Josie Duffy Rice
Josie Duffy Rice is a journalist, writer, and podcast host whose work focuses on prosecutors, prisons, and the criminal justice system. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times,…
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In November 1986, Robert Cleland was the head prosecutor in St. Clair County, Michigan. The morning after Cleland lost a statewide race for Attorney General, Scott Macklem was murdered. Cleland decided to prosecute the case himself, depicting the defendant as a dangerous ninja out for revenge.
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00:14
Speaker 2
People were just running in and out.
00:16
Speaker 3
They would try and keep you back, especially away from the body.
00:21
Speaker 4
We'll hypnotize them to strengthen that memory.
00:26
Speaker 1
Tell me what's going through your head.
00:28
Speaker 4
I'm being wrongfully accused of the murder of somebody I've never met.
00:31
Speaker 5
I was flabbergasted.
00:32
Speaker 6
I really was.
00:42
Speaker 1
Port Huron, Michigan was like many law and order towns, places that can, when they please, untether themselves from the constraints of the law. Here, the law is not always made at the Capitol or even in a courtroom. Sometimes the law is made in bars and back rooms. It's made through victories pursued, through pride or vengeance. To mention Kinsu had gone into the Port Huron Jail in the apprehensive cold of November, when everyone up north is stealing themselves for what's to come. He was charged with the murder of a man named Scott Macklem. Timogen's fiancée, Michelle, was seven months pregnant at the time. After he was arrested, she moved from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, 500 miles away, to Port Huron to be near him.
01:36
Speaker 7
I walked to a little area of town when I was still pregnant and went to a church. I just found a church and a couple of ladies from the church are who were with me at the hospital. I think one of the ladies from the church took me there. I'm not sure.
01:53
Speaker 1
She gave birth to their son alone in late January of 1987. She remembers how the church ladies tried to make it all feel a little bit less lonely.
02:04
Speaker 7
They got me some gifts and, you know, brought balloons and just made it, you know, kind of a celebration for me.
02:11
Speaker 1
She would visit Timogen with their newborn son.
02:13
Speaker 7
So I was able to get into this apartment and it was, gosh, I'm going to say maybe a mile or maybe a mile and a half or so from the jail. I walked up there pregnant and then I, when I had him, I walked up there, you know, put him in a little pouch and would walk back and forth to visit him.
02:36
Speaker 1
By the time Timogen's trial came around, it was the middle of spring. To Timogen and Michelle, the trial was the promised land. They were putting all their hopes on vindication, that he would be acquitted, that they could put this whole thing behind them. But if you looked closely, there were signs of what was to come. They just didn't see them. I'm Josie Duffy Rice, and this is The Backfire Effect. Episode 3, The Ninja. By the time Robert Cleland... the head prosecutor in St. Clair County, Michigan, had heard about the murder of a local mayor's son, he was already having what I imagine must have been a pretty bad day. It was the day after Election Day. Cleland had been the Republican candidate for Michigan Attorney General. He was nobody's first choice, picked in a last-minute scramble after the original candidate dropped out. And outside of St. Clair County, he had no name recognition. But Robert Cleland had a few things going for him. He was a moderate, plus he was young, just 39, tall, and he had a presence in a way, some gravitas. Here's Detroit-based reporter Bill Proctor, a former newscaster who has reported on this story.
04:19
Speaker 6
Mr. Six-foot-five, six-foot-six, perfect suits, square shoulders, wonderful voice, enthusiastic with the media.
04:32
Speaker 1
People describe Cleland as straight-laced, A little uptight. Good at being a politician, but not someone you'd want to hang out with, exactly. Former Port Huron Police Department officer Herb Welzer remembers him as pretty aloof.
04:46
Speaker 2
He didn't, you know, talk about the weather and things like that. He didn't joke around too much. He was just to the point. Very intelligent, very thorough, well-spoken. No nonsense, I guess, is what you'd describe.
