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 Donald Trump becoming the ‘presumptive’ Republican nominee, our Threatcon Color Code is ORANGE HATERADE
- The crackpot candidate: Trump was barely done celebrating his victory before he doubled-down on his birther beliefs. No major party nominee in recent history has subscribed to so many goofball conspiracy theories, at least not out loud
- Have you seen the disgusting, sexist buttons that Trump supporters sell?
- The Rolling Stones have told the Trump campaign to stop using their music immediately
- Trump keeps claiming that he opposed the invasion of Iraq, and media organizations keep letting him get away with it, but of course he’s lying
- The Clinton campaign has released two new web ads that preview their approach to Trump for the next six months
- Trump has killed the conservative movement. Will there be a party realignment?
- Former KKK leader David Duke described Trump’s nomination as a victory over “Jewish supremacists who control our country.” Perhaps coincidentally, Trump has denied responsibility for all the hateful anti-Semitic messages received by Jewish journalist Julia Ioffe after her profile of Melania Trump was published in GQ
- Because she was one of just three people Trump thanked by name after winning Indiana on Tuesday night, expect Sarah Palin to become more prominent in his campaign. Which makes sense, since he’s riding the wave that she started in 2008
- The real danger of Trump’s candidacy is that it may become the new normal, even if some Republicans move back to the center in revulsion
- I wonder how many Trump fans will be arrested with guns and explosives before the year is out?
- As Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, now that he’s the nominee, Donald Trump will start receiving CIA intelligence briefings. What could possibly go wrong?
- The funniest thing about Obama’s monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner is that he wasn’t really being funny
- Fox News campaign correspondent Ed Henry has taken time off to deal with revelations that he cheated on his wife with a Las Vegas hostess
- Anti-LGBT hate group American Family Association admits they are not really sending men into Target stores to ‘test’ access to women’s restrooms, after all
- The man arrested following an ‘active shooter’ call at a Bradley, Illinois Target store turned out to be an unarmed, but hysterical man who was protesting the store’s transgender-friendly policy
- As Gov. Pat McCrory continues to deny that his state has done anything wrong by passing HB2, the anti-trans ‘bathroom bill,’ the Republican speaker of the North Carolina House is dismissing yesterday’s letter from the US Department of Justice giving the state five days to cease enforcing the law. Saying “we’re not going to get bullied by the Obama administration,” Tim Moore refuses to even try to meet the deadline even though he managed to pass the bill in a single day
- During a meeting about transgender students in Horry County, South Carolina schools, the fine upstanding ‘Christians’ present decided to drown out the lone voice in support of transgender rights by singing “Jesus Loves Me.” But the mayor of Rockwall, Texas couldn’t get any Republican council members to second his own ‘bathroom bill,’ so it died without a vote
- Oxford, Alabama has rescinded an anti-trans ordinance passed just last week which required people to use the public restroom according with their birth gender rather than their current identity
- Last night, Alabama House Republicans skipped over several bills in the special order calendar to pass a pair of anti-abortion laws that will absolutely not survive federal court scrutiny. In order to please their Christian fascist base in the waning hours of the regular legislative session, Republicans invoked cloture, limiting debate time to ten minutes. Angry Democrats stood up to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ after the first bill was rammed through, whereupon Speaker Mike Hubbard — who awaits his corruption trial next month — called security to the House floor, although no one was removed. See the video below, which was posted by Rep. Christopher England
- We have been tracking the first of the two bills passed in Alabama, SB 205, for over a year at BU. Aimed at shuttering one particular clinic in Huntsville, it would prohibit the state Department of Public health from licensing any facility that provides abortions within 2000 feet of a school — the same ‘buffer distance’ required for sex offender residences. As forced-birth activists have sued all the way to the Supreme Court to protect their abusive ‘sidewalk counseling’ by declaring buffer zones unconstitutional, this is easily the most hypocritical anti-abortion law in the country
