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 Treasury Department’s plan to take Alexander Hamilton off the $10 bill and replace him with a woman, our Threatcon Color Code is PINK GREENBACK
- The Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision is expected today. That keening sound you hear is the wailing and gnashing of teeth by right wing culture warriors, who speak about the topic in increasingly apocalyptic and insurrectionist language
- Seven months ago, I called attention to the disturbing probability that white supremacist organizations have active members wearing police blue all over the country. Yesterday, Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center blog found two members of the white supremacist League of the South in the Anniston, Alabama police department. Both officers have been suspended, but how many more of them are out there, empowered to enact racist fantasies with badges and guns?
- In what police are calling a hate crime, a white man entered a historic black church in Charleston, SC last night and shot nine people dead
- Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch takes a long look at extremist David Lane, a Christian nationalist and political operative with an un-American agenda whose close relationship to top Republicans ought to draw way more criticism than it has
- Fired from his mall cop job for giving too many employees the creeps, open carry activist Alexander Kozak returned with his handgun and shot his latest sexual harassment accuser three times in the back as she fled from him in terror. Some of the anonymous weenies at a “men’s rights” forum found it “hard to blame” him for the murder
- House Republicans are trying to overturn Title X, a move which would deny birth control, testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and treatment for those diseases, to millions of low-income Americans. This is a purely ideological attempt to please the forced-birth lobby, which is no longer satisfied attacking abortion services anymore and seeks to cut off access to contraception, too. If the GOP succeeds, count on disease epidemics breaking out in American communities. We’ve already seen how this worked out in Indiana; perhaps now we’ll observe the same events on a national scale
- Pursuant to the previous point, Congress has an 8 percent approval rating
- A new report from the International Monetary Fund says that income inequality is bad for economic growth. Also: water is wet
- New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks is ducking questions about bogus research cited in his latest book
- Kudos to Angelo Carusone for catching Donald Trump’s paid actors at his campaign launch, which would have gone much better with a teleprompter. But did you know that “rent-a-crowds” are already a real thing?
- Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change will be published today. It’s important to note that there’s no debate anymore, at least not within the scientific community: 99.9% of climate scientists agree that human activity causes global warming, meaning the deniers and crackpots are outnumbered 17,000-1. That is the definition of a scientific consensus
- The roots of evangelical hostility to environmentalism lie in the religious movement’s focus on individual conversion and suspicions of government
- Speaking of environmental justice: green spaces around schools improve memory and learning in children
- Jeb Bush’s economic promises are as unlikely as unicorns
- Heritage Foundation “scholar” Ryan T. Anderson uses completely-discredited research to push an anti-LGBTQ line in major media outlets
- Testimony at the ‘ex-gay’ trial in New Jersey makes ‘conversion therapy’ sound really, really super-gay
- New Hampshire Republicans are trying to force their national representative to the RNC out of her position because she signed an amicus brief for marriage equality
- Michigan Republicans are raising taxes on the poorest residents to pay for road repairs. Speaking as a former transportation policy blogger, this is the dumbest way to finance asphalt maintenance that I’ve ever heard in my life. In fact, this is not about fixing potholes at all, it’s just another example of Republicans sticking it to the poor so they can give tax cuts to the rich
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: Iowa state Rep. Greg Heartsill and talk show host Jan Mickelson decide to pursue prosecution for organizers of the Iowa Governor’s Conference on LGBTQ Youth, an annual event sponsored by the anti-bullying group Iowa Safe Schools, because they think the dissemination of gay-positive material is a violation of obscenity laws
- Conservative Erick Erickson is officially carrying water for ALEC, the Koch brothers’ legislation mill
- Your free market health care at work: of the 50 American hospitals that charge the highest markups on procedures and care, 49 are owned by big for-profit health care chains
- 101 year-old Mary Lou Miller explains why that “easy to obtain” photo ID is not really so easy to obtain. Preventing people like Miller from voting is a feature of voter ID laws, not a bug
- Repeat animal cruelty offender Carol Murphy of New Sharon, ME was ordered not to have any pets ever again in 2010, but now that she’s been caught abusing animals once more, she’s trying the ‘sovereign citizen’ defense to claim the court has no jurisdiction over her
- Remember ‘Camp LoneStar,’ the Brownsville, TX-area ranch property used by militia ‘patriots’ who pretended they were ‘securing the border’ for all of us until some of them got arrested for being felons who weren’t supposed to have firearms? The owner is now selling his land and regrets the whole affair
- Every time a white pundit intones that black kids should just obey the police and then they wouldn’t ever get thrown to the ground at pool parties, we should ask them whether their opinion on Ruby Ridge has changed since 1992
- Klan flyers have turned up in Topeka, KS. Expect more reports of these across the southeast during the Summer
- Factionalism on the white supremacist Stormfront website has led to outing and drama
- Ken Ivory, one of the biggest advocates for “land transfer” of federally-managed lands, faces renewed accusations of nonprofit fraud
- In the 2014 election, North Carolina’s new voting restrictions disenfranchised thousands of people, disproportionately hitting Democrats and African Americans
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Does anyone actually read this blog? Lol. If a lib runs its mouth on a blog that no one reads, does it still sound like a dummy? My guess is yeah.