They hail from the Dallas suburbs, but it could be Robert Altman’s Nashville. Frisco, Texas finds itself in the spotlight as a hub for domestic extremists. Authorities have charged nineteen residents for breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6. Many still believed Donald Trump would be installed as president on March 4th (Washington Post):
“We are optimistic . . . If you’re in morning [sic] Please stay at home!!!” the group’s organizer, Jeff Hauk, told the weekly meeting of a group of conservatives who call themselves the “DFW Deplorables.”
In posts on their private Facebook page, Hauk said he still believed Trump had their backs and that the former president was working behind the scenes to return to power. “It is not over,” Hauk wrote.
Not quite. More arrests are coming. Perhaps here in North Texas.
Local law enforcement authorities had been grappling for months with the poisonous impact of baseless claims. In September, Frisco authorities were flooded with calls and emails after QAnon conspiracy theorists latched onto a video shared on social media of a crying little girl in the back seat of a car. In reality, the girl, who police say was part of a custody dispute, was safe, but her privacy was violated by the video being shared repeatedly, and time spent addressing the false accusation affected the investigation, authorities said.
Police also were forced to address a viral social media post that falsely labeled the town’s sprawling Stonebriar Center the “No. 1 mall in the U.S. for sex trafficking,” assuring the public that teenagers were not being kidnapped.
The area has doubled in size over the last two decades. Median household income of $97,000 exceeds the national median of $69,000. But with the population increase came diversity and with diversity unease. The county’s Latino and Asian American populations are growing, and the White population is in decline, writes Annie Gowan.
“They created this perfect little bubble of the way they wanted things … now we’ve got true diversity, and those Christian nationalists are afraid of losing their power,” said Johnston, a Democratic activist and one of the Internet sleuths who helped unmask local residents who participated in the Capitol riots. “These are the very people who would do things like have Trump parades every weekend and take a private jet to a riot.”
Realtor Jenna Ryan did just that with a few of her friends. Her Facebooked participation led to her arrest. “I bought into a lie, and the lie is the lie, and it’s embarrassing,” she says now. “I regret everything.”
Shortly before Biden’s inauguration, Pastor Brandon Burden of the KingdomLife church — a boxy, largely windowless sanctuary in Frisco — mounted the pulpit and gave a stemwinder of a sermon that went viral.
Burden spoke in tongues and urged his flock of “warriors” to load their weapons and stock up on food and water as the transfer of power loomed. The emergency broadcast system might be tampered with, so if Trump “took over the country,” he could not tell them what to do, he said.
“We ain’t going silently into the night. We ain’t going down. This is Texas,” Burden preached.
“This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville! They can’t do this to us here,” country singer Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) tells a political rally at the climax of Altman’s film.
Except this is Dallas.
Trump was going to save the world — their world — from a cabal of baby-eating, Satan-worshipping pedophiles. But where are the bodies? The pictures of the missing on milk cartons? The shallow graves off Rte. 9 containing bleached bones of the tiny victims? The news-at-six video of distraught parents pleading for the return of their babies? Those are not answers the QAnon faithful seek. Nor are they the real source of their anxieties.