There are millions of these people out there
This article in the Texas Monthly about a family who went to DC on January 6th is a must read. Grab a cup of coffee and settle in, it’s amazing. Here’s an excerpt.
Amid this kaleidoscopic melee, another strange tableau unfolded, one that might have escaped notice but for the Capitol surveillance cameras. It occurred at 2:25 p.m., just twelve minutes after the first rioter breached the building and about twenty minutes before Babbitt was killed. A slender middle-aged man slipped through a broken window into the Senate wing of the Capitol. He wore a red sweatshirt, camouflage pants, and a black knit cap. Though the marble corridor was already crowded with rioters bustling along in both directions, the man lingered by the broken window. He helped a teenage girl wearing a camouflage coat climb through, taking care that she didn’t land on the shattered glass covering the floor. Then the man assisted a second teenage girl who was similarly attired. A third woman followed, slightly older and wearing a Trump flag as a cape. Then came a middle-aged woman, hooded and wearing sunglasses. Finally, a young man clambered through the window. The six of them then proceeded through the U.S. Capitol in tandem, as the American family unit they happened to be.
These were the Munns. Just over an hour earlier, they had stood among tens of thousands of Trump supporters at the Ellipse, watching on the JumboTron as the president had said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol,” adding, “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” They had done exactly that, following other rallygoers all the way to the steps of the Capitol, in an atmosphere that Tom would later describe in an online post as “upbeat and patriotic.” Minutes later, his post continued, “everything suddenly became very ‘dark.’ I do not know how else to describe it. Eventually resulting in our entry of the Capitol Building”—past police barricades, with tear gas swirling and accompanied by a soundtrack of flash-bang grenades, security alarms, and the roar of the mob. Through the broken window, they entered the restricted area of the Capitol while federal legislators were convening to certify the presidential election.
The Munns’ movements over the ensuing 52 minutes were unremarkable. They wandered through the Capitol visitors center. They made their way into a Senate conference room, where the oldest sibling, 28-year-old Kristi, used her phone to record video of rioters confronting police officers. At one point, the father stood and lit a cigarette. At another, an officer who had been shoved by a rioter collided with Dawn, bruising her knee. Finally, at 3:17 p.m., the six Munns exited through a different broken Senate window. Throughout their nearly hour-long excursion, they were surrounded by fellow trespassers as well as police officers yet interacted only with one another. As Tom’s court-appointed attorney would later say, “They stuck together, as a family.”
That evening and into the next day, the Munns memorialized their activities on Facebook. “We went in and stormed capital,” the mother wrote. Declared the father: “I need to tell you all that the media is LYING TO YOU. . . . There was no violence in the capital building, the crowd was NOT out of control . . . they were ANGRY!!!” Maintained their only son, 23-year-old Josh: “It was super cool everything was cool till the cop used tear gas that is when people got mad but still never hurt anyone . . . I am still feeling the tear gas so ya I’m pissed.” Kristi wrote, “I was just thinking . . . tear gas tastes like freedom.” And eighteen-year-old Kayli, four months shy of graduating from high school, was ebullient in a message to one of her sisters in Wisconsin who asked how things were going: “F—ing great! Holy s— we were inside the
f—ing capital!”Then, on January 7, the Munns piled back into the gray family van and began the long drive back to Borger.
Everyone thinks of this family as Texans but they actually just moved to Texas in 2017 from Wisconsin — because of gender neutral bathrooms. I’m not kidding.
They seem like such good people:
Two intertwining threads came to define the Munns over the years. One was their insularity. The eight children, who uniformly share their father’s gaunt appearance, lived under strict rules. For years, observing Halloween was forbidden. At one point, some of them were pulled out of public schools and enrolled in a small Christian school.
The other constant was the parents’ tendency to spend and borrow beyond their means and then leave others holding the bag. In May of 1996, Tom and Dawn filed for bankruptcy, listing creditors that included J. C. Penney, Sears, and the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. Thirteen years later, in 2009, the Munns again filed for Chapter 7, after both Tom and Dawn had formed individual private construction companies, secured bank loans, and subsequently failed to make payments. Their liabilities totaled $168,001. Their debts included $6,569 in rent that the Munns had failed to pay their landlord in 2008.
During the 2009 bankruptcy proceeding, Tom declared his income as zero. By 2010, he had stopped working altogether. Dawn supported the family on her nursing income, with assistance from Tom’s father, Harvey. Despite their meager resources, in 2012 the Munns moved into a six-bedroom rental home out in the country, a few miles from Sparta, near the town of Cataract. The owner of the house, Don Crandall, did not see anything that aroused concern. Apart from the spent bullet casings littering the yard from family target practice and the fact that the children owned an alpaca named Q-tip that occasionally defiled the interior of the house, Crandall regarded them as decent tenants. Dawn faithfully deposited a $1,175 rent payment on the first and fifteenth of every month. But one day in 2016, Crandall received an alarming phone call.
