A Parallel Universe Part 2: Insurrection Reunion
January 6th rioters share a heroic new version of events. Part 2 of 5.
I pull into Juniper Valley farms, a large property of several acres with a barn that serves as an event space and modest house. Inside the barn is a makeshift stage, event tables are covered with paper liners and someone has done a smattering of iridescent decor in red white and blue, like a patriotic countrified Sweet 16 party. The first people I meet are Kevin and Mary Caldwell, members of the Patriot Relief group, a fundraising outfit for J6 prisoner families. They scan my ticket and hand me a “Justice for Ashli Babbitt” bracelet. I ask for permission to shoot photos, they eagerly point me towards David Clements, a keynote speaker. A tall, handsome man with the air of ‘1970’s college professor’, Clements is something of a celebrity in the election conspiracy world.
Buzzing around Clements is a pair of filmmakers setting up to shoot the event. I introduce myself and politely ask about their work (a documentary about Jan6 ‘heroes’ and the fraudulent 2020 election) I offer up some equipment or help if needed. I meet the director first who has come from Michigan and eye his companion who is walking towards the stage. He’s a youngish looking man with an undercut and a habit of falling into, and then completely out of, a strong Irish accent. The director notices me studying him and says, “don’t worry, he’s a patriot.” I bite my tongue and dam the remark about what exactly I think he can do with his brand of patriotism.
A light smattering of guests filter in and stake a claim at the banquet tables set up to face the stage. The merch table features stickers, bracelets, handmade jewelry, all with a patriotic color scheme. I consider purchasing “Make Honey Great Again” moulded in the shape of Trump’s sour visage. There’s also a copy of The American Gulag Chronicles, a glossy coffee table book featuring writing and images from the inmates serving prison terms. One page features a watercolor painting of “MAGA Mouse”, an injured prison rodent adopted by an inmate and illustrated in the book with a tiny red hat. Even a grim jail pet can’t escape the hat treatment I think. I step outside for a cigarette with Tricia, well-dressed vamp who had recently been arrested after Facebook revealed she’d entered Nancy Pelosi’s office. She had remarked on Facebook logs, provided to the feds, that Pelosi’s decor was ‘gaudy’ and I found that pretty funny. It’s her first event and she’s getting to know everyone.
The event’s MC, Tommy Tatum, is a freight train of a man, tall and heavy. You know when you see him you wouldn’t want to be on his bad side. In person he comes off like a gentle giant. A soft voice with a slight Mississippi lilt, I know him as a person who trolls online critics relentlessly and harasses Capitol police in person, telling one he would face “eternal damnation” and that the capitol mob had “God on their side.” “Careful around Tommy,” I was warned by one of the Sedition Hunters, “he’s a very angry person.”
Tommy is a crusader for his fellow rioters and he does really seem to care for them. He’s a fixture at many of the vigils and support events. He’s also tells one of the more florid versions of the insurrection. In his telling, rioters were ‘enticed’ up to the West Tunnel entrance where they were then trapped and mercilessly beaten by cops [9]. But his version of things conveniently leaves out the cornering MPD officers on the lower terrace steps, forgetting that he screamed “yeah run bitches, we got ya’ll mother fuckers now! Take your pig sorry asses back up there!” He may forget that his group closed in pepper spraying the cops as Tommy gleefully yelled “take their helmets” later claiming this was because police “were the ones spraying us and taking helmets would stop them.” No mention of why they were compelled to pursue the retreating police.
Most fantastical are Tommy’s claims about Rosanne Boyland, the Trump supporter who died after losing consciousness and collapsing under a crush of rioters. Tommy was positioned very close to her and heard her companion, Justin, screaming that she dying. Overwhelmed police fell back from the terrace steps up to the tunnel doorway where they managed to hold off rioters from entering the building, pushing them out then being overrun in a back and forth that lasted hours. Over and over, rioters beat at the police to gain entry, then retreated as they took pepper spray clouds and baton hits, then charged forward again, angrier and more determined. Body cam footage shows the attacks as rioters dog-pile, many sustaining blows and a few losing consciousness. Why the rioters couldn’t have turned around, walked down the stairs and left of their own volition — something I was able to do myself at the same door — is a mystery.
Tommy takes the stage to show his proof of Rosanne’s murder. These are the moments when you struggle to decide if the Tommy Tatums of January 6 know they’re lying or if they believe the story they’ve created. As one of the most documented historical events of all time, with virtually every participant filming, there is a sea of high quality footage to choose from. You can see almost any moment of the riot from several angles. Why then, is Tommy’s proof of murder a highly compressed shot from a distance? He provides commentary for the grainy footage, “I’m trapped under this white railing for 8 minutes while we are being crushed — and I can show you guys better,” he offers. But better doesn’t come. At 4:27:21PM he says that she’s fallen and the crowd has seen her body then the ensuing violent attack by rioters, lunging with makeshift weapons at the police, is in response to that. “This is what our guys are reacting to, you see all this violence.”
