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Kava bars have been opening in North Carolina and across America with increasing popularity over the last decade. The beverage, a lightly intoxicating alternative to alcohol, is made by grinding up dried kava root, mixing it with water, and straining the liquid contents into a bowl. It has a bitter taste that numbs the mouth and produces a pleasant euphoric effect. Moon and Root is a fantasy-themed kava bar in downtown Asheville. The bartenders dress like Game of Thrones characters. The “Kava Names” they adopt add to the immersion of the venue and offer a pseudo-anonymity to its regular patrons. There’s a young goth lady I would see there named Moonraker, for instance. I’m pretty sure that’s not the name on her birth certificate. It’s like club kids in the early 2000s calling themselves DJ so-and-so or Downtown Eric. Elysium is the owner of Moon and Root, but his real name is Lewis Easton Cantwell. I never use his real name. I didn’t even know it until he was doxxed, canceled, and publicly denounced by half the city. Before opening up Moon and Root, Elysium served five months in a federal prison in Kentucky for his role in the J6 protests. Elysium was 35 years old on January 6, 2021, employed as a network engineer, and the proud owner of a new kava establishment. Though largely apolitical, he had taken a stand against the system when he refused to go “takeout only” during COVID, feeling that, as a veteran, the government had overreached. He kept the place open, and business boomed, much to the chagrin of his competitors, who leaned far to the left. Elysium’s girlfriend’s dad, a staunch Trump supporter, was on his way to DC to attend the J6 protests. Despite his stand against COVID mandates, Elysium had no desire to overthrow the U.S. government. “My girlfriend thought it would be a good bonding experience,” recalled Elysium. “Makes sense,” I said. “What could go wrong?” “I was there, but I never made it inside the building,” Elysium confesses on a recent afternoon over a cup of chilled kava. He brews it strong and flavorful. We drink it straight from corrugated coffee cups. The earthy flavor of the root makes me grimace ever so slightly with each sip, but challenges me to take another. The way whiskey used to challenge me with its burn to the back of the throat. After a couple weeks of patiently sipping this stuff without feeling much effect beyond the numbing of the lips, I’m starting to understand why people drink it. A calm buzz. Proof, I figured, that I’d developed the famous “reverse tolerance” kava drinkers always talk about. Elysium shows me a video from the day of the protest in which he’s visible on the porch of the Capitol building. In the footage, a crowd of protesters push up against a phalanx of riot police. He stands near the front of the scrum, but far enough back to avoid making direct contact with the officers. The tragic irony, of course, is that Elysium’s business would be fine if he only catered to MAGA Republicans. But he didn’t, that’s not his style, and so he built up a customer base of the very people who would eventually turn on him. “I was trying to get them to calm down and stop pushing because a lady had fallen over and was getting crushed by the door,” he claims. “I never even set foot inside the Capitol building.” While Elysium never touched the door or engaged in any physical contact with a federal agent, his repeated shouts to “hold the door” that the officers were trying to close resulted in a lengthy list of charges: civil disorder, obstruction of an official proceeding, entering a restricted building or grounds, disorderly conduct in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building or grounds, parading/demonstrating/picketing in a Capitol building, and the big one: obstructing or impeding a Capitol Police officer. The final charge is the felony he was sentenced for, alongside the litany of misdemeanors. “I went to prison for my words,” says Elysium. Shortly after it all went down in DC, a rival business owner posted videos of Elysium at the Capitol all over Facebook and Twitter. According to Elysium, he inserted the hashtag @FBI in every comments section. Posing as a concerned citizen, he allegedly called the FBI anonymous tip line. On February 14, just over a month after the protest, Elysium said an armada of 23 U.S. Marshals, FBI agents, and local police showed up in ten vehicles, stormed the kava bar, and arrested him. He surrendered voluntarily and without incident. Wouldn’t you know it, the local news just happened to be present at the time. They plastered his face all over the media along with the long list of charges. That well-publicized fiasco made evicting him and shutting down the kava bar, despite the illegal breach of contract, all the easier. The man’s a deplorable insurrectionist, out on probation for the felony of trying to overthrow the U.S. government. What’s he gonna do, sue you? After 2 years of pretrial probation, during which time he lost his job, land, business, and was evicted from his home, Elysium faced years in prison before a plea bargain. Because he had no prior criminal record, is a veteran, and was able to pay his attorney $112,000 (with the proceeds from the sale of 17 acres and a liquidated 401(k)), the sentence was reduced to five months in federal prison plus 36 months of work release and probation post-incarceration. Elysium reported to federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky. “The prison was a converted basketball arena. It was over a hundred cots lined up next to each other on the court, with the empty seats of the stadium surrounding us. I could reach out my hand from my cot and easily touch over half a dozen other prisoners if I wanted to. That’s illegal, by the way,” recounts Elysium. There were also the roaches. “They crawled on you at night,” he said. “They scurried across your face. At first I tried squashing them, but there were too many; you had to make peace with it.” “How does one make peace with cockroaches?” I asked, glancing around the Moon and Root and taking another sip of kava. “You just had to close your eyes, keep your mouth closed, and hope they didn’t nest in your ear. One prisoner had a roach crawl into his ear canal, where it died. He said he could hear it chirping even after the nurse removed it with tweezers.” “How was the food?” I asked. “Infested with roaches and spiders. The mashed potatoes had maggots. Mostly dead. You learned to eat around them. But occasionally you’d get one that was still alive, slithering around.” “Did you throw it away or complain?” I asked. "You just ate around it.” After his release, Elysium started to put his life back together. He distanced himself from politics, founded Moon and Root, and eventually got a girlfriend. For years he stayed busy and kept his head down. Then, years later, on May 15 2026, he was accused of being an antisemite by Citizen Times. Titled, “Asheville kava bar owner called out for following racist social media,” the piece noted that, “His Instagram account for Moon & Root, @moonandroot.apothecary, at some point followed a racist and antisemitic Instagram page. The profile picture for the account is a racist caricature of a man with a hooked nose, and the account features a wide variety of antisemitic videos that explicitly attack the Jewish people. A personal Instagram account that Cantwell confirmed belonged to him followed right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, Libs of TikTok and an account that featured videos of protestors being injured.” Elysium himself had posted nothing antisemitic. The mere fact that he followed three right-wing accounts was apparently newsworthy information. The story appeared all over my social media feed and featured Elysium’s photo alongside the fact that he was a J6 protester who had served time in prison. The message was clear. Get him. ...Read the rest at MAMA mamathemagazine.com/the-insu…