How A Butterfly Sanctuary Became The Center of a Border War, Part Two

James and Robert continue their exploration of the war between Qanon and the Butterfly Sanctuary.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:13):
A few weeks after Colfety's tweet, the Butterfly Center closed
its rusty gate. It reopened in late April of twenty
twenty two, but the almost three months in between were
a harrowing experience for Marianna and for the staff. When
we arrived at the center in early March, there was
a police surveillance tower posted in the car park and

(00:34):
young men in hum v's on the road we traveled
down to get there. Despite them, or perhaps in a sense,
because of them. In the theater they represent, Marianna doesn't
feel safe. She carries a gun on her property even
without the wall. The militarization of the border has had
a huge impact on the center. If you walk down
to the river, she shows us some of the roads

(00:55):
and access routes that.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Have been built. Concrete goes here in the base to
the levee or midway in the levee, and then fill
the gap to make this road up here wide enough
for two to three vehicles, and then down here they'll
have a high speed all weather road. So we fully

(01:16):
expect there's porterer wall, and then there's border wall system,
the road, the lighting, the sensors, those sorts of things
part of the system, and we think the seas are
clear and alter this poor system. Otherwise they come down

(01:38):
this high speed all weather road have to slow.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Down, go up and drive along the canal.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
And we know the number one killer of border patrol
agents is both hical accidents.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
As we walk along one of the roads, we talk
about the impact the wall has had on wildlife. I
tell our story about idea I saw tried to get
around wall to a pond. For whatever reason. It was
so desperately sad that I can't forget it. The devastation
the border reeks on human life tends to get the
most press and rightfully so. But Marianna has spent years

(02:12):
watching the wall spread like a cancer of the ecosystem.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
She loves side the addition of herbicide to you know,
keep the enforcement zone dead and free of any vegetation.
It has to do with the installation of all night
bright lighting that disrupts mammals, and of course the wall
when it eliminates range.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Area, When it forms that barrier for land mammals and reptiles,
you eliminate genetic diversity from breeding, you eliminate seed distribution,
all kinds of other things.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
So no, there's no way to build.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
A wall like tossing in.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
The lower reo ram value wildlife observation.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
Of course, the human cost is even higher. Marianna first
became aware of exactly what was at stake when she,
like millions of other people, opened up her phone learned
about the most recent in a string of hate crimes
inspired by anti immigrant rhetoric.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
A very disturbed young man drove from Plano to the
Walmart in El Paso and massacred twenty two people and
injured dozens others. We were very much aware of that
and believe that is ultimately what we build. The wall

(03:41):
seeks to provoke.

Speaker 4 (03:42):
Here, the shooter, who openly targeted Mexicans and believed in
the great Replacement theory, which is common among white nationalists,
had posted a manifesto on eight chan before he started
his killing spree. In that manifesto, he complained of a
Hispanic invasion and used rhetoric that mirrored that of Colfage
and his fundraising collaborate, Steve Bannon. Twenty nineteen was the

(04:12):
year the eight Chan shootings dominated news coverage on extremism.
I found myself as the world media's go to guy
for explaining what had happened. The hardest thing to get
across was how much of the hate that had ended
in dozens of murders had started with shit posting, people
spreading racist memes and hateful jokes within the confines of
a digital echo chamber. For Marianna, the El Paso shooting

(04:34):
was a wake up call, hard evidence that online bullshit
can turn into deadly violence. The longer she spent online
reading far right conversations, the more she realized Colfage's baseless
allegations might mean real danger for her in her colleagues.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
After we filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security,
and there was publicity about that, and honestly, the timing
of that was kind of good because wild suit at
the beginning of December, so by the time media picked
up on it, people were really already distracted by Christmas,
you know, they were holiday planning and partying and shopping

(05:10):
and all that, So there wasn't this enormous explosion of
publicity and negative backlash. But we did start getting what
we call disaster tourists, people who would show up going
we heard they're going to build the wall across the
Butterfly Center show us where they're going to build our

(05:31):
president's big, beautiful wall. And as long as they behaved,
you know, we have maps, we would take their entry
fee and say, okay, now you've got to walk a
quarter mile that way to the canal that's where they're
going to build it, and then walk another one point
two miles to the border, to the actual border. And
again it gave us a chance to educate people. And

(05:55):
there was a lot of head scratching with people going,
but why would they build the wall?

Speaker 4 (06:00):
Things seemed to be going well, but then they took
a turn for the worst. Colfage had tweeted that quote.
The only butterflies we saw were swarming a decomposing body
surrounded by tons of rotting trash left behind by illegals
and his lives had become something of a fixture on
the places where Maga and Qwanon overlap. Almost none of
these people had ever visited the border, but years of
propaganda had given them a fixed set of expectations about

(06:23):
this place. They spun up ever more ridiculous fantasies, and
by late twenty nineteen, some of them had even started
to show up in person.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
About that same time, police arrested two young men with
Adam Woffen in West Texas and they had been stopped
and pulled over, and they had all kinds of weapons
and munitions and grenades and you know, improvised explosive devices

(06:53):
and everything in the car, and they said they were
headed to the border. Then the militia people started here.
And I was here the day the first ones came.
The first that we know of, came inside the building

(07:13):
to case the joint. And sometimes I sit here at
the conference table to work. Sometimes I'm in this office
right here, but I can always hear what's going on
at the front counter, and we have a doorchime. And
so there are questions that people ask when they're first
time visitors. There are questions people ask when they're part

(07:35):
of our tribe, when they're naturalists, when they've come for
the butterflies and the birds and all of that. And
then there are questions people ask that make all of
your spidy senses, you know, go off. And I heard
that kind of questioning, and whenever that happens, I get

(07:57):
my phone open to camp and I go out there.

Speaker 4 (08:02):
What the question you heard was that kind of triggered
you a bit?

Speaker 2 (08:06):
They were asking about the lay of the land and
how they would get to the river from here, and
those aren't regular questions when most people show up. They're like,
we're here on family vacation and not on our way
to South Padre. But we heard there was a butterfly center,
so we stopped, you know, so they may say, like

(08:28):
where are the butterflies? People show up thinking we're a
butterfly house, and you know, but when people immediately say
like how do I get to the river from here?
Or explain to me where the access points are, and
you're kind of like, okay, we know that's yeah. And
I took a picture of them from behind, and then

(08:52):
I went out there and I was like, you know, hello, gentlemen,
can I help you, you know, and make sure they
you know, it's like we are looking you in the face,
we can identify you. And one of them kind of
turned and walked off, and one of them stayed to
talk to me, and they wereizing, well, we've just you know,
never been here before, and tell us which all are
all about. And it was the week of Thanksgiving and

(09:15):
we'd actually just had our pot luck for staff and
some of our members, so they're like and you've got food,
and they're like, can we have some pecan pish or
have a slice of pie. But the other guy who
had peeled off, I noticed him walking around. He came
and looked back here. He was noticing the cameras and
all the places. He made his way toward the back

(09:37):
of the building and started the same thing. And I
was like, oh, and I told Luciano, go outside, photograph
all the vehicles in the parking lot, you know, get
license plates, get all the identifying information that we would need.
And sure enough, there were two trucks backed in with
the punisher stickers and the thirteen stars in a circle

(10:00):
and the you know, the don't tread on me and
this and that. One of them was from New Mexico,
and I believe the other one was from I want
to say, like Oregon or somewhere, but it was yeah,
I mean it was yeah, I've still got all that information.
And then I so after they left, we downloaded the

(10:22):
security camera video and put our photos and everything together,
and I emailed everything to the commander for DPS down
here as well as the Mission police chief, and then
asked to meet with them, and of course the Mission
PD guys had no idea about the Adam Woffen people

(10:45):
being arrested in Texas. They had no idea the militia
was in town. And then they more and more of
them kept coming. And you know, one of them would
drive up and down sherboch and his huge jack to truck.
There's a red truck with the Trump flags, and he
had two big great danes that you know, and he

(11:06):
would just be loud and annoying. He wanted everybody to
know he was here on patrol and ready to intimidate.
That was disconcerting, but the police responded. They wound up
having several interactions with various militia people and even taking

(11:29):
at least two of them that we know of into custody,
and at least one of those was turned over to
the FBI.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
The man arrested had outstanding warrants and had been flying
a drone in a controlled airspace. Another had been impersonating
a law enforcement officer. Seeing the threat, Marianna realized that
if she wanted to stay safe, she was going to
have to take matters into her own hands.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
We don't know if it was done here or somewhere else.
I assume it was not here because they didn't tell us.

Speaker 4 (11:57):
It was here.

