to capture the true characterIt’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 Siege of Malheur, our Threatcon Color Code is BURNT UMBER
- The Southern Poverty Law Center has called out Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart News for promoting white nationalists
- Is it time for the civil rights movement to become intolerant? Journalist Brody Levesque argues that LGBTQ activists and their allies must adopt a more confrontational attitude towards bigotry and religious extremism
- Vocativ analyzed 80,000 tweets that Donald Trump’s fans directed at Fox News host Megyn Kelly and they’re as awful as you probably expect. Meanwhile, a social media analysis finds that Trump mostly retweets white supremacists who say nice things about him — and nearly two thirds of his followers also follow at least three accounts which participate in white nationalist hashtags
- Think of the GOP as a nuclear reactor and Trump as a glitch that turns off the cooling system
- The Koch brothers’ net worth has more than doubled under President Obama, once again underlining that confiscatory taxation of super-high incomes creates a more democratic political order
- Remember Indiana’s ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’ that actually would have enshrined protections for bigotry in law? State Senator Michael Young wants to go even further and create a ‘right to discriminate’
- A 94 year-old woman who once had to deal with Jim Crow laws meant to deter black voters was a key witness in a federal court challenge to North Carolina’s voter ID law this week
- Stolen valor: Graham Hunt, a Republican state representative and “conservative constitutionalist” who chairs the Ted Cruz campaign in Washington, appears to have exaggerated his experiences and awards in the Arizona Air National Guard
- Tennessee’s House Speaker Beth Harwell tried to duck questions regarding a sexual harassment scandal by saying: “I have never received a formal or informal complaint regarding Rep. [Jeremy] Durham…I asked our human resources director to talk to him based on rumors I had heard.” How does she not hear the dissonance coming out of her own mouth?
- A man with neo-Nazi ties who tried to run as a Republican for an Illinois seat in Congress failed to turn in any valid signatures
- Change for the worse: two linguists analyzed the dialogue of every Disney princess movie and found that female characters are even more marginalized now than they were decades ago
- Alabama moves to complete the destruction of public education: the state Board of Education has approved a new class of non-certified ‘adjunct teachers,’ bringing a wage-depressing trend from the world of higher education into primary and secondary schools; State Senator Del Marsh wants to end tenure and switch new teachers to a ‘merit pay’ system. Attacking teacher pensions and pay was the very first priority of the Republican legislative supermajority that came to power in the Tea Party wave election of 2010
- Rafael Cruz, father of Senator Ted Cruz, spoke for the modern conservative mind when he told Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM that public schools are a communist plot to brainwash children
- A Texas grand jury unexpectedly cleared Planned Parenthood in the ‘baby parts for cash’ hoax — and then charged the hoaxers for obtaining drivers’ licenses under false names and interfering with legitimate organ donations
- A Washington, DC charter school is being forced to close by large protests against a future Planned Parenthood location nearby
- Stung by criticism of their misogyny, the forced birth movement is re-branding itself as a feminist cause
- A forced birth activist identified only as Paul told the Florida House Criminal Justice Committee that “white culture” will diminish if white women are “outside the home not having babies” while non-white women continue to have children. Chances are, Paul also lurks outside of abortion clinics to yell “black lives matter” at African American women seeking care
- I told you about Wendi Kent a few weeks ago, and now her ‘Faces of the Fight’ project, which uses photography to capture the true character of forced-birth ‘sidewalk counseling,’ has been featured in the Washington Post. Kudos to a worthy endeavor!
- The contractor hired to remove confederate monuments from New Orleans has received death threats and his car was burned
- What explains irreligious Donald Trump‘s strong appeal to evangelical voters? They’re not actually more religious than anyone else, and they’re just as easily turned against the faith leaders who’ve led them to defeat so many times. In other words, evangelicals seem to regard their religious elites in the same light that conservative grassroots see Republican elites. This explains the growing political influence of polarizing religious figures such as Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, and Robert Jeffress over the learned, but too-liberal preachers emphasizing grace over hellfire
- Nadia Khalid Raza is suing Lane Community College for allegedly failing to protect her from a disturbed neo-Nazi student
- Voting on party lines, the Florida Senate Judiciary Committee moved a ‘right to discriminate’ bill to the legislative floor after a local pastor opined that homosexuals are roaming school hallways looking for Christians to murder
- The most dangerous right wing campaign you’ve never heard of: ALEC, the Koch brothers’ legislative ‘bill mill,’ is within seven states of being able to hold a constitutional convention aimed at eliminating environmental and labor laws, among other radical priorities
- Black drivers matter: in Florida, they’re twice as likely to be stopped and cited for failure to wear a seat belt even though both races wear them at the same rate
- A social change earthquake: since 2007, significantly more white Americans agree that racism is a serious problem in the country
- Mike Huckabee has created the campaign season’s worst ad. It’s possibly even worse than Carly Fiorina’s ‘demon sheep’ spot
- Trolling done right: an unidentified man is traveling around Iowa to accuse Ted Cruz of liking the band Nickelback
- Former Charles County Circuit Court Judge Robert Nalley faces jail time for ordering his bailiff to use a Taser on a ‘sovereign citizen’ for persisting in his arguments. No one ‘deserves’ to be tortured
- Kassidy Townshend of Stephensville, Texas tried using ‘sovereign citizen’ arguments to defend himself on a cocaine possession charge. The jury took ten minutes to return a verdict; he will spend three years in prison
- Max Udargo managed to visit the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on what was probably the single most important day of the early occupation, so he got to watch ‘Three Percenters’ of the Pacific Patriot Network arrive in the middle of a press conference at Pete Santilli’s instigation. He says that despite a constant boil of debate, Ammon Bundy was the undisputed leader of the militant band and therefore owns the results. Bundy is one of seven people being held as a flight risk; through his lawyer, he called on his fellow militants to ‘stand down’ Wednesday evening. Several of the remaining occupants have been allowed to leave, but three have been arrested. Contrary to the propaganda coming from Cliven Bundy, Michelle Fiore, and the Pacific Patriot Network, Robert ‘LaVoy’ Finicum was killed by a police SWAT team, not the FBI, and we may eventually see video that shows him reaching for a gun in his waistband
Updated info for my big Anti-Government Extremist Violence list. http://t.co/QL49KT4SpQ Pic below is tiny sample. pic.twitter.com/Uvvx2kZ2xo
— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) October 5, 2015
• Those Donald Trump supporters sure are classy.
• Why is it so damned important to some people that they be allowed to discriminate? Especially since there’s really no such thing as a permanent majority. Did they not learn the Golden Rule as children?
• Fetus fetishists have long pretended to be feminists, or at least that they care at all about women. The current PR effort is bigger and splashier than past efforts, but it should be just as ineffective.
• Lane Community College sounds like a terrific place to work, with an intelligent and supportive administration. /snark
• It doesn’t surprise me that ALEC would be pushing for a constitutional convention, but it should. The Koch brothers have always struck me as greedy and arrogant, but if they think they can exert some kind of control over a convention, I’ll have to add “profoundly stupid” to my list of descriptors.
• “Ted Cruz likes Nickelback” is the funniest protest sign I’ve seen in ages.
–alopecia
I would venture to suggest that the Kochs’ desire to hold a “con-con” is another primary point of separation from the John Birchers.
True. I’m just gobsmacked that the Kochs are willing to bet a constitutional convention wouldn’t get out of hand and light the entire structure of government on fire.
That’s not a bet I would take.
–alopecia