The Buckhorn Inn is now listed for sale, after an online furor started by a local MAGA elected official over a Facebook post from the operator of the Augusta County bed-and-breakfast in the aftermath of the Sept. 10 murder of Charlie Kirk.
“Facebook Friends be aware that this gentlemen (sic) owns these businesses – Buckhorn Inn and Thomas House. I will no longer support either. This man needs to understand many of us will no longer tolerate this left hate speech!” wrote Steve Landes, a former long-time state delegate, who is now in his first full eight-year term as the absurdly overpaid elected clerk of the circuit court in Augusta County, on his personal Facebook page.
The “left hate speech” in question was … anything but.
That was the post – Trump raped kids, and we’re supposed to pray for a guy who made excuses for him? – made and later deleted, by Jack Kearney, the operator at The Buckhorn Inn, which Jack and his wife, Brenda, took over as tenants in 2021.
Quick history of The Buckhorn Inn: it opened in 1811 as a tavern, the location serving as the first stagecoach stop for travelers heading west from Staunton toward what is now West Virginia.
If you’re familiar with Augusta County geography – as I am; I’m a native of Deerfield, which is several miles west of The Buckhorn Inn – anything west of the city limits of Staunton feels like the edge of the known world.
It’s also quite stunningly beautiful out that way, particularly this time of year.
The outcry whipped up by the Landes post was immediate.
“Thank you for standing. Shut them down,” wrote an account by the name of Peter Kimberly McCarthy, about an hour later.
“Looks like he took the business page down?” wrote a local Realtor, Amy Argenbright, whose name you might be familiar with, because we wrote about her on AFP back on Aug. 1, after she was arrested on a felony fraud charge.
Argenbright was indicted by an Augusta County grand jury after an investigation that found a victim had paid Argenbright $366,000 to build a single-family residence that allegedly remains “far from completion,” according to the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office.
ICYMI
Per info from the Virginia Judiciary Online Case Information System, Argenbright was released on bail, and has a plea hearing in her case scheduled for Nov. 5.
Maybe the likes of Amy Argenbright should sit these kinds of things out.
You know, like, forever.
A certain Scott Cline responded to Argenbright’s post on the Landes thread: “it was, but Google is still up so feel free to give them a one star.”
Cline’s name may be familiar if you remember that, back in 2019, he was tied to an effort to smear Augusta County Sheriff Donald Smith with claims that Smith had been dishonest and uncooperative during a federal labor trafficking investigation.
ICYMI
It didn’t work, but Scott Cline is still hard at it – it being the get Donald Smith game.
Another winner there.
As the furor shifted from the Landes post to the pages of The Buckhorn Inn, its operators and its employees, Jack Kearney posted an apology online:
Which, back to the Landes page, and the online mob there, was too little, too late.
“he only apologize (sic) for Charlie Kirk. HE CALL (sic) OUR PRESIDENT A Pedophile and raped little girls A pure lie!!! Jack is a POS,” wrote a man named John D. Yates, who identifies himself on his Facebook profile as the owner and CEO of Blue Oval Industries, which is based in Elkton, and bills itself as “(y)our source for late model Ford Mustang parts!”
Another poster, Karen Saufley Warren, a “digital creator” from Augusta County, commented: “he said exactly how he felt…he hates Trump, and that isn’t going to change…”
You see what the real issue is here – it’s not Charlie Kirk, it’s the line about Trump, who MAGAs in Congress are doing everything they can to protect from being implicated in the child sex-trafficking ring led by his former best friend, Jeffrey Epstein.
ICYMI
- Beyond the grave: Virginia Giuffre, Epstein victim, doesn’t hold back in ‘Nobody’s Girl’
- Epstein files update | Supreme Court declines to hear Ghislaine Maxwell appeal
- Jeffrey Epstein survivors put pressure on MAGA, Trump to release files
House Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the House of Representatives on holiday for most of the past three months to try to prevent a vote forcing the release of the government’s files in the Epstein case.
Against that backdrop, add the names Jack and Brenda Kearney to the list of victims of elected MAGAs.
In the case of Steve Landes, we’re talking about a guy who, per publicly available records, was paid $157,210 by county and state taxpayers to serve as the elected clerk of circuit court in 2024.
Landes is a classic MAGA elected, too – for a guy who has railed about how bad government is, he has sucked off the government teat for 30 years now, and whenever he retires, he’ll get a hefty government pension, for doing as close to nothing as you can possibly imagine.
I’d suggest here that, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander – Steve Landes ran the Kearneys out of business, maybe it would be worth running Steve Landes out of office.
He would get the last laugh, though – in the form of that pension.
The only way a state government employee can lose their pension is because of a felony conviction.
I’ll leave things there.
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Chris Graham
