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 removal of the confederate flag from South Carolina’s capitol grounds, our Threatcon Color Code is REVANCHIST RED
- As efforts to remove the confederate flag succeed, frightened white ‘patriots’ have begun turning out to defend the “heritage” symbol of racial supremacy. This past weekend, a parade of flag-waving pickup trucks took place in my own corner of Alabama as the scared, angry white participants showed us all how not-racist they are by blocking off black drivers at stoplights to yell and curse at them. Not only does this speak to the racialized angst that is omnipresent in conservative politics, but culture warriors are clearly converging their reactionary issues underneath that banner. The confederate flag is increasingly turning into the right wing symbol of reaction to modern America, opposing gay rights and abortion and pluralism (such as Muslims helping black churches rebuild after arson). This theme will likely crystallize over the next few days as the most virulent forced-birth activists in the country gather in Montgomery, Alabama to admire the confederate memorials and hear Ten Commandments judge Roy Moore pontificate about the evils of ‘sodomite marriage’ — an event we will be covering here at BU
- Marion County, Florida commissioners voted unanimously to put the confederate flag back up
- We cannot ignore the confederate flag, but we can set it on fire and then bury it
- Magnum jackass: conservative actor Tom Selleck is accused of stealing water from a public hydrant during California’s drought emergency
- Scott Walker’s presidential campaign is working overtime to avoid offending the nativist vote on immigration issues
- Attention sports pundits: the ratings for the Women’s World Cup Final should end any need for people to ‘defend’ women’s sports
- Fresh out of the halfway-house and just embarked on his permanent false martyrdom tour, convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza has already destroyed his credibility
- Karoli dissects the latest Katie Pavlich-Judicial Watch fabricated IRS conspiracy
- Colorado’s experimental long-term birth control program was so successful that the New York Times has noticed it, but their reporting barely takes note of how Republican legislators have defunded it at the behest of culture warriors on the right
- California has removed the word ‘lynching’ from its state laws, so of course angry racist white people gathered in a Yahoo News thread to complain about it. Yes, why do we ever peek in comment sections when we know how awful they are?
- Now that he’s a real Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump must surrender control of his Twitter account to a PR hand immediately
- Lauren Nelson of Patheos spells out why the religious right isn’t going to win the bakery culture wars. And no, the state of Oregon did not “gag” bakers for being homophobic
- It can happen in your neighborhood: Texas racists spray painted graffiti on a man’s truck because he had a black houseguest
- After the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the Ten Commandments monument on state house grounds was unconstitutional, Governor Mary Fallin chose to ignore the ruling and request a rehearing, while Republican legislators proposed to amend the state constitution
- Economist Thomas Piketty explains why Germany has nothing to say to Greece about being a responsible debtor
- How will capitalism survive when technology eliminates all the jobs? And how will Jeb Bush survive being so out-of-touch that he says Americans need to work longer hours?
- Breitbart.com’s Michael Flynn didn’t make the GOP primary cut to replace disgraced representative Aaron Shock
- Not only did Sarah Palin lose her Fox News contract last month and shut down her TV channel this week due to nonexistent viewership, but Medicare has proposed a new regulation based on the end-of-life counseling measure that she smeared as “death panels”
- Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) wants his party to impeach “activist judges” on the Supreme Court. Of course, Brooks isn’t talking about the Citizens United decision or Shelby County v Holder. Only gay weddings and Obamacare qualify as “activism” on the federal bench
- The Dothan, Alabama police officer who shot and killed ‘sovereign citizen’ Robert Earl Lawrence last year at a Houston County animal shelter will not face charges after a grand jury returned no indictment
- Attention law enforcement officers: this is how you handle a sovereign citizen during a traffic stop
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, a hate group against unarmed people and liberals, telling Armed America Radio that Dylann Roof targeted the Emanuel AME church in Charleston because they were unarmed liberals:
- Reddit.com is still being sketchy about banning white supremacist subreddits
- Guns have replaced bombs as the primary weapon of violent white supremacists
- Two of the South Carolina state senators who voted against removing the confederate flag from the capitol grounds have longstanding ties to white supremacist organizations
- Why does a majority of white Americans disagree that Dylann Roof is a terrorist? Because one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, of course
- United Aryan Empire leader Jeremiah Mauer was sentenced to thirteen years in prison for assault and conspiracy to commit murder
- Maine Governor Paul LePage may have accidentally let bills become law that he’d meant to veto
- Two federal judges have made it much harder for the government to imprison Robert Doggart, who admitted to plotting an attack on an Islamic community in New York state, and sent him home from jail until lawyers can prove he’s “a true threat.” What could possibly go wrong?
- Being around racist people can make you racist
- Earl Holt III, the Republican donor who leads the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (get it? CCC=KKK) which inspired Dylann Roof’s massacre, managed to make some part of his fortune by glomming onto the heiress of a Jewish businessman
- Idiocracy: Texas students are about to start learning a right wing version of American history with all the white supremacy stuff excluded
- Still a birther, Donald Trump is the perfect Republican candidate:
