Thursday THREATCON – 22 October 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 Benghazi hearing, our Threatcon Color Code is CLINTON HIGHLIGHTS

• A new poll shows that 72% of Americans agree the Benghazi investigation is a political witch hunt. Also, a depressing number of Christian conservatives actually blame witchcraft for mass shootings, tax fraud, and headaches
• The biggest loser in this week’s Benghazi news? Jeb Bush
• Speaking of witch hunts and spectral evidence: there’s been yet another attack on a Planned Parenthood, this time in New Hampshire. There’s also been a string of arson fires at black churches in the Ferguson, Missouri area. The probability of this GOP-controlled House of Representatives spending five minutes investigating either active crime wave are actually lower than Paul Ryan’s chances of winning enough ‘Freedom Caucus’ votes to be Speaker
• Liars for Jesus: a study of 100 PolitiFact articles during the first months of Obama’s second term finds that Republicans were rated ‘pants on fire’ three times as often as Democrats
• Liars on Fox News: Wayne Simmons, the fake CIA operative who scammed his way into appearances on the channel until he was arrested for fraud, was denied bail this week because the judge is concerned by his “lack of regard” for the law. How many more ‘terrorism experts’ are just self-inflating hacks? A whole lot of them, probably
• Speaking of media figures who give far too much credence to fringe conspiracy garbage: Seymour Hersh is a fantasist, Jonathan Mahler is a fraud, and Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein deserves to be fired. What’s next, Batboy on the cover?
• White nationalists have been especially active on Twitter lately, trending a new hashtag almost daily and trolling both sides of the political spectrum. Today’s topic, #WhenAmericaWasGreat, had plenty of racist memes, but also became a gray retrospective on conservative ‘golden oldies’ such as school prayer, normative cisgendering, and jingoistic patriotism — basically, your classic old white man shouting at the clouds. Earlier this week, an account linked to Brooks Bayne, who awaits trial on assault charges in Georgia, was key in trending #BoycottStarWarsVII to ‘protest’ the casting of the new Star Wars film. Essentially, they got the rest of Twitter to float their trend for a longer time by making fun of their apparent ignorance and evident bigotry. Some people advise we ignore these gambits for our attention (“don’t feed the trolls”), but I say the spotlight needs to shine on what they do
• Joliet, Illinois police officer Michael Pauly and his wife are openly racist on social media. In fact, Angela’s online remarks are so bigoted and insane that she’s earned her own hashtag
• The new Captain America storyline features a black man in the title role, and he’s taking on a sinister racist border vigilante group. Of course, Fox News freaked out about the comic book as an attack on “conservatives,” thus proving that the lines between white nativism and conservatism have been blurred to nonexistence in our time. The cast of Fox & Friends also demonstrated a profound ignorance of pop culture history in the process: superheroes have been taking on racists and nationalists for decades, and Captain America is just one of many
• A sampling of the delightful tweets that women receive whenever they speak out on abortion:

• Remember abortion before Roe v Wade? There’s a generation of providers who do! Knitting needles and coat hangers may soon become fashionable again in Missouri, where the Planned Parenthood witch hunt is making it impossible for a reopened clinic to survive the state’s regulatory environment. This is a feature of the ‘baby parts for cash’ hoax, not a bug
• Sovereign citizen David Rick Van Theil is waiting to ‘help’ desperate women with their unwanted baby problems just as soon as the clinics are all shut down
• United Airlines will have to pay a $10,000 fine for flying Troy Newman of Operation Rescue to Australia without a visa. Newman is a key figure in the ‘baby parts for cash’ contrivance
• Remember ‘diaper baby’ David Vitter and the DC Madam? A former prostitute now says that the Republican Senator and probable next governor of Louisiana got her pregnant and asked her to get an abortion. Expect Vitter to dwell on his conversion story, invoke the ‘baby parts for cash’ fraud at every turn, and win by promising to exceed his predecessor Bobby Jindal in upholding “the sanctity of life.” Regardless of the success of the forced birth lobby, abortion will never, ever be illegal or unavailable for rich people
• Speaking of blazing hypocrisies: Paul Ryan is demanding generous family time to run for House Speaker, but has made a career out of standing against paid family leave. Gee, what sort of policy inducements could help families ‘choose life’ when an unexpected pregnancy comes along?
• Wisconsin Death Trip: now that Scott Walker has given up on the presidency, he can finish destroying the state
• A Texas group is trying to scare people about trans bathroom use ahead of an equality ballot initiative in Houston, and the governing body of Texas high school athletics is trying to ban transgender athletes. This is the same state that made Ahmed Mohammed’s family feel so welcome, they moved to Qatar
• Idiocracy: a California teenager is suing her school principal and his assistant for sending her home. Both men allegedly said that her t-shirt, which read “Nobody knows I’m a lesbian,” was “an invitation to sex” and possibly “gang related”
• The principal of Glenn Allen High School in Virginia has apologized for a racist parody song that was played on a PA system during football pregame warmups
• ‘All lives’ do matter: contrary to the complaints of white privilege, black-on-white hate crimes are in fact prosecuted — and tracked by the SPLC
• Disgraced right wing Hungarian reporter Petra László says she will sue the refugee she tripped on camera, and also Facebook, which makes her the perfect girlfriend for conservative choad Charles C. Johnson

• The World Congress of Families doesn’t like to acknowledge their success as a global anti-gay hate group. Breitbart News contributor Austin Ruse is a leading participant in the WCF
• Green County, Tennessee commissioners voted 20-1 against flying a confederate flag over the courthouse
• ‘Sovereign citizen’ Harvey Leelance Searcy has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for assaulting a deputy in Ellis County, Texas
• 19 year-old Indiana University student Triceten D. Bickford has been arrested and is under investigation for a hate crime after assaulting and attempting to choke a Muslim woman in front of her daughter during what he claims was a blackout
• Meet the new wave of white power extremists running for public office in 2016
• Token brain surgeon Ben Carson hates ‘political correctness’ on campus, but by golly he knows which speech is correct for your campus
• Stung by attention to the way he closed DMVs due to budget cuts, thus cutting off voters in every county in the state where three-quarters or more of the population is black from obtaining an ID, Alabama Governor Dr. Robert Bentley has decided they can reopen for one day every month. This is exactly why Section V of the Voting Rights Act existed in the first place
• Florida Tea Party activists Pat Wayman and Steven R. Fields have been accused of using their positions to undermine the authority of other county officials. Both led an effort to create a sovereign citizen ‘common law’ grand jury in the county; on her Facebook page, Wayman has called for President Obama’s arrest for treason and posted Sandy Hook conspiracy theories
• The new Texas history schoolbooks are carefully written to remove all the unflattering context of touchy topics like slavery so as not to conflict with reactionary pseudohistorical belief systems in a deeply red state. This advance of the American idiocracy was years in the making; culture warriors play a long game
• Speaking of long games: Democrats need to focus on the future of the Supreme Court, retaking power in the states, and winning Congress, or else they are totally screwed and so is the country. As long as people who believe in ‘baby parts for cash’ and Benghazi stand-downs continue to run Washington and the state legislatures, it won’t matter if a Democrat wins the White House