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 biker gang shootout in Waco, Texas, our Threatcon Color Code is HARLEY DAVIDSON BLACK
- I am becoming increasingly suspicious of the story we’re getting from McLennan County officials and I have many pressing questions about the decisions made by Waco area law enforcement. Clearly, most of the attendees and some of the men killed were neither violent nor criminals, while participants’ families insist the gathering was a peaceful one. If law enforcement knew about actual violent criminal bikers among the gangs beforehand, why didn’t they arrest those individuals instead of waiting until a large, mixed crowd had gathered? Most police departments prefer to deter crime altogether by having a visible presence at the scene, so what was the actual nature of the alleged brawl which signaled the police teams to swoop in with guns blazing, and why did they choose this confrontational strategy instead of a preventative one? How come the restaurant security camera videos don’t back up the official version of events, showing people rushing into the restroom instead of spilling out as the fracas began? Why does the McLennan County prosecutor seem to panic every time one of the men he’s charged gets close to making that $1 million bail? How many bikers were actually killed by law enforcement versus each other during this supposed gang war? Of the 1000 weapons police say they’ve recovered, how many simply belonged to 2nd Amendment-loving good ol’ boys who ditched them out of fear once the shooting started? By reputation, McLennan County is another Ferguson, Missouri — a place where low-level crimes have become a profit center for a tax-strapped government. Given Texas’s cop-friendly civil asset forfeiture laws, were these bizarre law enforcement decisions unduly influenced by the $5 million+ value of all the motorcycles they confiscated afterwards?
- There has been lots of attention to the visual disparity in treatment between the (white) bikers of Waco and the (black) rioters of Ferguson and Baltimore. Nothing that I just said invalidates that point of view in the least: so far, no one has blamed rock or country music, fatherless homes, or sagging pants for the violent criminals in American motorcycle gangs
- Meanwhile, the Texas legislature is about to let people ‘open carry’ any gun they want — and ban police officers from even asking whether they’re licensed. What could possibly go wrong with that? Well, for one thing, police may be more apt to ‘shoot first, ask questions later,’ not less
- Speaking of ‘guns blazing,’ Alexander Zaitchik’s article about the wannabe-leaders of revolution in Papua New Guinea is absolutely fascinating
- House and Senate committees have passed patently-unconstitutional bills designed to protect the economic interests of illegal Israeli settlements. I have tracked a profusion of these bipartisan efforts in the last month
- Here’s what’s the matter with Kansas: Republican legislators have forced the state supreme court to cut its own funding if it rules against their changes to the way chief justices are selected
- The deinstitutionalization of America’s mental health system is complete: compared to the population, there are fewer inpatient beds available now than there were in 1850. Since 1955, jails and prisons have replaced psychiatric facilities as the primary warehouses of mentally ill Americans
- Oklahoma oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm was so upset by research conducted at the University of Oklahoma which linked recent fracking activity to the massive surge in earthquakes that he tried to get the scientists fired
- Gender bias? When pollsters included a random female name in an opinion survey about the 2016 presidential race, twenty percent of Republican respondents said they dislike her
- Have you heard anything about Robert Doggart, the ordained Christian minister arrested by the FBI for planning to attack a Muslim community in New York state? Of course not, because there is never a press release or widespread media attention for white, Christian right wing terrorists
- Anthropologists say that gender equality was the normal state of the human race for most of our history, and that patriarchy is a recent phenomenon linked to agricultural lifestyle choices
- What happens when an entire country adopts conservative ‘family values’ as a governing order? Russia is experiencing a massive epidemic of HIV infections
- Pennsylvania’s House Health Committee has voted to posthumously honor John Patrick Stanton as a “humanitarian.” Stanton was in fact a bully who enjoyed harassing and intimidating the workers at reproductive clinics, shouting racist and homophobic epithets, terrorizing women trying to access reproductive health services, and annoying pedestrians with confrontational tactics
- Have you heard of ‘telemedicine abortions’? They’re exactly like regular oral medication abortions, except that they’re conducted over a closed-circuit TV link instead of in-person. Forced-birth activists are working hard to ban them in as many places as possible through baseless concern-trolling
- Contrary to forced-birth activist propaganda, late term abortions are almost always a tragic choice about an unviable fetus
- Two Florida students are suing Valencia College, charging that they were forced to undergo transvaginal ultrasound probes in the classroom. Just think how many lawsuits could potentially be inspired if Alabama’s legislature passes the forced-birth lobby’s ‘fetal heartbeat’ bill, which would require any woman accessing abortion services to undergo the exact same procedure
- Josh Duggar, the scion of TLC’s mass-birth Duggar family who became the head lobbyist for anti-gay hate group Family Research Council, was also the alleged offender in a 2005 police investigation of underage sex abuse, but due to the involvement of a crooked cop the statute of limitations ran out before he could be charged. He has now resigned his post at FRC. Last year, Duggar family friend Douglass Phillips was accused of grooming a fifteen year-old girl as his sex slave over period of years. When is TLC going to stop concealing the darkness of this family and its creepy patriarchal belief-system from viewers?
- Tennessee state representative Scott DesJarlais is a rabid opponent of abortion — unless his wife or mistress is pregnant, in which case he’s all about getting them to the clinic ASAP
- Another drug policy disaster: so-called ‘synthetic marijuana’ is much, much, much more dangerous than the real thing
- The neo-Nazi National Alliance has been hit with allegations of money laundering, embezzlement, and tax fraud
- Watch what happens when a black man tries to ‘open carry’ an AR-15:
- When you hear right wing Christians whining that their beliefs are ‘under attack,’ what they’re really moaning about is the loss of their power to tell other people how to live their lives
- Want to get elected to public office in Alabama? All you have to do is make up an outside threat and pretend you will save the state from it
- Data published by conservative political scientist Bruce Bartlett shows that Fox News misinformation and propaganda has pushed both political parties to the right and boosted Republican turnout in past elections, but is actually hurting the GOP by pushing them into more extreme language
- Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly allegedly abused his ex-wife in front of his children. I eagerly await the results of this scientific experiment: will his now-estranged offspring start riots, use drugs, commit murders, or otherwise behave as O’Reilly’s political theology predicts they should?
- The so-called ‘sharing economy’ is just another exploitative race to the bottom for American workers and a big reason why unemployment will continue to plague college graduates working in service industries
- Next time you hear someone gripe about renewable energy programs, tell them that the world’s governments subsidize fossil fuel industries to the tune of $5 trillion annually. That’s enough money to fund one million Solyndras
- Jeb Bush is still trying to recover from his disastrous statements last week regarding his older brother’s invasion of Iraq. Now he’s trying to blame faulty intelligence, but this is just a lame excuse invented by neoconservatives. Michael Morell, the CIA deputy director who gave George W. Bush his daily briefings prior to the invasion, says that Bush and Cheney made a “false presentation” of “some aspects” of their case for war, including a supposed link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that the American intelligence community had already debunked
- People CAN change: 49 year-old Luis Lang of South Carolina no longer blames Obamacare for his problems and has instead called out Republicans and the Supreme Court for creating the Medicaid coverage gap into which he has fallen
- The actual, real, not-imaginary ‘death panels’ are called “insurance companies.” Shima Andre of California is suing Anthem Blue Cross for refusing to cure her Hepatitis C infection because her liver isn’t scarred enough yet to satisfy them
- A coalition of public policy groups warns that the ongoing armed Oath Keepers standoff at the Sugar Pine Mine in Oregon is threatening local democracy