It’s Thursday Threatcon, your intelligence briefing on right wing activity. Below are the best reports, investigations, exposées, and debunkery of the wingnutosphere this week. Due to the incipient fascism of Donald Trump fandom, our Threatcon Color Code is ORANGE HIGHLIGHTS
- If video of Laquan McDonald’s murder has provided gruesome vindication for the Black Lives Matter movement, it has potentially ruined Rahm Emanuel’s mayoralty — just as the shooting of Jamar Clark has revealed the abiding racism in Minneapolis
- The twentysomething white supremacists who fired on a Black Lives Matter encampment in Minneapolis represent the emerging threat of online radicalization. While they clearly identify with confederate mythology and display militant attitudes, there is no larger organization or uniting ideology at work — just a generalized racial animus born of alarm at demographic trends and expressed in Twitter hashtags such as #WhiteGenocide every day. The shootings have gone right down the memory hole at Fox News, where paid talent has consistently framed #BlackLivesMatter as a “hate group.” I keep saying that the line between respectable conservatism and the lunatic fringe has been utterly erased in our time; now, we’re seeing the barrier between Republican politics and violent extremism erode away
- America’s favorite insane anti-gay pastor Mr. Kevin Swanson has declared the election of openly-gay Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski “will destroy nations” and that the Parisians killed at the Bataclan “were devil worshippers,” thus confirming that he knows even less about music than he does about human sexuality
- As Rachel Maddow has reported this week, Ted Cruz is not disowning his endorsement from Swanson, and now he’s openly consorting with forced-birth activist Troy Newman, whose Operation Rescue is infamous for links to clinic violence. Cruz has been gaining in the polls thanks to the deflation of Ben Carson, and these moves are intended to shore up his support with evangelicals
- Texas State Republican Executive Committee member Tanya Robertson wants to add a secession measure to the party primary ballot, and anti-LGBT Republicans are trying to move the 2016 state convention out of Dallas to protest recent transgender protections passed by the city council. Meanwhile, Dallas has experienced a dozen anti-gay assaults in the last three months
- Masked, armed ‘III Percenters’ are protesting outside mosques, following Muslims around, and doxing them in Irving, Texas. A group of III Percenter ‘patriots’ was badly outnumbered by a peaceful support demonstration for Syrian refugees in Boise, Idaho, but managed to show their ass before it was over. This fight is getting increasingly ugly
- Half of Republican voters share Donald Trump’s views on immigration and refugees. They don’t seem to mind all the bubbling fascism or the pathological lying, and in fact appear to be electrified by his endorsement of violence against protesters and Obama conspiracy theories
- In the wake of Turkey’s shootdown of a Russian plane this week, Vladimir Putin has accidentally put the limits of his power on full display, disappointing conservatives who thought he was the perfect manly-man to take Obama down a peg
- Remember, everything is justified by white anger at the uppity black man
- Not that Trump’s fans actually care, but Seth Meyers explains the falsehoods and bigotry of Donald Trump quite succinctly:
https://youtu.be/d70OuefjY70
- “The problem is not Trump. The problem that the Right has spent many years and billions of dollars to cultivate millions upon millions of American bigots and imbeciles who are now so reliably paranoid, angry and Dunning-Kruger ignorant that they can be told what to think, what to buy and who to vote for by Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes or Donald Trump”
- Remember when the Koch brothers won praise for their sentencing reform efforts? As I predicted, their championing of ‘liberty’ turns out to be just a leading wedge for their campaign to defang laws against ‘white collar’ crimes — like, say, selling toxic securities, or dumping toxic pollution in the air and water. Charles and David never, ever do anything altruistically, especially not altruism
- Federal appeals judge Richard Posner has called out the lies, distortions, and constitutional violations in Wisconsin’s defense of a TRAP law requiring admitting privileges for abortion providers
- It’s easier to buy a gun in most states than to obtain an abortion
- The man who allegedly vandalized an abortion clinic in Louisville, Kentucky returned to the scene yesterday to brag about the crime and intimidate volunteers
- Dr. Cheryl Chastine is a skilled and dedicated abortion provider — exactly the sort of person Ted Cruz wants dead
- 18-29 year old Americans are the first generation that is more likely to accept the science of evolution than to believe in a ‘young Earth’ or complain about Google doodles
- A pastor and six parishioners at the Word of Life Church in Chadwicks, New York have been charged with beating a teenager to death because he wanted to leave the fold
- Thanks to the blithering bothsidesism of Chuck Todd and the Koch-kissing rants of Joe Scarborough, MSNBC has taken last place among younger viewers and will probably decide to fire Chris Hayes in desperation now
- John Kasich’s ad is perfect, but will it make a dent in Trump’s lead? I doubt it:
- Fox News ditz Elisabeth Hasselbeck is quitting television to spend more time misinforming her family
- Benjamin Harris Manses of Jacksonville, Florida was arrested for threatening to bomb a meeting being held on a college campus to discuss strengthening the city’s Human Rights Ordinance
- Online trolls are setting up fake ‘white student union’ Facebook pages to make some sort of point about the new wave of campus activism
- Cuts to public health programs are leading to a dramatic rise in STD transmission among 15 to 24 year olds
- When Fay Wells locked herself out of her apartment, one of her neighbors reported that she was breaking in — and at least nineteen police officers showed up
- Libertarian students at the University of Oregon are demanding fellow students pay for a celebration of their ammosexual lifestyle choices
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ couple Ronald and Dorothea Joling were arraigned in Oregon for filing $100 million in bogus leins
- The data keeps piling up on this one: economists tested seven ‘cash transfer’ welfare systems to see if they made people lazy and exploded moral fables about work
- Instead of spying on their employees to suppress union activity, maybe Walmart should try paying a living wage
- Seth Meyers explains the refugee vetting process to Sarah Palin:
https://youtu.be/mfYT4mRRwBA
• The only thing I find distressing about the indictment of Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald is that the other officers on-scene, the ones who backed Van Dyke’s fabricated story, weren’t also indicted.
• Now would be a perfect time for elected officials to show some … oh, what’s that word? … leadership by telling the more unhinged of their constituents that refugees do not pose any meaningful threat to the US. However, that would require … oh, what’s that word? … courage, so I expect it to happen about ten minutes after the heat-death of the Unvierse.
• The Koch brothers’ ulterior motives in pushing for sentencing reform should surprise no sentient being on the planet.
• Cuts to public health programs are leading to a dramatic rise in STD transmission among 15 to 24 year olds Unsurprising, but to the anhedonic scolds on the Right—”cultural conservatives”—that statistic is a win. I do wish they’d get professional help for their problem.
• Trying to explain the process of refugee screening to Sarah Palin is like trying to explain vertex operator algebra to a cat.
–alopecia