RENEGADE FLORES, BORN-AGAIN REPUBLICAN, DRANK TRUMP'S KOOL-AID

 

By Juan Montoya

Albert Camus once wrote a story called "The Renegade" which told of a converted colonial French native missionary who set out to evangelize the City of Salt where all the heathens lived worshipping a fetish.

He was, as Republican District 34 candidate Mayra Flores is attempting to be, more Catholic than the pope. And she thinks that with the religious babble of a born-again Republican she will be able to turn South Texas red for her religious/political mentors.

She has swallowed the GOP narrative hook line and sinker and mindlessly repeats it to gullible voters in the new District 34. But despite her brazen assertions today, her record on various right-wing talking points are coming home to roost.

Her Democratic opponent in the District 34 race, Vicente Gonzalez, minced no words on her candidacy.

He called Flores an "unqualified opponent" who was "a pawn chosen by the Republican Party for a race they poured millions of dollars into for a seat that's going to last six months."

After she won the special election called for by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and defeated former Cameron County commissioner Dan Sanchez in the old so-called "fajita" District 37 that stretched all the way up from the Rio Grande through upper rural south and central Texas all the way to Gonzalez, Texas, she called the win "historical."

That seat was left vacant when Democrat congressman Filemon Vela resigned and left before his term expired. His unexpired term ends December 2022. 

She is facing veteran Gonzalez in November's general election.

And she is starting to feel her oats and is under the illusion that hordes of evangelized South Texas Hispanics will join her in her crusade into South Texas – her City of Salt – and finish off the "fetish,"  the Democrats.

Is is said that patriotism and religion are the last refuges of scoundrels, and her constant mouthing of these two themes to seek the district's political congressional representation illustrate these points.

If she is here to save souls – as she claims in her social media posts – she doesn't specify how it is that one of the first votes she took was to vote "No" on a bipartisan gun-safety bill put together by Senior Texas Senator John Cronyn and other Republicans and Democratic senators in the wake of the massacre of 17 elementary school children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.

And while she told Cameron County commissioners that she had voted against it because schools would only get $3,000 for security each, she promised them "$34 billion" instead and glossed over the fact that the bipartisan gun-safety bill would have required thorough background checks on 18 to 21 years-olds attempting to purchase a gun. 

Those toughened background checks might have well kept the gunman who massacred the children and their teachers from purchasing two assault weapons and 300 rounds of ammunition. He had turned 18 the week before he purchased them.

All he needed was an ID and he was able to get them without allowing authorities to probe into his background, social media postings, or other "red flags" that could have shown them he was not mentally stable enough to own these military weapons of war with which he slaughtered these innocents.

To Flores, protecting his Second Amendment rights outweighed protecting human life. Then she promises "billions" to sweeten the pie and hide the ugly truth that she valued the National Rifle Association gun zealots and their extreme right supporters and their "guns for everyone" mantra over the protection of the murdered children and their two teachers. 

She's here, she says, "to win souls for God..." How can she save souls for Christ and vote against keeping our children safe, asks her opponent Gonzalez?

Gonzalez isn't exaggerating about her right-wing zealotry.

The New York Times reported that what is most striking is that Flores won by shunning moderates, embracing the far right and wearing her support for Donald J. Trump on her sleeve – more Marjorie Taylor Greene than Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Her campaign slogan – “God, family, country” – was meant to appeal to what she calls the “traditional values” of her majority-Hispanic district in the border city of Brownsville. She called for President Biden’s impeachment. She tweeted QAnon hashtags. And she called the Democratic Party the “greatest threat America faces.”

She also texted her lemmings that she considered Democrats "traitors" and Biden a "criminal." (See graphic of mailout above.)

In an interview in her still-barren office by a New York Times reporter the day after her swearing-in ceremony, Flores was asked whether she considered Mr. Biden the legitimately elected president.

“He’s the worst president of the United States,” she said.

When asked three more times whether Mr. Biden had been legitimately elected, she repeated the same nonanswer. 

Flores often speaks of working alongside her parents as a teenager (she says 13 and told the Cameron County commissioners as much) in the cotton fields of the Texas Panhandle. But when she was 13, it was 1999, about 30 years after cotton crops had been planted, thinned, weeded, and harvested mechanically. What did she do?

Is bearing false witness (lying) outside the scope of the 10 commandments? Or only if it furthers your aims? 

The she blamed U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for allegedly pushing her daughter during a photo op minutes after her swearing in.

Pelosi posed with Flores and her family for a photo. What happened next is a matter of debate. To Democrats, it looked as if Ms. Pelosi had brushed her arm against Ms. Flores’s 8-year-old daughter to make sure she would appear in the frame and not be hidden behind her as the two stood side by side. Flores and her fellow Republicans charged Pelosi had shoved her aside.

“No child should be pushed to the side for a photo op," Flores shrieked. "PERIOD!!”

She was also posting tweets using the hashtag #QAnon.

When asked about posting tweets using the hashtag #QAnon, Flores denied ever having supported the conspiracy theory, which claims that a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring is trying to control the government and the media. Flores insisted her intention was to express opposition to QAnon.

“It’s just to reach more people so more people can see like, hey, this needs to stop,” she said of using the QAnon hashtag. “This is only hurting our country.”

But the fact that Flores deleted the tweets about QAnon, didn't mean that she refrained from expressing other right-wing views.

Following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, she retweeted a post falsely calling it a “setup” by antifa. She has called Mr. Biden “president in name only” and has demanded his impeachment. And as her own oath of office coincided with the hearings by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Ms. Flores largely dismissed the proceedings.

In the "Renegade" Camus short story, the heathens in the City of Salt cut out the zealot's tongue. Oh, that life imitated art in Flores' case.