MONSTERS

I'm going to be super blunt here:

Human beings on foot in the desert will die without water. Men, women, kids will all die because they simply can't carry that much water with them & he's doing this in the name of Christianity and to save women & kids from imaginary sex camps.

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) July 2, 2018

 
Wonkette summarizes J.J. McNab’s latest depressing domestic-terrorism news:

In early June, a conspiracy nutter, pretend veterans advocate, and wannabe rightwing star named Lewis Arthur got himself about two weeks’ worth of social media fame after he decided that an abandoned homeless camp in the desert near Tucson, Arizona, was actually a child sex trafficking site, complete with a “dungeon” and a “rape tree.” No evidence whatsoever, but he seemed so certain about it that some local TV stations that should have known better gave it coverage, and the wingnuttosphere glommed on to it as the latest “proof” of the vast imaginary pedophile network that started with #Pizzagate and later morphed into the insane QAnon troll drama that the kids are so into these days. The Internet, which has an attention span shorter than Donald Trump’s, moved on to other things, but instead of gracefully fading away like Numa Numa videos, Arthur is determined to regain his brief moment of online glory. He seems determined to be a complete asshole about it, and may just end up getting people killed.

As the invaluable militia-watcher JJ MacNab explains, a month after his brief fling with being the hottest new shit in wingnut world, Arthur finds himself with stagnating online support, mostly because “People have gotten bored watching hour after hour of Lewis pointing to trash and calling it proof that traffickers were there just before he and his crew ran them off.” …

As MacNab notes, Arthur seems to have decided on a new tack: Instead of looking for the child sex traffickers that he can’t seem to find, Arthur and his “Veterans on Patrol” (a group Arthur originally started to help homeless vets; he himself has never served but is very big on military-speak) will now start going after illegal immigrants, because obviously a bunch of loons in the desert looking for migrants to harass will bring an end to the child trafficking, too.

Lewis Arthur has a real cool plan: He’s gonna go out and find every single cache of supplies left to help migrants, “confiscate” the water, food, and medical supplies, and then place them in national parks and monuments (and maybe national forests — he seems unclear on the concept) so they can be used by Americans. At one point he claims he and his group will “re-open” the national parks, which he seems to think have been shut down by the constant flow of human traffickers and drug mules all over public lands…

Long story short: Lewis Arthur certainly isn’t going to be setting up any water stations in national parks. But the damn fool’s likely to destroy water supplies for migrants crossing the desert in Arizona’s summer heat, and that may very possibly lead to people dying. You wouldn’t be amiss in sending a few dollars to Humane Borders, which has this crazy idea that even though crossing the border is illegal, it shouldn’t be treated as a death sentence.

As the NYTimes is bound to assure us if — Goddess forbid, when — Arthur’s nutball stunting causes an actual tragedy, it’s not as though Donald Trump / Paul Ryan / Mitch McConnell were directly responsible. But Trump is the man who gave Arthur and his fellows explicit permission to “knock the shit outta” everyone not a bigoted xenophobe… and the entire Republican coalition are the ones whose endless energy have been directed, not at reducing the harm their Dear Leader can do, but at guaranteeing maximal damage for their own personal power.

As Above, So Below: More Repub-Enabled Tragedy Waiting to HappenPost + Comments (118)