Thursday THREATCON – Refugee Edition

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. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, our Threatcon Color Code is TRICOLORE VICTORIEUX

• Until congressmen who try to block Syrian refugees hold a vote on an AUMF for Syria, they are not really serious about fighting terrorists, and everything they do or say is just political posturing
• You won’t believe this one simple trick: everyone needs to stop calling it the Islamic State, ISIL, or ISIS. We all have to start calling it Daesh, a native Arabic acronym that the men with the black flags loathe. Overall, the media is doing a pretty terrible job of helping us understand this threat and would improve matters greatly if they started using the right word
• As a practical matter, the path to destroying Daesh lies through Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan. While the Arab states surely share blame, all other regional bystanders take second place to Turkey
• What does Daesh want? The apocalypse. How do they get it? By provoking a big response. They especially want to trick the stupid Americans into sending an army back to the Middle East
• Daesh is trying to stop the embarrassing flow of refugees from their territory. How convenient that right wing xenophobes in the West have been organizing to do exactly the same thing for years
• Don’t fool yourself, turning away scary foreign refugees with strange religions is an all-American tradition. Just ask Anne Frank. So is politicizing refugee status; just ask Ted Cruz
• France seems to get all of this, and so do the French people. Unfortunately, American snap reactions feed right into Daesh’s plans, proving once again that our enemies are smarter than we are (and that immigrant hysteria is worse than ever)
• White privilege: polling shows that a majority of American white people actually see themselves as an oppressed minority
• A study of confirmation bias in stock market traders finds that when ‘conventional wisdom’ is wrong, the co-called ‘wisdom of crowds’ tends lead the crowd right over a cliff
• Watch colonel Jack Jacobs perfectly state the dilemma in dealing with Daesh:

• Thanks to the National Rifle Association, actual terrorists have no problem buying guns in the United States. Sleep tight!
• The drive-by shooting of a Muslim family’s Florida home is also an act of terrorism — in fact, Islamophobia is the only growing category of hate crime
• Reminding us how important the Supreme Court really is, Justice Antonin Scalia compares gay people to child molesters — again
• The anti-LGBT activists who defeated the Houston HERO ordinance with a ‘bathroom-fearmongering’ ad campaign are trying to elect a transphobic slate of city candidates with a new round of TV spots
• Forced-birth terrorist Zachary Klundt may get out of prison just months after pleading guilty to destroying the All Families Healthcare center in Kalispell, Montana
• Yet another state finds zero evidence of wrongdoing at Planned Parenthood
• House Republicans are dipping into reserve funds to continue their witch hunt against Planned Parenthood
• Texas TRAP laws have forced clinics providing abortion services to close, but have not reduced demand for abortion one little bit. As many as 240,000 Texas women have attempted self-abortion, risking their health and lives in desperation to not be pregnant anymore. The Lone Star state thus becomes an American slice of the Third World
• Senator Ted Cruz will hold a Senate committee hearing next week on the imaginary “Ferguson effect” and the nonexistent “war on police” because black lives don’t matter to him any more than Syrian ones
• Do black jobs matter?

• Incipient fascism: expect a rare two hours of light traffic in Hoover and Shelby County, Alabama while all the suburban white people who voted for Governor Robert Bentley are at Donald Trump’s Birmingham rally this weekend to cheer for his plan to make the dirty Muslims wear badges
• Turns out that more Mexicans are leaving the United States than arriving
• The Koch brothers have their own spying agency and their money has made an ethical mess of conservative news analyst Frank Luntz
• Hillary Clinton is ditching Obama’s education policy, which happens to be the area where I disagree with the administration most
• Utah judge Scott Johansen has reversed his decision to remove a child from the home of a lesbian couple and recused himself from the case, but now the Alabama Supreme Court is set to become a bastion of LGBT parent-bashing 
• One man’s failed effort to organize an ‘open carry’ rally by Ferguson residents left him bitter about racist attitudes among the right wing Oath Keepers
• More Klan flyers weighted down with bags of candy have appeared, this time in Oregon
• Roanoke, Virginia, Mayor David A. Bowers thinks that Japanese internment camps were a great precedent for dealing with Syrian refugees. As a result, he’s been dumped by the Hillary Clinton campaign and received a scathing lecture from Japanese-American actor George Takei
• Coming so soon after his ridiculous attempts to stoke war with Iran, Chuck Schumer’s facepalm-inducing endorsement of a “pause” in the processing of Syrian refugees is a good argument for never, ever giving him the speakership if Democrats regain the Senate
• Rep. Steve King, the dumbest man in Congress, tried to make a point by asking U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services Director Leon Rodriguez to name a non-Muslim suicidal terrorist. I can think of quite a few, actually