The month of October is synonymous with youthful mischief. With Halloween just over the horizon, rambunctious teens and rowdy children delight in smashing pumpkins, messing with festive décor, and all manner of minor misdemeanors.
Those minor issues can quickly spiral into a felony during an election year, however, as one Missouri teen might learn the hard way. After dozens of signs supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz went missing, one neighborhood had enough. A simple yet elegant solution led straight to the MAGA perp, and even if his parents didn’t seem overly concerned in the moment, his victims hope that a public shaming will do the lad some good.
In a video saga uploaded to Tiktok @RuralHealthJustic, whose real name is Laura McCaskill, shared her Springfield neighborhood’s frustrating saga. She told the local paper, Ozarksfirst, that in the weeks leading up to her tipping point, she and her neighbors suffered multiple yard sign thefts. They had managed to capture the perp on home security devices, but no one recognized the person responsible, despite three rounds of sign snatching.
After her third sign supporting the Harris/Walz team disappeared, McCaskill devised a plan to track her property with an Apple Airtag. When her sign was yet again snatched over the weekend, she and her partner used the device to follow the thief to a restaurant, before tracking it nearly 30 minutes farther to the nearby town of Nixa, MO.
Her partner recognized the vehicle as they drove through the neighborhood, and after speaking to a neighbor, the duo was able to meet the homeowner.
“We said hello, and we said we think that you have something in that car that was taken from our neighborhood,” McCaskill said. The woman acknowledged the car was her son’s before saying, “Well, he’s just an idiot,” and heading back inside. “We thought that was interesting,” McCaskill said.
Right around here is where the teeth gnashingly aggravating video comes in.
“I expected to find the air tag, but not 59 signs. It was kind of like finding a dead body.” McCaskill said.
While the boy’s feigned innocence in the face of a literal mountain of evidence is annoying, it’s really his mom that takes the MAGA entitlement cake. She scoffs out a fake apology before grabbing an armful of signs. “Here you go Liberals,” she says, hurling them to the ground, “it’s so stupid, just go vote,” she adds.
McCaskill reminds the MAGA mama that it’s a criminal offense to steal election signs, but Karen isn’t having it. But tampering with, destroying, or stealing a campaign sign is a class four offense, a misdemeanor that comes with up to a year in jail and a max fine of $2500. A City Council member in Carthage was charged with theft a few days ago for taking just two.
It quickly becomes evident that the boy is just as bad as his mom. He reveals that he was calculating the number of signs needed to put him past the aforementioned misdemeanor, and elevate his misdeed to a felony-level charge. “Oh, you know the law for what you steal,” McCaskill can heard saying. Unfortunately for the MAGA Minor, his calculations were a bit off. He assumed each sign was $3, rather than the $20 it costs to purchase directly from the Harris/Walz Campaign – and that doesn’t account for the cost of the stolen tracker. Once it’s totaled with the true cost per purloined item, the kid’s stolen somewhere near $1200.
The boy claims that he didn’t care about the meaning behind the signs, he “just saw it on Tiktok.”
“It seemed like he felt like in his head he had an idea on the threshold of how he wouldn’t get in trouble,” McCaskill told Ozarksfirst. “This is pervasive theft. This was calculated. This is a different level.”
McCaskill and several of her neighbors have decided to file police reports. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have taken that far, but the flippant reactions from the family were too much.
“We don’t want to cause any harm to the young man or his family, but the attitude is bothersome and I hope that can be turned around for him,” she said. “If my son stole Trump signs, I would hold him accountable… I would be horrified if he did that. It’s respecting your neighbors, respecting their First Amendment rights.”
The family is just another example of Republicans claiming to be for “law and order” until it applies to them. We can’t fully blame the kid for acting out with a mom like that, but he’s old enough to know better. It’s a truly poor showing from the party of family values, and shows once again that MAGA’s espoused ideologies are nothing more than hot air.
