Mark Levin asks if Joe Biden is 'still a White supremacist?'

'Life, Liberty & Levin' host joins 'Hannity' to discuss Democratic nominee's 'racist' past

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  • US Supreme Court asked to block Biden win in Pennsylvania

    Republicans attempting to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to take up their lawsuit, three days after it was thrown out by the highest court in the battleground state. In the request to the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly of northwestern Pennsylvania and the other plaintiffs are asking the court to prevent the state from certifying any contests from the Nov. 3 election, and undo any certifications already made, such as Biden’s victory. Biden beat President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016.

  • Body of missing Instagram influencer Alexis Sharkey found on Texas road

    There were no visible wounds to the body and a cause of death hadn't yet been determined for the 26-year-old, police said.

  • Turkish exploration vessel back in port ahead of EU summit

    Turkey's seismic exploration vessel Oruc Reis returned to port on Monday from disputed Mediterranean waters, less than two weeks before a European Union summit where the bloc will evaluate possible sanctions against Ankara. NATO members Turkey and Greece have conflicting claims to continental shelves and rights to potential energy resources in the eastern Mediterranean. Tensions flared in August when Ankara sent Oruc Reis to map out energy drilling prospects in waters also claimed by Greece.

  • The Electoral College is only getting worse

    The Electoral College is a political abomination. As I have written before, rather than protecting the influence of small states, it grants overwhelming power to a handful of states that randomly happen to have a close partisan balance, which are mostly fairly large. Worse, it allows popular vote losers to win — which has happened twice in the last 20 years. Indeed, theoretically a candidate could lose the popular vote four to one and still win the electoral vote.Moreover, since 2012 the divergence between the Electoral College and the popular vote has been steadily growing. As I'll show below, while Joe Biden won a clear victory in the popular vote, he just barely squeaked through in the Electoral College. This idiotic anachronism must be destroyed.Let's take a look at this over the last two decades. One way to examine this question is to look at the most "efficient" way that losing candidates could have won the Electoral College. In other words, if we add up the state totals for previous elections going back to 2000, how might the losers have won by flipping the least number of votes?Using data from U.S. Elections Atlas, and 2020 data from the The New York Times (including a rough extrapolation assuming Biden wins 80 percent of the mail-in votes that haven't been counted yet in New York state), I calculated how the popular vote losers could have won the Electoral College — or lost, in the case of George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.In 2000, of course, Bush officially "won" Florida by 537 votes, and therefore the presidency with 271 electoral votes, while Al Gore won the popular vote by about 550,000. (In reality, Gore probably would have won a fair recount in Florida if it hadn't been stopped by a conservative Supreme Court on nakedly partisan grounds, but I'm going to ignore that for the time being since it doesn't matter for this particular argument.) That means a flip of just 269 votes in one state from one candidate to the other would have changed the result. In 2004, Bush won re-election with a margin of about three million votes, and 286 electoral votes. John Kerry famously could have won if he had just flipped Ohio, where the margin was just 118,601 votes. However, it would have been slightly more efficient in vote terms to flip New Mexico, Iowa, Nevada, and Alaska, with a cumulative margin of 117,411. That means a flip of just 58,706 votes would have given Kerry the presidency.In 2008, Barack Obama steamrolled John McCain with a popular vote margin of over 9.5 million, and 365 electoral votes. But it would have taken relatively few vote changes to overturn even that landslide result. Obama won Florida, Colorado, Iowa, Rhode Island, Maine, New Mexico, Nevada, Vermont, Delaware, New Hampshire, Indiana, and North Carolina by a cumulative margin of just 1.436 million votes — therefore flipping just 718,138 would have given McCain an additional 97 electoral votes and victory. Similarly in 2012, Mitt Romney could have won by taking the nine closest states in terms of total votes, requiring only 384,188 flips. Then in 2016, Trump of course squeaked out an Electoral College victory with tiny margins in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — just 38,868 flips would have given Clinton the win.That finally brings me to 2020. Biden won the popular vote easily, with a margin maybe in the neighborhood of 6.9 million or so (depending on what happens in New York.) But it would have taken just 33,139 flips in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin to deliver a Trump second term.Bringing this all together: If we plot these minimum vote flips to change the Electoral College result as a percentage of the popular vote margin, we can get a sense of how badly it diverges from the principle of one person, one vote:Courtesy: U.S. Elections AtlasWhat this shows is that the Electoral College is routinely on the edge of handing the popular vote loser the presidency even when it doesn't happen — and it seems to be getting worse. In 2008 and 2012, it would have taken a flip of 7.5 percent and 11 percent of the popular vote margin (still not great), but in 2016, flipping just 1.3 percent of the margin would change the result. The 2020 election, meanwhile, is the worst result since 2000 — though Biden did win, a flip of a mere 0.48 percent of the popular vote margin (or something like 0.02 percent of the total vote) would have let Trump win. Moreover, while the 2008 flipping scenario outlined above relies on implausible large percentage swings in small states like Vermont, Biden's victory depended on razor-thin margins in three swing states.All this speaks for itself. But before Republicans get too smug about cooking up justifications for the Electoral College because it happens to help them at the moment, consider that in 2004, flipping just 1.9 percent of the popular vote margin would have delivered the presidency to the Democrat even though Bush got three million more votes. Because the Electoral College's rules are so goofy and arbitrary, it is very easy to imagine demographic trends handing the Dems a near-automatic victory every time — if Texas went solidly blue, for instance. It would be better and fairer for everyone if the presidency simply went to the candidate that got the most votes.More stories from theweek.com Americans are choosing death over deprivation Our parents warned us the internet would break our brains. It broke theirs instead. GOP Sen. Josh Hawley tries to explain how Democrats are both 'Marxists' and 'corporatists'