The caller was Laura Bolden, the caretaker of Harvey, who was then living in Sparta and in his nineties, widowed and recovering from a debilitating stroke the previous year. When Crandall told Bolden that the Munns had been paying their rent on time, the caretaker warned that this would likely soon change. She explained that Tom and Dawn, who’d taken control of Harvey’s finances after his stroke, had moved almost all of the elderly Munn’s money out of his retirement account and into a checking account they had opened under his name. Where there had once been approximately $200,000, now there was only $700. Belatedly, Harvey closed the account and confronted Tom in the presence of Bolden. Tom didn’t deny he’d taken his father’s money. Instead, the son asked for more so that he could make next month’s rent. (The Munns were never charged with a crime over this, though Bolden said an investigator with the sheriff’s department suggested that Harvey hire an attorney and pursue his son in civil court. He chose not to.)
Sure enough, the Munns stopped paying their landlord. The family promptly held a yard sale made up of items that were in fact owned by Crandall. When the landlord arrived and asked what was going on, Tom first said he thought the objects were his. Then, according to Crandall, Tom said, “Well, you’re the one evicting us. We’ve got to raise money to get out of here.”
These are Trump’s people. These are the salt-o-the-earth folks to whom we’re all supposed to defer. This is MAGA — all American inmates running the asylum. Read the whole thing.
After the Capitol rioters were finally routed from the building and Biden’s victory was formally certified on the evening of January 6, a bitter and fearful despondency fell over much of the rural Panhandle. In the town of Fritch, thirteen miles west of Borger, Blaik Kemp, who had just been elected as Hutchinson County’s sheriff, convened a town hall. Kemp intended to discuss local law enforcement issues with his constituents. Instead, Kemp recalled, “I stood for maybe an hour and a half and just answered questions about not really local problems. ‘What’s going to happen at the border now? Are they going to come take all our guns?’ ”
Tom Munn was also consumed with discontent. On Facebook, he posted a photograph of two bare-chested men hugging, both ostensibly gay and one bearing a resemblance to Trump’s former vice president. “I’m still trying to figure out why Pence, would turn on President Trump?” he wrote. “Anyone got any ideas??” For months, he repeatedly told his followers that Biden was an illegitimate president and that Trump would be restored to his office. He also hinted at civil war.
Facebook eventually identified him as a serial misinformer, and his account was permanently shut down. He took over the account of one of his younger daughters and unleashed a torrent of conspiracy theories, suggesting that one of the Capitol police officers who was attacked on January 6 had also posed as a rioter, and that the so-called New World Order, supposedly led by the Rockefeller family, might be responsible for the three 5G cell towers that had recently been erected in Borger. He wrote, “I really have to admit . . . I am really wishing we could see something, anything . . . I’M READY, JUST DO IT!!!” He responded to a follower’s approving comment with a photo of a man in a suit wearing a necktie shaped like a noose, writing, “Treason has a penalty.”
Is all this violent energy spent? Maybe when it comes to some of the more or less normal people. But people like this? I doubt it. Besides, there’s the grift to think of:
“American Family Needing Help,” blared the title of the GiveSendGo account established by one of the Munn daughters in the summer of 2022. The web page included a lengthy elucidation by Tom of how he had tried to instill in his children his deep commitment to the Constitution, often focusing on the First Amendment. He wrote that the 2020 election results had left him doubting the process. Following what he termed “a frustrating display of political maneuvering, to obstruct the verification of the vote,” Tom “felt compelled to let my voice be heard and obligated to demonstrate to my children, the vital importance of doing so.” He described a Gestapo-like raid by armor-clad federal agents on his peaceful home. He said that his family had lost friends and now struggled to find work.
Tom’s synopsis of the family’s legal predicament was misleading at best. “Having no other ‘real’ recourse, we accepted the ‘plea deal’ offered by the prosecution,” he wrote. In truth, each of the Munns were provided free legal counsel from the federal public defender’s office. The children, beginning with Josh, eventually indicated their willingness to plead guilty. Though Tom and Dawn waited ten months to acknowledge their guilt, they offered no legal challenge to their indictment at any point.
When the GiveSendGo page went live, Tom lamented that the Munns lacked the means to travel to Washington for their sentencing hearing in October, and as a result, “we are greatly fearing being held in contempt of court,” he wrote. This appeal, which raised the Munns more than $33,000 in donations, evoked a familiar trope, that of a patriotic and Trump-loving American family suffering under the bootheel of a deeply partisan criminal justice system. That sentiment was echoed by Clay Renick, the Borger-based director of the Hutchinson County Historical Museum. Renick is no fan of the Munns and doesn’t believe they’re at all representative of Borger, but a few days before their sentencing trial, he wrote in an email to me that “Justice in America today, isn’t much more than a fleeting concept under the liberal definition, and I feel certain that the punishment the Munns receive will be severe—just to make yet another point about the residents of ‘flyover’ country.”
The martyrdom runs deep. You can see why they all worship Trump.