As Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida, one Texas mayor has a novel idea about how to deal with it: Nuke the damned thing.
In a since-deleted Facebook post, Bobby Lindamood, the mayor of Colleyville (a Fort Worth suburb) wrote: “For the amount of destruction this next hurricane is brining, it’s time to throw a simi nu/ke bo//mb (minus the radiation) at this dude and see if we can stop the rotation. It may save more than it can hurt.”
He added, “Just casting thoughts and ideas. This is gonna be bad.”
When reached Tuesday, Lindamood said his idea for a NukeNado wasn’t “a literal suggestion.”
Lindamood isn’t alone in fearing for the safety of Floridians — especially in Texas, where we’ve seen our own fair share of historic, devastating hurricanes. And Hurricane Milton was receiving international attention after the mayor of Tampa described the situation to CNN late Monday. Speaking about the 10-12 foot tidal surge heading toward central Gulf Coast Florida, she said, “There’s never been one like this.”
“I can say without any dramatization whatsoever, if you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die,” Tampa’s mayor told CNN.
Meanwhile, in his defense, Lindamood said in a text message to The Barbed Wire that he wasn’t being serious.
“After seeing the mass destruction caused by the Helene hurricane, my heart goes out to all the people that may be impacted by one of the largest hurricanes in history,” Lindamood said, in the text. “My post was simply an expression of deep concern for Florida and surrounding states who will be impacted. My comments were meant to convey a desire to use all available resources to protect American citizens not a literal suggestion.”
Needless to say, this is a very bad idea. (Though if Lindamood knows how to remove the radiation from a nuclear weapon, we’re all ears.) And it would not be Lindamood’s first terrible idea.
To say the least, he’s a colorful character on the far right — and he’s grabbed quite a few headlines for the mayor of a suburb with a population of 25,000 people. He’s shared QAnon memes, along with debunked claims about the attempted insurrection of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Before that, Lindamood’s demolition company made the news for accidentally tearing down the wrong house in Dallas.
And before that, in 2015, Lindamood filed a defamation lawsuit related to a political leaflet that suggested he’d engaged in misconduct and improper behavior. Last year, his lawsuit was thrown out, and he was ordered to pay almost $200,000 to the defendants’ attorneys.
So yeah, definitely the guy you’d want to listen to when it comes to using weapons of mass destruction!