Speaker 2 (11:59):
Oh no, the mission PD officer who is their liaison
with the FBI came and met with me and thanked
me for sharing all of that information. I mean, we
knew what hotel they were staying at. And we've had
to become our own sort of security and detective force

(12:19):
because nobody else is doing it. And I think most
people in communities around the country think the police know
what's going on and they're out there, you know, safeguarding us,
when we have learned the hard way that that is
absolutely not true.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
Soon she was plumbing the parts of the Internet that
she'd only heard mentioned on passing in the news.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
We were aware of Pizzagate. Yeah, we were aware that
they had declared that Hillary Clinton and associates were running
a Satanic child you know, sex ring with you know,
ritual sacrifice and all kinds of preposterous stuff out of
the basement of a DC pizza parlor, you know where

(13:07):
the pizza parlor didn't even have a basement, much less
a Satanic ritual child six trafficking ring.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Just a few weeks after the shooting in Opaso, we
build the war broke ground on their Phase two project
within sight, very much within shooting distance to the National
Butterfly Center mayonn and was under no illusion about the stakes.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
They know that they have the ability to incite violence
in that way to motivate people to take action, and
they use a lot of really inflammatory rhetoric. Even Steve
Bannon's broadcast is called the War Room. You know, we're

(13:50):
all at war. We're at war against the cartels, and
we're at war for the soul of our nation, and
we're at war against the Democrats, and you know, and
now they're at war against the Butterfly Center.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
In addition to her intelligence gathering, she started taking steps
to protect herself and her workers. It weren't exactly the
sort of thing she'd expected once you took a job.
What she'd hoped to write grants and talk to kids
about butterflies.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
We had to develop some very rudimentary safety plans, like
if there were a shooting, where you would shelter, how
we would try to safeguard visitors and other things to
like the women on staff, even the guys on staff,

(14:41):
like I never have my hair down. I always keep
it up or under a hat or something. Because you
just learn in basic self defense that somebody's gonna grab
your ponytail or your hair as the fastest, easiest way
to take control of your whole body. Basically, So we
just we all take a variety of precautions, and it

(15:04):
has radically changed the way we we operate here and
the way we perceive this place, which used to be.
I mean, we were blissful idiots coming to work in
this oasis of flowers and butterflies every day. And you know,

(15:24):
my children described me as snow white that I'm out
there just with the you know, the butterflies landing on me,
and the hummingbirds coming up and saying hello.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
Luckily, she wasn't alone. As soon as people heard about
the threats to her in the center, she began to
receive messages of support. It turns out it's not only
right wing grifts. You can summon people to remote part
of southern Texas where the Rio Grande prissed through the reeds.
A local switch to English and Spanish as a mood
suits in. Groups from across the country, from veterans to

(15:57):
indigenous nations, reached out to a support.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
So first we had the water protectors and indigenous peoples
like the Kadisoko, Mekrudo and Navajo and other nations. People
came here and set up camp. They were good being
here night and day to be our eyes and ears

(16:22):
and a deterrent for the militia entering the property. And
along with them came others like the Sierra Club Military
Outdoors Program participants who also camped out here for a week.

Speaker 3 (16:39):
And we had.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
The Brown Berets and Veterans for Peace, and even folks
from the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. I mean,
I hate to even include that since we get called pinko, commie, libtards,
snowflakes and all of that. But those folks showed up

(17:04):
willing to help in the face of fascism, in the
face of these militia.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
But all this stress and the need for constant patrols
and vigilance to gets toll, even with support. Being the
center of a fabricated firestorm of lives is no fun.
It wasn't just Marianna who's impacted. The constant stress and
the non stop over flights of the border patrol helicopters
impacted her staff as well.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
And then in twenty nineteen, like all bets are off.
Anybody can say anything they want. They can. You know.
I hate to say it, but people get mental health
days now if they pay, if they just for whatever reason,
are like, I can't deal with this shit today. They
don't have to come to work and I've lost good employees.

Speaker 4 (17:49):
In twenty twenty, briefly, we built the wall, won an
injunction and kept building their privately funded wall. Massive erosion
quickly undermined it, but the International Boundary and Water Commission
report on the construt auction wasn't completed until March, by
which time we build the Wall had completed three miles
of wall. The consensus among hydrologists and engineers interviewed by
Pro Publica for a report on the wall said that

(18:11):
the Rio Grande had scoured against the base of the wall,
causing erosion and putting the wall in danger of collapse.
With its very shallow foundation, Colfager's wall was an immediate
danger of toppling into the river. In response to this,
Trump did what Trump does and took to Twitter to
blame everyone else. In July of twenty twenty, he tweeted,
I disagreed with doing this very small, tiny section of

