Thursday THREATCON – 19 May 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 brand-new court desegregation orders, our Threatcon Color Code is JUMANJI GREEN

• Everyone has been talking about Trump’s behavior towards women this week. To be sure, he just uses them to enhance his own ego and refers to them as “third-rate hookers” when they reject him, but doesn’t that just make Trump the perfect candidate for the new Alt-Right? Similarly, when Breitbart News attacks William Kristol for his efforts against Trump as a “renegade Jew,” it’s the latest sign that a disturbing, reprobate streak of anti-Semitism animates the 21st Century right — a point that Breitbart alumnus Ben Shapiro, who resigned the website over its too-cozy relationship with the candidate, acknowledged yesterday by admitting “I was wrong” to say that anti-Semitism was purely a phenomenon of the left
• Trump butler Anthony Peter Senecal’s weird description of Michelle Obama as “a man” is further evidence that Robert Morrow, the insane Travis County, Texas Republican Party chairman who co-authored a conspiracy book with Trump hand Roger Stone last year that was described by reviewers as a kind of ‘Clinton fan fiction,’ may just be the single most influential person in the entire campaign
• Everyone was also discussing Trump’s short list of possible running-mates, but the most important thing to know is that the same guy who ‘vetted’ Sarah Palin will also be managing the process for Trump. Also, his energy policy adviser is a climate change denier, his chief strategist thinks the presidency is “the ultimate reality show,” and let’s not even start on his delegates. As we’ve seen, Donald Trump has no firm policy position of any kind because he’s devoid of ideology; his opinions at any given moment will always reflect the crank with whom he has most recently spoken. This is how he swings from defending Caitlyn Jenner’s right to use any restroom in Trump Tower over to promising to reverse transgender protections just two weeks later. He will be as fascist as the right wingers around him tell him to be
• The electoral math gives Trump a very narrow path to win in November — and he has not brought a new surge of voters into Republican politics, after all. They’re just the same racist white people as before
• The Southern Poverty Law Center has pulled the lid off of the Council for National Policy, an opaque and extremely influential conference of mainstream conservative powerbrokers and fringe right extremists, by obtaining a copy of their 2014 membership directory. Many of the names are familiar to me from our reporting on Groundswell at BU
• Ted Cruz returned to the US Senate last weekend, a homecoming which pleased absolutely no one
• If you ask me, DC statehood is the number one democracy issue in America
• Turns out there’s a word for Alabama: “kakistocracy” is government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens
• Having failed to extract Obamacare cuts, Republicans in Congress have cut funding to fight the Zika virus and attached provisions to the president’s request that would ensure more sleepy truck drivers make the highways as dangerous as possible. The latter point is all the more galling because ‘truck driver’ used to be a middle class job before the industry transformed ’employees’ into ‘independent contractors’
• Why do evangelical voters love the irreligious Trump? Possibly because their movement was never really about a god, but just a fig-leaf for plain old racism. The ‘religious right’ made Ronald Reagan president, and by the end of his tenure the momentum of desegregation had been fully reversed. This is why a new Government Accountability Report finds that America has resegregated its schools during the era of evangelical political power

• The North Carolina Chamber of Commerce has admitted they supported HB 2, the infamous ‘bathroom bill,’ for its provisions that essentially destroy workers’ rights to sue for discrimination
• Reese M. Hartstirn, a 33-year old Chicago man, was arrested after choking an 8 year-old girl unconscious in a deli bathroom with intentions of sexually assaulting her in a stall. Oddly, Hartstirn wasn’t wearing a dress at the time
• Turns out that Target’s transgender bathroom access policy really is attracting the kooks and weirdos — but they’re not men in dresses, they’re raving bigots who think Jesus was a shouter and violent creeps who follow behind, spy on, and even assault people they think are transgender
• Three years ago, Germany was the first nation to see renewables hit price parity with other forms of electric generation. Two weeks ago, Germany generated so much electricity from renewable sources that electric prices dipped into the negative
• CBS has rejected a series based on the classic Nancy Drew mysteries because it’s “too female”
• This horror story about a birth mother going through hell because her inhaler caused a false positive test for methamphetamines is the world’s best reason to stop criminalizing motherhood over urinalysis results. BTW, guess what happens when you give pregnant women $81 in prenatal benefits with no strings attached? Healthier babies, the very thing that forced-birth conservatives pretend to care about most
• Science says that men and women were more equal before they settled into agricultural societies
• About half of all internet users have stopped or reduced their online activity due to concerns about identity theft and “privacy.” Although one in five of them mutters something about government surveillance, the fact is that few cyberstalking or trolling experiences have anything to do with the NSA
• Last year was the first time since the government began recording numbers that the uninsured rate dropped below 10%. Thanks Obama! Now if only those red states would welcome Medicaid expansion, we could get it down to 5% or less
• Congressional Republicans’ top Benghazi investigator says there was nothing the Obama administration could have done differently

• Madison, AL police officer Eric Parker became a national pariah after he tackled and badly injured an elderly foreign visitor on a neighborhood sidewalk. But the feds have now screwed up two attempts to try him and the state is giving up
• Eric Fanning was confirmed as the first openly-gay Secretary of the Army. Having personally witnessed the outrages and stupidity of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ Army, this is one of the most welcome and refreshing signs of cultural shift in the military during my lifetime
• Accused of killing a black man in a hotel room, Jeffrey Knoble has invoked ‘sovereign citizen’ status in his Illinois capital murder trial. One easy guess how this will work out for him
• ‘Sovereign’ squatters Jennifer and Randall Skates failed to prevent their trespassing trial from progressing; the couple was found living in a $900,000 Prescott, Arizona home
• Anderson County, Tennessee Mayor Terry Frank has predictably caused an uproar by affixing a ‘sovereign citizen’ title to his office door
• The anti-LGBT hate group World Congress of Families will hold its tenth congress in Tbilisi, Georgia this weekend. Happily, Franklin Graham will not be present to exhort them to “take a bullet for their beliefs“
• Cliven Bundy pal and would-be ‘constitutional sheriff’ Joseph Rice badly lost his bid for law enforcement powers on Tuesday. Overall, such candidates did not fare well in Oregon this week
• It’s not just Trump: Montana Republican legislative candidate Taylor Rose is an unapologetic racist and white supremacist
• Boston brothers Scott and Steven Leader have pleaded guilty to beating and urinating on a homeless immigrant, a hate crime they say was inspired by Donald Trump
• Donald Trump immigration policy adviser Sen. Jeff Sessions, who has a long history of racism and admiration for hate groups, brought Mark Krikorian of the white nationalist ‘think tank’ Center for Immigration Studies to testify before a Senate subcommittee
• Psychologists have confirmed that tea partiers’ visceral reactions to President Obama are driven by race