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 new X-Men movie trailer, our Threatcon Color Code is BOX OFFICE GREEN
- PBS did an entire story on first time Trump voters and didn’t even notice the white power symbols tattooed on one of them
- We’ve been following the story of Michelle Fields, who left Breitbart News on Sunday after management failed to support her over a well-evidenced allegation that Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had manhandled her. Now Fox News chode Eric Bolling has removed Lewandowski from rotation in his weekend show “Cashin’ In”
- The 2016 election might just produce the largest gender gap in American electoral history. Something to think about when the President is praising women for speaking out against online harassment
- Donald Trump’s rallies could yet devolve into organized violence. Have you noticed that Trump’s campaign embodies the full meaning of the word ‘mob’? Or that Trump is using the phrase “private event” just like Barry Goldwater did? Or his approval of police violence?
- American public transportation systems had a very bad week. Troubles at the California Bay Area and the Washington, DC Metro are policy choices of a Congress that does not want to pass a comprehensive transportation bill as long as a Democrat is president. Sound familiar? If you watched the Flint hearings yesterday, just know that old pipes are the tip of the proverbial iceberg, while America is the Titanic
- Ted Cruz has dipped into the neoconservative well for his foreign policy team: professional crank Michael Ledeen is one of the worst lunatics of the Bush-Cheney administration; anti-gay endorser Kevin Swanson wants to execute Girl Scout leaders for “promoting homosexuality”
- They are the fear they want us to feel: the Alabama Senate has voted to eliminate marriage licenses. For years, culture warriors said marriage equality would destroy marriage; it turns out they meant that they were going to destroy marriage if forced to share it with couples unlike themselves
- Sen. Arthur Orr (R-Decatur) wants to cut public assistance by denying it to anyone who owns a car. However, he still expects recipients to find jobs and get to them rather than suckling at the taxpayer teat
- Having just pleaded budgetary crisis in order to block Birmingham’s minimum wage bill, Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama just raised his staffers’ pay by 80%. I guarantee this will raise a hornet’s nest, but not as much as a Senate committee deciding to spend money on a Ten Commandments display
- Watch CBS reporter Sopan Deb describe the racism he experienced from Trump reporters in Chicago:
- The Economist has added a Donald Trump presidency to its top ten list of global risks, but Trump is fumbling the transition to the general election
- Georgia is as bad as Alabama: Sen. Renee Unterman (R-Buford) is blocking a bill to account for the rape kits of sexual assault victims; the Senate has passed an anti-gay ‘religious freedom’ bill, which they have rewritten somewhat in the face of veto threats by Gov. Nathan Deal; and an Atlanta man poured boiling water on two gay men in what appears to be a hate crime
- North Carolina’s Voter ID law worked exactly as intended by disenfranchising students
- Being a lone black male at a Trump rally is scary. Someone even tried to start a ‘Lion’s Guard’ on Twitter purporting to “protect” Trump supporters from “violent far-left agitators“
- A Muslim student at Wichita State was attacked by a man shouting Trump’s name; two young Trump supporters at Northwestern University allegedly painted swastikas, slurs, and his name on the walls of a chapel
- What really made the right crazy? Obama. Not that it’s his fault they can’t handle him being president
- The Koch brothers are trying to defund the Veterans Administration because it is a successful non-profit model for health care, and of course they’ve tried to leverage the recent scandal
- The Koch brothers are also attacking libraries, because of course they are
- Glenn Beck’s multimedia empire seems to be on the verge of dissolution
- I keep saying that Alex Jones is underestimated as a primary driver of right wing batshit insanity. Here he is ranting about life extension, interdimensional transportation, and Satan’s psychological war to steal space travel
- Thomas Robb, leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, praises Trump’s white supremacist language; David Duke seems to think that the rise of Trump will rehabilitate Hitler; meanwhile, all the political momentum to remove Confederate flags and symbols is gone
- The FBI Hostage Rescue Team is trying really hard to feed endless conspiracy theories about the suicide-by-cop of LaVoy Finicum. Meanwhile, the cult of Cliven Bundy is turning out for his hearings
- Nevada congressional candidate Michelle Fiore, who enthusiastically endorsed the Malheur takeover and whose Republican lobbying group was very close to its leadership, calls the occupiers “campers” who were “victimized by the federal government“
- The Bundy agenda is showing up in laws aimed at claiming federal lands for states
- 39 year-old Milwaukee resident Dan J. Popp lured three men and killed them because of their immigration status, saying “you guys got to go” for not speaking English. But Minnesota’s hate crime enhancement will be difficult to implement
- A ‘sovereign citizen’ couple was held in jail for contempt after declaring themselves beyond the reach of Louisiana courts
- Stories about the Kentucky legislature passing a bill against interracial marriage are untrue
- Federal officials are investigating Bernard Township, New Jersey for violating the First Amendment by refusing to allow local Muslims to construct a mosque
- It Donald Trump does signal the decline of the enlightenment age, scientists need to examine their own role in creating the post-factual society
- This week, 26 year-old American Mohamad Jamal Khweis quit fighting for ISIS, saying that he was “not thinking straight” when he joined. Amir Said Rahman Al-Ghazi of Ohio pleaded guilty to attempting to aid the Islamic State, while Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem of Arizona was convicted of taking part in a scheme to assault an anti-Muslim cartoon rally. I don’t need anyone to tell me that Islamic terrorism is a threat to liberal Western values, but just consider the full context of non-Islamic violence I’ve recounted in one week, and how extremism prospers when it feeds on itself
- Polk County, Florida poll workers hid the Democratic ballots and tried to tell Democrats that only Republicans were voting
MATT OSBORNE you just shit all over the Irish, saying that the sun cross proves the lady in the picture is racist…. what an asshole
The woman in the photo also has an “88” tattoo on her left hand, the white supremacists’ not-so-clever code for “Heil Hitler.” It’s reasonable to conclude that she’s racist.
The Celtic cross has acquired any number of symbolic meanings. It’s not fair to blame Matt because a bunch of racist knuckleheads appropriated the thing as a symbol of white supremacy, just as it’s not fair to blame the Irish (or, for that matter, piano makers, since a standard keyboard has 88 keys) for those racist knuckleheads.
–alopecia
• I wouldn’t have noticed the white power symbols, either. It’s hard to pick any one tattoo out of the visual noise on that woman’s arms and hands. (Commenter “Livi_O” at Talking Points Memo has the best reaction to the story: “Nothing says ‘proud of being white’ like turning yourself mostly blue.”)
• As awful as Ted Cruz’s foreign policy advisers are—and boy howdy, aren’t they a bunch of crazies?—his team isn’t nearly as disturbing as Donald Trump’s (“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”).
• The Alabama senators voting to eliminate marriage licenses basically threatened to hold their breath until they turn blue. This is what happens when grown-ups aren’t in charge.
• Bigots will go to remarkable lengths to deny rights—even basic humanity—to people they consider lessers.
• The Koch brothers created the VA scandal.
• The FBI Hostage Rescue Team really screwed the pooch in Oregon. I begin to wonder if there’s a single competent person in the entire FBI.
–alopecia