  • Iran's parliament approves bill to stop nuclear inspections

    Iran’s parliament on Tuesday approved a bill that would suspend U.N. inspections of its nuclear facilities and require the government to boost its uranium enrichment if European signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal do not provide relief from oil and banking sanctions. The vote to approve the bill, which would also require approval by the Guardian Council, a constitutional watchdog, was a show of defiance after the killing of a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist last month. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has the final say on all nuclear policies.

  • Black woman sentenced to 5 years in prison for illegal voting files new appeal

    In 2018, Crystal Mason was sentenced to five-years for voting in the 2016 election. The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas is now working with her to appeal the verdict. Mason had no idea she was not allowed to vote in 2016 when she cast her provisional ballot due to the fact that she was on federally supervised release.

  • U.S. imposes sanctions on Chinese firm accused of undermining democracy in Venezuela

    The United States imposed sanctions on Monday on Chinese firm China National Electronics Import & Export Corporation (CEIEC), accusing it of supporting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's efforts to undermine democracy. The U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement the Chinese company supported the leftist government of Maduro in its "efforts to restrict internet service and conduct digital surveillance and cyber operations against political opponents." "The United States will not hesitate to target anyone helping to suppress the democratic will of the Venezuelan people and others around the world," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement.

  • Project Veritas’ CNN Sting Uncovers Explosive News That Tucker Carlson Is Racist

    All day, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe has been hyping the huge revelations the group would be releasing from their latest stunt. In a dramatic video posted Tuesday morning, the conservative activist could be seen unmuting himself and informing CNN chief Jeff Zucker, “We’ve been listening to your CNN calls for basically two months and recording everything. Just wanted to ask you some questions, if you have a minute.”“Do you still feel you are the most trusted name in news?” he asked. “Because I have to say from what I’ve been hearing on these phone calls, I don’t know about that. I mean, we’ve got a lot of recordings that indicate you’re not really that independent of a journalist.”“Thank you for your comments,” Zucker replied, dryly. “So everybody, in light of that, I think what we’ll do is we’ll set up a new system and we’ll be back with you, we’ll do the rest of the call a little bit later.”So what were the supposedly shocking comments O’Keefe uncovered? According to his group’s Tuesday night release, the most damning thing anyone on CNN’s editorial team did was accuse Fox News’ Tucker Carlson of being a racist.“I think it’s unavoidable that you have to talk about the naked racism of Tucker Carlson,” a man Project Veritas identified as CNN digital VP of global programming Marcus Mabry says in one tape. “Because that’s really what drove this anti-diversity push, you know, Trump watches Tucker Carlson's show and then reacts. And just as sort of the white supremacy hour they have on Fox News every night.”Not exactly news for anyone who watches Carlson’s nightly show, including some of his own Fox News colleagues who said as much earlier this year.Without mentioning Project Veritas, Carlson attacked Mabry directly on that show Tuesday night for “lecturing” media companies about the value of diversity. The host laughed out loud at the notion that “there’s a lot of work to do” to make newsrooms more diverse.CNN’s PR Twitter account, meanwhile, responded to Project Veritas with this message: “Legal experts say this may be a felony. We‘ve referred it to law enforcement,” though it’s unclear what laws the group may have broken.Later, that same account revealed that Mabry was not even the staffer who made those comments about Carlson. “James & Tucker, the voice you ID’d tonight as ‘Marcus Mabry’ is actually GA resident & CNN General Counsel David Vigilante. We’re certain you’ll want to correct the record and apologize to the Black executive for assuming he was the voice raising concerns over white supremacy.” The other big revelation from Project Veritas appeared to be that Zucker did not want his staff to “normalize” President Donald Trump’s delusional claims about the election.“This is a president who knows he’s losing, who knows he’s in trouble, is sick, maybe is on the aftereffects of steroids or not, I don’t know,” Zucker said. “But he is acting erratically and desperately, and we need to not normalize that.”“You know, this is what we've come to expect for the last three and a half years, four years, but it clearly is exacerbated by the time that we're in and the issues that he’s [Trump] dealing with,” he added. “I think that we cannot just let it be normalized. He is all over the place and acting erratically, and I think we need to lean into that.”It appears that for Project Veritas, pointing out the reality unfolding in front of Americans’ eyes, whether on Fox News or in the White House, is proof of CNN’s supposed bias. But if anything, their big sting is likely to endear Zucker to those who still like to blame him for elevating Trump during the 2016 campaign.Seth Meyers Brutally Mocks Sidney Powell, the Trump Lawyer ‘Too Insane’ for Tucker CarlsonRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Senate Republicans called out for hypocrisy after complaining about Biden nominee's tweets

