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 unveiling of Dick Cheney’s bust, our Threatcon Color Code is EMERALD CITY
- Even without his religious beliefs, Syed Rizwan Farouk strikes me as a good candidate for random mass shooter-of-the-day. At this hour, it appears Syed and his wife Tashfeen radicalized in isolation. Syed, who appears to have grown up in a violent home, was born in the United States, and had already been an all-American gun enthusiast for years. Highlighting the importance of Muslim congregations in detecting and preventing violent extremism, Syed ominously stopped attending mosque three weeks before his attack on the Inland Regional Center
- Robert ‘baby parts’ Dear bragged about gluing the locks of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Charleston years before his assault in Colorado Springs killed three people and wounded nine. He also expressed admiration for the violent anti-abortion group ‘Army of God,’ which has links to organizations BU covered in Montgomery this summer. The horrifying cherry on this terrible sundae: Dear was accused of rape, but the charges were dropped when the alleged victim had to relocate
- Robin Marty, who covered the same events in Montgomery, exposes the dissonance of forced-birth activists’ claims of nonviolence with their rhetorical jihad against providers. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences, and I fully expect the reproductive rights community will confront irresponsible politicians at an increased rate
- The dirty secret of anti-abortion terrorism is that it works. Sadly, this is also true of most terrorism
- Allen Scarsetta, who has been charged with shooting unarmed Black Lives Matter activists in Minnesota two weeks ago, is a so-called ‘sovereign citizen’
- Abortion rights are literally under attack, as they have been for a long time now
- Like climate change, mass shootings are a creation of public policy — one that serves powerful, wealthy interests while pretending to care about freedom of the individual
- Budding serial killer George Zimmerman still has all his guns, but has been banned by Twitter for violating their abuse policy to punish an estranged girlfriend
- Coal baron and Tea Party billionaire Don Blankenship has been found guilty today of a conspiracy to violate mining safety regulations which resulted in the Upper Big Branch disaster and the deaths of 29 miners
- Did you hear that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave away $45 billion to charity? Turns out that’s not what he did at all, and even if it was, there’s no reason to expect the money would provide necessary social benefits to the 99%
- This Chris Hayes segment about the right’s war on abortion access is mandatory viewing
A special All In America report on abortion access
Posted by All In with Chris Hayes on Tuesday, December 1, 2015
- When Donald Trump lied about “predicting” Osama bin Laden, the most telling aspect was that he did it on the Alex Jones show. If there was anything left of the line separating mainstream Republican voters from the lunatic fringe, it has now been thoroughly erased
- The conservative Heritage Foundation has issued a long, self-contradicting report to argue that discrimination against LGBTs is “reasonable.” If there was anything left of the line separating venerable conservative institutions from hate groups, it is now being thoroughly erased
- Nearly three dozen Christian schools of ‘higher learning’ have applied for Title IX waivers from the US Department of Education to be allowed to practice anti-LGBT discrimination
- Elections have consequences: Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is issuing an executive order to protect LGBT state employees
- A true history of the South is not taught in schools — especially when it comes to the history of violence against people of color
- After Christian ‘New World Order’ author Britton Clayton Traylor was arrested for attempting to rob a movie theatre in Hoover, Alabama, he invoked America’s oldest paranoid conspiracy theory by telling police that Freemasons made him do it
- Pedophilia has no religion, either: a Tennessee family is suing Fellowship Bible Church of Williamson County, which first tried to deny their 3 year-old child was raped in a bathroom, then tried to persuade them not to file charges
- Sen. Ted Cruz’s claim that “the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats” has no factual basis
- Racist white members of the Dothan Police Department colluded to plant drugs and guns on young black males for years while leadership actively concealed their crimes. The current police chief, the District Attorney, and a state assistant director for Homeland Security are implicated. Sourcing the story to whistleblowers on the police force, Jon B. Carroll writes at HenryCountyReport.com that a federal investigation is warranted by the evidence. Rumors and accusations have swirled around the department for years, but Police Chief Steve Parrish says he’s just a history enthusiast, and that Carroll has his facts wrong. Being on assignment yesterday when this story broke, I haven’t had a chance to dig into the details, but I do note the Southern Poverty Law Center has deleted a tweet linking to the story
- Speaking of my assignment: I was present for the unveiling of a historic marker in Montgomery yesterday. I will have great video tomorrow, yet as a result of my travels and editing work this Threatcon post is shorter than usual. We will return to our regular programming next week
Guys, I have a great memory too and the only person I recall celebrating on 9/11 was Dick Cheney.
— Laurie Kilmartin (@anylaurie16) December 1, 2015
• At the risk of being accused of immaturity, I’m sure the … erm … creator of that bust of Dick Cheney was going for an expression of firm resolve, but only managed the expression of a man who’s constipated.
• Gollies, what a suprise, Robert Dear isn’t anything the fetus fetishists have been insisting he must be: liberal, Democrat, transgender, &c. Naturally, the forced-birthers and the politicians they own have decided to ignore that and continue to blame liberals for what Dear did, because they’re The Party Of Personal Responsibility! or something.
• The Heritage Foundation sure hired itself a charmer in Ryan T. Anderson. Anderson’s attitude toward LGBT people is something I’d expect from a particularly oafish high school student.
–alopecia