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 birth of Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher’s daughter, our Threatcon Color-Code is AVOCADO GREEN
- Be sure to pick up the latest issue of Rolling Stone to read Tim Dickinson’s article about Koch Industries. Far from a paragon of free market virtues, “it appears the very essence of the Koch business model is to exploit breakdowns in the free market.” Ever thin-skinned about factual reporting of their activities, Koch Industries responded by not actually denying anything in the article
- White privilege defined: white high school dropouts make more money than black and Latino college graduates
- Google may have left the Koch brothers’ American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), but they’re still giving money to politicians who deny climate change
- Hotel workers in New Orleans are doubling the size of the unionized hospitality industry there
- The National Organization for Marriage is campaigning against Republicans who support marriage equality
- Conservative politics are a circle of scam whose primary victims are white southerners
- Satanists are very good at exposing the bigotry of Christian Dominionists who would replace American government with theocracy
- It turns out that apologists for the Washington Redskins team name have a really hard time explaining themselves to actual Native Americans
- A Massachusetts ‘sovereign citizen’ who paid over $900 in fines for driving without a license yesterday was arrested for the exact same offense by state police shortly afterwards
- John Oliver asks a good question: why is Ayn Rand still a thing?
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ Robert G. Wray of Utah was arrested this week on a federal grand jury indictment alleging 34 counts of fraud, wire fraud, bankruptcy fraud, and aiding and abetting Dennis Eric Fluck Von Kiel, a Pennsylvania osteopath who sought to avoid taxes
- Why are Democrats still struggling in this midterm election cycle? Probably because they won’t articulate a middle and working class vision
- The Earth has lost half its wildlife in the last 40 years
- When the Koch brothers-backed organization Americans For Prosperity sent out that misleading ‘voter registration’ mailer in North Carolina, they violated the law at least as much as they accused ACORN of doing
- Unemployment is finally down, but almost all the gains of the economic recovery have gone to the top 1%, leaving the middle class poorer than it used to be. Why isn’t the middle class benefiting from the economic recovery? Because they haven’t had a raise in 15 years, and half of all income goes to the top 1%
- The Ron Paul agenda has nothing to do with promoting freedom and everything to do with privatizing fascism
- How did a St. Louis program cut pregnancy rates by 12.5% among high-risk teens? By teaching them about sex and offering free birth control
- How much Antarctic ice has already been melted by climate change? Enough to change the Earth’s gravity
- Unexpectedly losing his reelection race, Kansas Senator Pat Roberts has started using the words “national socialism” in sentences
- Watch US Senate candidate Corey Gardner run away from the fetal personhood bill that he cosponsored. Run, Corey! Run!
[youtube]http://youtu.be/jIcoZKBIc8g[/youtube]
- To promote the sanctity of life and prove that he’s completely different from those nasty ISIS guys, National Review writer Kevin Williamson wants to hang women who get abortions
- Have you heard of ‘The Gathering’? It’s a billion-dollar far-right organization devoted to Christian hegemony in America
- Libertarian ideology is the natural enemy of empirical science
- Timothy Flanagan pleaded guilty to federal charges from an April, 2012 cross-burning this week
- Did you see the way Breitbart.com turned a man with “Jesus Christ” tattooed across his chest into a big Muslim terrorist fear-generator? Contrast their treatment of that incident with, say, the way they completely ignore cop-killer Eric Frein
- 58 year-old Daniel Puckett was convicted of threatening his former supervisor with the message, “We have space for you and your family under a big oak tree,” scrawled across a Ku Klux Klan publication
- Logic fails: a Keithville, Louisiana Baptist church has decided to stop hosting an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter because of the threat of gay marriage
- US and European racists are having a big meeting in Hungary this weekend
- Keep your eye on Colorado City, Arizona, where the polygamist cult of Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints is being blamed for a bombed pickup truck
- Former FBI agent John Guandolo may have lost his job for sleeping with a confidential informant, but he has made a new career stoking Islamophobia
The Gathering: Creepy name with a frightening mission. I wasn’t aware of this Christian money machine.
Seems like a gathering of Christian zillionaires passing tax-exempt millions back and forth amongst each other. Their efforts to fund the enforcement of white male inerrant Christian Dominion in the hearts and minds of Teacups and legislators have been wildly successful.
Yikes.
Letting you know about these things is one of the primary purposes of THREATCON 🙂