    Republicans are already signaling they won't vote to confirm Neera Tanden, President-elect Joe Biden's choice to run the Office of Management and Budget, next year -- and some have even cast doubt on whether she'll receive a committee hearing. One reason for their antipathy is her prolific activity on Twitter, which includes a fair amount of criticism of GOP lawmakers. Indeed, it appears Tanden was expecting this, since she has seemingly deleted a fair number of tweets over the last few weeks.But GOP critics are calling the lawmakers complaining about Tanden's social media presence hypocrites, especially since President Trump and a few of his own appointees haven't shied away from using the platform to ridicule political and personal opponents (and sometimes presumed allies) over his four years in office.> Do republicans feel even the slightest bit sheepish talking about a Biden nominees tweets when they supported a president who governed largely by tweet?> > -- Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) December 1, 2020In fact, throughout Trump's term, it wasn't uncommon for Republican lawmakers to say they hadn't actually seen the president's posts.> Many Republican senators who always professed to be unfamiliar with Trump tweets are very familiar with Tanden tweets https://t.co/xZPi3mivFU> > -- Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) November 30, 2020But, The Washington Post's Paul Waldman argues, the lawmakers likely aren't all that concerned about Tanden's Twitter use, but are instead using it as part of a strategy to make it more difficult for Biden to assemble the Cabinet he wants. > When you hear Republicans air specific concerns about Biden nominees remember that Obama nominated Merrick Garland because Republicans specifically mentioned him as a Supreme Court nominee they'd support. > > This is their rope-a-dope strategy. Don't fall for it. /1> > -- Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) December 1, 2020More stories from theweek.com George Floyd family lawyer Ben Crump recommends Kamala Harris' brother-in-law for attorney general Americans are choosing death over deprivation Our parents warned us the internet would break our brains. It broke theirs instead.

  • ‘I can’t begin to explain the level of anger I have right now over this’: Georgia election official speaks out about threats against staff

    On Tuesday Gabriel Sterling of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office spoke forcefully against post-election threats and rhetoric directed at election staff.

  • Charging the 'Beatles': Inside the case against IS militants

    As two Islamic State militants faced a judge in Virginia last month, Diane Foley listened from home through a muffled phone connection and strained to make out the voices of the men prosecutors say kidnapped her son before he was murdered. Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh stand accused of belonging to an IS cell dubbed “the Beatles,” an incongruously lighthearted nickname for British citizens blamed for the jailing, torture and murder of Western hostages in Syria. After geopolitical breakthroughs and stalemates, military actions in Syria and court fights in London, the Justice Department’s most significant terrorism prosecution in years was finally underway.

  • Senate Republicans vetting COVID-19 relief that Trump would sign

    U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that he and his fellow Senate Republicans have begun considering COVID-19 economic relief provisions that President Donald Trump would be willing to sign into law later this month. The Kentucky Republican said that he and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy spoke with White House officials about what measures Trump would accept and that proposals are being circulated to Senate Republicans for feedback.

