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 Ben Carson’s amateur biblical archaeology, our Threatcon Color Code is TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT
- Jonathan Chait begat a conversation about Ben Carson’s profiteering this week, causing other writers to take note of Carson’s messiah complex, his many bizarre opinions, and the giant red flags of dishonesty in his biography. I think Charlie Pierce of Esquire hits closest to the mark: Carson’s experience selling quack nutrition cures was the perfect preparation for attracting the modern GOP ‘base’ voter. Of course, to Carson, all of this attention to the truth is just a Satanic conspiracy
- Rand Paul’s sputtering presidential campaign is a sign that the ‘libertarian’ reinvention of conservatism has failed
- Marco Rubio says that he would like to “have a beer with” Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai, a culturally insensitive-if-well intentioned remark that also highlights everything nativists and bigots in the GOP hate about Rubio
- What crony capitalism? The so-called ‘Freedom Caucus’ of debt ceiling-disaster Republicans in the US House of Representatives just voted to subsidize banks to the tune of $17 billion. The modern GOP can still talk a populist game when they’re not in power, but their actual voting record betrays approval of socialism-for-the-rich when they get in power, and tea parties have not changed that
- Monty pipeline: the Keystone XL project is not dead yet and refuses to get on the cart. TransCanada thinks that it is just resting and feeling better, but activists insist that it will be stone cold dead in a minute, and could President Obama please do them a favor?
- There were off-year elections this week, and of course Democrats never do well in those due to disorganization — a major reason why the party has declined so badly in local and state politics. As I’ve noted before, Democrats refuse the kind of lockstep discipline in messaging and platform-building that’s necessary for building a political brand, which is why a lot of Kentuckians just voted against their own health insurance. For all the complaints about Democratic leaders acting like tyrants, the party has lost control; Artur Davis is suing to run as a Democrat again even though the Democrats of Alabama don’t want him back. Too much of the Democratic ‘brand image’ is in fact a projection on the party by Republicans, so when the right wing attacks begin, many Democrats unsurprisingly balk from standing by their leadership and successes. We have seen this dynamic play out over and over again in the Obama era
- Stolen elections? Low turnout was certainly a factor in the unexpected victory of Matt Bevin as the Kim Davis candidate in Kentucky’s race for governor. But as election integrity journalist Brad Freidman and dark money expert Karoli Kuns of Crooks and Liars discussed in a podcast yesterday, the sketchy ballot results also deserve greater scrutiny
- Why I’m godless, episode #83,995,742: after fundamentalist Christians showed up to protest the opening of a Luciferian church in Texas, they fell to arguing among themselves over who the real Christians were
- As expected, new owner Rupert Murdoch got busy right away destroying National Geographic
- GOP candidates occupy a false reality because they pander to a strain of evangelical Christian politics that has completely detached itself from reality
- Last Sunday, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was the featured speaker at a white nationalist ‘writer’s workshop.’ Despite his protestations that the organization is merely a ‘think tank,’ the Social Contract Press has featured some of the most vile bigotry on the racist right
- Stewart Rhodes, founder of the right wing Oath Keepers, stands to lose his license to practice law in Montana over his shenanigans as an attorney. The Institute for Research and Education in Human Rights has obtained video of Rhodes describing his plan to infiltrate local institutions in order to erect a subliminal ‘shadow government’ across the nation
- Equality-hating Republican Brent Randall of Goshen, Indiana has lost his bid for a city council seat after he was outed as a closeted gay man
- They were warned: taxpayers in both the State of Ohio and the State of Alabama have been stuck with seven-figure legal bills for marriage equality challenges
- There’s a reason why the United States Constitution doesn’t contain the word ‘arbitration’ anywhere. As the New York Times reported this week, in practice, arbitration hearings are just a means to deny people justice
- White supremacist and Holocaust denier Willis Carto, who died last Monday, could end up buried in Arlington National Cemetery. As we reported in January, in his golden years Carto lost a power struggle for control of his genocide-denying ‘Institute for Historical Research’ to what appears to be a cabal of Nazi-apologizing Scientologists
- Georgia Republican political consultant Jim Collins is being sued for allegedly forcing boys to commit more than a hundred sex acts in church
- No matter how ‘good’ individual police are, they’re just being called in to hold the line while civil society is defunded into nonexistence
- The Koch brothers have transformed higher education into factories of libertarian ideology. LGBT-hating Conway, Kansas parents are trying to get a teacher fired for showing his class a YouTube movie about bullying. Polk County, Florida teacher Wendy Bradshaw has decided her own children should not have to endure misguided ‘reforms’ that have been put in place. Principal Jason Rowland of Airline High School in Bossier Parish, Louisiana refuses to stop systematic religious indoctrination. What these events all have in common is the role of school administrators who don’t actually teach, but consume the lion’s share of resources as public funding levels decline and private snake-oil salesmen offer alternatives. If you were trying to make America stupid, this is how you would do it
- Faisal Mohammed, the man who stabbed four people on the campus of UC Merced yesterday, was not motivated by religion. Nevertheless, his name is a rallying cry for Islamophobes today
- Liars for Jesus: several fake ‘pregnancy crisis centers’ are suing for their ‘right to lie’ about the legality of abortion in the state; former abortion provider-turned forced-birth activist Carol Everett claims that Planned Parenthood is pushing teens to have sex with animals
- Burmese reproductive rights activists are getting death threats from fundamentalist Buddhist monks for discussing sexual health issues
- What medical privacy laws? The State of Texas is digging around in women’s abortion records looking for excuses to conduct legal harassment of providers
- Claiming that males are simply incapable of controlling themselves when they see young female skin, Jim Brazen, principal of a Christian high school in Grand Rapids, has written that dress codes exist to preserve female virginity for their “one and only” — proving once again that purity culture is incredibly creepy and patronizing
- Marshall Leonard was arrested and charged after detonating a bomb at a Tupelo, Mississippi Walmart to protest the removal of the confederate flag from store shelves; Thaddeus Murphy will spend five years in prison after being convicted of a bombing at the Colorado Springs NAACP office
- Michael and Laura McIntyre want to abuse their children by withholding education because they expect the Rapture. In a worrying sign, the Texas Supreme Court is actually going to hear this case
- Your ‘liberal media’ at work: MSNBC morning hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski did a big, fawning interview with Charles and David Koch without ever disclosing the fact that they have been treated to fabulous Koch-related junkets
- David Neiwert traces the right wing extremism behind the public facade of Fox News’s favorite black sheriff
- Don’t forget: Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal will be speaking at the National Religious Liberties Conference this weekend. The event is organized by Kevin Swanson, who thinks Abraham Lincoln was a communist and advocates the death penalty for gay people
- Frank Cocozelli demolishes the neoconfederate mythology that the South was perfectly united during the Civil War
• Kentucky has (a) a critical technical problem with its voting machines; (b) the weirdest voters in the land; or (c) a serious problem of election fraud. Those are not listed in order of likelihood.
• The idea that two groups of protesters would squabble over which is more Christian is hilarious, but I found the caption on the third photo interesting: “Few, if any, of the protesters were local. Groups arrived from Louisiana, Las Vegas and as far away as Pennsylvania.” Not to point it too finely, but why do people from Pennsylvania care about the opening of the Greater Church of Lucifer in Spring, Texas?
• I wonder if purity culture advocates like Jim Brazen realize they’re green-lighting sexually-aggressive behavior in boys by claiming males are nothing more than slavering bags of hormones with no impulse control. I also wonder if they care.
• I thought right-wing extremism was the public facade of David Clarke.
–alopecia