On Jan. 21, around 6:30 p.m. central time, Houston radio host Frank Spagnoletti made a stunning claim to the listeners of KSEV 700 AM—stunning even for this fevered era of paranoia and mass disinformation.
“They’re already among us, cyborgs,” declared Spagnoletti. He returned to the theme repeatedly in his hour-long program. “Cyborg supersoldiers—we see them around, we’ve seen some of them.”
The title of this particular episode was “Beyond the Great Reset,” alluding to the long-debunked conspiracy theory that pandemic restrictions are a prelude to a new regime of biomedical totalitarianism. Yet in his hour-long broadcast, Spagnoletti pushed the twisted vision to its weirdest and most dystopian conclusions: that the goal of the shadowy global elites is not just a unified one-world government, but a fully fused human hive mind in which “electrodes snaking into your gray matter will be thieves slipping in the backdoor.”
Along the way, the local maritime lawyer also baselessly claimed the novel coronavirus is “military technology.”
Spagnoletti is no isolated crank: his former co-host, who first brought him onto the radio two years ago, was the second-place finisher in Houston’s nonpartisan mayoral election in 2019. And the microphone Spagnoletti spewed his delusions into and the station that carried them across the greater Houston area belong to one of the most powerful men in the nation’s second-largest state: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Patrick...
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