The Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorists and the Butterflies (Sierra Club)

[Nevilledog]

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Mark Elliott
@markmobility
You heard that Q-Anon had forced the National Butterfly Center to close, right? Well, I bet you don't know the half of it--I certainly didn't. This sh#t is insane! And really frightening.
The Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorists and the Butterflies
sierraclub.org

The Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorists and the Butterflies
Marianna Wright, executive director of the QAnon-attacked National Butterfly Center, gets candid with Sierra
12:33 PM · Feb 5, 2022

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/right-wing-conspiracy-theorists-and-butterflies-marianna-wright-national-butterfly-center

When I first met Marianna Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center—a private nature conservatory near Mission, Texas, that’s made national news since having to close indefinitely after Wright was physically attacked by right-wing conspiracists last week—she was leaping to shore from a pontoon boat on the Rio Grande. I was reporting a story for this magazine about America’s 100th meridian; how that informal climate divide is marching east due to climate change and subtly reshaping life along the way. Wright offered me a beer and, though I had only come to discuss the butterflies her Center labors to protect, immediately launched into a Jeremiad on the Center’s neighboring border wall as we puttered upstream alongside it—or rather, alongside them.

“That red one is the government border wall, and this is the Bannon-Fisher scam,” she said. The towering slats of the private wall glared white in the sun and cut off abruptly near an elevated patrol tower skirted with invasive Carrizo cane. “That patrol tower hasn't been operational for six months, maybe longer. That's how bad the ‘crisis’ is.”

The more she spoke, the more I realized our sunset cruise wasn’t just for pleasure, and it wasn’t just to show a strange journalist the Rio Grande. It was, in fact, a tiny act of protest. The Border Patrol, Wright said, has been discouraging public use of the river for years, and she and her colleagues and friends at the National Butterfly Center are insistent on taking it back. They often use the hashtag #reclaimtheriver: “And that’s what we wish everyone would do, you know? Everybody should be out here enjoying it, just like Mexico does.”

Previously the executive director of The Foundation at Mission Regional Medical Center, Wright was recruited to fortify the fledgling National Butterfly Center in 2012. She doesn’t hold back. She’s frank. She’s funny. She’s unapologetic. And alongside her operation’s sponsor, the North American Butterfly Association, she’s currently a plaintiff in two separate lawsuits aiming to halt construction of the border walls, both direct threats to their 100-acre wildlife sanctuary and botanical garden.

When the National Butterfly Center was forced to close temporarily last week, following a bizarre encounter with Virginia congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe, I reached out to Wright again via Zoom. Here’s what Wright had to say about the border wall, her butterflies, and the rightwing conspiracists who are out to get her.

*snip*

[catrose]

1. So angry about this. I don't know what to do to help. Problems are beyond a few $$ donation.

[Dale in Laurel MD]

2. Yes, but I've sent them one anyway. nt