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 release of the new Disneyfied Star Wars sequel, our Threatcon Color Code is JEDI BLACK and shorter than usual in anticipation of ticket times
- Donald Trump’s non-answer to a debate question about the nuclear triad ought to set off alarm bells for every rational American. Nuclear weapons are not toys for authoritarian idiots. As for Chris Christie’s assertion that ‘”World War III” is in progress, is it such a stretch to imagine him praying to dead kings for thermonuclear guidance? The Republican Party is utterly powerless to deal with Trump’s astounding ignorance on national security issues because the rest of their candidates aren’t much better. Liberals have been talking about the declining intellectual quality, militant absurdity, and rising bigotry of their ideological opponents for decades, and Trump is proof they were right all along
- Pursuant to the previous point, Frank Gaffney’s Islamophobia-touting Center for Security Policy held a ‘summit’ in Nevada Monday. David Neiwert attended the event and describes a non-stop parade of lunatic conspiracy nuttery that included four Republican presidential candidates, including some who’ve condemned Donald Trump’s plan to deport and exclude Muslims. Ted Cruz made the amazing claim that President Obama has “banned anti-Muslim rhetoric“
- The key to understanding the radicalization of Ben Carson is Glenn Beck’s infusion of Cleon Skousen into the 2009 Tea Party movement. Your ‘modern’ conservative is in fact just a Goldwater/John Birch Society zombie
- Conspiracy theories are a kind of intellectual crack cocaine; Republican candidates are all smoking it
- There’s one Trump story that’s somehow managing to fly under the radar right now: his continued self-destruction as a commercial brand. Citing Trump’s “disturbing, bigoted, fascist and misogynist ideologies,” last night the Nuburger restaurant chain announced they will be renaming ‘The Donald,’ a sandwich that has borne Trump’s moniker since their opening. The Trump Towers in Istanbul are also “assessing their relationship” with him
- It’s worth remembering that Chris Christie is actually running on his record as a ‘terror prosecutor‘
- It’s also worth bearing in mind that more Americans like Muslims than like Donald Trump, and that a majority of Americans oppose his Islamophobia. However…
- …Republicans are suddenly way more concerned about terrorism than they were before the Paris attacks or San Bernardino. It’s their number one issue, and thanks to billionaire-empowered cranks like Gaffney few Republicans are left who don’t treat the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘terrorist’ as synonyms
- Islamophobia is incompatible with law and order
- Bruce Bartlett doesn’t think congressional Republicans are capable of retaking the White House
- We thought using social media as our source of news would make the world better, but instead it has created ‘information bubbles‘ where we all choose to live in separate realities
- Do Muslims and Christians worship the same god? Empirically speaking, the answer is yes, because they both claim to be Abrahamic religions. But one college professor who said ‘yes’ to this question has nevertheless been suspended by evangelical Wheaton College
- The community of the San Bernardino mosque where Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook once prayed shunned their funeral
- Watch this blacksmith demolish a key conspiracy theory among the 9/11 ‘truth’ cult:
- Coat hanger abortions are back, only now women go to jail for surviving them. This misogyny is a feature of TRAP laws and ‘pro-life’ political polarization, not a bug
- Life Dynamics, whose founder Mark Crutcher trained propaganda videographer Lila Rose, has sent out a new mailer promising to hold a seminar to create a “CIA of the pro-life movement”
- BU gives a shout out to two fantastic clinic defense blogs this week: Every Saturday Morning, which is a diary of life under siege; and photojournal Faces of the Fight, which documents the hostility of so-called ‘sidewalk counseling’
- The United Nations sent three women to Alabama to examine gender inequality. What they heard and saw horrified them. Alabama’s unqualified auditor Jim Zeigler, who made forced birth activism a component of his campaign, denounced the UN mission as an “intrusion” that is trying to “dictate” culture war issues in Alabama. In a tweet this week, Zeigler reassured me that his election to office has magically swept away all fraud, error, and corruption in state departments with a pen-stroke
- Your seasonal holiday present is a delicious schadenfreude pie: Martin Shkreli, the notorious pharmaceutical investor who raised the price of an AIDS medicine 4000% and spent the lucre on a Wu Tang Clan album, has been arrested for securities fraud. One of his companies has already lost half its market value
- Breitbart author John Nolte says that #BlackLivesMatter protests at Trump events are a ‘liberal media conspiracy,’ but offers no evidence of collaboration. This man is a writer at a pay-for-play right wing ‘news’ site
- Who could have foreseen the breaking of Flint, Michigan’s water supply? This disaster has been a feature of Republican austerity governance, not a bug
- In a new dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg raises an alarm over the center-right majority radically undermining consumer rights
- The backlash has begun: Missouri Republicans are threatening to cut funding for the University of Missouri, mandate ‘free speech’ classes, and revoke scholarships in revenge for the student uprising which recently deposed its president
- The federal ban on medical marijuana funding has been reversed without fanfare
- Watch the Daily Show demolish the myth of the ‘good guy with a gun’
- Once the best-known white supremacist group in America, Aryan Nations is practically extinct
- Five so-called ‘sovereign citizens’ were found guilty of tax fraud in South Carolina on Wednesday
- Here’s a new video of ‘sovereign citizen’ scam artist Anthony T. Williams telling police officers that he’s a ‘private attorney general‘
- When he was pulled over for his self-issued license plate, an unnamed Michigan ‘sovereign citizen’ with several outstanding warrants told police they were “kidnapping” him and threatened to file liens against them
- The biggest loser in the continuing rise of Donald Trump? Bernie Sanders
• Barack Obama has “banned anti-Muslim rhetoric”? Is that before or after he declared martial law and sent all the conservatives to FEMA death camps? *eyeroll*
• That letter from Mark Crutcher is half bluster and half be-afraid-be-very-afraid. It’s aimed straight at the amygdala of every fetus fetishist, and will be very effective in generating a mailing list which will, I predict, be used to hoover money out of the rubes’ pockets; that is the usual pattern for these things.
• Donald Trump’s personal brand is being damaged by his antics and Aryan Nation is disappearing. Who says there’s no good news?
–alopecia