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 papal address to Congress, our Threatcon color Code is PURPLE VESTMENT
- Of course, Pope Francis is hardly a left-wing radical. He’s not going to shift the church on gay marriage, and he would probably like to defund Planned Parenthood just as much as Ted Cruz. But his call for an end to denialism about climate change and critique of unfettered capitalism is inspiring the American political right to label him a socialist anyway. The key thing to note is that they are projecting politics on a decidedly non-partisan message. If Pope Francis eating with the homeless makes John Kasich feel bad about targeting minority communities in Ohio for food stamp cuts, whose fault is that, really?
- Speaking of Republicans who love to kick the poors for funsies: Paul Ryan is desperately trying to stop President Obama from lifting sanctions on Iran, a rear-guard action against the deal struck to limit that country’s nuclear program. Just like the fifty-odd times that the House has voted to overturn the ACA, these efforts are meaningless, but expect GOP congresscritters to make similar noises through 2016 anyway
- The praise for Carly Fiorina’s debate performance embodies everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. An emerging Fox News favorite, she is coalescing as the anti-Trump candidate, but her tendency to see things that don’t exist (like, say, her success as a tech CEO) and her glossy weirdness (demon sheep, anyone?) will eventually catch up with her
- Now that ‘God’ aka the Koch brothers have appointed Scott Walker to lead the way out of the Republican nominating process, Chris Weigant has Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal pegged as favorites to drop out of the horse race next
- At last week’s GOP debate, Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio all said they would prefer to see Rosa Parks on the new $10 bill. No one mentioned that Parks served on the board of Planned Parenthood
- Speaking of Marco Rubio: he spoke at a fundraiser held in the home of an Adolf Hitler art collector on the eve of Yom Kippur
- Bill Gothard, the homeschooling guru associated with the scandal-plagued Duggar family who became mired in scandal himself last year due to allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, has reappeared on Facebook after months of silence — only to have his victims speak out on his page
- American slavery has been reinvented (again) as prison labor
- Speaking of American slavery: thanks to anti-abortion activists, Alabama leads the nation in criminalizing pregnancy. This report from AL.com and ProPublica makes disturbing reading
- Witness the blinking incomprehension as gay-hating Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis is asked whether a non-Christian could ever have a “valid claim” to “religious liberty”
- Kim Davis fan Eugene “Sherlock” Holmes is running for mayor of Kings Mountain, North Carolina, on the “what’s wrong with eradicating homosexuals?” ticket
- Reproductive rights advocates trended a #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag last weekend to dissipate the stigma and shaming around abortion. Of course, there was the usual right wing red alert on Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy.com, whereupon the hashtag was flooded with spam, pornography, abusive tweets, judgmental condemnations, stigma, and shaming. Here’s a word cloud someone made of the reply messages she received
- Texas resident Scott Lattin has gotten himself and his family members arrested for a hoax police report blaming Black Lives Matter activists for vandalism to his truck. Breitbart News made a great deal of noise about this case a couple of weeks ago, but of course there has been no correction. The scam, which netted at least $6,000 from gullible conservatives, was transparent enough that Reddit users figured it out
- Franklin Graham, son of the noted evangelist Billy Graham, who has long since crossed over into the bizarro-world of paranoid Christian counterculture, says that the Muppets “promote sin”
- Rumors continue to swirl around Rebekah Caldwell Mason and her relationship to Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, now being divorced by his wife. Newspapers across the state have asked the judge to unseal the Bentleys’ case
- Because the Heart of Dixie doesn’t have enough national embarrassments, Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler spoke to the white supremacist League of the South last week. As BU reported a year ago, Zeigler is singularly unqualified for the job, and while in office Zeigler has done absolutely everything he could manage to do with his new powers except audit any state departments
- The Anniston, Alabama Civil Service Board has ruled against Josh Doggrell, the police officer fired for his ties to the League of the South
- Jon Ritzheimer, the Oathkeeper ‘patriot’ who organized an anti-Muslim rally in Phoenix, Arizona and then tried to raise millions of dollars ‘to protect his family,’ now says he wants to organize Marines to arrest Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan over her support of Obama’s Iran deal — and of course, he’ll be raising money for this dubious new project. Of course!
