Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

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.

Sunday Long Read: Zeroed Out

Our Sunday Long Read this week is Ernest Owens's New York Magazine interview with Black Lives Matter icon and Campaign Zero co-founder Johnetta Elzie on her start as an activist in Ferguson, Missouri and the near decade of peaks and valleys since the fateful days of the Michael Brown shooting.

Johnetta Elzie wants to remind you that she — and not DeRay Mckesson — was there first.

Ever since Elzie left Campaign Zero, the police-reform organization she and Mckesson founded along with Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Samuel Sinyangwe, she has refused to give on-the-record interviews about what went wrong. But now, she says, she’s ready to be blunt and honest — qualities Elzie argues have been “missing from the movement for a very long time.”

On August 9, 2014, Elzie was on the scene in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, shortly after Michael Brown was shot; she was there when his body was still on the ground.

“I saw a tweet from someone who said there was a Black man who got shot by the cops and was left dead in broad daylight,” Elzie, a native of St. Louis, says. “I went down with a few of my friends to see what was up, and my life was never the same.”

Brown was only 18 years old when he was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. Witnesses to the incident claim that during the altercation between Brown and Wilson, the former put his hands up to surrender before getting shot six times — inspiring the chant “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Protests would prompt a militarized response from the police. The public outcry got international attention.

During those intense weeks, Elzie met with Packnett Cunningham, who was the executive director of the St. Louis branch of Teach for America. According to Elzie, Packnett Cunningham wanted to introduce her to a man named DeRay Mckesson, also an affiliate of Teach for America. Mckesson had been working in Minneapolis as a schools administrator but came to Ferguson to protest. The plan was for the three of them to connect to find better ways to support efforts on the ground.

Shortly after their meeting, Mckesson launched the Ferguson Protester Newsletter as a digital hub to send information to activists across the country on what was happening in the area. Elzie and Packnett Cunningham soon joined him. Mckesson, who earned a massive following on social media for his notable presence at protests (he stood out in photographs in his signature blue bubble vest from Patagonia), found Sinyangwe, a Stanford grad and tech whiz, on Twitter. This connection would lead to the formation of Campaign Zero, which would become one of the most visible policy-driven organizations calling for police reform in America.

For many years, it was just that — an endeavor led by four unique personalities, each with his or her own superpowers: Mckesson was the outward-facing big-ideas guy, Elzie was the community-outreach voice, Packnett Cunningham was the communications-and-policy wonk, and Sinyangwe was the tech-and-data guru. Their efforts took them from the streets of Ferguson to the White House — a feat that earned them admiration and some skepticism.

In 2016, Wired named Campaign Zero one of the 20 most influential tech-driven political organizations in the country: “Campaign Zero’s founders are taking ideas long embraced by on-the-ground protesters and using the power of social media to persuade politicians to embrace those ideas, too.” According to Sinyangwe, who previously served as the board treasurer, the organization would eventually come to be worth more than $40 million.

Today, Mckesson is the sole co-founder still attached to Campaign Zero — the other three have either resigned or been fired. In addition to Elzie, Mckesson and Sinyangwe are speaking openly for the first time about how Campaign Zero got to this breaking point. (Packnett Cunningham declined to comment for this article.)

Like similar stories of movement organizations that have been thrust into the spotlight, this is a tale of how something so promising collapsed because of ego and misguidance. But it’s also one that measures the evolution of progressive views — and how the ideas behind Campaign Zero got left behind.

 

Elzie's oral history of the rise and fall of Campaign Zero is definitely worth experiencing, and it remains as a cautionary tale that we don't always get to control the movements that happen and the people who join them.

Remember that not everyone has your exact agenda, a valuable piece of advice no matter what organization you find yourself a part of.