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 Israel’s hard right turn under Netanyahu, our Threatcon Color Code is APARTHEID BLUES
- The lesson the American right will take from the Israeli elections is that they should go for broke — “go id or go home,” as Jon Stewart puts it. Expect Republicans to double-down on Christian fascist politics, dismiss all contrary evidence as a leftist conspiracy or “lies from the pit of hell,” blame scary brown people for their problems, use faith-based math, and publicly pray that peace doesn’t break out — basically, everything they’re doing right now, only worse
- Strange bedfellows: Benjamin Netanyahu’s American televangelist ally John Hagee claims that a ‘half-breed Jew’ committed the Holocaust and blames the Jews for Antisemitism
- Republican 2016 presidential frontrunner Mike Huckabee is peddling quack diabetes cures
- Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s new jobs plan? Ban abortions, because women are baby factories
- Vladimir Putin appears to have lost a power struggle while ISIS is shrinking. Surely the “liberal media” will notice one of these days that nothing Republicans predict about Obama’s foreign policy ever comes true
- Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s four-year quest for evidence of non-citizens voting has turned up just forty-four possible cases in the last fifteen years — and a mere four convictions
- If you’re still upset by the incredible shrinking Clinton email ‘scandal,’ then you should be livid about Jeb Bush using a “homebrew” server, too
- Saint Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco has sprinklers to chase away the homeless people
- Rick Santorum being screamed at by a crazy woman — and responding to her — is the modern right in a nutshell, pun intended
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: Pastor Steven Anderson of Tempe, Arizona “joking” that mass killings of homosexuals would “cure” AIDS
- As I’ve been asking for months, why is serial wife-beater Mark Fuller still on the federal bench?
- Georgia Republicans’ new anti-gay “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” would help child and spouse abusers use religious beliefs to impede law enforcement investigations
- I said last week that more people should dare to describe Tom Cotton as a sociopath, and the word is starting to show up in blogs. Now that he has invoked Hitler within his very first minute speaking on the Senate floor and revealed his basic ignorance of the world, some Arkansas journalist can make a name for themselves by looking into his strangely-brief career as an attorney
- Matt Taibbi says that for the New York Times’s David Brooks, the rich are people while the poor are just numbers
- Arizona’s cuts to its community college system are unprecedented
- As Scott Walker makes Wisconsin a ‘right to work’ state, Mark Ames remembers that the phrase — and the reactionary political movement that came with it — were the creation of a bitter racist
- Are American workers too atomized by technology and globalization to work together in their collective interests?
- Republican state senator Bo Watson couldn’t support a plan to bring 200,000 jobs to the Chattanooga area because it would change the “culture” of the state by “becoming a magnet for unions, intentionally“
- Employers have used racketeering laws to fight unionization in recent years
- Fox News is basically inventing unnamed “experts” out of thin air now
- Few things are funnier to me than watching Glenn Beck threaten to break up with the National Rifle Association over a conspiracy theory about Grover Norquist’s wife and leave the Republican Party because they won’t pass another bill to overturn Obamacare
- Travis Lee Lambert of Andalusia and William Peter Witwicki of Enterprise have been found guilty of eight counts of offering a false instrument for recording against a public servant. Lambert and Witwicki claim they aren’t ‘sovereign citizens,’ but make the all standard quack legal claims associated with the movement
- Ryan Giroux, the man arrested after a shooting spree in Arizona yesterday that left one dead and five wounded, is a white supremacist skinhead
- More Ku Klux Klan flyers have shown up at homes in Leon, Florida, Auburn, Alabama, and all over the inside of a Walmart in Tuscaloosa, Alabama
- The decline of hate groups and extremist organizations continues, but rates of violence are not declining and the activity has simply moved online
- Here’s how Amazon, PayPal, and Spotify are funding white supremacists
- When Republicans say “jobs,” they mean deregulation of Wall Street and polluters
- Just when you thought it was safe to forget that whole campus rape issue, a Penn State fraternity has been suspended for posting pictures of unconscious nude women online
- The University of Alabama will miss out on a multi-million dollar bequest from this gay couple because of the state’s stand against marriage equality
- White Christians are now a minority in 19 states. Keep that in mind while the GOP tries turning out “an army of evangelicals” again in 2016