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 hazelnut shortage, our Threatcon Color Code is NUTELLA BROWN
- Last week, we wondered at the possible link between the restoration of white electoral supremacy and events unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, we have learned that the community has been “getting darker” for several years, that the poverty rate has doubled and unemployment nearly tripled, but the city government and police department have remained almost entirely white. Given how the United States is transforming into a ‘majority-minority’ country, expect the same sad scenario to repeat itself in many different places
- The easiest fix for Fergusons everywhere? Get rid of stand-alone municipal elections
- It’s not just that conservatives want to believe the killing of Michael Brown was justified. Voter registration efforts in Ferguson have stirred the Breitbart crew to express their fury that black people might vote
- Black and white Americans have completely different views of police. Missouri’s (white) Republican Lt. Governor Peter Kinder, for instance, thinks that the “Anglo-American justice system” is completely fair, while blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to say that Michael Brown’s shooting is a racial issue
- Ferguson municipal courts have issued an average of three warrants per household
- Police are much more likely to use force against a protest with black people in it
- What issue stance does the entire 2016 Republican presidential field have in common? Climate change denial
- Paul Ryan’s ideas to confront poverty just get worse all the time
- While Republicans continue to undermine the ACA, health insurance companies are finding new ways to discriminate against the sick
- Alexander Reynolds visits Sheriff Arpaio’s infamous open-air jail for Vice.com and pronounces it “a concentration camp“
- Tax rates have no effect on the competitiveness of American corporations
- A Mississippi man with biracial grandchildren was beaten and shot two weeks after a burning cross was placed in his yard:
- Despite opposition from anti-choice activists who think that plain language should lose all meaning, the Alabama Women’s Wellness Center will reopen for business at a new location in Huntsville after the city zoning commission agreed this week that medical facilities providing abortion are in fact considered ‘medical facilities’ under current regulations
- When the Tennessee Valley Authority cleaned up the coal ash spill at Kingston, Tennessee, they treated it like toxic waste — until they got to Alabama, where they dumped it on the black community of Perry County as “household waste“
- Professional token black conservative Ben Carson says that liberalism is why so many black families are fatherless, but the charts say it’s because black dads are all in prison
- People who graduate from for-profit colleges have no advantage in job interviews over those who never went beyond high school
- Gay people can start getting married in Virginia today
- After just a half-hour of deliberation, a Talladega, Alabama jury convicted 24-year old ‘sovereign citizen’ Christopher Isaac Surles of murder this week. Rather than present a defense, Surles had tried rejecting the court’s authority to try him
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ James Timothy Turner lost an appeal of his fraud conviction from last year. Turner was a leader of the “Republic of the united (sic) States of America,” one of the best-known sovereign citizen groups
- Maine Governor Paul LePage’s spokesman tried to push back against journalist Mike Tipping this week, but not by refuting his book that portrays the governor as a friend of ‘sovereign citizen’ group the Aroostook Watchmen. Instead, Brent Littlefield went on a local TV show and kept reminding everyone that Tipping is a liberal
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: Eric Bolling of Fox News wins a race-baiting championship!
[youtube]http://youtu.be/SMSqvAM7NiI[/youtube]
- Microsoft is leaving the Koch brothers-backed American Legislative Exchange Council
- Turns out that Republicans get very upset when former colleagues use their membership as an excuse for past racist acts
- What would happen if you applied conservative economic principles to the most popular sitcom on television? A disaster, of course
- Profiteers of public education, beware: the FBI is starting to take down your charter school scams
- If you donate to a tea party thinking it will help conservative candidates win, you’re probably being scammed
- What are white nationalists, militias, and the KKK saying about events in Ferguson? Surprisingly little
- The American Family Association is now saying the ALS ice bucket challenge “kills babies“
- A white supremacist was arrested for assaulting a bar patron in Mesa, Arizona
- Someone in Bryan County, Montana has been dropping neo-Nazi literature in people’s driveways; Havre County, Montana has been hit by flyers for United Klans of America
- The NRA is opposing efforts to allow alcohol at gun shows, but not for any reason that makes sense to normal people
- Ted Nugent’s freedom-loving fans have successfully deterred a protest of his show by threatening violence
- Original tea party organizer Eric Odom described anti-immigrant activist and Bundy Ranch friend Pete Santilli as “a borderline lunatic“