- The other anti-abortion bill, SB 363, bans so-called ‘dismemberment abortions,’ better known as dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedures. Similar to bills passed in Oklahoma and Kansas, the law effectively prohibits the safest means of doing second trimester abortions — and SB 363 has no exceptions for rape or incest, of course
- The very essence of forced-birth activism: arguing for Missouri’s new “personhood” amendment, Republican Rep. Tina Hubrecht said that rape has “a silver lining through the birth of a child“
- A federal civil rights lawsuit charges that the San Domingo Cemetery in Normanna, Texas is still enforcing a segregation-era ‘whites only’ rule
- The evidence just keeps getting firmer that environmental lead was responsible for the higher crime rates of the 1970s and 80s — not single moms, or crack cocaine, or rap music, or sagging pants
- Turns out that the children of godless households are, if anything, more moral than their peers raised in religious households, not less
- Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has a perfect record…of upholding white supremacy
- The GOP witch hunt against Planned Parenthood is setting American science backwards
- The Southern Poverty Law Center says that at least 200 events involving at least three people each have been held around the country to push the ‘patriot’ militia narrative of martyrdom for LaVoy Finicum, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupier who was killed by an Oregon state police officer during a traffic stop when he appeared to reach for a handgun. Arrested the same day, Ammon Bundy reportedly offered to plead guilty to a single federal conspiracy charge if his fellow militants were allowed to leave; Michele Fiore, the Nevada assemblywoman who backed their cause, now says it’s perfectly legal to point your gun at a cop if they point theirs at you first
- Tax evading ‘sovereign citizen’ Reuben T. DeHaan was arrested in his elaborate North Carolina bunker with illegal firearms and bomb-making materials; Florida ‘sovereign’ Melanie Moffett tried to claim her child was “property” during a custody hearing
- She is the fear she wants us to feel: ‘constitutional’ Sheriff Pamela Elliot is accused of using her office to intimidate and harass Hispanics and Democrats in Edward County, Texas with an eye towards controlling elections and the grand jury indictment process
- Stephen Piggott of the SPLC asks whether Breitbart News is “becoming” the media arm of the new ‘Alt-Right’ ideology of racism and misogyny
- Artist Illma Gore claims she was beaten by Trump supporters in retaliation for her painting of ‘Naked Trump’ with a micropenis
- I predict this tweet will probably not help Donald Trump with Latinos:
Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics! https://t.co/ufoTeQd8yA pic.twitter.com/k01Mc6CuDI
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2016
• It would be surprising if Donald Trump’s supporters weren’t selling sexist merchandise.
• Barack Obama could have held his own against Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker in a contest of cutting wit.
• I can’t express how happy I am not to live in a sink of ignorance and bigotry like Horry County.
• Most people have realized they know someone who’s gay or lesbian, so the Right needed to find a new bogeyman for the 2016 election season. Transgender people aren’t particularly terrifying—and my five bucks says maybe one Righty in a million even knew they existed before now—but they were convenient.
• There’s a good reason I’ve never had a particularly high opinion of John Roberts.
• Righties have very little use for science. They like—even demand—technical advances in medicine, but they go out of their way to ridicule the science underlying the bits they want.
• Kevin Drum (motherjones [dot] com [slash] kevin-drum [slash] 2016/05 [slash] everyone-getting-todays-trump-tweet-totally-wrong) suggests that taco bowl tweet from Donald Trump wasn’t an awkward attempt at outreach ot Latinos, but was aimed at his white supporters. Makes as much sense to me as anything the short-fingered vulgarian does.
–alopecia
Of course Donald Trump would choose to eat a taco bowl. It’s the only Mexican dish that comes with a wall already built around it.
Yes, and the “wall” works for what its intended use is, doesn’t it?
Being delicious?
Of course, Hillary tries her best to sound like blacks when she’s speaking at black churches and like Bill, every time she waves her finger for emphasis, she’s lying.
Which would perhaps be indicative of character if not for the fact that people slip into, and out of, accents all the time. I do it. When I came back from Summers in Canada as a teenager, I shed my New Brunswick cadence before Labor Day, but it always comes back within minutes of my arrival in Toronto airport.