Samuel Corum/Getty Images Unfair Park from p4 Dallas office, which covers most of the top half of the state, had nabbed 35 people, said spokesperson Katherine Chaumont, who urged people to keep “calling those tips in.” In early December, Keller resident Thomas Paul Conover, 53, was picked up by the FBI and hit with misdemeanor charges for allegedly entering a restricted building and disorderly conduct. “I don’t always storm the Capitol of the United States of America, but when I do, I prefer Coors Light,” Conover allegedly said in a Facebook video at the time. (He was actually toasting with a Coors Light in the video, screenshots show.) Less than two weeks after Conover’s ar- rest, the feds picked up two more North Tex- ans, both from Tarrant County. Donald Hazard, a 43-year-old Hurst resident, and Lucas Denney, a 44-year-old who lives in Mansfield, stand accused of assaulting police officers during the unrest. The way the FBI tells it, Hazard had been “grappling” with po- lice officers, while Denney “swung his arm and fist” at a police officer and then yanked him “further down the stairs.” The month be- fore the riot, Denney had taken to social me- dia to hunt for new recruits for his militia outfit, The Patriot Boys of North Texas. Before the ink started drying on the bal- 66 lots, Texas Republicans were drumming up paranoid claims that the November 2020 vote had been rigged against Trump. Attor- ney General Ken Paxton filed a flurry of failed lawsuits to have election results over- turned in four battleground states. Some Texan politicians had even shown up to Trump’s rally earlier in the day on Jan. 6. “We will not quit fighting,” Paxton said at the gathering. “We’re Texans, we’re Ameri- cans, and the fight will go on.” Others were spotted in more politically compromising positions. State Rep. Kyle Biedermann, known for his “Gay Hitler” Halloween costume and his infamous “Texit” bill, had been filmed on the Capitol steps standing among a crowd of Trump supporters chanting “traitors” at the law- makers inside the building. Biedermann didn’t respond to the Observer’s request for comment, but the day after the riot, he told a radio station that only a “few radicals” had “caused the trouble,” while he and others like him had “marched peacefully on our na- tion’s Capitol to make our voices heard.” In August, Biedermann denied that it was an insurrection at all. When Democratic state Rep. Erin Zweiner introduced a bill in the Texas House that would forbid insurrection participants from becoming voting assistants, Biedermann lashed out. “People that attended that rally and attended the Jan. 6 event, you’re calling them all insurrectionists?” he asked. He added, “The amendment is all about the insurrection that you are claiming on Jan. 6, yet you were not there. You don’t know what happened. All you do is listen to the liberal media, is that correct? Where do you get your information?” tion denialism has continued unabated. Since early 2021, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and GOP state lawmakers have repeatedly warned of widespread voter fraud, despite the lack of any evidence to back that claim. In September, less than nine hours after A Trump wrote Abbott an open letter urging an audit of the vote, Texas announced a probe in four counties: Collin, Dallas, Harris and Tarrant. (In Collin and Tarrant counties, news of the audit caught election officials off guard, emails recently revealed.) Facing criticism, Abbott defended the probe. “Why do we audit everything in this world, but people raise their hands in con- cern when we audit elections, which is fun- damental to our democracy?” the governor told Fox News in November. After hundreds of Trump supporters, white nationalists and conspiracy theorists from across the country stormed the U.S. Capi- tol, Abbott said violence was “unacceptable” and that the perpetrators “should be pun- ished,” declining to directly criticize Trump. Angelica Luna Kaufman, a spokesperson for the Texas Democratic Party, said the state accounts for such a large presence among suspected Capitol rioters because its GOP leaders are “beholden to failed Presi- dent Donald Trump instead of to the people they’ve been elected to serve.” year later, critics worry that the po- litical climate hasn’t improved much. In Texas and beyond, elec- Trump leads his rally before the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. “Republican leaders in Texas, like Gov. Greg Abbott, have not only encouraged this kind of radicalism they have brought it to the forefront of their party, and they are directly responsible for its rise in popularity,” she said. “Instead of denouncing the riots, they con- tinue to perpetuate the ‘big lie’ around elec- tion fraud in the hopes of gaining popularity among this extreme right-winged base of Trump followers and insurrectionists.” Meanwhile, even as the feds continue rounding up alleged Capitol rioters and oth- ers on the far right, some experts say Jan. 6 has become a rallying cry. In February, a third of Texas Republicans polled by re- searchers at the University of Houston ex- pressed support for the insurrection. In May, another study found that nearly three in four Republicans around the coun- try thought “too much [was] being made of the Capitol insurrection,” the Houston Re- cord Chronicle reported at the time. Heidi Beirich, cofounder and chief strat- egist for the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, has spent decades researching the radical right in the U.S. and beyond. The way she sees it, the Jan. 6 riot will continue to have consequences. “In the last year, ex- tremist movements have not waned under the pressure of the DOJ indictments, and some have actually grown or taken root across the country,” she said. MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 JANUARY 6–12, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
