By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Butterflies Are Free?
Add to the Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Scorned annals Tasha Adams, who last week released photographic evidence of elaborate escape tunnels her estranged ex-, Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes, built in their backyard.
“Folks,” advised Adams, “if you ever feel tempted to rent a backhoe and dig escape tunnels in the backyard of your rental house, keep in mind it may come back to haunt you if you later attempt to overthrow the US government.”
Now she tells me. My backyard has so many tunnels it looks like a giant mole army had bunkered there.
“Do you plan to take over the U.S. government?” my wife asked.
“They’re there to escape you,” I said, “but also take over Pullman.”
“Pullman doesn’t have a government.”
“That should make things easier,” I said, popping down a hole that led to under the Pullman Tavern. When I emerged through the floor with pickaxe in hand and wearing a miner’s helmet, the regulars eyed me wanly.
“No more for me,” one of them told the bartender.
“Give me his,” said the guy next to him. “Make both doubles.”
“What’s your deal?” the bartender asked me.
“I’m an Oath Keeper.”
“What’s your oath?”
“To defend the Constitution,” I said, quoting Rhodes, “by refusing to obey unconstitutional orders of the ‘Leader.’”
“Doesn’t the Constitution say the judiciary decides what’s unconstitutional?”
“That part of the Constitution’s unconstitutional,” I explained.
In walked Marlena Pavnos-Hackney and her legal representative “Judge Slayer” Richard Martin.
“Rich, you’re out of jail,” I said.
“For the time being.”
“Weren’t you disbarred, like Rhodes was?”
“That’s why I’m here in a bar,” he said. “Stew would be here too but he’s still locked up on sedition charges for leading patriots who tried to take over the U.S. Capitol.”
“In a stew indeed,” said bartender.
“The judge denied bond,” I added, “after Rhodes’ ex- testified about the tunnels, unregistered cars he hid in the woods, hundreds of dollars’ worth of razor wire he installed, that he’d threatened her with firearms and abused their children under the guise of martial arts practice.”
“My kind of patriot,” said the Judge Slayer.
“We the People need to take back our country,” agreed Pavnos-Hackney.
“With a face like yours, I’d wear a mask, Covid or not,” said the bartender.
“What happened,” I asked, “to the guy who just drank two doubles?”
“Fell down the hole you dug,” said bartender “Where’s it lead to?”
“Wait till he meets my wife,” I said. “No cure for that kind of hangover.”
In walked Virginia Congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe, who last week was caught trespassing at the National Butterfly Sanctuary near McAllen, Texas, with another woman she said was a Secret Service agent. “I’ve got my 9mm just sitting right here,” said Lowe in a video made while driving there. The two asked for further gate entry so they could see “illegals crossing on rafts.”
The private Butterfly Center has been in far-right crosshairs since opposing Trump efforts to build a border wall through its center. Steve Bannon has led spreading QAnon-type conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking right there among swallowtails and lacewings.
Center director Marianne Wright says she’s been threatened by the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and other militia groups. When she refused the two women entry, Lowe started narrating a cell phone video, “So we’re here with a woman who’s not a very nice person who’s OK that children …”
“Given Bannon, neo-Nazis and their various outlets have published and broadcast images of me, along with threats to the center, me and my children, I panicked,” Wright said.
The audio cuts out as Madame Butterfly swats Lowe’s phone. “You did not take my fing phone,” shouts the candidate. According to Wright’s affidavit and the audio record, someone shoved her to the ground. “Get the f down, bitch,” one of the visiting woman is heard shouting.
A scuffle ensued, during which Wright’s son went to lock the gate to keep Lowe from making off with her video till police came. In her now-deleted Facebook video Lowe appeared to drive towards Wright’s son crying, “Get the f* out of my way. Get out of my fing way. Get the f out of my way. Jesus Christ.”
Both sides, not surprisingly, gave police different accounts. So now what? Subpoena monarchs?
“Hail the Patriot!” cried the Judge Slayer as Lowe bellied up to the bar.
“Get the f* out of my way,” Lowe said.
“Nice platform,” observed the bartender.
“We the People salute you,” said Pavnos-Hackney.
“I don’t,” I said.
“Who said you’re a person?”
Time to hop in my rabbit hole, I figured, and scurry home. The double-double guy had passed out and just made it partway, so I dug around him and came up in a new place — thank goodness, because my wife had spread razor wire across the old tunnel entry, hid my car in the woods and was practicing martial arts firing uzis.
“Is this a great country or what?” she asked.