  • How China's special forces stack up against the US's special operators

    Chinese special operators are getting more resources and going through more training, but there are something you can't teach.

  • Team of retreads

    The shape of a future Biden administration is slowly coming into view along with a few of the president-elect's Cabinet picks. Thus far, the selections are exactly what one might have expected from a D.C. lifer like Biden — namely, other D.C. lifers. We have former chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen at the Treasury Department, former Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken to be the nation's top diplomat, Biden's previous chief of staff Ron Klain returning to the same job (only for the president this time), and former deputy secretary at Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas now up to run that department. All are longtime Democratic Party insiders, most close associates of Biden himself — and just like him, fresh off a turn of the revolving door.Already the conflict between the left and moderate wings of the Democratic coalition, which had slowed down for obvious reasons during the general election, has broken out again. Lefties and centrists are sniping at each other over several picks — on the left over the appalling policy records and Wall Street connections of various selections, and on the moderate side over the left not being team players.Because Biden will be president, at the end of the day he will have the Cabinet he wants. But so far there is little sign that his administration will satisfy a more elemental requirement — namely, the kind of ferocious determination and energetic vision that is a necessary precondition to repairing this shattered country.Take a look around: America is in dire shape. The economy is turning south thanks to the resurgent coronavirus pandemic and the long-expired CARES Act rescue being spent down. Mass foreclosures and evictions at a scale unseen since the 1930s are looming on the horizon if another rescue is not passed. We will apparently have a coronavirus vaccine soon, but Congress isn't even spending the relative pittance to make sure it can be distributed as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, Republicans are poised to gerrymander themselves an even bigger advantage in the House of Representatives and in multiple state legislatures. To even have a prayer of passing anything through the Senate, Democrats will need to sweep both runoff elections in Georgia in January. If they don't, then the Biden administration will have to lean on every legal authority in the U.S. Code to be able to do anything — and even then face the possibility that those actions will still be struck down by partisan hacks on the Supreme Court.Does Team Biden look up to this challenge? Yellen is reasonably progressive, but as Fed chair during the Obama administration, she voted for a number of interest rate hikes that — as I and many others pointed out at the time — were very obviously premature, conservatively guarding against inflation instead of aggressively pursuing full employment and higher wages, and indeed may have slowed the economy enough to hand the 2016 election to Trump. What's more, there are disturbing numbers of Wall Street insiders being handed deputy spots at Treasury, which may hem in even Yellen's mild progressivism. (A rare straightforward bright spot is Jared Bernstein, a smart and gregarious lefty economist selected for the Council of Economic Advisers, who has been on the right side of nearly all the important economic questions for the last decade.)Meanwhile, as Jonathan Guyer writes at The American Prospect, most of Biden's foreign policy team got rich openly peddling its connections to government over the last four years. Since the Trump administration was not much in favor of handing contracting gigs to firms full of professional Democrats, it's likely a safe bet that much of the money came from interested parties looking to essentially bribe future administration insiders. More broadly, people who have profited handsomely from status quo forces sending this country to the devil — endless pointless imperialism, legalized corruption, extreme policy timidity unless Wall Street is threatened — are not likely to countenance the sweeping action necessary to fix that status quo.Perhaps most telling is the selection of the President and CEO of the Center for American Progress, Neera Tanden, to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This is a sort of regulatory clearinghouse for the executive branch, and develops the administration's budget each year (which has no legal force but signals priorities and ideas). It's an ideal position for a quiet, competent, loyal manager — someone who will get the administration's business done efficiently without any fuss. But that description hardly fits Tanden's record.Tanden's politics, despite previous endorsements of austerity and stealing Libya's oil to pay for imperialist wars of aggression, are probably still to the left of Bruce Reed, who was reportedly previously under consideration for the OMB job and is best known for decreasing the income of the poorest single mothers with welfare reform in 1996. However, Tanden is also infamously quarrelsome. Articles which mention her routinely result in her complaining to editors in the middle of the night (full disclosure: myself included), and she is regularly found fighting with complete nobodies on Twitter (full disclosure: myself included). Nor is she well known for running a tight ship organizationally — according to The New York Times, she once literally punched a subordinate for asking Hillary Clinton about the Iraq War (though she says she only pushed him). She also clumsily outed the identity of a sexual harassment victim in an all-staff meeting, and under her leadership CAP disbanded its unionized journalism project ThinkProgress, then attempted to replace the staff with scabs, only to back down after a huge backlash. Whatever Biden wants to achieve, be it progressive, moderate, or otherwise, Tanden is a mystifying choice to put in arguably the most important administrative position.At any rate, this suggests a coalescing administration that is not exactly champing at the bit to clean up this smoking ruin of a country. It seems more like a collection of mostly bog-standard moderate liberals, some fairly earnest, some plainly just looking to pad out their resume for a few years before they go back to their buckraking private sector careers, and some in between — people who, on average, will not want to rock the boat too much, much less take the kind of extreme, norm-bending action that might upset future offerers of consulting contracts.Now, nobody would be happier than myself if Yellen turns out to be the second coming of FDR adviser Rexford Tugwell, or if Tanden turns OMB into a well-oiled machine. At least Biden has not hired any actual Republicans as Obama did, and so far his team thankfully does not appear to be worried about the national debt. But it is hard indeed to imagine this administration rising to the challenge of a country in worse shape than at any year since 1932.More stories from theweek.com George Floyd family lawyer Ben Crump recommends Kamala Harris' brother-in-law for attorney general Americans are choosing death over deprivation Our parents warned us the internet would break our brains. It broke theirs instead.

