Thursday THREATCON – 25 February 2016

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 continued success of Donald Trump, our Threatcon Color Code is BURNT ORANGE

• Yes, Donald Trump could actually be president. He’s on course to win all the delegates he needs. It’s not just that he speaks to the conservative id, winning evangelical voters by channeling their shared antipathy to common enemies and appealing to latent white supremacy. It’s the fact that he speaks in simple, if ridiculous language to rust-belt workers who are tired of seeing their jobs go overseas
• The single biggest predictor of whether someone will vote for Trump? Authoritarianism. For example, they are more likely to agree that Lincoln freeing the slaves was a bad idea
• The good news? A Trump nomination is an extremely big risk for the GOP
• After months of speculation that the Ben Carson campaign was an overgrown direct mail fundraising scheme, Carson seems to agree that might just have been the case
• Screenwriter Etan Cohen never expected Idiocracy, the 2006 dystopian comedy he co-wrote with animator Mike Judge, “to become a documentary” in our time
• Speaking of idiocracy: the University of Houston has told professors they can avoid being murdered by armed students if they just teach less and drop controversial subjects; an Oklahoma legislative committee has passed a ban on Advanced Placement history classes in the state; Republican governors are mulling cuts to liberal arts education, which teaches critical thinking skills, in favor of STEM (science, technology, math) majors
• Mitt Romney says there is a “bombshell” hidden in Trump’s tax returns. My guess is that he’s hinting Trump is less wealthy than he pretends to be, which is always a sore point with The Donald, but there may actually be evidence related to litigation in progress. Remember, Trump will be taking the witness stand later this spring in one of three ongoing fraud trials related to his ‘Trump University’ scam, which targeted exactly the same sort of people who are most likely to vote for him
• Republican state legislators keep passing mean-spirited new restrictions on food stamp purchases, but they do absolutely nothing to stop the actual, real, not-imaginary sort of food stamp fraud taking place
• The latest right wing Twitter conspiracy theory has #GamerGate enthusiasts actually believing that feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian is micromanaging the social media network. I wrote a piece this week about putative victim Robert Stacy McCain, an old friend of this website now being touted as a free speech martyr to Sarkeesian’s supposedly-censorious influence
• Late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spent his final hours on Earth with a centuries-old secret society of game hunters. Baroque and obscure to the end
• Want to beat Donald Trump? Then recognize he’s using reality game show tactics:

• Bernie Sanders is expected to lose in South Carolina on Saturday and is conceding most of the South next Tuesday. One big reason why he’s falling behind: campaigns which rely on the youth vote always, always, always fail. Sanders’s troubles are a worrisome sign of a growing enthusiasm gap that his mere candidacy is not fixing
• Mainstreaming hate: the sponsor of an anti-gay ‘religious freedom’ bill in the GA state senate admits that it would protect the Ku Klux Klan, which is also trying to participate in the state’s Adopt A Highway program
• Darwin at work? A III-Percenter militiaman accidentally shot his 12 year-old daughter in the stomach while clearing his weapon during a get-together at a shooting range
• Protip to ‘sovereign citizens:’ citing the Articles of Confederation will not get you out of a traffic stop
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that ‘sovereign citizens’ have cost taxpayers $17 million in bogus liens and deeds over the last four years
• Underlining just how hard it is to get a jury to convict someone on sex crime charges, Don Finney, a Trenton, NJ ‘sovereign citizen’ of the Moorish Temple, was found guilty of lesser crimes in the three-day kidnapping, assault, and rape of his estranged wife
• The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge standoff may be over, but the right wing campaign against the Bureau of Land Management continues in the Utah state legislature and the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives
• Speculating on the growth of the Bakken shale oil project, a small group of so-called ‘sovereign citizens’ took over the town of St. Marie, MT in 2013. They’re still there, but low gas prices have led to an oilfield bust
• Federal prosecutors had wanted to push the trial of the Malheur militants back into 2017, given all the complications of a very big case with lots of defendants, but the judge is pushing for a speedy resolution. The FBI has finished its evidence-gathering and returned control of the facility to the US Fish and Wildlife Service; damage is estimated at $3.3 million and counting. Grant County, OR has passed a resolution denouncing the occupation and telling ‘patriot’ militia groups to stay away
• We should never, ever laugh at someone’s death, especially when they are killed by police. So why do I find this VIRAL VIDEO which PROVES!!! LaVoy Finicum was MURDERED!!! so hysterically funny?

https://youtu.be/2kNQIAeFVIQ?t=1m20s

• A Center for American Progress review of crime data shows that about 43,000 hate crimes were committed by using or threatening people with a gun between 2010 and 2014. I’m pretty sure that every one of the perpetrators thought of themselves as ‘good guys with guns’
• The Indiana Department of Child Services has fired white nationalist leader Matthew Heimbach for suggesting violence against a client in response to a training question
• It was a bad week for reproductive freedom: the Oklahoma Supreme Court approved state restrictions on medication abortions even though they admit the rules will “result in higher complication rates and in decreased women’s safety;” Alabama Republicans are pushing a new bill to require abortion providers to disclose their annual income to patients and a law that would treat clinics as sex offenders; the US 5th Circuit allowed Louisiana to move ahead with its unnecessary new requirement that abortion providers obtain hospital admitting privileges; the South Dakota senate passed a 20-week abortion ban; an Indiana Senate committee has approved a bill to ban abortions for ‘genetic abnormalities,’ such as babies developing without a spine or brain, and also to require that fetal remains be buried or cremated
• Trolling done right: a Texas man is selling ‘Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer’ t-shirts to help pay for abortions
• Three human rights organizations have filed an historic complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against ‘ex-gay’ conversion ‘therapy’ provider People Can Change charging them with fraud
• Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: two Illinois Republicans are pushing a bill to deny birth certificates to women who do not identify their child’s father
• Mendacious history: Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant has declared April ‘Confederate heritage month‘ without making a single mention of slavery
• Republican Sheriff Newell Norman of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana gave a speech this week in which he trashed conservative movement figures and called former Governor Bobby Jindal “an idiot” and “a cult leader”
• One good thing about Donald Trump’s candidacy: it has pulled the ‘evangelical’ mask off the racist movement that brought you modern conservatism
• The more I watch video of Trump’s voters, the clearer it is to me that they are just suckers in his latest scam. The man has nothing but contempt for them: