and that’s a divorce threat, what do we think is going to happen after Trump’s inaugurated? If there’s no barrier at all between the headlines and home, I got no chance.’

“God, I can’t imagine what it would be like for me to try to live in that house since January of this year. Can you imagine? After what’s happened from the beginning of the year? Holy shit! Like dozens of executive orders on the first day? And then it just kept going!”

A TOUGH MATCHUP

Kate grew up in the type of family that draws hard, unforgiving lines. You’re either good or bad, in or out — good training for partisan warfare. What little family Tom had taught him that love was extremely conditional. So it makes sense: her big feelings reaching for hard, satisfying lines; his tendency to treat them like a bomb that needed defusing.

Once, way back in 2016, he did ask for a shift. He felt she was being cruel. She threatened divorce, so he retreated. He went back to trying to behave.

“Pretty tough matchup, right?” Tom said.

They would’ve struggled, like any couple struggles, without Trump and Heather Cox Richardson and the rotating cast of characters that comprise our days on our screens.

But for Tom, those characters, especially HCR, “diminished” Kate’s joy and “amplified” her pain. They “stole” her. They made it harder to have conversations — to navigate the world’s philosophical terrain as fellow travelers.

“They’ve figured out they can make themselves rich by making everybody else hate each other, and they’re cool with that,” he said.

Now, as a consequence of the divorce process, Tom’s working too hard at a tech company instead of retiring. He’s entering the final third of his life alone, with no one to smile back when he looks at the mountains. Kate’s devastated, too.

“Telling this story is cathartic for me and, I hope, cautionary for at least some of the people that read it. Our family bonds are SO important… the most difficult differences human beings have might only be resolvable as part of familial love,” Tom wrote me in a final note.

“But if the political is personal? How does that ever happen? If there’s never any divide between personal life and political life then aren’t we all doomed to partisan warfare at some point?”

— Blake Dodge