  • 2017 ban on local LGBT ordinances ends in North Carolina

    A 3 1/2-year ban on new local ordinances aimed at protecting LGBT rights in North Carolina expired Tuesday, prompting gay rights groups to urge the passage of such measures now. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper agreed to the moratorium in March 2017 in exchange for GOP lawmakers agreeing to do away with several portions of a “bathroom bill” that Republicans had approved a year earlier. It drew national condemnation and prompted several large corporations and sports teams to relocate events to other states or reconsider expanding in North Carolina.

  • Trump administration rushes to complete Mexico border wall before Biden takes office

    The administration’s blasting crews are swiftly tearing through the remote Peloncillo Mountains in forbidding terrain with dynamite, reflecting an increasing urgency to install the structure

  • Trump Campaign Clashes with Barr for Pushing Back on Voter Fraud Claims

    Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday that the Justice Department has not found evidence of voter fraud widespread enough to change the outcome of this year's presidential election, prompting a recrimination from the Trump campaign legal team, which claims the DOJ is unaware of the totality of the evidence they've gathered to substantiate their fraud allegations.“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said in remarks to the Associated Press.The statement from the attorney general comes after Barr suggested earlier this year that the high levels of mail ballots this year due to people opting to stay home during the pandemic could become a breeding ground for fraud.Shortly after the election, Barr authorized federal prosecutors across the country to probe “substantial allegations” of potential voter fraud. However, the DOJ has not seen evidence of certain illegal voting irregularities the Trump campaign claimed occurred, the attorney general said.“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,” Barr said, apparently referring to allegations from since-dismissed Trump lawyer Sidney Powell that election systems flipped votes from Trump to Biden.“There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all, and people don’t like something they want the Department of Justice to come in and ‘investigate,’” Barr said.The Trump campaign's legal team responded to Barr's update in a statement, saying "there hasn't been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation.""We have gathered ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they have not examined," read the statement from Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. "We have many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud. As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ. The Justice Department also hasn't audited any voting machines or used their subpoena powers to determine the truth.""Again, with the greatest respect to the Attorney General, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud," the attorneys said.Giuliani and Ellis vow to continue their "pursuit of the truth through the judicial system and state legislatures."Since Joe Biden eked out a victory in the election earlier this month, flipping several key battleground states Trump won in 2016 by razor-thin margins, the Trump campaign has launched a slew of more than 40 lawsuits challenging the vote results in six swing states.Late last month, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from the Trump campaign that sought to invalidate millions of votes in Pennsylvania and block the certification of the state’s election results. The campaign subsequently lost its appeal of that decision.In Michigan, the campaign dropped a federal suit last month that had sought to block the certification of ballots in deep blue Detroit. Republicans had claimed that GOP poll watchers were not allowed meaningful access to observe the ballot counting process in Detroit.Even as late as Tuesday the campaign was still launching new challenges, filing a new lawsuit in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court alleging that abuse of absentee voting affected 220,000 ballots in the battleground state that President-elect Joe Biden won.Trump has so far refused to concede the election to Biden and has claimed he won a second term "by a lot" even as his legal team fails to produce of voter fraud on a scale widespread enough to affect the outcome of the race and the former vice president's victory.