- Neo-Nazis are robocalling residents of Idaho and Mississippi
- Right wing Islamophobes are trying to shut down refugee relocation programs in Idaho for fear that Syrians fleeing war, rapine, and lawless massacre will turn out to be ISIS in disguise
- Token brain surgeon Ben Carson told a 2011 Seventh Day Adventist gathering that Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution because he was influenced by Satan. In fact, Darwin was an abolitionist and humanitarian who was deeply troubled by 19th Century ‘scientific’ racism
- Speaking of Ben Carson: his Islamophobia is at least as demented as Carly Fiorina’s ‘demon sheep’ ad, but it tells you where the conservative grassroots really stands on religious liberty. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council doesn’t think the First Amendment applies to Muslims; that’s the demographic to which Carson makes his appeal. The fact that Perkins is still a welcome guest on mainstream opinion shows is proof that no one pays a price for anti-Muslim bigotry in America –after all, even Bill Maher is doing it. In fact, this weekend the tenth annual Value Voters Summit will feature almost as many anti-Muslim bigots as anti-gay bigots. There’s no ‘paradox’ here
- Speaking of religious zealots: if you’re looking for a cult of abusive, child-raping crooks, you don’t have to go all the way to the Middle East. You can check out the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints right here in America
- Did you miss the right wing ‘gay Doritos’ freakout? One Facebook user posed as their customer service department on Facebook to troll the angry haters
- When Pennsylvania’s only Latina legislator spoke in Spanish during a committee hearing on an ‘English-only’ bill, her microphone was cut off
- Who would dare defend Martin Shkreli, the CEO who wanted to raise the price of an anti-AIDS drug by 5000%, and how would they do that? If you guessed ‘Eric Bolling and Greg Gutfield of Fox News praising the almighty god of profit,’ congratulations, you’re correct!
- Sheriff Joe Arpaio will likely be held in contempt of a federal court for refusing to stop his immigration sweeps
- What happened to the campaign of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker? First, he turned into Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
- Why do politicians ignore the poor? Because they don’t vote
- While we’re discussing popes and climate change, it turns out that Exxon has known they were warming the globe since the reign of Paul VI, who was the last reformer to occupy the Vatican. Coincidence?
• Kim Davis has a set of rote responses that she sorts through to answer any question put to her. I feel sorry for the waitress who asks if she wants soup or salad, because Davis will probably launch into her “Christians are the ones being persecuted” answer instead of deciding whether she’s in the mood for corn chowder.
• By modern standards, Charles Darwin was a pretty awful character. By the standards of his time, he was remarkably tolerant and open-minded. By any standards, Ben Carson was a brilliant neurosurgeon, but has proved himself otherwise perfectly useless.
• I’d managed to forget about “gay Doritos.” The outraged! responses are just plain charming. (And good on Frito-Lay—and PepsiCo—for partnering with the It Gets Better Project.)
–alopecia
Isn’t that true for every historical figure though? I’m an admirer of Thomas Jefferson, but frankly I’m not sure I’d want to have him over for dinner.
Of course.
It’s unfair to judge historical figures by the standards of the early 21st century simply because they lived in a different world. It pleases me to believe that Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin would, if brought forward in time, be able to wrap their minds around most changes in society—although they might hyperventilate a bit upon seeing women’s fashions—in a fairly short time. I’m probably wrong and they’d likely both be aghast at the unseemly informality of social interactions today and stunned by the speed of communication (though Jefferson would have a blast playing with a mobile phone).
“Never meet your heroes.” Good advice.
–alopecia
“No one over the age of eighteen should have a hero.” – Joseph Suglia
As I’ve been writing my WW1 blog, I’ve become more aware than ever before of how deeply flawed America was a century ago, and how flawed its people were. That’s especially true with Woodrow Wilson, who seems to diminish with time. I don’t think I could tolerate him being in my living room, quite frankly.