The National Butterfly Sanctuary in Texas is closed until further notice because the park and its staff have been targeted for deadly violence, as Trump cultist conspiracy nuts have deemed the center to be a secret child kidnapping and smuggling base.
In a country where many believe that Satan-worshiping pedophiles run the government and the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr. will restore a Trump presidency, the butterfly center has become the latest unlikely victim of wild misinformation and outright lies spreading rapidly online. It has become a borderland version of Comet Ping Pong, the Washington pizzeria that became the center of the baseless Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed that Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring in the restaurant. That lie spread so far that it prompted a North Carolina man to drive to the pizzeria and fire an assault rifle inside .
Becoming the focus of this type of attention has terrified and infuriated the staff at the butterfly center, some of whom have taken steps to protect themselves online and at work.
“The kind of activity, the kind of chatter going on — these are the kinds of things that happen before other horrible events where people ended up dying,” said Dr. Jeffrey Glassberg, the president of the nonprofit North American Butterfly Association, which runs the butterfly center in Mission.
He feared that someone who believed the lies could resort to violence, and cited the mass killer who targeted Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, amid a similarly heated debate over border security.
“We know it’s a dangerous lie,” said Dr. Glassberg, 74, a lifelong lover of butterflies who also developed the process of DNA fingerprinting. “People say you’re raping babies, then unhinged people come out of the woodwork.”
When people began showing up at the butterfly center, the nonprofit decided it needed to do more to provide security for staff members and visitors. It would remain closed, he said, until a plan could be developed for how to do so.
And why is the enter being targeted? You can blame Donald Trump and his horrible minions for that.
Created nearly two decades ago by Dr. Glassberg, the butterfly center in Mission,was built on the site of a former onion field. The recent trouble began in 2017 as President Donald J. Trump pushed to build new sections of border wall. The center did not support construction of the wall through its 100-acre property.
The center and its staff have endured attacks by conservative figures and from Mr. Bannon’s “We Build the Wall,” a crowdfunding campaign that raised millions to construct a border barrier on private land near the butterfly center. Mr. Bannon and Brian Kolfage, an Iraq War veteran involved in leading the effort, were indicted by federal prosecutors in 2020 on fraud charges. (Mr. Bannon was pardoned by Mr. Trump.)
During the wall-funding campaign, Mr. Kolfage repeatedly attacked the butterfly center on social media. “Instead of enabling women and children to be sex trafficked like @NatButterflies, we are taking action! This is a war for control of the most powerful country,” read one post from his Twitter account in 2019.
“When I took this job, I thought I would be able to spend a good amount of time outdoors: butterflies, birds, educating children, writing grants,” said Marianna Trevino Wright, the center’s executive director since 2012. “Now every day my children literally worry whether I’m going to survive a day at work.”
So yes, because the center refused to sell its land to Bannon for Trump's goddamn wall, it's now being targeted by his violent, arme3d, lethal cultists and the staff is in mortal peril of being assassinated.
The staff of a butterfly sanctuary.
I hate Trump. I really do.
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