Thursday THREATCON – 29 January 2015

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 American Family Association’s sudden firing of Bryan Fischer, our Threatcon Color-Code is PINK SLIP

• In addition to the above video of Rachel Maddow reporting on the end of Fischer’s career of bigotry, Karoli has a roundup of other insane and blatantly-fascist things that Fischer has said. My personal favorite is how he supports torture because he believes in a god who was tortured to death. Right Wing Watch says that AFA won’t be able to disown him so easily
• Conservative choad Charles C. Johnson is easily the worst journalist in America
• This week, I told you how forced-birth activists Joe and Eric Scheidler tried mass-mailing plastic handcuffs to abortion providers as an act of intimidation, and how an Alabama reproductive rights group is transforming their ‘gag gift’ into art for auction. As of this morning, ARRA has already raised over $1000 to help women in need access their rights
• Indiana German teacher Kevin Pack is suing the Middlebury School District, claiming that he was fired for his atheism. Of course, the Superintendent says that he was fired for showing students “inappropriate” movies — namely the 1998 German-language action thriller Run, Lola, Run and the 1930 cinema classic The Blue Angel — and teaching them the proper German words for body parts
• Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wants to cut $300 million from state universities so he can spend $220 million on a new basketball arena for the Milwaukee Bucks. In related news, Walker’s stump speech story about an award-winning teacher being laid off because of union rules predictably turns out to be a nothingburger
• The Burwell lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act took a big credibility hit this week when former Senator Ben Nelson submitted a brief to the Supreme Court that severely undermines the litigants’ central argument. Also, the Kaiser Family Foundation finds little support for cutting subsidies — even in Republican districts
• For months now, I have been warning you that GOP Israel-chauvinists in Congress would seek to provoke a confrontation with President Obama over his Israel policy. I stand vindicated
• A new study from the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California found that 100% percent of minority women respondents had experienced gender discrimination in their STEM (science, technology, engineering math) jobs
• Jeff Roorda, the disgraceful Democratic Missouri legislator who double-dips as the fascist business manager of the St. Louis police union, showed up to a meeting about a proposed police oversight board last night and promptly started shoving a woman around

• Alabama state representative Patricia Todd has made waves by vowing to expose colleagues who cheat on their spouses while preaching ‘family values’ to support bigoted legislation on the house floor. I saw Todd speak to a local equality community in December and expect she will not fail to follow through on her threat
• Comic book superheroes are a great way to fight bigotry
• David Neiwert tells the story of antiwar protester Kenneth O’Keefe, who has crossed the line from opposing Israeli policy to plainly anti-Semitic bigotry
• I’ve been sounding an alarm for months about the emerging new strategy on the right that seeks to reverse gains against bigotry by campaigning for a ‘freedom to discriminate.’ Our latest examples: the so-called US Pastor Council, which is organizing to repeal Texas’s anti-discrimination laws, and a Colorado bigot’s discrimination complaint to a state civil rights agency after a bakery refused to fill his order for homophobic cakes
• Mirroring and complimenting the aforementioned campaign, the World Congress of Families is organizing to pass discriminatory anti-gay legislation around the world
• Nashville writer Randy Horick takes The Tennessean to task for printing Islamophobe Carol Swain’s call to jihad against Muslims
• Three members of the United Aryan Empire, a racist gang in Oregon, have been arrested and charged with “shooting into occupied homes, detonating an explosive device and involvement in a large gang fight”
• Have you heard of “Redpillers”? They’re the intellectually-pretentious white men on the internet who believe in right wing ideology, but don’t consider themselves conservatives. “Gamergate” is just one manifestation of the phenomenon
• Pursuant to the previous point, Doug Henwood blasts the illusion of opportunity offered by “sharing” services like Uber and Airbnb
• A Michigan jury has awarded $4.5 million to University of Michigan student Chris Armstrong for the online harassment and libelous smears of former Assistant Attorney General Andrew Shirvell, who will now be stuck with the judgment

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— Tom Pride (@ThomasPride) January 24, 2015

• America’s libertarian ideologues are turning Honduras into a blasted hellscape with magical free market unicorns
• The Economic Policy Institute has proof that so-called ‘right to work’ laws reduce worker pay
• During a court hearing on charges of extortion and fraud, Calhoun County Circuit Judge Bud Turner told bailiffs to put masking tape on ‘sovereign citizen’ Everett Leon Stout’s mouth if he didn’t stop interrupting. Stout’s commonlaw wife, Miriam Claire Shultz, pleaded guilty
• Illinois appellate judge Mathias W. Delort has proposed that courts issue monetary sanctions on ‘sovereign citizen’ legal tactics
• The further away from a state capital a woman lives, the less likely she is to run for office
• The United States has the world’s largest prison population because more trials end in guilty verdicts and sentencing laws have extended terms
• The Republican Governors Association spent the most money on last year’s state elections
• Mike Elk, whose firing by Arianna Huffington in 2011 helped prompt me to delete all my content from her site, is writing for POLITICO now…and trying to unionize the writers
• Shades of Rebekah Stevens? Senator Rand Paul’s new blogger may be his “problem waiting to happen.” Also, he can’t keep his opinions straight on whether drones are good or bad
• A large study has confirmed that abortion-inducing pills are very safe — in fact, they’re several orders of magnitude safer than giving birth