GOVERNMENT
Innocent after proven guilty A raw conversation with your friendly neighborhood J6er
BY ELIAS WEISS
M
racist” and far worst things by other metro Phoenix journalists sip his juice and share a meal, a conversation and even a few laughs with a member of the lame-stream media such as myself. Not to mention my Jewish ancestry. A few hours before our interview, he had posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Stalin was a good man.” And that’s actually quite tame compared to the on-camera confrontations that cultivated his internet stardom pre-Jan. 6. Our waitress recognized Jackson from the newspapers. Her propinquity to swooning was palpable — she insisted on getting a photo. He was wearing a timeless red MAGA cap, a “NEVER SURRENDER!” t-shirt featuring the president’s 2023 booking mugshot and a chunky Eastern Orthodox crucifix hanging from a gold chain on his chest. He had the impeccable grooming you’d expect from an (honorably discharged) ex-Marine, and he brought his framed certificate of pardon, freshly signed by President Trump himself. I hadn’t interviewed Jackson in two years. It wasn’t until the New Times and the Arizona Republic identified Jackson as a Maricopa resident in January articles that I realized we had unfinished business. Fortunately, he agreed. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. ELIAS WEISS: Since you reminded me, I did call you a hard-right Libertarian. I still think that’s pretty accurate, too. But I was thinking about it — if I wrote that today, I’d probably call you a nonpartisan Christian nationalist. Because I saw you publicly attacking [White House Press Secretary] Karoline Leavitt yesterday for her 32-year-age-gap marriage. MICAJAH JACKSON: She wears a cross, and I really hope she’s about that, but can I know for sure? No. There is, honestly, a lot I don’t care for about Republicans. For example, McConnell, Romney, Murkowski [GOP senators of Kentucky, Utah and Alaska] — you’ve been in politics for 40 years. That’s not a sign of a healthy democracy. At least Democrats, and some of
ICAJAH JACKSON WAS IN PRETTY hot demand when we sat down to breakfast Jan. 31. It was two days after President Donald J. Trump
honored his campaign promise to pardon Jackson for a crime he had committed during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Of course, it’s no longer accurate to call ... whatever Jackson did that day, flanked by members of the neofascist militant group Proud Boys ... a “crime.” He’s not a Proud Boy, by the way; he’s just friends with them. Hell, his biggest idol is a Democrat. Don’t believe me? Keep reading. Jackson, better known by his influencer moniker The JFK Report, had turned down interviews with the likes of NBC News and USA Today in the hours following the pardon, he told me at breakfast. He only agreed to one interview, and it was with the guy who called his “Justice for J6” rally a “tearful bitch fest” in the headline of a Phoenix New Times article in early 2023, a handful of weeks before I came on board as editor of InMaricopa . Yeah, I’m that guy. I stand by my assessment. In the same New Times article, I called Jackson a “hard-right Libertarian.” During our recent breakfast, he said that was one of the most accurate ways he’d ever been described by a reporter and called me “nice and honest enough.” High praise for a journalist in my position. Trust me. Jackson, a former Marine who was never charged — let alone convicted — of any other crime before or since Jan. 6, 2021, told me his guilty plea in federal Zoom-call court was nothing more than a stratagem. To many, myself included (I’ve periodically interviewed Jackson for different news publications since the date of the riot), he sounded like a pissed-off provocateur when he said as much four years earlier. And here I was, in 2025, eating my words as a side dish with French toast. He, meanwhile, ordered an apple juice. It was a funny juxtaposition to see the 29-year-old, who has been called a “right-wing extremist,” a “Nazi propagandist,” an “anti-government
MICAJAH JOEL JACKSON
Screen name: The JFK Report Age: 29 Hometown: Helena, Mont. Military service: U.S. Marines 2014-2016 Charged with: Picketing in a Capitol Building Sentence: 90 days in halfway house, 2 years probation Breached the U.S. Capitol: Jan. 6, 2021 Jailed in Phoenix: May 18, 2021 Pardoned by Trump: Jan. 29, 2025 Alma mater: Grand Canyon University Field of study: Political science
Dream job: Professor Deployed from: Camp Pendleton, Calif. Deployed to: Oceania
Because his mother was in 10th grade and his father was a severe alcoholic, Jackson was raised by his grandparents in poverty in a Montana trailer home. At age 16, he began experimenting with drugs and alcohol. He joined the Marines to get clean. Today, he is proudly six years sober.
InMaricopa.com | March 2025
March 2025 | InMaricopa.com
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