racist monster Greg Abbott fucks up a perfectly good eclipse

the town of Eagle Pass gets screwed once again

the people of Eagle Pass, Texas just can’t catch a break.

all Eagle Pass wanted to do was hold a nice little festival centered around tomorrow’s eclipse — eat some good food, hear some good music, pump some money into the local economy — but it turned into a shit-show disaster, all because of Greg Abbott, Texas’ psychopath governor.

Eagle Pass, you’ll recall, used to be a quiet border town where nothing much ever happened — until Abbott decided to turn the joint into a laboratory for cruelty and death.

Abbott has a well-known bug up his ass about migrants, and he’s decided to “solve” this imaginary problem in the most fucked-up way imaginable.

his initial move was to submerge razor wire booby traps in the Rio Grande. you’ll never guess what happened next.

a pregnant woman having a miscarriage was found late last month caught in the wire, doubled over in pain.

any normal human would have looked at what he wrought and said oh my god, what have I done? let’s put an end to this shit, pronto.

but not Death Trap Greg. he looked at all the misery and said this is fucking awesome. you know what? let’s make it worse.

so he sent a private army of border goons down to Shelby Park in Eagle Pass and ordered them to fence off the area, and to stand guard and prevent anyone from helping migrants caught in the razor wire. once again, you’ll never guess happened next.

Texas “physically barred” Border Patrol agents from trying to rescue migrants who drowned, federal officials say

A woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande on Friday while trying to enter the U.S. near a section of the southern border where Texas National Guard soldiers have prevented federal Border Patrol agents from processing and rescuing migrants.

that’s right: Greg “I Am The Law” Abbott and his goons prevented the United States Border Patrol from doing their job — patrolling the border, duh — and people died as a result.

and then, inevitably, a bunch of clownfuck MAGA dipshits decided to get into the act. looking for some migrant ass to kick, these would-be vigilantes drove their Trump-sticker-encrusted pickup trucks down to Eagle Pass — but when they got there, they couldn’t find a single migrant, because this whole “millions of brown people streaming across the border” thing is a fantasy cooked up by Republicans to give Dear Leader something to campaign on.

so they ended up circling their pickups aimlessly around the streets of Eagle Pass, becoming the very problem they went there to quote-unquote solve. the town’s residents were none too pleased about this new, actual invasion.

“I’ve always felt very safe here. this is a good place to raise your children. today, downtown, was the first day that I felt unsafe just walking down the street in broad daylight.”

things came to a head when bored, frustrated MAGAs — with no migrant ass to kick and without any outlet for their violent revenge fantasies — flipped out and started beating the shit out of each other.

which brings us to tomorrow’s total solar eclipse.

a year ago, long before any of this bullshit went down, the town of Eagle Pass decided to hold a three-day music festival, culminating on the day of the eclipse.

Aide Castano — the municipality’s marketing and tourism director — told a meeting of the local Rotary Club last year that the town of 28,000 residents could expect to see its population temporarily swell to more than 100,000 people on the first weekend of April for the eclipse boom. The city scheduled a music festival to take place dubbed the “57 South Music Festival” set to last three nights, featuring 17 bands on two separate stages.

what a way to put Eagle Pass on the map, and rake in a windfall for the town!

this was a can’t-miss proposition — except for the part where over the past year, Greg Fucking Abbott made “Eagle Pass” synonymous with “death, drowning and violent MAGA morons.”

oh, and this is the icing on the cake: the site that the town chose for the festival — Shelby Park — is exactly where Abbott strung up razor wires fences and posted armed goons, preventing anyone from entering the area.

“Alexa, show me the opposite of Woodstock”

realizing their vision was fucked all to hell, the planners were forced to hastily regroup. they moved the festival to the grounds of the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino, which has a maximum capacity for only 10,000 people — a tenth of what the town had hoped to attract.

but it was too late. Eagle Pass was toxic. no potential festival-goer wanted any part of what Abbott had told them was a criminal-infested shithole. after spending $3.5 million dollars on the planning and execution of the 57 South Music Festival, only 2,500 tickets were sold.

Garcia-Grewell recalled to the Beast that she was told the city spent roughly $3.5 million on the festival, yet sold only 2,500 tickets. She further elaborated that the city would have had to sell tickets at $1,400 apiece just to break even when accounting for the total cost.

thanks, Greg Abbott. awesome fucking job. pat yourself on the back.

governors are supposed to work for the people of their state. a music festival at the border should be a no-brainer — exactly the kind of thing Abbott should be encouraging and helping to promote. but nope, that’s not how he sees it, because Greg Abbott is a sadistic psychopath who gets off on inflicting pain and misery.

so it’s fuck the people of Eagle Pass and fuck their stupid little music festival.

Texas under Abbott has become a dystopian hellscape where pregnant migrants drown in razor wire booby traps and pregnant citizens are forced to carry life-threatening non-viable fetuses to term.

can anyone name one thing that Greg Abbott has done for the people of Texas?

the next total solar eclipse over Texas will be on August 23, 2044. presumably, Death Trap Greg will gone by then.

folks, a word on a different subject before I let you go: we’re doing some quarterly fundraising at my other venture, The Smirking Chimp. I’m leery of even mentioning it because if you’re one of the people paying to support my own writing here, you’re already doing god’s work and you’re already doing more than enough to help out. but if you’ve got five dollars that you absolutely wouldn’t miss and you do feel like supporting the Chimp, well, that just makes you twice the hero. the donation link is here, or you can go straight to paypal if you need no further convincing. and if you don’t care to donate, that’s totally cool, too, and we will not speak of this again. in fact, we never had this conversation. thanks for listening and that’s it from me for now.