God wants you to shoot hogs from a helicopter

Let's check on Mercy Culture real quick

Hello and thanks for reading.

Do you happen to have $15,000 to burn on a worthy cause? Do you know what that money could accomplish in the world, apart from allowing me to devote much more time to writing Lost In Panther City?¹

Civic-minded and charitable souls might gravitate toward intrinsically valuable goals like battling child poverty or some such. But there are other options. If you don’t want to spend money trying to improve the world but still feel uneasy blowing it all on material possessions, you could sponsor an elite team of Christian sharpshooters so they can rain down hellfire and vengeance on feral pigs from the safety of the air.

Let me explain.

In March, deep-pocketed supporters of Mercy Culture, our most visible and lamentable local megachurch, will get a chance to fund the aggressive electoral mobilization of far-right religious nationalists. (To be more precise, it’s Mercy Culture’s political arm, For Liberty and Justice, that’s running the fundraiser, but calling the two entities separate organizations feels like a technicality to me, considering For Liberty and Justice is quite literally housed within the walls of the church.)

This fundraising will happen in the most normal way possible: By hunting hogs from helicopters.

serve barbequed feral hog you cowards

I don’t mean to diminish the problem helicopter hog hunts are ostensibly meant to solve. Invasive pigs, which destroy landscapes with reckless abandon, are actually an enormous problem for farmers and, frankly, anyone who cares about the health of natural ecosystems — though Texas’s aerial warfare approach to wildlife management has by all accounts been ineffective, as Texas Monthly has documented:

Sid Miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner, had, even prior to taking office in 2015, been waging a vendetta against the pigs. As a member of the state House of Representatives, Miller authored the “pork chopper” bill, passed in 2011, which famously allowed licensed Texans to snipe at pigs from helicopters. Hunters, emboldened further by 2019’s Senate Bill 317, which waived the need for a license to kill wild pigs, now stalk them year round, on land and aerially. Miller also has championed a toxicant and a contraceptive bait marketed to landowners. But these attempts have mostly been futile—the pig population continues to grow.

What the For Liberty and Justice fundraiser makes extremely clear is that this failed eradication method has also become an extremely weird luxury tourism product. Booking a helicopter to experience the visceral thrill of mowing down hogs with a machine gun requires a not-insubstantial sum of money. Hence, the astronomical cost of For Liberty and Justice’s sponsorship levels.

It may not surprise you to learn that For Liberty and Justice’s goal here has little to do with solving Texas’s feral hog problem.

Mercy Culture hasn’t been in the news too much lately, but it probably will be soon because the church’s leaders clearly intend to play a significant role in the 2024 election cycle, if they can. Nate Schatzline, founder of For Liberty and Justice and current representative for Texas House District 93, is up for re-election in November. His organization is also scheduled to introduce its “friends and family candidates” to the Mercy Culture congregation in mid-February. (The list of approved politicians has already been posted on For Liberty and Justice’s website.)

But Schatzline’s pitch to potential sponsors and attendees of the hog helicopter fundraiser is much broader in scope:

2024 is going to be huge. Not only are we launching Campaign University online so that we can raise up godly men and women to run for office all over America, but we will also be launching For Liberty and Justice chapters so that we can mobilize the church in counties all across Texas as well. If you want to create lifelong memories for you, your family and your team, while also helping take For Liberty and Justice all across the state of Texas, then sign up to be a sponsor today.

In other words, the fundraiser is designed to help Mercy Culture’s political project colonize as many Texas counties as possible and, ideally, allow them to rampage through as many U.S. states as they can; and in this way, they are not unlike the wild pigs their supporters will soon be gunning down.²

1. Seriously, though, hit up my PayPal.

2. I asked one of my more pious friends to comment on the religiosity of the fundraiser but he didn’t answer my question and may never acknowledge it which is fair now that I think about it: