The great butterfly sanctuary conspiracy
So there’s a butterfly sanctuary in Texas, just north of the border with Mexico. Trump wanted to build a new section of border wall through the butterfly sanctuary, even though the sanctuary is not in Mexico or even touching Mexico. The butterfly sanctuary does not endorse this plan. Therefore, the lunatics hate the butterfly sanctuary and have been trying to break it.
A Congressional candidate and someone she called a “Secret Service agent” showed up at the sanctuary and demanded entry “so that they could go see ‘illegals crossing on rafts’.”
“Immediately, we knew what that was about,” [Marianne] Wright told The Daily Beast on Thursday. “It was an echo and reiteration of the lies Steve Bannon’s ‘We Build The Wall’ campaign published and promoted against us for years.”
Wright is the executive director of the National Butterfly Center, a private nature preserve in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. The center is a sanctuary for hundreds of butterfly species—and a frequent target for conspiracy theorists after Wright and her colleagues opposed the Trump administration’s plans to build a border wall through the middle of the property.
…
Although the National Butterfly Center is located in Texas, Donald Trump’s proposed wall would run two miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, bisecting the protected land. In 2019, the center filed a restraining order against the construction project. That court filing made the center a fixation of the far right.
One Trumpist group, the Bannon-backed “We Build the Wall” campaign, targeted the center with conspiracy theories. Brian Kolfage, a leader of the group, repeatedly tweeted that the National Butterfly Center was harboring an illegal sex trade and dead bodies.
Sounds like that DC pizza parlor that kept – what was it? child prostitutes? – in its basement, at the behest of Hillary Clinton.
By late 2019, conspiracy theorists were circulating memes falsely accusing the National Butterfly Center of being a front for sex traffickers. Wright and colleagues faced in-person threats from members of militia groups like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, as well as threatening phone calls and emails from a man who was revealed to be a Texas police officer.
It’s impressive the way they kill multiple birds with one stone. Butterfly sanctuaries have nothing to do with border policy or immigration or MAGA or any of it but hey, there’s one sitting there, super close to the border, so might as well try to stamp out interest in nature, protection of wildlife, educational projects, and all that hippy shit, yeah?
Updating to add: I think I got it wrong about the butterfly center not touching Mexico. The article doesn’t say that, I find on reading more carefully, and on Google maps it looks as if it’s bordered by the river, so in a sense it does touch Mexico. I say “looks as if” because the map doesn’t have a border mark other than the river.
While there I took a look via streetview. Recommended.
If they put the wall there, they would actually close out any American citizens living south of the wall. But, hey, a lot of those communities are majority Hispanic, so probably don’t matter, right?
Trump did so many things just for spite and to destroy anything he didn’t like or see any use for, it’s no surprise he would challenge a butterfly sanctuary. I wish this made a bigger news splash; a lot of Americans love butterflies.
That stupid wall never could amount to anything other than a symbol of being “tough on illegal immigration.” But it would leak like a sieve, there are already tunnels that cross under the Rio Grande and you can’t build a wall in the middle of a river. So, either Mexico would have to cede land, or imminent domain would have to seize land to build it. And the farmers on the wrong side of the wall would lose access to a valuable resource for irrigation. It’s nose-cutting for face-spiting. People come across because they get hired. And do work that Americans won’t take. These people always talk about how “libs don’t understand simple economics,” but when it comes to the border, they don’t see sense. Before immigration rules were weirded up, day labor across the border and back was common.
In Arizona the government bulldozed saguaros to prepare for the wall that was never built. Stupid. Just stupid nationalist emotion is the driver.
Listen, I’m happy to see someone finally considering sex trafficking as an issue to address but this is not how it’s done. Destroying a butterfly preserve? SMDH.
I myself seen a buncha Meskins with fake butterfly wings goin in that so called butterfly sanchuary. I sneaked in and didn’t see them but I heard they get sent to a sanchuary city!
Well, all those butterflies flapping their wings are causing all those hurricanes, so maybe we’d be better without them.
And fun fact about the pizza parlor: it turns out that it doesn’t even have a cellar.
No cellar! How suspicious is that?!
Right? It seems positively un-American!
Oh, come on. When I lived in Oklahoma, almost no one had a cellar. I certainly never did. Cellars are challenging in the hard Oklahoma clay. And how can you get more American than Oklahoma? It’s just filled with Trump voters!
iknklast @1,
This is why Democrats should be blasting “Trump wants to move the border and GIVE AWAY American land to Mexico!!!!!” Let the Republicans try to explain the nuances that they wouldn’t actually be moving the border, just building the wall away from the border. As the old saying goes, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
iknklast,
Then where do Oklahomans put their adult kids when they move back home?
I updated the post – I think I got the not touching Mexico bit wrong. The border of the butterfly sanctuary seems to be the river. Does that count as “touching Mexico”? Dunno.
Over the garage, of course. Or the tool shed, but only if they’re not using it for tools.
I checked the Hildago County online property map, and the butterfly association does in fact own land along the Rio Grande River. It’s not developed.