Democrats are worrying the “Medical Reverse Racism” next MAGA misinformation circlejerk ahead of the midterms might be more effective than reality can handle, Politico reports. First highlighted by the Orange God Emperor in a rant at his Arizona rally ten days ago, the premise is that since some hospitals and health systems use race and ethnicity as a criteria when rationing limited supplies of anti-virals, favoring non-whites over whites to try and correct the racial inequalities endemic to the nation’s healthcare system. Never mind that this rationing almost certainly wouldn’t be necessary if all people – white, black, brown, whatever – would just have gotten themselves fucking vaccinated against COVID-19 before they got sick, a situation exacerbated by right wing media and politicians encouraging vaccine “freedom” for their fucking idiot fanbase.

“There will always be people susceptible to cries of ‘reverse racism.’ They become a dog with a bone on these issues, whether it’s real or imagined,” former DNC spokesman turned health advocate Brad Woodhouse told Politico. A GOP strategist said the party will find a way to squeeze a their “All Lives Matter”-style bullshit in as a rider to a bill in Congress. “There’s not a ton we can do now. But if there’s another vote-a-rama, expect an amendment on this. It’ll be a tough vote for Democrats,” the strategist said. “And if Republicans take back Congress, expect investigations and oversight. We will make the officials who signed off on it come up here and defend it.”

Reality TV-celebrity stuff is not National Zero’s usual beat. Mostly because it’s stupid bullshit, but because it’s also pretty freaking boring. We prefer our trashy gossipy drama stuff to be at least tangentially related to politics (like in the previous article) or have some other edge that makes it interesting enough to publish. This one’s certainly worth a look.

The above four women are stars of various series in the “Real Housewives” franchise on BravoTV, a really tedious reality show that follows wealthy women around as they drink wine and shriek at each other over interpersonal slights real and perceived. And it’s not just one series, there’s probably like seven or eight by now, literally hundreds of hours a year of “The Real Housewives of New York”, “The Real Housewives of Atlanta”, “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”, et cetera.

All four of those women have taken heat for racially insensitive comments they made over the past few years, but only one of them was actually fired for it. Yeah, you already guessed which one.

At top left is Jennie Nguyen, member of the Salt Lake City “Housewives” cast who was let go on Tuesday over some pretty blatantly racist posts denigrating Black people. Not fired, however is Ramona Singer, one of the Caucasian gorgons above, who cares which, who reportedly told a producer in November “This is why we shouldn’t have black people on the show,” off camera after an argument with her fellow New York “Housewives” cast member Eboni K Williams, who is Black.

While the burden of proof is obviously a little higher for a private conversation than it is for social media posts, it’s also pretty true that if a producer otherwise trusted with making the show happen makes an allegation then that should be enough to go on and Singer should’ve been fired as well. The story’s probably similar with the other two above that are not Singer, whoever they are (We say probably here because we’re not getting into the weeds on researching some bullshit reality show to figure out who they are and what they said, this is already too long of an article).

Whatever it was, this was quite a feat for Bravo TV to pull off: They managed to make their handling of credible accusations of racist talk by their cast members kind of racist itself. Impressve!

Failed House candidate and MAGA “influencer” Laura Loomer, a Jew, was deeply hurt and upset by newer fellow MAGA influencer Nick Fuentes, a Nazi, making a pretty unsubtle comment about his hatred of her people on Monday. Wrote Loomer on Telegram: “The idea that you can’t trust someone who is Jewish is quite absurd. I’ve been on Gab since it was created, I sent donors to Andrew Torba in 2017, I have never condemned him or Nick Fuentes, and I have fought for the America First agenda AS A JEWISH AMERICAN. I’ve also taken lawsuits against google, Facebook twitter and Apple all the way to the Supreme Court AS A JEWISH AMERICAN.”

“This notion that Jews aren’t faithful or that Jews don’t belong is the America First, pro free speech movement is asinine. I’m not going to be told that I’m not America First and that I’m not ‘faithful’ to free speech just because I’m Jewish. I’m a United States citizen and have actually done more for free speech than 99.999999% of people I know. There are many so called ‘Christians’ who spend their days attacking free speech and advocating against the America First agenda, it’s not just groups like the ADL,” and she just keeps going after that. Dogs. Fleas. Etc.

Olavo de Carvalho, a Brazilian right wing media douchebag and mentor to failed president Jair Bolsonaro, has died of what he called the “moronavirus” at age 74, the Guardian reports. “The family… asks for prayers for the professor’s soul,” de Carvalho’s relatives wrote on Twitter after he went to go be with Meat Loaf and William Hartmann and all the other denialists, wherever they are.

