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 Brazil’s depressing World Cup defeat by Germany, our Threatcon Color Code is PRUSSIAN BLUE
- The current issue of The Progressive has documents showing that Charles Koch was not just a John Bircher who followed in his father’s footsteps, but actually led the Society during its ugliest years of opposition to civil rights. Charles split with JBS in 1968 over Vietnam, but he carried many of its agenda items over to his later efforts — including tea parties
- Is the Fox News effect actually self-destructive? Oliver Willis wrote a succinct study of Roger Ailes’s channel as a victim of its own success
- At AlterNet, Don Hazen explains why liberal bloggers must stop putting right wing words in their headlines
- It turns out that women can win political office by talking about their abortions
- Colorado has vastly reduced teen pregnancy — and abortions — by offering free birth control
- Science confirms: conservative concerns about birth control and promiscuity are actually about keeping women dependent on men
- The Washington Post has noticed that minimum wage increases don’t actually hurt the economy at all
- In the wake of their Hobby Lobby decision, People For the American Way held a telebriefing last week to discuss the Roberts Court’s right wing turn:
- IREHR’s Devin Burghart shows that Tea Party Patriots, widely seen as the most successful national tea party organization, has lost 90% of its local affiliates since 2012. Some of those local activists have moved to more radical causes in the age of Cliven Bundy
- In the wake of those anti-immigrant protests in Murrieta, California that were organized by an extremist, participant Jim Gilchrist says he may revive his nativist Minuteman Project. David Neiwert reminds us just how close Gilchrist was to convicted murderer Shawna Forde
- According to a count by Media Matters, this wave of unaccompanied minors from Central America is at least the tenth time that an issue has been described as “Obama’s Katrina” by his detractors
- A Massachusetts jury took only minutes to reject the argument of a ‘sovereign citizen’ that he was not subject to the laws of the commonwealth. Found guilty of driving without a license, one of Christopher Schulte’s pseudo-legal tangents was cut off by the judge after he began with a mention of the year 1776
- Indiana has a new extremist anti-police group called “765 Anarchists.” Although their stated beliefs are a dissonant amalgam of left and right, they are quite racist
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ and pseduo-legalist Ron Price of North Carolina is running for reelection to the Rockingham County Board of Education
- Michael Peroutka, who won the Republican nomination for an Anne Arundel County Council seat, is asking for support from the neoconfederate League of the South in his general election race. Peroutka has created quite an embarrassing dilemma for Maryland Republicans
- At Jacobin.com, Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones explains how the age of “free market” academic research has actually subsidized quackery and fraud
- It turns out that “coal rolling,” where people make their vehicles produce extra smoke in protest of President Obama and environmentalism, is actually illegal — which will probably just make it even more rebellious and ‘cool’
- Possible right wing head-exploder: not only does British Columbia’s carbon tax work really well, it’s allowed the province to have the lowest income taxes in Canada
- Climate Scientist Michael Mann has won a symbolic victory in the Virginia Supreme Court against the climate science-denying American Tradition Institute. Coincidentally, this week Montana’s Commissioner of Political Practices ruled that Tom Kitts violated the law in 2011 when he accepted dark money in-kind contributions from the Western Tradition Partnership, which is now the American Tradition Institute, to run for the Livingston County Commission
- You Tube musician James Rustad first gained our notice during the Bundy ranch saga. Here is his new “Message to Murrieta:”
[youtube]http://youtu.be/vWkay8Pt9zo[/youtube]
- It’s not just your mind playing tricks on you. Republican obstruction in the US Senate actually is worse than ever
- When dark money sauce is good for the goose, but not the gander: Georgia Republicans are trying to attack the nonprofit status of liberal organization Better Georgia through the state ethics commission — rather than, say, an IRS audit
- Mississippi’s contentious runoff has echoes in Georgia’s 10th District Republican primary runoff race. A mailer asking Democrats to vote for Mike Collins, who is running to replace the anti-science Paul Broun, describes his opponent Jody Hice as “too extreme.” Matthew Pulver of the Athens-based Flagpole.com has read Hice’s book so you don’t have to
- Evangelicals are increasingly OK with gay marriage
- Breitbart.com writer Matthew Boyle is receiving flack from the media after news reports that a scandal he reported at the Daily Caller was a Cuban intelligence fabrication aimed at taking down Senator Robert Menendez, a hard-line opponent of the Castro regime
- The founder of GoDaddy is rumored to be behind attack ads in the Arizona governor’s race. Which makes sense, since the candidate being supported by the ads is Christine Jones, a former general counsel for GoDaddy who has been accused of fluffing her resume