This is vintage Matt Gaetz, meaning vintage lies. We live in a world of dual narratives and reality is nothing more than a point of view, at least in MAGA world. And granted, people do experience the same event differently, no question about that. But actual empirical evidence doesn’t change. So in MAGA world, that means you lie about whatever facts are inconvenient.
Gaetz doesn’t like immigrants. Gaetz loves Donald Trump. Ergo, he’s always going to find a way to pin something that Trump did wrong on the immigrants, particularly migrant Mexicans, if that’s at all possible to do.
Watch what he does here.
Matt Gaetz says that migrants are creating a food shortage in the US by destroying monarch butterfly habitats. pic.twitter.com/WbDnNwqs8B
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) July 23, 2022
Huh? That’s what we say. Here’s an old Daily Beast article from 2019:
“A treasured butterfly sanctuary along the Rio Grande says the only invasion they’ve seen is feds trampling wildlife and installing hidden surveillance cameras.”
President Donald Trump is expected to sign a deal this week funding 55 miles of his border wall. The new barriers won’t meet his goal of sealing off the country’s southern border. But they will smash through an American butterfly sanctuary, whose leaders are suing the government.
Trump’s xenophobic presidential campaign cast the southern border as an imminent threat, with immigrants bringing crime and corrosion. But his proposed wall across the U.S.-Mexico border is violating constitutional rights and destroying a treasured wildlife institution, the North American Butterfly Association said in a petition for a temporary restraining order, filed on behalf of the National Butterfly Center on Monday. The center, which currently stands in Mission, Texas, will have its land cut through by the wall. And even before the wall’s construction, feds are allegedly trampling the center’s grounds, ripping out plants, harassing staff, and installing hidden surveillance cameras.
The National Butterfly Center is a 100-acre property in the Rio Grande Valley, “one of the most biologically diverse areas in North America,” Marianna Wright, the center’s executive director told The Daily Beast. A hotbed for birds and rare plants, the wildlife preserve hosts thousands of school children every year. […]
The preliminary work has already damaged the delicate ecosystem. Wright described Border Patrol agents stringing chains of old car tires to the back of vehicles and dragging them around the area, churning up constant dust that disrupts wildlife.
“They claim the tire-dragging is absolutely fundamental to their ability to detect and apprehend people who may be crossing into the country illegally,” she said. “They drag the tires around, and if they find new footprints in the dirt, then they know someone has passed through. After the fact, then they can look for them or call in the helicopters to search for people who may have already passed through.”
We keep messing with these delicate eco systems. We’ve disrupted the bees and the Monarch butterflies and now that it’s gotten to a crisis level, along comes the likes of Matt Gaetz and blames it all on a group of people he’s already demonized, so as to both demonize them further and to exculpate Donald Trump and his minions, who are the responsible parties.
Lies, lies and more lies. We are no longer one country, listening to the same news on TV every night, we are two countries, with two different versions of reality going and we are the worse for it. We cannot continue this way. We’re at a point of existential crisis with both climate control out of hand, and the food chain being disrupted, not only by ecological matters like this one but by Vladimir Putin threatening to withhold grain from India and China and create a global food crisis and mass starvation.
Facts are the building blocks of intelligent action. People like Matt Gaetz who make up facts need to be voted out of office. The stakes are too high. We need leadership not performative jackassery.
I’m surprised Gaetz is the least bit concerned; after all, the monarch butterfly is a “migrant” itself. Many monarchs routinely migrate from the central US to central Mexico (mainly the State of Michoacán) for the winter and then back in the spring.
And last time I checked, monarch butterflies don’t carry silly paperwork like “passports” or “visas” to facilitate their migration.
We live in the transit zone here in San Antonio. I have a few tropical milkweeds as do my neighbors and I do get Monarchs in spring and fall. I am also a member of the butterfly center, but have not had a chance to visit in the last few years. The endangered species listing for Monarchs is so troubling because there has been a great deal of work done to protect the Monarchs in Mexico and despite all that they still are declining. They have evolved to survive in a certain climate and that climate is changing faster than they can adapt.
BTW, if anyone claims the border is so open and Biden is not enforcing border security like greg abbott claims. 149 Border patrol agents were close enough to Robb Elementary to be part of the almost 400 police standing outside doing nothing.
Matt is only interested cuz he heard there were Hispanic ‘butterflies’, & all were under 18 years old.
Growing up the Monarch was the most common butterfly I saw. I lived in the Midwest. I think about the only more common butterfly, or as least as common, was the Cabbage White. I am beyond shock at what we’ve done to this species.
Something I have noticed is there’s a definite decline of honey bees. I’m an avid gardener and I’m also allergic to honey bees. All types of venomous bees but let’s get back to honey bees. Now I have learned that honey bees have you don’t Fck with my sht and we won’t fck with you. But on my flowering plantings I just don’t see honey bees. Some other varieties but not in numbers. I believe the moron farmers with there chemicals and their war on weeds has finally killed most of the bees. And with everything else going up in the warmer globe 🌎 we will soon be eating grass and proud to get it. Good luck!