GOTTA be a parody…. Right? Please God please let it be a parody… pic.twitter.com/DOWMPYmliV

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) January 25, 2022

Deeply fucking unhinged right wing psychopath Alex Jones told his podcast listeners that his Monday interview with the House January 6th Select Committee investigators went well enough aside from the fact he pleaded the fifth “almost 100 times,” to their questions, CNN reports. “I just had a very intense experience being interrogated by the January 6 committee,” said Jones on his podcast after the virtual conference interview. “They were polite, but they were dogged… The questions were overall pretty reasonable. And I wanted to answer the questions, but at the same time, it’s a good thing I didn’t because I’m the type that tries to answer things correctly even though I don’t know all the answers, and they can kind of claim that that’s perjury because about half the questions I didn’t know the answer to,” said the domestic abuse victim.

Alex Jones makes up a lot of shit, but this description of his experience with the committee doesn’t quite sound like a lie. Like you’d think he’d tell his audience that Adam Schiff threatened to imprison Jones’s kids on Mars for not answering questions if he was going to fictionalize how it went. So if it’s largely accurate, it makes one wonder why Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, and the others were too chickenshit to simply sit down and either answer or not answer questions instead of making a big show of their non-compliance – and end up facing federal felony charges for it. It takes a really stupid asshole to make Alex Jones look reasonable by comparison but hot damn they did it.

The Russian government have added opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his pals to a list of terrorists, the Associated Press reports on a pointless gesture directed at people mostly already in prison anyway, meant to distract from everything going to shit in the country under Vladimir Putin’s failed leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and parallel economic crisis.

The situation bears some similarities to the later months of Donald Trump’s disastrous presidency when the Donald vowed to designate leftist Antifa protestors as terrorists and promptly failed to do so as there is no federal registry for domestic terrorist groups in the United States. Well, it’s similar in that Trump said he would do it. He didn’t, because he had no interest in putting in the work necessary to create a federal domestic terrorist group designation. Or he didn’t want to do it because he knew it’d end up being mostly the violent right wing militias like the Oath Keepers, 3%ers, and others that swore loyalty to him would end up on the list too. Or both. Probably both.

The legal team at Wilmer Hale defending Twitter from Trump’s bullshit lawsuit should be sanctioned for figuratively smothering Trump’s face in a puddle and spitting on him after they already shoved him down on a muddy hill in this exquisitely written motion to dismiss. Some lowlights:

• “Plaintiffs’ theory of coercion rests on isolated statements by individual congressmembers supporting Section 230 reform or criticizing social media platforms’ moderation practices. As Twitter explained, these statements were not threats. They did not tie any real prospect of amending Section 230 to the challenged content moderation decisions and certainly do not establish the ‘something more’ required to sue a private party for a constitutional violation.”

• “Plaintiffs erroneously analogize this case to a trio of Jim Crow-era cases in which the Supreme Court overturned criminal trespass convictions of protesters who conducted ‘sit-ins’ at, and refused to leave, segregated restaurants. Plaintiffs theorize that those cases show that private conduct can become state action – with private actors subjected to liability for violating the U.S. Constitution – when government coercion calls for adverse treatment of a large group of people rather than particular individuals…”

• “Numerous courts in this District have squarely rejected Plaintiffs’ theory that Section 230 converts a private platform’s content-moderation decisions into the official action of the state, explaining that Section 230 does not require private parties to do anything and so is not coercive. Plaintiffs argue those courts were wrong because Section 230 creates state action by ‘enabling’ discriminatory conduct. That is triply wrong.“

Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags. https://t.co/tKFWOvRvq3

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) January 25, 2022

Sad hillbilly novelist who only went full MAGA because the libs mocked the shitty Netflix adaptation of his book and Ohio Republican Senate primary candidate JD Vance has been endorsed by white nationalist and unfaithful wife Marjorie Taylor Greene. Vance currently trails the more authentically MAGA Josh Mandel in polls of Ohio Republican voters, but Mandel was ineligible for Greene’s endorsement because he’s a space laser guy. It also kind of tracks with another memorable Greene Senate endorsement, where she went with the reptilian capitalist pretending to be the hardcore alt-right Republican candidate over the actual hardcore alt-right Republican candidate.

An array of social media influencers – and not just MAGA conspiracy theorists, interestingly enough – have received emails from “Ana” at vip3@tmtgcorp.com urging them to reserve their preferred username on Trump’s upcoming Truth Social platform, Axios reports. Two of the recipients who spoke to Axios have actually been pretty vocally anti-Trump in their past content, indicating that the Trump Media and Technology Group are looking to appeal to a broader audience than just right wing scumbags. This comes off the heels of CEO Devin Nunes’s comments to Fox News that Truth Social will be automoderated by AI to be “family friendly”. This ought to be pretty freaking funny.

In related news, National Zero will be holding a contest for best banning from Truth Social upon its launch, so we strongly encourage readers to think of the most creative and hilarious way to be permanently suspended from the network long before you actually create an account there.

