Luke Bowen.  Never heard of him?  Well, you will now.  Luke Bowen is was political director of extreme anti-choice activist PAC Texas Right to Life.  He’s also apparently been a blogger for the Texas GOP.  David Lowe, a Republican candidate for the Texas State House, tweeted last night that Bowen, trying to help Lowe’s primary opponent, had smeared him by spreading a rumor that he is a human trafficker.  Nice, huh?  Well, justice and extreme irony collided a couple of weeks ago when Bowen was arrested in Conroe on charges of…wait for it…online soliciting of a minor for sex.

Texas Right to Life says they fired him the same day.  SubStack blog Current Revolt has all the juicy details including the arrest record.

What is it that they say about those who scream the loudest?  I think it has something to do with the most guilty.  The irony is a bonus.

Luke Bowen of @TXRightToLife helped spread a rumor that I was a part of human trafficking on behalf of the @StephanieKlick campaign. Today, we find out that he was arrested for solicitation of a minor. Disgusting.
https://t.co/RmmCxtlcFj

— David Lowe for Texas (@DavidLowe4Texas) August 25, 2022

The National Butterfly Center, located in Mission Texas is (was) the North American Butterfly Association’s (NABA) “flagship facility and a primary focus of its efforts aimed at educating the public about the value of biodiversity, the beauty of the natural world, the wonder of butterflies, particularly, and the powerful role they play in maintaining healthy ecosystems and sustainable food resources.”  The NABA was founded in 1993 to study and preserve the butterfly populations that migrate between North and South America, and hold butterfly counts and other conservation programs to protect these delicate creatures.

Why am I writing about a butterfly sanctuary?  Because it was forced to close indefinitely in late January after suffering years of harassment by QAnon followers and other rightwing nutjobs who believe that the sanctuary is not really a butterfly center, but actually a hub for child sex trafficking.  Remember PizzaGate where some idiot shot up a pizza shop believing bullshit that it was being used by cannibalistic Democrats led by Hillary Clinton for child sex trafficking? Well, the same thing has been going on now for 4 years at the butterfly center after rightwing grifter and pal of Steve Bannon, Brian Kolfage, unleashed a barrage of false accusations in retaliation for the center filing suit to stop TFG’s construction of his border wall right through the sanctuary.  Kolfage, who, along with Bannon, is under federal indictment for fraud over their “We Build the Wall” project that duped a whole lot of gullible people out of about $20 million.  Kolfage is well known for releasing nonsense and wild conspiracy theories into the rightwing Noise Machine to attack his perceived enemies.  He’s been banned from social media for all kinds of things including spreading conspiracy theories and creating fake accounts, but his followers do most of his dirty work now for him.

One of those followers is a fringe candidate for Congress from Virginia, Kimberly Lowe, who is apparently so far out there that she was even uninvited to the anti-immigration “We Stand America” rally recently in South Texas, but she took the opportunity while there to “investigate illegal immigration and sex trafficking” at the butterfly center with her friend who was apparently posing as a Secret Service agent.  It went about as you’d expect, with a physical altercation between the center’s director, Marianna Treviño Wright, Lowe, and her friend.  Lowe had demanded to see where the “smuggling” was going on, and, well, you can guess the rest.  The center had planned to close for the duration of the rally, but is now closed indefinitely due to the danger posed to the center and its staff by nutjobs.

It’s easy to stand back and shake your head at the nonsense that proliferates on social media, but this stuff is so corrosive that it’s actually endangering lives and has poisoned all reason, threatening the very foundation of our system of government. It’s especially bad in Texas and other red states where this nonsense has infiltrated once mainstream conservatism and goofy conspiracy theories are now repeated by elected leaders.  Since the base is now crazy, and gerrymandering has cemented it in, I don’t see a path for a return to any kind of reason.

We’ve talked at length about QAnon adherents bending reality, believing wild conspiracy theories, being anti-vaxxers, anti-mask, anti-science, and anti-common sense.  Most amazing about this phenomenon, though, is there absolute devotion to their delusion to the point of dying for it.  To wit, I give you Veronica Wolski, a high profile QAnon advocate from Chicago, who publicly protested against masks, vaccines, and against all things not Trump and who died of COVID this week.  Her dying is not the story, though; the story was that Lin Wood (yes, THAT Lin Wood) whipped up a QAnon protest last week in an attempt to force the hospital she was in to administer Ivermectin, the horse de-wormer, as treatment for COVID.  He has now declared that the hospital, Amita Health Resurrection Medical Center, caused her death through…wait for it…malpractice. He’s also made the same claim against the hospitals where Herman Cain died and another right wing activist and GOP party operative Presley Stutts.  Of course, Cain and Stutts died after being infected while not practicing normal masking and distancing protocols.  In fact, it’s likely that Cain was infected at the Trump campaign rally in Tulsa.

In an unrelated story, the fifth hate radio talker died this week.  He was Bob Enyart, an anti-science talking head and bible thumping preacher.  He was a charming fellow who made his career by bashing AIDS patients, calling for the death penalty for women who received abortions, and spreading the lie that the vaccines were made from aborted fetal tissue.  The irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

The stupidity of these people wouldn’t be so bad if they were only killing themselves, but they’re risking the lives of many other people AND stressing the medical staffs who are having to risk their own lives to treat these self destructive idiots.

