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 Duggars’ fleeing sponsors, our Threatcon Color Code is CABLE GREENLIGHT
- Dan Savage wants to make ‘Duggar’ into a word the same way he gave meaning to ‘Santorum’ and has started accepting possible definitions. As Sarah Posner explains, the Duggar parents have relentlessly promoted the sexual purity of their family to empower a politics of bigotry against ‘impure’ culture war enemies, so I propose that ‘Duggar’ should refer to the hypocrisy of the ‘purity movement’
- Nancy Kay Knoble of Minneapolis has been arrested for menacing a random Muslim couple with a pellet rifle, but not for a hate crime. When their daughter wrote about the matter online, several commenters decided to confirm her point about rampant Islamophobia
- Ed Kilgore demolishes that silly ‘both sides do it’ op-ed that Peter Wehner wrote for the New York Times
- Libertarian ophthalmologist and 2016 presidential hopeful Rand Paul says that crime isn’t a “race thing.” but a “spiritual problem.” This is actually just another way of blaming high crime rates in minority neighborhoods on innate character defects rather than public policy, supplanting corrective governance with tax cuts and saccharine piety
- As expected, Alabama’s Republican-supermajority House voted to insert a 2,000-foot ‘buffer zone’ between abortion clinics and schools this week. If HB527 manages to pass the Senate in the final hours of the legislative session, it will become the most interesting abortion fight in America
- Consonant to the previous point, the citizens of Arlington, Virginia are fighting to keep a gun store from opening up two blocks from a school — and just guess how Fox News is talking about it. This is the essence of conservative politics: ‘we make it easier to buy a gun than get a clinical abortion’
- The Black Conservatives Fund apparently thinks ACORN still exists
- Hillary Clinton will run for president on an equal pay plank and her nomination would create the most liberal presidential candidacy of my lifetime
- When PS 120 in Flushing, Queens tried to host a carnival, kids found themselves segregated by rich and poor
- Watch former Ronald Reagan adviser Brice Bartlett explain how Fox News is actually bad for the Republican Party:
- Shades of Jade Helm: the Golden Triangle Militia wants to become the official military force of Orange County, Texas
- Surprise, surprise: Jeb Bush’s favorite author, racial pseudiscientist and Koch apologist Charles Murray, is a big booster of autocratic monarchy for America
- Matt Taibbi deconstructs the last two decades of urban policing trends and finds the problem isn’t ‘militarization,’ but social control of minorities
- Republican states are overruling local government ordinances at an increasing rate. Turns out the GOP isn’t really about ‘smaller government’ so much as taking over state governments, defying the federal government, and imposing their own will on the cities and towns
- When Republicans talk about “securing the border,” what they really mean is that they want the Border Patrol to keep transforming America into a high-security zone
- Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore thinks happiness is impossible without the bible
- Confused as to which disgusting rumors about conservative trolling hack journalist Charles C. Johnson are true, and which ones are satirical humor about his depraved blogging? Don’t worry, Gawker has posted your disambiguation page
- GOP Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado’s new bill pretends to make birth control available over the counter, but wouldn’t actually accomplish anything. It’s just a PR move to blunt criticism of his party’s misogyny
- Yet another scientific study shows that conservative moral theology about the ‘welfare state’ is utter bunk: generous benefit systems actually make people want to work
- Demographic doom: the Republican base is older than the Democrats’ and is consequently dying off
- ‘Quiverfull’ megafamily advocate Rick Boyer, author of a book endorsed by Jim Bob Duggar, whines that “abuse is the new racism” as he defends the cult of patriarchy
- Americans For Prosperity, a Koch brothers organization linked to the astroturfing of tea parties around the country in 2009, has abandoned the state of Oregon. Also leaving: the Oath Keepers and ‘patriot militia’ goons who’ve occupied Sugar Pine Mine for weeks over a conspiracy theory about the Bureau of Land Management, after declaring “victory!” because a BLM administrative judge issued a routine stay of enforcement while the mine owner’s case is being adjudicated
- White supremacists showed up to heckle a Cleveland press conference held by Black Lives Matter activists — because everyone needed a reminder that America is not a ‘post-racial’ anything
- So-called ‘patriots’ have sent anonymous threats to mosques in Arizona
- KKK recruiting flyers have turned up in Lexington, Kentucky
- 75 year-old ‘sovereign citizen’ Robert Wray faces up to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of a scheme to defraud the IRS by helping a Pennsylvania doctor avoid taxes
- ‘Sovereign citizens’ Travis Lee Lambert and William Peter Witwicki of Alabama have been sentenced to ten years on each of eight counts of filing a false lawsuit against public officials
- As I keep saying, whenever a right wing culture warrior weaponizes Christianity another atheist is created
- Bill Nye linked the Houston floods to climate change on Twitter. Predictably, conservatives got their knickers in a twist about it
- Is there any discernible difference between Ann Coulter and white nationalists?
