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 increasingly-disturbing and disgusting story of Josh Duggar’s sex life, our Threatcon Color Code is PURPLE PROSE
- Stripper and porn star Danica Dillon says that Josh Duggar was a fan who pursued her for unprotected rough sex. The Duggar family has dispatched Josh to a long-term rehab center, signaling that his admitted hypocrisy is going to require a major penance and a long time out of the public eye. No longer defending the former spokesman for the Family Research Council: presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, now running second in a Reuters-Ipsos poll, who says that Hillary Clinton should go to jail for handling her email just like Condi Rice and Colin Powell did
- Speaking of the Clinton email nothingburger: Hillary’s use of a private server was not a violation of State Department policy. The entire story is about keeping the Benghazi attacks up forever
- Having risen to power on coded racism, the GOP is horrified that Donald Trump channels explicit racism. With increasing support from overtly-racist groups as well as white supremacist David Duke, Trump has monopolized the angry white voters who showed up for Sarah Palin’s rallies in 2008. Lindsey Graham is right to worry for his party, because with such a large field of candidates making it impossible to unify a majority against him, Trump may end up re-branding the GOP as a white nationalist organization, with right wing conservatives rationalizing every step of their journey towards reality-show fascism
- Case in point: after Trump threw Fusion and Univision reporter Jorge Ramos out of his press conference, one of his “white power!” supporters told the most influential Latino journalist in America to “get out of my country.” As exemplified by this Red State diary, within 24 hours the wingnutosphere had started convincing itself that Ramos isn’t really a journalist, after all, but an “activist”
- As the calculated war of words between Roger Ailes and Donald Trump heats up, Republican Party efforts to keep Trump off the ballot in various states will backfire
- The subject of a 2007 PBS documentary, Alex White Plume has long been a symbol of resistance to an overbearing War on Drugs by growing hemp, a plant that occurs naturally on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, where Lakota leaders said this week they will try to pass a referendum legalizing hemp cultivation in tribal territory. White Plume recently gained the assistance of a former US attorney in his effort to overturn an 11-year old federal injunction against him; the case is seen as a test of the Obama administration’s declared policy on cannabis cultivation on Indian lands. Here is a White House petition to stop the persecution of White Plume
- The full meaning of marriage equality: Patricia Fancher, whose son David married Montgomery, AL resident Paul Hard and then died in a tragic automobile accident, is still not finished trying to claim the wrongful death settlement. She has lost in court, and Mr. Hard has received the check, but state Chief Justice Roy Moore isn’t accepting defeat. Now she has appealed in federal court to keep Hard from spending any of the money
- Casey County, KY Clerk Casey Davis, who is no relation to Rowan County, KY Clerk Kim Davis but joins in her campaign of saying ‘no’ to same-sex couples in defiance of the United States Supreme Court, says he’s willing to die for his freedom to discriminate. Maybe they should just find new jobs? After all, they’ve got thousands of dissonant supporters attending ‘religious freedom rallies’ for them, surely one of those folks can offer them employment that doesn’t involve dealing with members of the public like they’re American citizens?