If the renewed violence was a response to seeing Boyland’s lifeless body, the attacker who lunges at the officer doesn’t seem to mind stepping on Boyland and then creating a skirmish directly where she’s dying. He also claims that the officer fending them off with a walking stick begins to beat the defenseless Boyland on the head and face. In the Gateway Pundit edit of the officer’s bodycam footage, since removed from the internet, it does look like the officers’ strikes with the stick are landing on the ground where Boyland lay. However, watching the action by lining up 4 different angles in a multicam sync, I can see the officer is actually striking at rioters attempting to grab her uniform and drag her down the steps. Tommy sits dazed on the steps facing away from Boyland and the door. He’s not “stuck under the railing for 8 minutes” as he claims on stage, nor is he even facing the attack he claims to have witnessed.
Officer Fanone has already been pulled into the crowd. When one rioter said, “shoot him with his own gun!’ the officer begged for his life. Then he was tased by Danny Rodriguez before being brought back to the door where he suffered from a heart attack. As Boyland faints, police are in a fight for their lives, rioters using deadly force and the officers responding in kind. Other rioters claim withheld bodycam footage shows officers are hitting the arms of people trying to help Boyland, but there only seems to be the panic of trying to stop anyone lunging in the direction of the police, innocent or not.
Even if police can see that Boyland and others are injured, the rioters appear ready to kill. Rioters inside have loudly announced they are hunting for lawmakers and they want to hang the Vice President. I can’t fathom the disconnect in someone’s mind that allows relentless attacks on security with flag poles, tasers, railings, and bear repellent then believes putting your hands up and saying, “Stop! Someone got hurt!” is going to work. It speaks to the kind of cartoonish revolution these facebook soldiers had dreamt up, not realizing that real war draws blood. Real revolution has casualties. Tommy has spoken over and over again about this injustice on news outlets and various events. I should let him know his proof is available in HD, If really cares to see it.
Despite this, I feel for Tommy. Watching someone die is tragic, that’s trauma that will stay with him. She shouldn’t have died there, she should’t have died for that reason. But this version makes Tommy a victim, not a participant. The reality is, Tommy was part of the crowd that pushed overwhelmed officers up the West side steps to the door. He was part of the wave of rioters attacking police and trying to enter the capitol. They instigated the violent pushback. He played a part in that lost life.
Now, to Tommy’s credit, there are a lot of questions surrounding Rosanne’s death and I’m not apologizing for cops. The official report from the medical examiner listed it as “acute amphetamine overdose” amphetamine meaning adderall, not methamphetamine, the street drug. Tommy and other rioters say the media has spread this lie intentionally to smear her name (all major media I can find has made a distinction that this was a prescribed medication.) She also had co-morbidities like high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes. While none of these may have killed her alone, adderall does increase heart rate, in combination with pulse-raising factors like tobacco, caffeine, the adrenaline rush of the riot — it’s very easy to believe clouds of pepper spray and a tightly packed space could have caused her to pass out. Once on the ground, her fate would be sealed. Rioters claim she was hit by police and in a horrifying video, Rosanne can be seen laying on the steps her nose is bleeding. Her face blue as the rioters try to administer CPR. It’s awful, no one should die like that. An investigation by both homicide and internal affairs deemed the officers’ actions on the day as reasonable and not an excessive use of force.
The ironic thing about Tommy and other’s suspicion of a police coverup is their disdain for the BLM marches of 2020 against police brutality. Do people have questions about police coverups? Of course! There were weeks of demonstrations because of it! It’s an incredible conspiracy spiral that lets rioters believe BLM was there creating chaos and also helping police coverup their crimes of excessive force. For the right wing media sphere, the only thing the 2020 demonstrations accomplished were fires and vandalism “in all cities for months” there’s no crossover of BLM’s list of grievances and their own. The anti-police-brutality movement has been reduced to a conspiracy theory about secret, armed mercenary chaos agents.
We break for a BBQ lunch. I think about why Tommy needs this version he’s created, the one he retells over and over at events, on podcasts, on tv. Elizabeth Williamson’s 2022 book, Sandy Hook, chronicles the birth of a twisted version of real events and examines why some people can’t let this go. In December 2012, a gunman entered Sandy Hook elementary and murdered 26 people including children. Alex Jones claimed with scant evidence that the event was a false flag. Fans of Jones began to harass the mourning parents, accusing them of being crisis actors hired by the Obama administration. One of the most vicious and vocal, Kelley Watt, trolled relentlessly telling the parents she wanted to “hear the screams and dig up their children’s graves and prove they were empty.” No amount of proof has convinced her that children died at Sandy Hook, she just knows it. That may actually be self-preservation — thinking about children dying is awful, we can’t bear that, so the story that they didn’t die is much safer. The idea that the shadowy Deepstate started violence as the capitol is safer, it’s cleaner. The other reason may be an inability to reckon with one’s own actions. Williamson ponders in an interview about Watt, the Sandy Hook denier, “I actually think that maybe someone like her, they’re so far down the rabbit hole that there would be a level of shame involved… you have tormented the families of murdered children. At some point maybe you can’t come to grips with that.” For Tommy, reckoning with his own culpability may be equally impossible. Read Part 3