(18:32):
the wall going on to say it was only done
to make me look bad, and perhaps it now doesn't
even work. Should have been built like rest of wall
five hundred plus miles. I should also note that he
misspelled perhaps in that tweet. While Colfage was still reeling
from this condemnation, the acting US Attorney for the Southern
District of New York announced indictments of Colfage and Bannon

(18:53):
for wire fraud. The charging documents themselves are an unusually
compelling read. We did a couple of episodes of Behind
the Bastards covering them. The whole situation would be much funnier, though,
if it weren't for all of the lives that Colfage
and his cronies directly threatened. Anyway, it turned out they
had been taking huge sums for their own personal use,
while concealing their use of funds that donors thought would
be spent on the Wall by creating quote sham invoices

(19:16):
and accounts to launder donations and cover up their crimes. Initially,
all four entered not guilty Please. They seemed to be
buying time hoping that Trump would pardon them. In the end,
he did pardon Steve Bannon and you can make of

(19:37):
that what you will, but the others were left to
hang in the wind. This April, Colfage entered a guilty
plea to these and other charges. The failure of Bannon
and Colfage's grift didn't stop them from using the Butterfly
Sanctuary as a punching bag in their fundraising grants that
they published to whatever sites had not gotten around to
banning them yet. As right wing radicals were deplatformed from

(19:58):
Facebook and Twitter and the lead up to the two
twenty election, Marianna stopped getting tagged in their rants, but
they didn't stop ranting. Soon as it became clear that
Trump had lost the election and refused to concede it,
he began to lie about the election and then attempted
to overturn it by encouraging his supporters to storm the
US capital. At this point, it became clearer that the
same people who were fanatical about building the wall had

(20:19):
also become entirely detached from reality. Even after Biden had
been inaugurated and their lie had failed, A who's who,
or perhaps a who's not in jail for sedition Yet
of MAGA grifters continued to focus their rage at the
QAnon adjacent fantasies they'd concocted about unspecified cartels smuggling children
across a butterfly sanctuary to sexually abuse them. Sometimes they

(20:40):
claimed they cut the heads off of children so that
the corpses were easier to transport. It's the kind of habitual,
unhinged escalation that liberals and lefties on Twitter loved to
consume mockingly via aggregator accounts that enable mass gawking at
the far right. But for Marianna it was not at
all amusing.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
Like I didn't even know rumble existed. I didn't know
what rumble was. And then we were sent the video
that Christy Hutcherson and Lindsay Something from South Carolina made
here in front of the Butterfly Center.

Speaker 5 (21:13):
And you know, of.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
Course there's the ben Berkwam stuff, and you know, we
don't watch War Room, but sometimes I do have to
go find and film portions of those broadcasts where Steve
Bannon is still bashing us and using that platform to
bolster the lies and and you know, really stir up

(21:42):
the the terrible sentiment and ultimately we fear the stochastic terrorism.

Speaker 4 (21:52):
Let's stop for a second and go into more detail
about the people she's referencing here. Christy Hutcherson founded a
group called Women Fighting for America. On their websites about page,
they note, today Americans closely held beliefs and freedom seem
to be under constant attack from mainstream media, elitist academia,
judicial activists, foreign aggressors, and many times elected politicians. These
attacks highlight the two extremely different ideologies fighting for our

(22:15):
country's future, where we stand by and let America become
a socialist Marxist communist nation and give our children up
to this hopeless vision. I should also note that Women
Fighting for America actively solicits donations, which they note are
not tax deductible. Hutchison and cited rioters during the January
sixth insurrection and is generally what you might call a
B list MAGA star. Ben Berkwam is a correspondent for

(22:38):
Real America Voice, the network that hosts Steve Bannon's War
Room podcasts. In general, the folks most focused on harassing
the Butterfly Sanctuary are a lower grade of MAGA influencer
than the major national names, but they all have connections
higher up to those big names and when they do
land a successful line of propaganda, it tends to filter
up quite efficiently to those names. In January of twenty

(23:02):
twenty two, a year after the failed coup at the Capitol,
some of these MAGA holdouts came to the Rio Grande
Valley to pick on a target they thought they might
have a better chance of taking. The We Stand America
Border Security rally was headlined by the few remaining Q
and On conspiracy theorists and supporters of former President Trump
who had not gotten in trouble for the Capital Stuff.
In part, like the entire phenomenon, the conference was a

(23:24):
giant grift, but for many of the people taken up
with its religious proclamations and wild lies of child trafficking
and sexual abuse, it was the last chance they felt
they had to stop something evil. Marianna up until that time,
hadn't been aware of how serious the threats against her
sanctuary were. Then a friend involved in local Republican politics
reached out and told her be armed at all times

(23:46):
or out of town. Ahead of the rally, bin Berkwam
appeared in a video on Getter outside of the sanctuary
holding a pair of children's shoes which he claimed were
evidence of trafficking and stated that he and the Butterfly
Center were calling on Joe Biden to shut down the border.