05:09
Speaker 1
Born and raised in St. Clair County, Cleland wanted more than his hometown could give. His father had also been head prosecutor there, and now he could build on that legacy even further. He was in spitting distance of being the attorney general of the state of Michigan. Maybe this was only the beginning. During his campaign for state attorney general, Cleland flew around Michigan in a friend's six-seat Bonanza airplane. And he hammered just one message. His opponent was too soft on crime. One campaign ad said he'd, quote, hit crime as hard as it's hitting us. Cleland had a little hope. A dangerous thing. And if desire converted to votes, he definitely would have won. So imagine the blow when on November 4th, 1986, Cleland lost. and not by a thin margin either. His opponent, the incumbent, had run away with nearly 70% of the vote. Even when you expect to lose, that big of a loss can deal a knockout blow to your ego. And then, first thing the next morning, Scott Macklem is killed in the parking lot of the local community college. It's the first murder in St. Clair County in 18 months. Here's Herb Walzer again.
06:28
Speaker 2
This murder happens in his hometown that morning, the day that he loses that state election. Can you imagine the pressure here in St. Clair County of the mayor of Croswell's son gets murdered in broad daylight in the college parking lot? The pressure to get a conviction.
06:52
Speaker 1
I should mention that I reached out to Cleland more than once for an interview, but he didn't respond. He's been hesitant to talk about this case, speaking very rarely about it, for reasons you may come to understand. Scott Macklem and Robert Cleland had a lot in common. Scott, too, was the son of a politician, a golden boy. It goes without saying that prosecutors want to win. That's especially true for the head prosecutor. It's an elected position, after all, and voters don't want to elect a loser. But Cleland really wanted to win this case. He decided to try this case himself, an unusual decision for the head prosecutor in the office. The actual legwork usually went to the people under him. That he wanted to be the one to build a case, cross-examine witnesses, perform in front of a jury, was a bad omen for Timogen. So pretty quickly, Timogen, arraigned under his birth name, Frederick Freeman, knew who would be prosecuting him in this case. But who would be his attorney? He and Michelle were desperately trying to find a lawyer. The problem was that they had no money. But then, a cop at the jail recommended a lawyer named David Dean. Here's Timogen talking to journalist Joy Marie Mann in 2024. Dean comes to see.
08:18
Speaker 5
Me, and he pretty much just makes it clear he's my lawyer. And he's like, hey, I'm going to.
08:22
Speaker 6
Get myself appointed to your case, and, uh, He goes, you're going to have a giant malicious prosecution lawsuit, and you're going.
08:29
Speaker 5
To be really wealthy.
08:31
Speaker 1
Dean seemed to think this was a case he could win. Years later, he talked with journalist Bill Proctor about Timogen.
08:38
Speaker 3
I found him to be very articulate, very bright, a very bright man. And I just felt that, man, this guy is absolutely telling the truth, and it's time to look into it.
08:50
Speaker 1
Timogen thought he had lucked out. In December of 1986, He wrote Dean a note that said, Assuming I am acquitted, I will do everything in my power to repay you, and then some. There is no doubt in my mind that I could have done no better than to have contacted you. Anybody who's ever heard Miranda Rights read on TV knows that if you can't afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to you. The right to an attorney is one of the most important protections afforded to defendants. But who that lawyer is depends. In some places, there are public defender offices where everybody there is paid to defend clients who can't afford to pay for representation. But in a lot of places, especially back then, there was no public defender office. What there was instead was a bunch of solo practitioners who take defense cases and are paid a flat fee by the state. Timogen had come up against a common problem in criminal law. where the constitutional protections afforded to defendants are loftier than what's actually available in practice. There's a stereotype about these solo practitioners, and I want to emphasize, it is a stereotype. It's not always true. But the classic image is someone whose private practice isn't exactly thriving, so they take these appointments to pay the bills. In other words, not the best lawyers that the bar has to offer, let's put it that way. Plus, they're generalists, not specialists. They might do a divorce in the morning, a drunk driving case at lunch, a murder in the afternoon. This, in many ways, was David Dean's practice, which might work for some things. But if you're arrested for murder, I can assure you that you want a specialist. David Dean and Robert Cleland knew each other. They'd both graduated from Port Huron High School. They'd actually spent years working together. In fact, Cleland had been Dean's boss for four years when Dean worked as an assistant prosecutor in his office. By the time Timogen was arrested, though, Dean was no longer a prosecutor, having left, or possibly been fired, from Cleland's office three years prior. David Dean wasn't inherently a bad lawyer, and he had some experience at criminal law. But he had a lot of other issues, many of them At the time, Dean was not only a member of the bar, but the owner of a bar called the Wall Street Exchange. It was located near the jail in the courthouse, and it had a particular clientele. Prosecutors, cops, defendants. It was, it seems, basically Dean's office. If you needed him, you called the bar directly. He even had legal correspondence sent there. And his business partners at the Wall Street Exchange were both prosecutors in St. Clair County, working directly for Robert Cleland during Timogen's case. And if that weren't enough conflict of interest, David Dean had previously represented another person closely related to the case, Sergeant John Bounds. I told you last episode that John Bounds, the lead detective in this case, had once been suspended from the Port Huron Police Department. The attorney who helped him get his job back? David Dean. The two men were friends. You could find them at the bar together. David Dean's social life, professional reputation, and financial security were entangled with the very people trying to put Timogen in prison. But he had other problems, too. Namely, his addiction.
