THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 15man recalled that Tom had attended one of Trump’s inaugural
balls in uniform. “He was a prepper, yes,” said the neighbor,
referring to those who are preparing to live self-sufficiently, as we
sat drinking cold Cokes in the shelter of his shaded driveway,
“but we’re all preppers.” The neighbor didn’t believe that people
who had entered the Capitol had committed a crime; rather, he
told me, it was a conspiracy: “Somebody was paid to break
windows.”
After we finished speaking, I headed a few miles down the
road back toward the highway, noticing a prominent Black Lives
Matter sign on the shoulder. As I drove down the adjacent
driveway, raindrops hit the windshield and a farmhouse
appeared. There I found Lowell and Elyse Smith, a White couple
who had moved to Clarke a few years before. The first time they
erected the Black Lives Matter sign on the road, they had awoken
to find it destroyed. The Smiths called the police and remade the
sign, but a few days after, someone tore it down and
spray-painted “white power” on the asphalt. Lowell, a retired
environmental scientist, took to sleeping in a folding chair by the
side of the road, concealed by a thicket of trees. He told me he
narrowly missed another time the sign was destroyed, but a trail
camera captured a man pulling up in a car and a boy jumping out
with a baseball bat, then smashing the sign to pieces. The Smiths
wrapped the next iteration with barbed wire.
On my drive home, the rain had rendered the land in
saturated green and the sky was streaked with cotton-candy
colors. Back on my laptop, I logged into a closed Facebook group
for residents called Clarke County Land of the Free. Created on
Feb. 15, 2018, it identifies as “A place between deleted posts and
censorship and complete and utter chaos.” It was clear from
comments that two years before Jan. 6, Tom joined in local
efforts to decree Clarke a so-called Second Amendment sanctu-
ary.Political Prisoner,” noting he had met Sharon along the way.
Clarke County’s population had grown by a few thousand since
Tom was in high school, and its median income had risen. The
area today has a poverty rate of 7.62 percent, lower than the
national average.
In 2000, the Caldwells started Progressive Technologies
Management, a software company that they ran from their
home. An archived version of the company’s website from 2008
shows they marketed themselves as disabled-veteran-led and
received a number of government contracts. At some point the
company appears to have folded; by 2011 its website was inactive.
But the Caldwells lived comfortably by Clarke standards: In
Tom’s first court appearance, he told the judge that he had about
$50,000 in his checking account and received $5,000 a month
in disability and pension from the government.
After retiring and before Jan. 6, Tom appears to have become
more politically engaged. Records from the Virginia Public
Access Project show that in 2017 he gave a $300 donation to
Virginia gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart, who had ties to
white supremacist leaders and ran for the Republican nomina-
tion on a platform of restoring Confederate history. Tom’s was
the only donation to Stewart in his Zip code, although plenty of
other people voted for him. In 2020, VPAP records show Tom
gave $700 to LaRock and $1,200 to the Chairman’s PAC, a local
group formed to support Clarke resident and prominent
Republican Matt Leeds for the chairmanship of the 10th
Congressional District Republican Committee. The Caldwells
also donated hundreds to Trump.
On a day thick with humidity that promised to storm, I drove
out to the Caldwells’ road. A no-trespassing sign hung on the
fence bordering Tom’s property, which was encircled by horse
and cow pastures. Nearby, I met a neighbor who knew Tom and
was willing to speak only on the condition of anonymity. The
Thomas Caldwell
poses at a booth set
up to resemble the
White House press
room at the
Conservative Political
Action Conference in
National Harbor, Md.,
in 2019.photo: Mike Theiler/United Press International/Alamy Stock Photo