Thursday THREATCON – 12 November 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 Million Student March, our Threatcon Color Code is GRADUATION BLUES

• I put my own thoughts on the current wave of student unrest into a post earlier today, but I want to highlight some facts: tuition has gone up 1,200 percent in 30 years, a rate much faster than inflation, crushing students in debt right as they begin their real working lives. Most of this increase in costs is directly attributable to the explosive growth of college bureaucracy, aka ‘big government on campus,’ which is exactly the sort of issue where you would expect conservatives to find common ground with students
• Also underlining the point that right wing culture wars have spawned the events we’re seeing on campus: a Missouri lawmaker is trying to stop a graduate student at Mizzou from studying the effects of the state’s 72-hour abortion ‘waiting period’ law. Such measures have consistently shown exactly zero effect on abortion rates, but they do make abortions happen later in pregnancy by increasing costs
• Black students on the University of Missouri campus are experiencing real threats, not just rumors. So are student representatives trying to meet with state lawmakers. There was a second arrest today related to those threats. Bear these facts in mind while liberals and conservatives alike condemn harsh student reactions to a professor’s email
• Some of the same people pooh-poohing black students at Mizzou on Twitter got very, very upset that Google’s Veterans Day doodle was too diverse
• Texas children are more likely to be tasered in school than in jail
• There was also another GOP debate this week, during which Ben Carson left us all very confused as to what he would actually do about ISIS if he was president and Ted Cruz exposed himself as a goldbug
• Cruz, who attended a ‘kill the gays’ rally last weekend, is still ducking questions as he prepares to spend this weekend with evangelical activists who believe Satan is behind the gay rights movement
• Family values: Utah judge Scott Johansen has removed a foster child from the care of a lesbian couple against the wishes of the mother, citing “research” that he refuses to share
• Anoka County, Minnesota prosecutors will not pursue hate crime charges against the woman who attacked Somalian-born Asma Jama for speaking Swahili at an Applebees restaurant two weeks ago because they want to make sure the assailant doesn’t escape with a lower-level sentence
• When Johari Osayi Idusuyi attended a Donald Trump rally, organizers ushered her on-camera…which was fine, until she saw how protesters were being treated at the event. So she started reading a book of poetry about racism:

https://youtu.be/W17w9uUXOLc

• Fast food workers also struck this week to call for a $15 minimum wage. Almost half of American hourly workers make less
• Lack of vetting: fraudulent ‘ex-terrorist’ and discredited gay-hating Islamophobe Walid Shoebat was paid thousands of dollars to address a seminar at the Ocean County Police Academy in New Jersey last week as a ‘terrorism expert’
• Pandering to the Rudy Giuliani vote, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie says that “Obama’s lawlessness” is causing campus protests. As with his remarks about #BlackLivesMatter activists, expect an uptick in his polling
• Elections have consequences: yes, voters who desperately needed Kentucky’s Obamacare system will come to regret voting for Republican Matt Bevin
• Canadian judge Robin Camp may lose his seat on the bench after a combative rape trial in which he asked the victim why she didn’t simply “keep (her) knees together“
• Climate of denial: scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted actual gun death statistics Monday, whereupon angry conservatives tweeted fake ‘gun facts’ to him in response
• The fraud of ‘sidewalk counseling:’ Maine’s Attorney General is bringing charges against forced-birth activist Brian Ingalls for disrupting a Planned Parenthood clinic with his shouting
• This Supreme Court term may potentially see the effective end of abortion access in red states
• Casino chiefs: Bill Britt explains how former Alabama Republican Governor Bob Riley carved out a tax-free gambling monopoly for the Poarch Band of Creek Indians
• Oh look, it’s whoremongering Republican diaper baby David Vitter with fake redneck Willie Robertson in a camouflage campaign ad:

https://youtu.be/DKr3Y1OXQ3k

• A group of female New Zealand lawmakers were ruled out of order and told to leave after they spoke out on their sexual assault traumas during a fierce debate over citizens detained by Australia
• Megachurch pastor Steven Furtick won’t reveal his salary because it would make Jesus angry
• Social media exploded in laughter this week when attention-seeking YouTube evangelist Joshua Feuerstein went into a rage about the seasonal cups at Starbucks not being Jesus-y enough. The reaction caused several right wing bloviators, including Sarah Palin, to complain that a liberal plot was trying to make ‘the war on Christmas’ look stupid — whereupon the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention promptly joined in the ‘conspiracy‘ along with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Your takeaway: the evangelical wing of the modern conservative movement is a joke about itself
• Proudly unrepentant, Frazier Glenn Miller has been sentenced to death for murdering three people at Jewish cultural centers in Olathe, Kansas
• A tactic I’ve seen a thousand times now: Kevin Swanson, the anti-gay activist who appeared with Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal last weekend and famously ranted about “carving happy faces in pussy sores,” has temporarily taken down the Right Wing Watch YouTube channel with a bogus copyright claim
• Now that she’s no longer in Congress, Michele Bachmann can really let the crazy out
• Cliven Bundy fan and Nevada Assemblywoman Michelle Fiore has lost her home healthcare business license
• A grandfather, son, and grandson associated with the ‘sovereign citizen’ movement were arrested for squatting in a home they do not own and threatening police during a traffic stop
• Sovereign citizen Anthony Williams has been arrested for practicing law without a license
• Behold the definitive zoology of anti-feminists! Click here to see the full-size version