It's About More Than Butterflies, It's About Authoritarians Peddling Fear
With the help of Trump, Steve Bannon, and other extremists, the Rio Grande Valley was transformed into a content factory for right-wing YouTubers, militia crowdfunders, and far-right news sites.
First off, a bit of housekeeping with an invitation to our readers to an online Q&A Todd will be participating in Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. (MST) with the Borderlands Literature and Film Circle about his book “Build Bridges, Not Walls.” To participate and learn more, you can sign up here. Hope to see you there!
It's About More than Butterflies, It’s About Authoritarians Peddling Fear
Last week, the National Butterfly Center, a nonprofit nature preserve located in the border city of Mission, Texas, closed for the “immediate future” due to threats from the far-right. In the coming weeks the center will review its safety protocols to determine whether it can safely reopen. When I spoke about this to Marianna Treviño Wright, the center’s executive director, I’d never heard her sound so defeated. (For more background on this, check out my series “Butterflies and Barbarians.”)
If you’re new to this story, you might be puzzled that a butterfly sanctuary became a target for death threats. News of the center’s closing was covered last week by several national media outlets, including The New York Times, all trying to unravel the perplexing saga.
But the National Butterfly Center’s closing really has nothing to do with the center itself. At issue is the center’s location, on the river in the Rio Grande Valley—the most politicized, overpoliced, and surveilled stretch of border in the country. Treviño Wright has been protesting this state of affairs for years, making her a target.
Treviño Wright became the center’s executive director in 2012, just as the Rio Grande Valley began to see a significant increase in asylum seekers. Because of its subtropical climate and southerly location, the valley, which comprises the four southernmost counties on the Texas-Mexico border, is one of the preeminent places in the U.S. to see rare butterfly and bird species. It’s also the section of U.S.-Mexico border closest to Central America and the preferred migratory route not only for birds and butterflies but also for asylum seekers.
During this time, Texas’s Republican governor, Rick Perry, had ambitions to run for the White House. He’d spent many hours on Fox News flying over the Rio Grande Valley in a police helicopter with host Greta Van Susteren hyping the border as a lawless place and asylum seekers as having links to Al-Qaeda. State police in helicopters began pursuing vehicles near the river, shooting our their tires. Within months, two men were fatally shot and another wounded after a police helicopter opened fire on a truck carrying undocumented men from Guatemala.
The fatal shooting took place just 10 miles from the butterfly center. Neither Perry nor the state police bothered to let communities know that they were shooting from helicopters at moving vehicles. Instead, it was debuted on a cable TV show called Texas Drug Wars.
For years, the Rio Grande Valley was used as a stage for countless Republican campaign ads and political ambitions. But then Donald Trump ran for president and things truly got weird.
The Grifter Carnival and Right-Wing Media Sideshow
No place in the country—other than possibly Florida and Arizona—has suffered more from the rise of Donald Trump and the splintering of the GOP.
With the help of Trump, his adviser Steve Bannon, and other extremists, the valley was transformed into a content factory for right-wing YouTubers, militia crowdfunders, and far-right news sites like One America News, Newsmax, and Real America’s Voice News, which now airs Bannon’s War Room, after he was kicked off other social media platforms for inciting violence.
The virulent, algorithm-driven ecosystem of misinformation about the border that Bannon and company built has now morphed into a big-tent carnival for QAnon conspiracy theorists, Big Lie believers, and anti-choice evangelists. And the Rio Grande Valley is an obligatory campaign stop for any candidate seeking Trump’s attention and endorsement.
With midterm elections fast approaching, hundreds of candidates nationwide are running their campaigns on unfounded, often dangerous fallacies about the border, targeting humanitarian organizations as child sex trafficking rings and hyping Tanton-esque “Great Replacement” invasion scenarios—all in the hope that their campaigns will go viral on social media and launch them from the fringe to mainstream Mar-a-Lago status.
To enable this phenomenon, a whole industry of fixers has cropped up, which includes former Border Patrol agents, the Border Patrol union, and former law enforcement, as well as some members of right-wing media who profit from arranging tours for out-of-towners, which includes the obligatory safari to the banks of the Rio Grande, in the style of Senator Ted Cruz.
“Saving America”
In late January, Kimberly Lowe, a Republican who is running for a congressional seat in Roanoke, Virginia, was on just such a safari, led by a retired police officer in the city of Laredo, where she live streamed wide-eyed nighttime dispatches about cartel shootouts and how the U.S. government “is trafficking people and children are being raped, even babies, until they’re done with them” to her Facebook followers.
On a two-week-long driving tour of the Texas border in her red Range Rover, Lowe said she was on a fact-finding mission to “save America.” “We got lots of guns,” she claimed in one Facebook live video after following a government bus for asylum seekers not far from the butterfly center. “We are very armed.”
On January 21, Lowe arrived at the butterfly center, accompanied by a woman identified only as Michelle, who claimed to be Lowe’s security detail. The two strolled into the butterfly center’s lobby, according to Treviño Wright, and said they didn’t want to pay admission. They just wanted one of the employees to open the center’s gate so they could drive down to the river and see the “illegals crossing on rafts.”
Treviño Wright was immediately on guard. In 2019 the butterfly center filed a lawsuit against a crowdfunding scheme masterminded by Steve Bannon and Brian Kolfage, a triple-amputee veteran and slinger of right-wing misinformation, called We Build the Wall, which raised $25 million. The group built a three-mile-long private border wall near the butterfly center in the river’s floodplain, violating international treaty laws with Mexico and endangering wildlife and the center. In August 2020, Bannon, Kolfage, and two other men were indicted on conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering through We Build the Wall.
The center was already a target after filing a lawsuit against Trump’s wall in 2017, and with the lawsuit in 2019, Kolfage, who has a history of viciously harassing people online, targeted Treviño Wright and the center, claiming it was a front for child sex trafficking and releasing photoshopped images on social media of what looked like a deflated raft next to a dock at the center, implying that it was a staging area for “sex traffickers.” After the online attacks, Treviño Wright and her staff received hundreds of death threats, and armed militia members showed up at the center.
Treviño Wright quickly googled Lowe and saw photos of her with Trump and with a Republican candidate in Texas who has accused Catholic Charities, a well-respected humanitarian organization in the area, of being child sex traffickers, yet another QAnon-inspired lie. And she saw Lowe’s recent Facebook posts from Laredo and other cities along the border.
Treviño Wright said she would not open the gate for the two women. “You are here to promote your agenda. And your agenda is not welcome here,” said Treviño Wright, who recorded the interaction.
“So, you’re not for keeping the illegals out?” said Michelle.
“So, you’re OK with children being sex trafficked and raped and murdered?” Lowe said.
“That is not at all what this is about,” said Treviño Wright. “We have Girl Scouts spend the night here. That’s how safe it is.”
Treviño Wright asked the women to leave, and Lowe called her nasty.
“I’m federal and I work for the Secret Service, so nothing is off limits to me,” said Michelle.
Treviño Wright laughed. “That’s hilarious,” she said.
Lowe held up her cell phone up and started filming Treviño Wright. “So we’re here with a woman who is not a nice person and is OK with children …”
Treviño Wright pushed Lowe’s cell phone away. She did not want a repeat of 2019’s barrage of death threats, which came after Kolfage manufactured lies about her and the center online.
Treviño Wright said Michelle tackled her to the ground and took her cell phone. Her teenage son, who was working at the center that day, ran to her aid, then called 911. In the meantime, Michelle fled with Treviño Wright’s cell phone toward the Range Rover, according to a police affidavit filed by Treviño Wright. But she was able to prevent Michelle from leaving and insisted that she return her phone. In the meantime, Treviño Wright’s son was closing the gate to the center’s parking lot, believing that the women still had his mother’s phone.
The women took off in the Range Rover and veered toward Treviño Wright’s son, according to the police affidavit, nearly hitting him as they escaped through the partially closed gate.
After Lowe’s visit, Treviño Wright learned about the We Stand America rally being held in neighboring McAllen that weekend, which Lowe was in town to attend. Claiming that “illegals are beholden to their Marxist overlords,” the political rally promising “election integrity from a biblical worldview” included a veritable who’s who of Trump loyalists, including disgraced lieutenant general Michael Flynn, former ICE director Thomas Homans, former Border Patrol chief Mark Morgan, and far-right Arizona representative Mark Finchem, a QAnon adherent.
A former Republican state official whom Treviño Wright had known locally for years warned her that she should be “armed at all times or out of town, and consider closing the center,” she said, while the rally took place over the weekend. “He told me we are going to be targeted.” After talking with Jeffrey Glassberg, the center’s founder, the board and her staff, they announced that the center would close for the weekend.
After the butterfly center incident, Lowe took to Facebook again to complain that because of the press coverage, she had received several death threats from the “loony Left” and had been “canceled” by Finchem and organizers of the We Stand America rally, “because they believe the far-left media hit pieces that were done.” Lowe also said that her VIP pass to the event—which cost $2,500—with privileges, including a private tour of the border wall with Flynn and Homan, had been revoked.
Even with the center closed, participants showed up at the butterfly preserve anyway, after they attended a rally at the border wall, where they sang “Amazing Grace” while being guarded by a man holding an assault rifle. (Local media report that less than 100 people showed for the rally.) Christie Hutcherson, who organized the We Stand America rally, and who is the founder of Women Fighting for America, recorded a video on Rumble in front of the center with Lynz Piper-Loomis, a Republican congressional candidate from South Carolina. In the video, the two women hold a baby shoe and talk about how babies are being killed and “their body cavities being used to haul drugs across the border until their bodies start decaying.”
Along with the women was Ben Bergquam, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice News. Bergquam recorded his own message for Twitter talking about “cartels trafficking children through the butterfly center” as he held the same baby shoe prop. He demanded that “the Biden administration stop the illegal invasion to save butterflies … because we know that Democrats don’t care about children.”
Within days, the center announced that it would close for the “immediate future.” I asked Treviño Wright when it might open again. “A lot is going to depend on the police and the other professionals that the board has decided they need to engage, in order for us to move forward safely,” she said.
One of the saddest things about this story, and there are many, is that the butterfly center was one of the last public places where residents could experience the river and the beauty that surrounds it. Lately, when I interview people in their 20s who were raised in the Rio Grande Valley, I ask them if they’ve ever spent time at the river. Many of them say no, even though it is a 10-minute drive at most. But who can blame them? Much of the river has been walled off and is guarded by the Border Patrol, the National Guard, and state police. It has become like a prison, built by lies and fear.
Thank you Melissa - outstanding!! (though heartbreaking and dystopian)
Love your in-depth reporting and thorough analysis. Please keep us informed. Thank you