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 MSNBC’s firing of Melissa Harris-Perry, our Threatcon Color Code is STEALTH-BAN BLACKLIST
- Jerry Delemus, the failed New Hampshire sheriff’s candidate who took part in the Bundy ranch standoff and then became a major Trump booster, has been arrested for his part in the 2014 armed insurrection as well as the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover. It is one of fourteen new indictments in the case
- Denouncing Donald Trump as a “fraud” in a barn-burning speech today, Mitt Romney became the latest prominent Republican to rebel against the grassroots favorite, warning listeners to observe Trump’s response and see for themselves why the reality show star is unfit for the White House. Predictably, Trump made an oral sex reference, and his Twitter fans are trending a #MittRomneySexTape hashtag
- We have seen Trump pretend not to know who David Duke is, or who the Ku Klux Klan are, and we have seen white supremacists campaign for him. We have seen him sort-of denounce the KKK, and seen the KKK decide he didn’t really mean it. And we’ve seen him start to have minorities thrown out of his rallies for no apparent reason. But did you know that Trump’s father was arrested at a Klan riot in 1927? Maybe it’s not such a coincidence that Trump’s son gave an interview and press credentials to an infamous white supremacist radio host, or that his rallies are basically KKK meetups at this point. Maybe that’s the real Trump, and we’re finally seeing him after all these years
- It’s not a smear, and it’s not just Trump: racism is an important part of conservative political success. Wouldn’t it be just terrible if it turned out that liberals were right about the right all these years? That this is the natural end for a political party which uses a ‘southern strategy’ to make Ronald Reagan president?
- Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota thinks Trump will be a better president than Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders even if the KKK are behind him
- Remember the time Trump skipped a debate to supposedly raise money for veterans? Turns out most of the stated beneficiaries are still waiting. Was this just another scam?
- Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film is giving Sony executives indigestion because it portrays Donald Trump being infected with HIV
- Donald Trump Jr. says that he would pay for his father’s black critics to leave the country. Both of Trump’s sons embody affluenza and white privilege
- TIME photographer Chris Morris was choked and thrown down by a Secret Service agent who was enforcing Trump campaign press restrictions. That’s not a legitimate function of the Secret Service, which is only charged with protecting the candidates. I predict Trump will eventually fulfill his fantasy of killing someone
- You may have heard that the single best predictor of whether someone will vote for Trump is ‘authoritarianism.’ But you may not know that the science on this topic lines up very well with the history of right wing populism, or that authoritarianism is a latent trait activated by fear
- Shouting “f**k the n*****s,” a white Texas teenager was arrested for shooting out the window of the Beaumont campaign office of Zena Stephens, who is running for Sheriff as a Democrat. The region of the state between I-35 and Louisiana is infamous for white supremacist activity
- Seven people face charges after a gathering of Klan members in Anaheim, California was set upon by protesters. Not charged: Charles Donner of San Francisco, who stabbed three people “in self defense”
- Turns out the late ‘Justice’ Antonin Scalia was just as racist as you thought he was
- Two unexpected victories this week: the West Virginia Senate wisely voted down a ‘religious freedom’ bill to protect anti-gay discrimination; South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard vetoed a bill that forced transgender children to use the restroom of their birth-gender
- Need one more reason to loathe Yelp and the so-called ‘sharing economy’?
- Dead stereotype walking: Native Americans drink less alcohol than white people
- A Florida jury has found ‘sovereign citizen’ Anthony Williams guilty of practicing law without a license
- Members of the sovereign citizen group Washita Nation keep getting arrested for squatting in houses in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans
- Why can’t a ‘real’ republican beat Trump? Watch Ted Cruz claim that marriage equality will result in Christian broadcasters being forced off the air:
- The satellite data that Ted Cruz keeps citing when he denies global warming? It shows the Earth is warming
- The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is taking place this weekend with Donald trump headlining. Once cast out of the gathering, the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy is running multiple panels this year — and brought two prominent racist Europeans to take part in them
- Is it an election year already? Idaho state representative Pete Nielsen resurrected the “legitimate rape” disasters of 2012 when he told a hearing room full of people that the “trauma” of rape and incest prevents pregnancy
- What happens when culture wars have gone on for too long, with too much success? You get Rick Green, the scandal-plagued, pseudohistory-spouting primary challenger for a state supreme court seat; you get Mary Lou Bruner, who thinks that President Obama is a gay prostitute, winning a seat on the State Board of Education; you get an elected chair of the Republican Party in the state capitol who blathers on about conspiracy theories and curses those he dislikes. In other words, you get Texas
- Los Angeles police arrested three white supremacists for attacking Hispanics
- People For the American Way looked into the groups lobbying to block anyone President Obama nominates to the Supreme Court. Known as ‘the four horsemen,’ they all exist to maintain a conservative majority on the court
- The women of the Supreme Court took control this week during oral arguments over Texas’s 2013 abortion law
- The abortion rate is declining because of better contraception
- Gov. Rick Snyder actively prevented the city of Flint from switching water sources last April
- Ben Mathis-Lilly is tracking every violent incident at a Trump rally for Slate
• Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has (rightly) said the #NeverTrump movement will “collapse under the weight of its own ridiculousness,” in large part because the only prominent R willing to say he won’t vote for Donald Trump in the general is Mitt Romney.
• Everything Donald Trump does is a scam. Sharks gotta swim and bats gotta fly, as Tom Lehrer once sang (in a very different context).
• Yeah, sure we live in a post-racial society. Uh-huh. Right.
• Rick Green and Mary Lou Bruner bring to an old and not very funny joke: Life is like a sewer. The really big chunks float to the top.
• Rick Snyder needs to face serious criminal charges over the Flint water disaster, and he shouldn’t be the only one.
–alopecia