Speaker 6 (24:01):
We're down here. We're actually heading down to Benson State
Park to look at the end of the wall where
Joe Biden stopped building the wall, and this place, the
Butterfly Center. They said they were afraid they had some
credible threats that something was going to go on. So
we came down here and we want to join our
voices with the Butterfly Center and say we stand against
the credible threats of the cartel's trafficking children through the

(24:24):
Butterfly Center, and we demand we call on Joe Biden
to close this border down to protect the butterflies, because
we all care about butterflies. I mean, you know the
children that are being sold. These shoes were from one
of the children that was trafficked across. This wristband was
from one of the children that was trafficked across. Smaller
than my four year old daughter's arm. But what really
matters to the Democrats are the butterflies, and so we

(24:47):
unite with them if that's what if that's what it's
going to take to shut this border.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
Down.

Speaker 6 (24:52):
We unite with them and say protect the butterflies, Joe,
close down the border, because we know you don't care
about the kids.

Speaker 4 (25:00):
The same day, Piper Lumis and Hutcherdson appeared in their
own video holding the same suspiciously new looking children's shoes
and they're horrifically over exposed video. They suggested that NBC
was quote more concerned about butterflies than the little children,
and that the Butterfly Center was used as a route
for the sex trafficking of children. Together, the videos title
said they would save America.

Speaker 5 (25:20):
Hey everyone, this is Lindsay Piper Loomis. I'm here with
my bestie, Christy Hutcherson and founder of Women Fighting for
America went to the border with her last year for
six days. We are here at the Butterfly Center. Look
at the credible threat. They said, there's going to be
a big protest here. There's no protests. They're protesting. What
tell them about the butterflies?

Speaker 2 (25:39):
Tell them why?

Speaker 5 (25:40):
What was the big deal?

Speaker 7 (25:41):
I'm not really sure, but I got news. I've been
hit by every single tabloid there is that there's some
kind of credible threat with butterflies here in mission Texas
from we stand America and women fighting for America. I
can tell you women fighting for America loves butterflies, and
we care about butterflies very much. So I wanted to
down here and see what the credible threat was and

(26:03):
if we have to protect the butterflies, we need to
protect the butterflies. I agree with that, So Biden, why
don't you build the wall to protect the butterflies? Yeah,
it's really that simple. But my question to this administration
and to the National Butterfly Museum.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
Here, why are you more concerned?

Speaker 7 (26:22):
Why are you more concerned about butterflies than you are
than the little children who are being trafficked right behind
this center, And they use the butterfly land to come
up through and bring these children who are trafficked and
these women who are trafficked. You know, Tom Homan yesterday
was speaking on stage and was telling one of the
stories where he's seen a little child where he had

(26:43):
to rescue and that one child had over twenty two
different people's DNA inside of them. That's disgusting. So as
much as I care about butterflies, I can tell you this, Lindsay,
I care a lot more about our children and the
children who are coming up and being exploited for the
different countries by the cartels. That's what I care about.

Speaker 5 (27:03):
So I've been telling you guys about how children are
tattooed according to how they're going to be trafficked or
sold into what type of trafficking, organ harvesting, sex, drug
and human trafficking. How they use their body they kill them.
They use their body cavities to haul drugs across the
border till the bodies start decaying. They find the body's decapitated.
Told you about the rate trees. But here we actually
have a shoe from and this actually this is this is.

Speaker 7 (27:27):
What so lindsay, this is a little bracelet and there's
a little how much money it costs for this person
to be brought aside to America from the cartels. The
other thing is is that the cartels, when they're getting
ready to move children, they call them tickets. So they
have no regard for life, they don't care. They'll throw
them in the river, they'll leave them in the desert
to die, and they call them tickets. That's how disgusting

(27:49):
this whole thing is. And America needs to wake up
and understand we are at a war with the cartels.
We are at a war to save our children.

Speaker 5 (27:57):
And every so much. Yeah, and every state's a border
ste eight and South Carolina's ranked one of the top
in the nation for trafficking. Lindsey Piper lymits with Christy Hudgerson, together,
we're saving America.

Speaker 4 (28:07):
God bless But this time they didn't stop with posting
It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 7 (28:18):
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Speaker 2 (28:32):
Thanks for listening