Ready for the plague of crickets?

By Monica Showalter

It just seems kind of emblematic of the Biden era with its inflation, defeat, wokesterism, and crime -- and now a plague of grasshoppers.

That's what we have in Nevada, which is getting the full brunt of a Mormon cricket nightmare spreading across their state, according to The Guardian:

Millions of flightless insects known as Mormon crickets have descended across Nevada, alarming residents, blanketing roadways and buildings, and fueling nightmares.

Footage shared on social media and by local news outlets captures six Nevada counties under siege, with thick carpets of bugs moving slowly and efficiently across the state. A local hospital had to deploy brooms and leafblowers to clear the way for patients to get into the building, a spokesperson for the Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital, told local news outlet KSL.

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Not only do the bugs make for terrifying plague-like images and videos, they make roadways dangerous when large numbers of them get crushed.

“They get run over, two or three come out and eat their buddy, and they get run over, and the roads can get covered with crickets and they can get slick,” Jeff Knight, an entomologist for the Nevada agriculture department, also told KSL. “The bigger issue is these afternoon thunderstorms and put a little water on that and it gets slick, we’ve had a number of accidents caused by crickets.”'

Gross.

The crickets are actually a variety of katydid or grasshopper, so the plague happening has got that biblical feel. The report notes that they aren't really migrating, they are just spreading out because their numbers had gotten so huge. They get into everything -- dropping from the ceilings, crawling in through the electrical outlets, jumping on people, according to a woman quoted.

They're called Mormon crickets because the Mormon pioneers had to put up with them as they settled the land in next-door Utah, which is kind of cruel to Mormons. They couldn't have liked them any more than we do.

This bug scientist from the Nevada Department of Agriculture, named Jeff Knight, quoted in this clip is so blase about the matter he's kind of comical -- surely he knows he's jacking with us:

Thousands of Mormon crickets have taken over the town of Elko, Nevada, as these flightless, grasshopper-like creatures come out of their dormant period and into their migratory phase pic.twitter.com/6ZxD7yoPIr
— CNN (@CNN) June 14, 2023

Yes, we know Biden didn't do it. The only thing we wonder is why his greenie team is not harvesting these crickets to serve as protein in children's school lunches.

It just seems kind of appropriate to be happening in the era of ... Biden.

But for those who know, they are a true biblical plague, the one that sticks out as particularly skin-crawling.

We also know that these things are unstoppable. It's not just the Mormon crickets which are spreading with biblical volume in Nevada, they seem to be all over the West, and perhaps the East, too.

They're the most unkillable things in the garden, a Home Depot gardening specialist told me, when I told her I saw one of those filthy things coming up from the canyon abutting my house and into my garden in San Diego, targeting my leafy rhubarb crop.The damage they do is enormous, leaving garden leaves in jagged tatters. The one I saw, which probably wasn't a relatively smaller Mormon cricket, was giant, gargantuan, bigger than a hummingbird. It was big and powerful in its soaring one-second leaps to the top of the second story of the house followed by its dive bombs straight at us people below. The Home Depot specialist said that poison was almost useless on them because of their thick armored shells and recommended I shoo them away with a spray bottle full of water or else capture them with a fishnet from the local PetSmart next door because buying poison was simply a waste of good money. I told her I preferred to behead them with garden shears when I could, but they were quick and I didn't like to get too close to them.

These things are seriously dreaded and there doesn't seem to be much anyone can do, although one bug-killer company, Ortho, tweeted that they could offer them a "warm welcome." So, perhaps they know how to get rid of them.