12:39
Speaker 7
I don't know exactly what substance, but he was under the influence.
12:46
Speaker 4
I can't lie to you. I knew that he was doing that.
12:49
Speaker 5
I mean, I just, everybody knew that he was doing that.
12:52
Speaker 4
He was, he was a mess.
12:55
Speaker 6
He had that Coke issue, and I don't mean Coca-Cola.
13:00
Speaker 1
Just one year prior, Dean had found himself in his own bit of legal trouble, charged with drug possession after he was caught snorting cocaine out of a vial in a park in Ohio. As a result, at the time of Timogen's trial... Dean was actually on probation and was ordered to abstain from alcohol and drugs and submit to random drug testing. Dean even asked Timogen for drugs. Here's what he told Court TV years later.
13:24
Speaker 4
We're sitting at a table before one of the hearings, and he literally said to me, like, do you know where I can get some Coke? And I was like, he's like, you must be somebody you can call or something.
13:32
Speaker 3
And I was like, what are you, nuts?
13:34
Speaker 1
No surprise, then, that Timogen remembers his lawyer being distracted, to say the least. He came to the jail to see Temujin just once, despite the fact that it was across the street from where he worked and drank. In fact, the bulk of Temujin's defense case seemed to be prepared by a woman named Jan. Jan had met David Dean in middle school, back when he taught junior high. He'd also been her divorce lawyer. Now, in 1987, Jan was technically Dean's investigator, though their correspondence implies a more personal connection. Hints of romance, of flirting, calling him sweetheart, exchanging gifts. Jan was young, in her late 20s, and didn't have a law degree. She'd only begun working for David Dean a few months before the trial. But it was Jan who seemed to be handling a lot of Dean's cases. Later, she'd say that she often prepared the motions, prepped the witnesses, drafted the cross-examinations. I've seen notes she wrote to him during Timogen's case. notes that show that she was a little in over her head. She said the prosecutor was keeping witnesses from talking to her. She said she had two, maybe three leads. She asked for his help. Meanwhile, Dean was elsewhere, running his other business, or on vacation in Barbados, and, it seems, using. Jan was so worried about Dean's addiction that she eventually went to the police to report his drug supplier's hoping to scare him straight. The officer she reported them to was, you guessed it, John Bounds. She gave Bounds the supplier's names, addresses, and even a copy of a check Dean had written to buy crack. Years later, Jan would testify under oath that by January of 1987, three months before Timogen's trial, David Dean had started smoking crack regularly. It was this period of time, she said, that he was, quote, at his worst, unable to do legal work.
16:02
Speaker 5
Unfair at this point for him or anybody else to bring up the issue of your admitted cocaine thing Is that unfair?
16:12
Speaker 1
That's Bill Proctor again, interviewing David Dean. Proctor was the first reporter to really look into this case, back in the 90s. Here's how Dean replied to his question about the admitted cocaine thing.
16:25
Speaker 3
Well, I would ask that it's unfair because it had nothing to do with a trial. And I don't know of anyone that would indicate that it did, because it did not.
16:36
Speaker 1
So to recap, Timogen's defense attorney was a former employee of the prosecutor, in business with members of the prosecutor's office, and had represented the lead detective in the case. He was sourcing drugs from his own clients and outsourcing his work to a non-lawyer. David Dean would eventually have his law license suspended in 1993 for buying cocaine. He had to get treatment before it could be reinstated, which it was. But then, over the next eight years, his license would be suspended five more times. Each time, Dean would promise to get treatment and submit to drug testing. But finally, after the sixth time, the state bar rejected his attempt to have his law license reinstated again. He was effectively disbarred in the early 2000s, and he died in 2018. There's one other person worth mentioning. James Corden, the judge in this case. Corden was also a native to the area. And before he became a judge, he was the head prosecutor of St. Clair County, the same position that Cleland and his father had held. His connections to Cleland went beyond professional. A few years before Timogen's trial, in the early 1980s, Judge Corden had been arrested by the Michigan State Police for a DUI. Years later, Herb tracked down the state trooper, who recalled that Corden had been acting belligerently, saying things like, The trooper was going to arrest Corden. But someone at the St. Clair County Prosecutor's Office intervened. They insisted he not be given a breathalyzer nor be taken to jail. Instead, he was allegedly released to the custody of one of the prosecutors in Cleland's office. No charges were filed, and the incident was never made public. These were the men that would determine Temujin's fate. An ambitious prosecutor, a flailing defense attorney, and a possibly indebted judge. The trial itself began on April 28, 1987. During opening statements, Cleland.
18:57
Speaker 1
Started to shape the paper-thin evidence he had into a story. He talked about Crystal, a girl who worked on the family farm. He talked about how she and Scott were in love. And then he talked about Temujin, moving from place to place and living in town and town and living with one relative and another, he said. This, it turns out, was the prosecution's entire strategy, character assassination. They didn't have much else to work with here, after all. There was no smoking gun. There was no murder weapon. No physical evidence. They hadn't found the getaway car. Their suspect said he was across the state at the time of the murder. It's a hard case to make. They had to flood the zone with conjecture. They had to make Timogen seem crazy enough, cruel enough, unpredictable enough to be the killer. The prosecution introduces nearly 30 witnesses, including Crystal. She's just 20 years old, pretty, polite, and six months pregnant. She's the first to testify and spends more than a day on the stand as Cleland paints a picture of a man obsessed. Here's David Dean.
20:11
Speaker 3
I mean, Fred Freeman was no Charles Manson by any means, but you got the sense that that was the kind of thing she was trying to bring.
20:22
Speaker 1
Crystal's testimony is harrowing. She alleges abuse, assault, rape. She says he stalked her, bugged her house. These, of course, are serious allegations, and they connect to a bigger theme here. which is the history of Timogen's mistreatment of women, something we'll focus on more in an upcoming episode. One of the things the prosecution was trying to convey was fear that Crystal, her family, and importantly Scott, were scared of Timogen. Still, there are other parts of her testimony that are harder to make sense of. She claims on the stand that Timogen wanted to get back together. despite admitting that they had not spoken since the day they broke up. And despite agreeing that when they broke up, the last thing he said to her was, it's no skin off my back. She says that Timogen always said he was going to kill Scott, that he had threatened him a dozen times during their relationship, despite no one else having ever heard Timogen mention him. Despite all of this testimony, it's still hard for Cleland to make a convincing case that Timogen was obsessed with Crystal. They dated so briefly, a few weeks. At the time of the murder, both of them were expecting children with other people. And even Crystal says that to her knowledge, Timidget and Scott had never even spoken. In other words, what was missing from this jealousy motive was any evidence of jealousy. So Cleland tries something else. The ninja theory. a characterization that captured people's attention in and outside of the county. Here's a clip from Detroit TV station WXYZ. Prosecutors claim Fred Freeman, a martial arts expert, is a dangerous criminal.
22:16
Speaker 4
He's been called.
22:17
Speaker 1
The ninja murderer. Throughout the trial, there's repeated discussion about how Temujin is, or claims to be, a ninja. And not just a ninja, but part of an international ninja organization. Crystal testified that Timogen claimed there were two rival groups, one for prostitution and drugs, and his group, which was against prostitution and drugs, and that he couldn't get a Michigan driver's license because he has to go into hiding and switch his identity too often. Crystal testified that his ninja masters demanded that he sell out or get rid of all his material assets, such as his yacht and Lamborghini cars. It is, however, true that Timogen is very into martial arts.
23:09
Speaker 7
Yeah, I got into martial arts when I was seven years old.
23:13
Speaker 1
Timogen is, was, a martial artist. That remains a major source of pride for him, a thing he talks about all the time. He says that his teacher had him speaking to martial arts schools and groups since he was 12 or 13.
