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 incredibly-disingenuous Abigail Fisher case, our Threatcon Color Code is LOCHNER LEMON
- Fox News bobblehead Kimberly Guilfoyle says that Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook birthed a “jihad baby” before their terrorist attack on the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California. Her public pronouncements suggest that Guilfoyle is ‘pro-life’ — except where Muslim fetuses are concerned, of course
- Birther nut and former New Hampshire state lawmaker Susan DeLemus has been caught lying to CNN about her past interest in politics while accusing President Obama of lying. DeLemus’s husband was a major figure in the Bundy Ranch fiasco and remains highly influential in ‘patriot’ militia circles
- Schuyler Pyatte Barbeau, who played bodyguard for welfare rancher Cliven Bundy in 2014, has been arrested on firearms charges by an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force
- ‘Christian’ Carson-Newman University has obtained a waiver from the US Department of Education allowing the school to discriminate against LGBTs, women who’ve had abortions, single moms, and pregnant students. Ironically, Carson-Newman is dedicated to the exaltation of a religious figure whose mom got pregnant out of wedlock and would presumably not be allowed on campus
- The rampant Islamophobia we see in conservative politics these days has been whipped up for years by the billionaire donors who benefit most from the Citizens United decision, including the Koch brothers’ Donors Trust, which is considered the ‘dark money ATM’ of the conservative movement
- Did you know that anti-Muslim Donald Trump has Muslim real estate business partners in Dubai? But maybe not for long, because DAMAC Properties just removed his name from a $6 billion luxury golf course
- He may try to deny them, but Donald Trump is very popular with white supremacists who consider Ted Cruz a ‘cuckservative’
- Sen. Cruz is touting an absurd theory that women cause violence by enjoying sex
- Robert Dear made a ranting confession in a Colorado courtroom yesterday, so can we stop pretending that violent attacks on Planned Parenthood aren’t terrorism? Maybe we should borrow a page from this wave of anti-Muslim hysteria and deport all the forced-birth crazies before they kill again?
- The soft bigotry of low expectations: from now on, whenever someone asks me what white supremacy and white privilege are, I’ll just point them to Supreme Court ‘Justice’ Antonin Scalia pretending that Abigail Fisher’s whiteness should qualify her over students of color with much better grades because he thinks black people are ‘too slow’ and attend schools “out of their league”
From transcript, what Scalia said today on whether black people would be better served at “less advanced” schools pic.twitter.com/ikYGnjqM5p
— Irin Carmon (@irin) December 9, 2015
- Ted Cruz keeps racking up endorsements from professional homophobes; the latest is Bob Vander Plaats
- President Obama has signed legislation that finally sweeps away the disastrous Bush-era No Child Left Behind law and its destructive emphasis on nationwide standardized testing. I wish I could get excited, but Obama’s own education policy has been a miserable failure in my eyes
- After forty years of public policy favoring investors over workers, the American middle class is no longer the economic majority
- Partisan polarization has annihilated the so-called ‘swing voter,’ which is not necessarily a good thing
- Lillian Fletcher Elementary School in Homer, Michigan went into lockdown last Friday when an ammosexual parent showed up wearing a handgun in a holster. After district officials met with the sheriff’s department and decided to have a dialogue with the unnamed man, he showed up armed again on Monday, triggering yet another lockdown
- Mandatory reading: a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper uses seven decades of data to prove that white racial resentment explains all the changes in voting patterns across the South since the Truman presidency
- Kern County, California law enforcement, which has the dubious distinction of the highest per capita rate of officer-involved shootings in America so far this year, has consistently tried to ‘buy off’ victims of sexual abuse by police and jailers
- YouTube phenom C.J. Pearson, who recently abandoned conservatism, is now endorsing Bernie Sanders
- Academics argue that Donald Trump doesn’t fit their textbook definitions of fascism, calling him a “far right populist” instead. Gee, let’s keep arguing the semantics while President Trump’s mass-deportations begin
- The Daily Show’s Hasan Minhaj turns Donald Trump’s dystopian rhetoric on its ear:
- Now cleared of all charges, Robert Pickett and Daryl Lewis of California are suing the Inglewood police department and the officer who shot them in a case of mistaken identity, then allegedly tried to cover up the error by planting weapons at the scene. Both men were charged with murder for the death of a pedestrian who was hit and killed by a police car during the incident
- When do black (and Asian) lives suddenly matter to Republicans? When they are trying to ban abortion
- Arson at a Somali restaurant in North Dakota. Death threats against Muslim congressmen. A Muslim store-owner brutally assaulted. A pig’s head left outside a Philadelphia mosque. A 6th grade student punched and assaulted by fellow school children in New York. Coffee and abuse flung at Muslims praying in a California park. Muslim women harangued at at an Austin, Texas cafe. Threats against a mosque in Virginia. Vandalism at a mosque in Palm Beach, Florida. Muslim anti-radicalism activists treated with suspicion on airplanes. A bearded transgender man threatened at gunpoint in Chicago. A spate of ignoramuses attacking Sikhs. Tell me again how Islamophobia is just something liberals made up to be politically correct
- Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association wants to pay Muslims to relocate outside of the United States
- Blazing hypocrite Sean Hannity doesn’t like Muslims because they’re not liberal enough
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ Tyrone Eugene Jordan was sentenced to ten years in prison for filing bogus liens against a federal prosecutor
- What academic integrity? Climate doubters are accepting money from fossil fuel companies and front groups under agreements not to disclose the sources of their funding
- What rape culture? In the wake of a discredited Rolling Stone article about an alleged rape on the University of Virginia, a group of fraternities lobbied for a bill that would have made rape the only crime that colleges cannot investigate independently of law enforcement
- CBS chief executive Les Moonves raving enthusiastically about Donald Trump’s ad dollars is everything wrong with American news media
- Donald Trump being attacked by a living symbol of America is the best new thing in the world
• Five years ago, Louie Gohmert waved his arms about and screeched about terror babies! Now it’s Kimberly Guilfoyle squawking about a jihad baby! Is there anything, anything at all, so stupid that Righties won’t believe it?
• E.W. Jackson and Ted Cruz must not know very many women.
• Andy Borowitz (http://www [dot] newyorker [dot] com [slash] humor [slash] borowitz-report/study-scalia-better-off-in-less-advanced-court?):
• Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly quotes Mark Bowden, who interviewed Donald Trump for Playboy in 1996:
Let’s just say Donald Trump isn’t an intentional fascist, he’s just an overgrown 13-year-old.
• Hey, here’s a thought: maybe we can take up a collection and pay Bryan Fischer to relocate, preferably to Pluto.
• I could watch that eagle try to bite Donald Trump all day. Having seen the video Time posted to YouTube, I don’t think the bird liked Trump very much.
–alopecia
I’m pondering a post about Trumpism as the inevitable result of a generation of conservative infantilization. Rick Perlstein said something similar today on Bloomberg that’s got the Trumpists howling in anger.