How "Spur of the Moment" Were Michael Cassidy's Actions in Iowa?
How "Spur of the Moment" Were Michael Cassidy's Actions in Iowa?
As Michael Cassidy continues to make the media rounds, telling his side of the story of how he came from Mississippi to Iowa and defaced a satanic idol, inconsistencies and oddities in his story are arising. In his first televised interview, Fox News host Jesse Watters asked Cassidy, “So, Michael, is this something that you plotted, or is this something that you just did on the spur of the moment?” Cassidy answered, “This was certainly a spur of the moment kind of thing,” and stated only that he “got to the Capitol.” He also told Watters that “nobody was there.”
He then went on Steve Deace’s show on The Blaze network, where, after mentioning that he lives in Mississippi, he ignored the question, “How did you end up in the hallowed halls, or at least the formerly hallowed halls, of our state’s [Iowa’s] legislature…?” When Deace asked him again, “Were you here visiting? Did you come from Mississippi specifically to witness this yourself?”, Cassidy answered, “You know, I travel around a whole lot for my job. I was, you know, I was on my own time and I came to Iowa on Wednesday.” He gave no details as to why he came to Iowa. He then told Deace that there was one man there praying the rosary, in direct contradiction to what he told Watters.
Then Cassidy went on CBN, and when asked whether this was a “PR stunt”, he denied the accusation and said, “I certainly saw this ahead of time, but I did not have a full plan of what I was going to do,” because “I didn’t know if there was going to be security there” or “politicians protesting.” He then said that, after seeing the idol through media, he “decided to get a plane ticket and go up to Iowa,” which makes his response to Deace’s question of how he got there—that he travels around a lot for his job—strange, to say the least. These statements contradict what he said to Watters about his actions being “spur of the moment,” because he went to Iowa, the day before, specifically to see the idol and contemplated beforehand what actions he could take, depending on whether there would be security or witnesses present. Cassidy then said that he knew there would be consequences, but he did not weigh the full legal ramifications of his actions before or during the time it took to purchase a plane ticket, fly from Mississippi to Iowa, spend a night in Des Moines, and deface the idol the next morning, which is also very strange, considering he has a degree from Harvard.
Cassidy told CrossPolitic, the podcast of Gabe Rench, an associate of controversial pastor Doug Wilson and owner of the media firm that Cassidy is now represented through, that he made the decision to fly to Iowa midday Wednesday. The closest international airport to his hometown is 150 miles away and the only evening flight from the one airline that services his regional airport that I could find gets travelers to Des Moines around 10:30am the next day, after several stops (he turned himself in at 8:15 on Thursday morning). If his claim is true, then he decided midday Wednesday to go to Iowa, most likely immediately got in his car to drive three hours to Birmingham, caught a likely five-hour, one-stop flight to Des Moines that arrived late at night, found a hotel and was in the Capitol by 8am the next morning—all of this when he could have waited until the next morning and taken a flight from his regional airport that would have had him in Iowa by 2pm. He also told CrossPolitic that, before he knocked over the idol, he “thought about what kind of risk [he] would take,” including going to to jail. Davis Younts, Cassidy’s attorney, told the podcast that “No one would have known it had been done if Michael hadn’t turned himself in,” as if no one would have noticed that a satanic idol that had made national news was beheaded and knocked over. Also, if discretion was the goal, why immediately give an exclusive to Younts’s associates at The Sentinel and then go on a media blitz?
Journalist Janet Mefferd has also noted, in a thread on X, that Cassidy told CBN he has received multiple offers for pro bono legal representation, yet has kept his GiveSendGo fundraiser open. He has received just shy of $80,000 in donations, at the time of this writing, and the fundraiser states that he has sole discretion to disperse unused funds to an unnamed nonprofit.
Lastly, Rench answered the questions I posed in a previous post.
The answer he gave to the first question was nondescript enough that I needed to ask a follow up question for clarification. Rench is aware of this follow up question, asked two days ago, but has not answered.