- The Council of Conservative Citizens (get it? CCC=KKK), which inspired Dylann Roof to massacre nine people in a Charleston, SC church, was supposed to hold their first meeting since the tragedy, but canceled when the hotel backed out due to unspecified ‘threats’
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: reacting to the Josh Duggar news, anti-gay lunatic Bryan Fischer compares sexuality to shoplifting, wants to cancel the First Amendment for pornography and online dating services. Whenever a right winger does wrong, it’s always a good reason to limit the freedom of others:
- Hoover, AL chiropractor Gary Forrest Edwards was sentenced to a $25,000 fine and community service for trying to avoid taxes with ‘sovereign citizen’ tactics
- Jeffrey Miller, arrested last December for squatting in an unoccupied Mansfield, OH home, has been sentenced to three years in prison
- California toughened its laws against ‘paper terrorism’ associated with sovereign citizens last week
- The Southern Poverty Law Center is suing the Etowah County Detention Center for violating the civil rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers
- Make time for this one: Tuesday saw a lynching reenactment by civil rights activists and a confederate flag parade in the same town, on the same day
- Forced-birth activists are increasingly using state records to access the private information of patients in an effort to hassle providers
- Next time you see forced-birth activists squawking about supposed links to the Civil Rights Era, remind them that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were enthusiastic supporters of Planned Parenthood
- Have you heard of abortion doulas? Meet the new frontier of reproductive justice advocacy
- Robin Marty interviews Raleigh, NC teacher Shana Broders about the forced-birth activists harassing her and the school where she teaches
- Paul Viollis explains why Vester Lee Flanagan’s murder of two former coworkers yesterday was an instance of workplace violence, not a hate crime
https://youtu.be/cKwezee-yXI
- Glendon Scott Crawford was convicted of trying to acquire a radiation weapon to kill Muslims
- Contrary to popular impressions, most mass shootings happen in our homes and are completely preventable
- The Wisconsin Supreme Court was put in place to serve the interests of Governor Scott Walker. In July, they delivered by killing the John Doe investigation
- An Arabic language program at a Houston school has drawn protests from people who think the language, and the religion of Islam, are the same thing
- Brian McCracken of Boaz, AL thought it would be hilarious to wear a KKK t-shirt to cheerleader practice
- Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has championed the state’s republican-passed voter ID laws, is trying very hard to keep Wichita State University mathematician Beth Clarkson from analyzing a sketchy pattern of Republican election outcomes
- Jeb! Bush doesn’t like “anchor babies,” by which he means Asians, though it’s not clear which Asians he’s referring to, specifically. Jeb! also thinks that Planned Parenthood pap smears, birth control, and HIV screening are not health issues for women
- Remember that book club of black women who were asked to get off the Napa Valley wine train because their laughter disturbed the stuck-up white people on board? Turns out that same experience also happened to a group of Latinas
- Life without government: having passed strict voter ID laws, AL Governor Robert Bentley is getting ready to close 45 of the state’s 49 driver’s license bureaus due to an enormous unresolved budget deficit
- A review of NC voting data reveals that neo-confederates are mostly middle-class people who are normally unengaged in politics, thus providing an electoral boost to Republicans who turn them out to the polls
• Bryan Fischer is, if anything, becoming more unhinged by the day. A more grown-up response to the Ashley Madison hack—and adultery—can be found in Dan Savage’s top-of-podcast rant this week. Turns out, people cheat—or “cheat”—for all kinds of reasons, none of which have anything to do with shoplifting, oddly enough. Savage also has more than a little to say about Josh Duggar.
• JM Ashby calls Trey Gowdy’s little clambake the Select Solyndra IRS Committee to Investigate the Benghazi ACORN Birth Certificate Emails. Seems to cover it, at least until the Rs get another bug up their collective.
• Those idiots in Houston are one of the reasons we can’t have nice things.
• It surprises me not at all that Kris Kobach and Tabitha Lehman don’t want to release voting machine tapes for statistical analysis. What does surprise me is Lehman’s argument that she can’t reasonably be expected to produce the voting records because, as the article says, “Each roll from the 2014 election is 385 feet long, and stored in 42 boxes that are not segregated by precinct or voting district.”
I’m not sure, but I don’t think “I can’t comply because I have lousy organizational skills” qualifies as a legitimate excuse.
• Maternity tourism is real, and there was a recent raid of apartment complexes used by birth tourists near my neck of the woods. The people who do this are mostly wealthy Chinese citizens, and as far as I can tell we’re talking a few thousand births per year at most. And since Jeb Bush was asked by Bill “The Eight Million Dollar Man” Bennett about securing the southern border, it seems unlikely Jebbie was talking about Asians.
• Passing a voter ID law and then making it much harder to get ID is a stroke of genius. Just think what Robert Bentley could accomplish if he weren’t evil.
–alopecia
Thanks heaps for featuring the petition to help Alex White Plume fight the DEA (which can be found at bit.ly/SaveAWP )