  • Iran denies Revolutionary Guard commander killed in Iraq-Syria border drone strike

    An Iranian commander was reportedly killed in a drone strike on the Syria-Iraq border over the weekend, coming days after the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist outside Tehran that Iran has blamed on Israel. The Islamic Republic has been shaken after the Friday killing of nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and some believe Israel may increase targeted killings ahead of the January inauguration of US president-elect Joe Biden, who is more conciliatory towards Iran than current president Donald Trump. Iraqi security and militia officials told Reuters on Monday that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, whose identity they did not confirm, was killed alongside three men travelling in the same vehicle as him. Two officials told Reuters the vehicle was struck shortly after crossing into Syria carrying weapons from Iraq. Israel has launched strikes against an array of Iranian and Syrian targets in Syria the past week, though there was no claim of responsibility for the drone strike said to have killed the IRGC commander, named in some reports as Muslim Shahdan. Assassinations of Iranian figures will likely continue as long as the regime continues making threats to destroy Israel, though not all targets will be household names, said Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran programme at the Middle East Institute. “I would struggle to come up with another name like Qassem Soleimani, who the Israelis could target in a bombshell act that would show its dominance in the intelligence war against Iran,” he said. The head of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force, Soleimani was killed in an US airstrike in Baghdad in January.

  • Nevada doctor's selfie used to claim COVID-19 is a hoax

    A photo of a hospital’s alternative care site in Reno, Nevada, is being misrepresented on social media to fuel the false narrative that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax, even as cases surge in the state. Renown Regional Medical Center has been the primary target of renewed conspiracy theories online suggesting that hospitals are empty and the virus is not as dangerous as top medical officials say it is. The hospital opened an alternative care site with two floors of supplemental hospital beds inside a parking structure on Nov. 12 to accommodate an overflow in COVID-19 cases if needed.

  • Kremlin-Funded TV Airs Mind-Numbingly Racist Blackface Attack on Obama

    The news that former Vice President Joe Biden would become the next president of the United States was met in Russia with grim resignation, bordering on despair. Experts on Russian state television have described Biden’s presidency as “Obama’s third term” and predicted a slew of new sanctions dreaded by the Kremlin. This anticipation revived the wave of racist attacks against former President Barack Obama, which were commonplace during his administration.Overt racism in Russian state media is far from uncommon but nonetheless continues to be shocking. Tigran Keosayan—the husband of Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-funded RT and Sputnik—took racist mockery to new lows on his program Mezhdunarodnaya Pilorama (“International Sawmill”). Keosayan described Barack Obama as “the dark page of American history,” while introducing a highly offensive sketch by an actress in blackface impersonating the former president, which was first reported by the Moscow Times.The purported portrayal of Obama was tasteless and crude, with the actress in a bandana gesticulating as a rapper and describing the former president as a “chocolate bunny.” The show, which aired on NTV—a network funded by state-owned gas company Gazprom, mocked “Black Lives Matter” and claimed that none of Obama’s relatives know how to write. The sketch concluded with a recommendation that rather than read Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, viewers should opt for “reading the label on the bathroom air freshener.”Facing worldwide condemnation for the latest racist episode, Margarita Simonyan—heralded as one of the most influential women in news media—attempted to backpedal, using her husband’s Armenian ethnicity as some kind of an excuse for his indefensible racism. She described the offensive sketch as a “parody of Obama” and disingenuously claimed, “As someone who is part of an ethnic minority in Russia, Tigran regularly makes fun, on the air, of his large 'ethnic' nose and his belonging to a 'Black' community (look it up if you don't know which ethnicities are referred to as 'Black' in Russia).”Despite Simonyan’s clumsy excuses, her husband is not the only one who considers himself somehow entitled to mock Black Americans. In June, RT’s editor-in-chief shared a despicably racist article from the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, which made references to “muscular criminal Negroes,” described “twerking” as the “national Negro dance,” recommended the use of amphetamines, and encouraged violence and death.Russian state media outlets have long expressed their desire for civil unrest in the United States. The author of the article, Dmitry Steshin, urged, “Beat the whites until they turn Black.” Simonyan shared the article, describing it as a piece of “good advice from an international journalist to the negroes of Minnesota and the United States.”Simonyan’s husband followed up the obscene sketch on his program with a ludicrous assertion: “There is no racism in Russia.” It was no more believable than the notorious Soviet claim, “There is no sex in the USSR.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.