Thursday THREATCON – 25 June 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 conservative hysteria about the pending Supreme Court decision on marriage equality, our Threatcon Color Code remains set at RAINBOW APOCALYPSE

• The Supreme Court has upheld Obamacare again and upheld the Fair Housing Act. Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in King v Burwell is apparently hilarious 
• The pending Supreme Court decision on marriage equality has made voices in the opposition movement increasingly strident and insurrectionist to the point of advocating sedition. Expect a decision that strikes down state bans on same-sex marriage to result in a new wave of efforts to pass vindictive “religious freedom” legislation and other anti-gay measures
• As the confederate flags go down, the reactive online right is beginning to focus their anger on the rainbow flag. Symbolizing the American heritage of sexual freedom activists, the rainbow flag has increasingly begun to serve the right as an icon for everything that culture warriors hate about post-patriarchal America. The issue is already internationalized on the right; here is a safe link to an example of the phenomenon at Breitbart London
• It’s nice that Republicans increasingly seem to be on the same page about taking down the confederate flag, but there are some who think renaming parks named for mass murderers is tantamount to ISIS destroying cultural heritage sites and that removing the confederate flag is “cultural genocide“
• No one in the punditry game has been as horribly wrong as often as Bill Kristol
• Most Americans think that protests of unfair treatment by the government make America better, but that majority shrinks if the protesters are black
• Conservative hit man and horrible, rapey boss James O’Keefe III is very, very angry that US Customs didn’t like his idiotic border-crossing stunt
• Bereft of his Twitter account in consequence of his endless harassment and doxing, conservative troll and fraudulent journalist Charles C. Johnson is suing Gawker for reporting on rumors that he once pooped on the floor of a college dorm
• Guess who really, really loves the confederate flag? If you guessed former Alabama Christian Coalition Executive Director and current forced-birth activist James Henderson, you are correct! This review of his Facebook wall is quite illuminating
• Your US RDA of outrage porn: strait-faced lunatic Alan Keyes tells Newsmax host Steve Malzberg that the Charleston church shooter may have been motivated by a gay rights agenda instead of, say, sexual insecurity about a black penis, or his white nationalist hate group freinds, or the white power bands he liked, and definitely not the decades of conservative pandering to angry white men

• South Carolina church shooter Dylann Roof appears to have been a regular commenter at the Daily Stormer white supremacist website and his manifesto is full of white nationalist language. This, too, is an example of internationalized conservative politics
• So much for ‘heritage, not hate:’ the Second Flag of the Confederacy was explicitly designed to be “the white man’s flag”
• Long before he presented his infamous ‘black shooters’ segment this Sunday, I had considered Chuck Todd a prime example of the creeping white supremacy in major news media. After all, this is the guy who wrote an entire book about how President Obama is too much of a “stranger” to Americans
• Now that we’re finally paying attention to the frighteningly-cozy relationship between the mainstream GOP and the Council of Conservative Citizens (get it? CCC=KKK), can we talk about the Republican defense of dark money nonprofits that also protects that organization’s nonprofit “social welfare organization” status? Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize hate groups
• Two South Carolina ‘sovereign citizens’ have pleaded guilty to running a debt elimination scam
• 55-year old ‘sovereign citizen’ and militia ‘patriot’ James Faire is charged with murder after deliberately running over a couple in his pickup truck
• The Bureau of Land Management doesn’t seem to be doing anything about welfare rancher Cliven Bundy, and calls for accountability are growing
• FBI Director James Comey doesn’t seem to know the Department of Justice’s definition of the word “terrorism”
• Wondering what to do when your neighbor displays white power symbols? Here’s some advice from the publisher of DiversityInc
• A Gallup poll show that almost half of Americans would vote for a socialist. Conservatives need to understand that this is the perverse consequence of over-using the word ‘socialist’ for anything they dislike. The same goes for the word ‘liberal’
• This video says a lot about the Fox News effect on the Republican Party, not to mention its impact on America:

https://youtu.be/UFq6IvLiYks

• French taxi unions are protesting the ridesharing service Uber. I am extremely suspicious of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ as another economic race to the bottom
• Climate change has made Alaska’s fire season much longer
• It turns out that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s high-profile terrorism investigation as a federal prosecutor was just another example of American law enforcement agencies creating enemies to prosecute during the Bush years
• Nick Hanauer is touting the benefits of higher wages
• Hillary Clinton is skipping Netroots Nation, which is not how you overcome a surging candidate like Bernie Sanders by winning over the activist base. On the other hand, Sanders needs to do a better job of outreach to minority voters, as his record on civil rights is a bit weak
• Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ) is leading the charge to restore the Voting Rights Act
• The Chesapeake Bay ‘dead zone’ is slightly smaller, but it would shrink much faster with better controls on agricultural runoff
• A sociologist explains why everything Fox News says about people on food stamps is nonsense
• Ted Cruz (R-Batshit) is campaigning on right wing victimization narratives about marriage equality supposedly forcing Christian business owners to violate their beliefs
• A little-noticed passage in Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s opinion in the case of Los Angeles v Patel hints at a rejection of Texas’s restrictive new abortion law that was recently upheld by one of the most conservative federal courts in the nation