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 Supreme Court’s new liberal majority, our Threatcon Color Code is GINSBURG BLACK

  • The hits just keep coming since Monday’s historic decision. Today, a federal judge has put the kibosh on Indiana’s new law that prohibited abortions of abnormal fetuses and required funerals for aborted fetal tissue. The court has reinforced efforts to fight back against hundreds of anti-abortion laws passed by state legislatures since 2011 on a broad spectrum of pretexts, such as Alabama’s bill aimed at shutting down clinics close to schools
  • Even if national opinion polls show Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump “deadlocked,” she leads in the swing states, and Nate Silver is correct that polls of likely voters give the fake billionaire very little chance of winning. One sign of how Trump’s general election pains continue: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is still kneecapping Trump as “not yet a credible candidate” to open a rhetorical space between Trump and his caucus members who face tough reelection fights in purple states
  • Pursuant to the previous point, Michigan Republicans are trying to prevent downballot damage in the year of Trump by doing away with straight-ticket voting
  • Despite the Supreme Court’s decision to tear out the heart of anti-bribery laws by nixing the conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Massachusetts trial attorney Whitfield Larrabee has asked federal prosecutors to pursue bribery charges against Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi for accepting a $25,000 campaign contribution from Donald Trump and then declining to prosecute Trump University
  • Trump’s new donations email scandal, in which foreign politicians have received spam asking them to make contributions that would violate US law, should not be seen as a deliberate crime. Rather, this is further evidence that the Trump campaign remains an amateur effort in dire need of professional political staff
  • Under the radar: the new Jane Doe lawsuit charging Trump with child rape in the 1990s is a stronger case than I had expected; the story of Trump Institute is actually more revealing than Trump University because he had so little to do with its operations, instead licensing his name to plagiarists with a long track record of fraud
  • New rule: Trump surrogates cannot ‘war whoop’ unless they are standing in front of a Native American audience to judge and grade their performances
  • Right wing Nevada trickster Tony Dane was charged in May with wiretapping, filing a false document, and perjury in an effort to extort anti-tax votes from Republican members of the state assembly
  • Although female Clinton supporters have emerged from the shadows ever since her primary victory, it is still dangerous to support her in public. Watch for an increasing number of stories about angry white men confronting women over their politics
  • British police have recorded a five-fold increase in hate crime reports since the Brexit vote; sweetening the tragic horror, a group of right wing Britain First members went to Sherwood Forest in search of a rumored ‘secret migrant camp’ that was actually just a treehouse

  • Worse than Brexit? Racist violence is on the rise in Germany and a secretive neo-Nazi network is trying to destroy the EU from within
  • You may have noticed an uptick in right wing evangelical excitement over Brexit. That’s because the American paranoid style of politics has long associated the EU with ‘end times’ fairy tales about a one-world government led by the antichrist. A very broad spectrum of fringe, mostly-right elements, ranging from conspiracy nut Alex Jones to prophecy nut Jack van Impe, share this basic mythology. Tangled in narratives of race, class, etc., this phenomenon is why you’re seeing tweets from both Trump supporters and some Bernie-or-bust’ers that celebrate Brexit as a defeat for “the globalists”
  • Anti-abortion extremist Cal Zostrow led a small anti-LGBT group in fouling a busy intersection this Monday to pass out flyers in support of Roy Moore, the state supreme court chief justice now suspended and awaiting a hearing before the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission over his rear-guard administrative efforts against the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. Zostrow says he plans to hand out as many as 30,000
  • Kudos to CNN’s Chris Cuomo for asking anti-LGBT Catholic League President Bill Dononhue “How are they putting their gay on you?” when he objected to having immoral lifestyles “thrusted” in his face
  • Emerging into the light: as the armed forces open up to transgender warfighters, the estimated American transgender population has doubled since 2011 to 1.4 million, but mostly because of better data
  • Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has scheduled a hearing on an anti-LGBT  ‘religious freedom’ bill, complete with anti-gay witnesses, on the one-month anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting
  • Eye of the Tiger: anti-LGBT crusader and past presidential contender Mike Huckabee is on the hook for the $25,000 judgment against him over his use of the song by the band Survivor as walk-out sound for a celebratory press conference with Kentucky clerk Kim Davis
  • Charter schools and ‘school reform’ are a gigantic taxpayer ripoff that is ruining American education, full stop
  • Note to George Will: Republicans were never really your party in the first place, they were always Trump’s. You were just there to make them feel smart until someone like him came along
  • Now that the email ‘scandal’ has withered, Hillary Clinton’s calendar entries are the nothingburger du jour
  • The Benghazi horse is dead. No amount of beating the dead Benghazi horse will ever make it get up and ride again. So why can’t Republicans let go of the bridle?

One thought on “Thursday THREATCON – 30 June 2016”
  1. • It’s good that federal judges now feel free to call the fetus fetishists on their nonsense. Clarence Thomas must be apoplectic about now.

    • As I keep saying over at Bob Cesca’s place (bobcesca [dot] com, for the uninitiated), all it would take is some event that scared voters for us to be facing the prospect of a President Donald John Trump. *shudder*

    • Tony Dane seems nice.

    • Men can be dolts sometimes.

    • The Brexit vote brought out the worst in the British (well, English and Welsh) people. And of course Boris Johnson, useless meatsack that he is, has decided not to clean up the mess he helped make.

    • Righties really, really want to be around when the world supposedly ends, don’t they?

    • Cal Zostrow seems nice.

    • Bill Donohue really needs to sit down and shut up.

    • Leave it to Jason Chaffetz to show such amazing sensitivity and respect toward a minority group.

    • I have to disagree. George Will helped make the Republican Party what it is today, by giving it what passes in Righty circles as intellectual heft. I think Talking Points Memo commenter “greycardinal” said it best (forums [dot] talkingpointsmemo [dot] com [slash] t [slash] discussion-columnist-george-will-leaves-gop-over-trump-this-is-not-my-party [slash] 39692/15):

    Wow. Another conservative walks away from the wreckage he helped cause wondering whose fault it is and why the servants haven’t cleaned it up already.

    Heroic denial followed by pouting. Works for climate change, may as well try it for everything else.

    • Scott Walker is a qing wa cao de liu mang, isn’t he? (Yes, I’m a Firefly geek.)

    • I fear the Republican National Convention will make the Altamont Speedway Free Festival look like tea at Buckingham Palace.

    –alopecia

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