The Michigan state Supreme Court issued a decision brutally dismembering the 2018 petition law passed by butthurt Republicans in response to successful ballot initiatives which legalized marijuana, made it easier to vote, and created a bipartisan redistricting commission during a lame duck session after Governor Gretchen Whitmer was elected, the Detroit News reports. Butchered out of the law were the requirements that no more than 15% of the total signatures come from any one congressional district in the state – meaning it wouldn’t matter how many signatures a petition got in Detroit, it would not succeed without rural buy-in – and a requirement that paid circulators sign an affidavit. The one major component that remains is that paid circulators mark a checkbox at the top indicating themselves as such, which seems reasonable enough.

Image from DJ Ferguson’s Facebook profile

Massachusetts man DJ Ferguson, 31, father of two with a third on the way, is being recognized by Boston Brigham and Women’s Hospital for his bold stand against the vaccine-industrial complex by removing him from the heart transplant waiting list, CBS Boston reports. Ferguson, suffering from heart failure, was at the front of the transplant line when Brigham cut him off, but his father says he has no regrets. “It’s kind of against his basic principles, he doesn’t believe in it. It’s a policy they are enforcing and so because he won’t get the shot, they took him off the list of a heart transplant,” Ferguson Senior said, adding “I think my boy is fighting pretty damn courageously and he has integrity and principles he really believes in and that makes me respect him all the more.”

Brigham said in a statement that “like many other transplant programs in the United States – the COVID-19 vaccine is one of several vaccines and lifestyle behaviors required for transplant candidates in the Mass General Brigham system in order to create both the best chance for a successful operation and also the patient’s survival after transplantation.” Epic!

Well said.

— Chen Weihua （陈卫华） (@chenweihua) January 24, 2022

London Metropolitan Police announced Tuesday they had opened a criminal investigation into UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s 2020 lockdown-breaching parties held at his residence at Number 10 Downing Street, the BBC reports. Metro PD Commissioner Cressida Dick said her department were had formally launched the probe “result of the information provided by the Cabinet Office inquiry team.” The news comes as Johnson takes an even heavier beating over a new revelation he held a birthday party for himself at Downing Street in June 2020 on top of the May 2020 garden booze fest many Parliament members were telling him to resign over.

Right wing fascist lawyer John Eastman, author of a plan for a Trump coup on January 6th, 2021, pleaded the fifth 156 times in an interview with House January 6th Select Committee investigators, the House’s counsel Doug Letter revealed in court on Monday, CNN reports.

An effort to get aid to Tonga as it recovers from a massive volcanic eruption may bring a new disaster:  coronavirus.  An Australian navy vessel on its way to Tonga has reported 24 confirmed coronavirus cases on board, Reuters reports.

The island nation of Tonga, located in an isolated portion of the Pacific Ocean, has had just one single confirmed case of coronavirus since the worldwide pandemic began in January 2020.  Tongan authorities have asked aid providers to deliver cargo without human contact.

The Australian ship, the HMAS Adelaide, a helicopter docking ship, can accommodate an airlift of its cargo of medical and humanitarian supplies, but there are no guarantees about the transfer of the virus.   “We will work with the Tongan authorities to keep that vessel at sea to make sure there is no threat and obviously the Tongan government is discussing that at the moment,” Australia Defense Minister Peter Dutton said on broadcaster Sky News.  “Obviously they need the aid desperately but they don’t want the risk of COVID.”

As tensions continue along the Ukraine-Russian border, the Pentagon has put 8,500 troops on alert to be ready to deploy to Europe should their presence be needed to dissuade Russian aggression, the Associated Press reports.

The troops could be part of a NATO “response force” the alliance would command to various locations in Eastern Europe to stabilize the region and deter further aggressive moves by Vladimir Putin by demonstrating US commitment to its European allies.

After being scooped by CNN, Fox correspondent and poster child for nepotism Peter Doocy spoke with Trump advisor and Fox host Sean Hannity about the call he got from President Biden.  Doocy never says Biden apologized; instead, Doocy said Biden said, “It’s nothing personal.”

As the segment goes on, Hannity tries to gripe that Biden didn’t actually apologize and–believe me, folks, I’m shocked I’m going to say this–Doocy honorably stops him, saying there are far more problems in the world than if Biden said specific words.

In a unanimous 3-0 decision, a federal district court ruled that Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by failing to create a second predominantly-Black Congressional district during redistricting.

This marks the second state that had its redistricting map rejected by courts in the past month:  Ohio’s was rejected as well, with the state’s predominantly Republican redistricting committee approving another that will also fail the court’s standard.

President Joe Biden has reportedly called Fox correspondent Peter Doocy for calling him “a stupid son of a bitch” on a hot mic after a photo gaggle at the White House Monday afternoon, per Kaitlan Collins of CNN (because Fox got scooped on its own story).