Jesus.  Literally.

Yesterday, notable public figures paid their respects at solemn ceremonies at Ground Zero, Shanksville PA, and the Pentagon to mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11.  At ground zero, the Bidens, Obamas, and the Clintons were all present plus Schumer, Pelosi, Bloomberg and other well known public figures.  Bruce Springsteen even played and sang at the ceremony.  GWB & Laura, along with Harris attended the Shanksville ceremony, and Biden later stopped there and laid a wreath at the Pentagon late in the afternoon.

The glaring absence? Trump.  A spokesperson for the 9/11 Museum and Memorial confirmed to the NY Times that all former presidents were provided the same information about the ceremony, but Trump mercifully didn’t show.  How did he spend his day remembering 9/11?  Indeed he was also in New York, but he spent his day releasing statements attacking Biden about Afghanistan and playing some of his greatest Oldies, then visited a NYPD precinct and a firehouse, where he continue talking about himself and Rudy Giuliani and attacking Biden.

After, Trump was scheduled to address a religious rally virtually on the National Mall in DC called Let Us Worship led by religious nut and anti-government activist Sean Feucht, whose security team has included at least one of the insurrectionists charged in the January 6th attack on the Capitol as his security team.  I haven’t heard how that went, and actually don’t care.

Keeping it classy to the end, Trump finished his day commemorating 9/11 by…wait for it… guest hosting a Pay Per View boxing event with Jr. at a casino in Hollywood Florida hired by Triller, a social media competitor to TikTok.  The fight night included a “professional match” between 58 year old Evander Hollyfield and some mixed martial fighter. Oscar De La Hoya had been scheduled to fight, but is hospitalized with COVID.  Hollyfield was a last minute addition, and the results were as you might expect.  The event really wasn’t a fight night, it was really a publicity stunt by Trump for Trump, as the crowd at the casino was waving printed signs saying “Bring Back Trump” and “Trump Won”.  Watchers also participated in a live chat where viewers floated QAnon conspiracy theories, insults about Hunter Biden, etc, etc.  Since the entire evening was the cheesiest of cheesy, Trump, the King of Tacky, was right at home commemorating one of the most solemn days in modern US history.

Phil Valentine; Jimmy DeYoung; Dick Farrel; Marc Bernier.  These four guys have several things in common – Syndicated hate radio talkers, anti-vaxxers, anti-science, racists, climate-deniers, religionists, and all dead.  Marc Bernier, who had dubbed himself “Mr. Anti-Vax” was the latest hate talker to have died after spreading disinformation on vaccines and conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus pandemic. His death, along with the others, not only demonstrates in real time the dangers of playing Russian Roulette with a deadly virus, but also lays bare the cesspool of disinformation they helped create and perpetuate.

Rush Limbaugh was the most significant figure in the rise of modern hate radio in the 90s, casting the Clintons as objects of hyper partisan hate, conspiracy theories, and grievance.  Remember the list of people that the Clintons supposedly murdered?  That vicious lie was so pervasive that it is now embedded in the DNA of political conservatives and formed the foundation of the idiotic Q Anon conspiracy theory culminating in a violent attack on the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the US government.

These four deplorables, included in a much larger group of deplorables like Alex Jones, feed a steady diet of anger, lies, distortions, gross exaggerations, conspiracy theories, and right wing red meat into a counterculture drowning in obsession and devotion to self-destruction.  Trump is one of the most successful politicians to tap into this counterculture which has formed the core of his base, dominating all of rightwing politics today and destroying what’s left of the Republican Party.  The ecosystem they enable has sickened millions, caused untold deaths, and is holding back the entire country from recovery from the pandemic.  These low budget hate talkers are the heartbeat of this ecosystem, pumping toxic disinformation into syndicated networks that is literally getting people killed including those doing the pumping.

I wish no harm to anyone, but it’s almost impossible for me personally to have any empathy for the self-inflicted death these hate talkers caused themselves and untold others, not to mention the financial burden of huge hospital bills left to their families to carry.  Is this the way nature cleans the gene pool?  That judgment is above my pay grade, but my observation is that this is exactly what’s happening; unfortunately they’re taking untold numbers of innocents with them, and that is nothing but tragedy in its purest form.  Perhaps all this senseless ignorance and death will drive at least some of their adherents to rethink their devotion.  We can only hope.

NOT THE ONION:

Apparently the cicada that landed on Biden’s shirt collar a couple of days ago was not actually a cicada; it was a QAnon “Comm” showing that their “plan”, whatever that is, is working.  Apparently the hundreds of thousands of hillbillies who believe in QAnon (still) were unaware of the science behind the emergence of cicadas every 17 years, and have connected their activity as definitely a communication from Q to be decoded.  The clowns are hung up on all kinds of “signs” and 17 is one of those signs since Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet and clearly it’s NO COINKYDINK that cicadas have emerged in the season when Trump is going to be reinstated to the presidency, right?

File under: Holy Shit These People are Completely Nuts.