23:27
Speaker 4
One of my first lectures was actually in front of a group of Korean grandmasters at United Taekwondo in Detroit.
23:33
Speaker 1
I was teaching.
23:34
Speaker 3
The juniors up at the school in Flint when I was a red belt, which, you know, was.
23:37
Speaker 4
Prior to black belt.
23:39
Speaker 1
But doing martial arts is very different, of course, than being part of an international ninja organization. If such a thing as a ninja organization sounds strange to you, you're not alone. Here's John, who taught at the martial arts school in Escanaba.
23:56
Speaker 6
It seemed to me that they used their background information by watching old Shokasugi movies. Jumping off of three-story buildings and so on and so forth.
24:06
Speaker 5
They didn't know what they were talking about.
24:10
Speaker 1
In fact, Crystal mentions these movies. Movies with, quote, ninja guys dressed in black, always sneaking out behind trees and killing people. Timidin's friend Dash Deal was at the trial, and he remembers hearing some of this testimony.
24:25
Speaker 3
Boy, I wish he would have showed me how to jump out of trees and do mind control and back flips and, you know, disappear and, you know, teleport.
24:33
Speaker 4
Fuck, yeah, I want that, you know? But it didn't make sense, though, you know what I'm saying?
24:40
Speaker 1
Timogen says he never made these claims to Crystal. And of course, they're really hard to believe. And maybe that was kind of the point. Cleland even says at trial that his conclusion from all of this is that Timogen was full of it. The ninja stuff is offered functionally, as character testimony, to make Timogen look boastful, like a liar. As the prosecution presents its case, Cleland is trying to make the half fit the whole. shoving together potential motives in hopes that one sticks. But in case it doesn't, he has a very eager witness, which brings us back to Rennie, the student who'd been hypnotized after he told police he'd seen the getaway car and its driver at the scene of the crime. Rennie had dreams of working in law enforcement. It made him the kind of witness that police like. Helpful, deferential, always glad to be asked. Two days after the murder, John Bounds sat Rennie down and laid out five photographs. A photo array is supposed to work like a test. Five faces and one question. And for the question to really mean anything, the wrong answers have to be believable. Four of these photos report Huron mugshots. Similar, a little faded and yellowed with age. The fifth was Timogen. and it had come from a different department in a different part of the state. Newer, sharper, shot from another angle against another background. It didn't match. The port here on paper had already told the whole town that the killer was wanted in Oakland County. In the fifth picture, Timigen held a letterboard with the name of a local Oakland County Police Department. Rennie picked that one. From the witness stand, He points to Timogen, who's sitting just a few feet away, and identifies him as the killer. Before the prosecution rested, they introduced another witness, a man named Philip Joplin. Joplin had been in and out of prison for years. He had a drug addiction and a long record, stolen property, a jail escape. A week before trial, he and Timogen had briefly overlapped for a few hours while in custody. Now he was called to the stand to testify for the prosecution. Joplin told the courtroom that Timogen had confessed to the killing of Scott Macklem. Quote, he said he had an airtight alibi. He had witnesses. He said it could never be proven and he wasn't worried about it. He also added, quote, he's a frightening person. Cleland asked him directly, explicitly, has anyone made any promise of reward inducement, or threat to you? And Joplin says no. Years after the trial, Bill Proctor tracked him down.
27:58
Speaker 5
In that day, you were handcuffed to a man named Freeman.
28:03
Speaker 3
Right.
28:03
Speaker 5
What did you and Freeman talk about?
28:06
Speaker 7
His case.
28:08
Speaker 5
And when he was talking about his case, what kinds of things was he telling you? What was he talking about?
28:14
Speaker 2
He said that, uh, There was no way that they was going to convict him of that, you know, because he didn't do it.
28:20
Speaker 5
But you wrote in your letter to Mr. Cleland that he said just the opposite.
28:25
Speaker 2
Right.
28:27
Speaker 1
Joplin says that he was coached by the prosecution and the police in this case, that they told him what to say.
28:34
Speaker 5
And what kind of statements do you remember making during the trial? I mean, did you say that the man told you he killed somebody? Yeah, I said that he said that he... Shot this guy with a shotgun. Prosecutor's office told me that when I made that statement to make sure that I turned towards the jury and looked at the jury. But did Mr. Freeman ever say that to you?
29:00
Speaker 3
No.
29:01
Speaker 5
Did he ever say something about the victim screaming when he shot him?
29:05
Speaker 1
No.
29:06
Speaker 5
Did he ever say he used a shotgun to kill somebody?
29:08
Speaker 7
No.
29:11
Speaker 1
Joplin says he didn't do this because he had anything against Temujin.
29:15
Speaker 5
He seemed like a decent dude, you know? He seemed like a guy that, you know, you'd meet on a college campus or something, you know? So why this guy that you kind of felt was a decent dude, why did you put his life in jeopardy like this? To see if it would get me out.
29:36
Speaker 4
It worked.
29:38
Speaker 1
Joplin was released early from jail. It's been many years since Proctor interviewed Joplin, but when he told me about it, it was clear that it still upsets him.
29:50
Speaker 6
It was really one of those things where I had a lot of difficulty jumping up from my side of the table and just knocking the fuck out of this guy. I mean, are you really that sinister?
30:02
Speaker 1
Phil Joplin is dead now, but I spoke to a social worker who knew him back then, Steve Spreitzer. He says that Joplin was certainly not the most honest man. But he also says that Joplin was facing a long sentence in a particularly terrible prison, and that the offer of something that could save him was hard to pass up.
30:25
Speaker 4
I can only imagine him having finally got to a situation in Port Huron where He could see himself getting a life for himself. And so all of a sudden, he found a way. He was given a way because they needed him to make their case. The prosecuting team needed Joplin's trumped-up testimony to package a horrible case against Demigen or Fred Freeman. And so they found a way to make it work for him.
30:58
Speaker 1
There's an internet era adage called Brandolini's Law, sometimes called the bullshit asymmetry principle. The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than the energy needed to produce it. You've seen it. You've seen it everywhere, even if you've never had a name for it. It's age old. In 1912, someone glued an orangutan's jaw to a human skull, buried it in an English gravel pit, and called it Piltdown Man. Manufacturing this hoax took pretty amateur handiwork. Exposing it took 41 years, during which textbooks were rewritten and scientists were chasing a fossil that never existed. It's not just that lies are cheap and truth is expensive. It's that the asymmetry rewards whoever produces claims the fastest and punishes whoever is stuck with the burden of answering them. Refuting a charge is slow, technical, boring, and And worse, you have to repeat the original claim, which means every rebuttal replants the very seed it's trying to dig up. The lie gets the headline. The correction gets the footnote. Now consider what happened in a Port Huron courtroom in the spring of 1987. Cleland is, in a sense, a portrait of Brandolini's law, wearing a suit, addressing a jury. It cost him almost nothing to conjure an international ninja organization. It cost Philip Joplin almost nothing to manufacture a confession complete with stage directions. By the time the prosecution rests its case, they've made Timogen out to seem like a womanizer, abusive, controlling. They put a pregnant woman on the stand for hours as the courtroom heard how he abused her and she says killed her fiancé. They brought up her family to testify. and other women who say he wanted to exert psychological control. And they painted him as, at the very least, a martial arts weirdo, if not actively dangerous. The problem is what they have to contend with on the other side. Because they have to not just convince the jury that Temujin would do something like this. They have to convince the jury that Temujin could do something like this. Because he has multiple people willing to say he was more than 400 miles away from the scene of the crime the day Scott Macklin was killed. Coming up in the next episode, Timogen makes his case.
33:42
Speaker 2
He actually has more alibi than he needs to cover the time that the state uses in its timeline.
33:49
Speaker 1
And Robert Cleland pulls a Hail Mary.
33:52
Speaker 2
I don't know if he got a conscience or not.
33:54
Speaker 7
You know, I think he lied for a clean.
34:05
Speaker 1
One. The Backfire Effect is hosted and reported by me, Josie Duffy Rice. Additional reporting by Joshua Sharp. It's produced by Lydia Jean Cott with additional production support from Trina Menino. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producers are Amy Gaines McQuaid and Jacob Smith. Our music was composed by Daniel Walter, sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. Our fact checker is Lauren Vespoli, and our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Special thanks to a few more people at Pushkin who made the Backfire Effect possible. Greta Cohn, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Jake Flanagan, Owen Miller, Sarah Bruguier, and Karen Shakerji. Additional thanks to Joy Marie Mann.
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