The Twitter account of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and failed gubernatorial and presidential candidate, was suspended early Friday.

"FUCKING FINALLY!," tweeted Sleeping Giants, a campaign dedicated to deplatforming bigots. "... We’ve only been asking about this for THREE AND A HALF FUCKING YEARS!"

Twitter confirmed to Newsweek that the suspension was permanent. Duke has received at least one temporary suspension in the past.

"The account has been permanently suspended for repeated violations of the Twitter Rules on hateful conduct," a Twitter spokesperson was quoted saying by Newsweek. "This enforcement action is in line with our recently-updated guidance on harmful links."

It's not clear exactly which tweet finally did him in, but the reference to harmful links makes it likely the final straw was his posting of a viral coronavirus conspiracy video that exhorts people to take an unproven medication to fight the disease.

Among America's most notorious living racists and antisemites, Duke advanced Neo-Nazi conspiracy theories, defrauded his supporters, and even joined the Republican Party in pursuit of his aims. Read the rest

“I am America.”

9. 9. 9.

Herman Cain died of COVID-19 today.

Killed by a hoax. Sad.

Herman Cain dies of Covid

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Republican presidential candidate and businessman Herman Cain has died. Hospitalized with Covid since June, Cain attended Trump's disastrous Tusla rally shortly before his symptoms appeared.

We knew when he was first hospitalized with COVID-19 that this was going to be a rough fight. He had trouble breathing and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. We all prayed that the initial meds they gave him would get his breathing back to normal, but it became clear pretty quickly that he was in for a battle.

We didn’t release detailed updates on his condition to the public or to the media because neither his family nor we thought there was any reason for that. There were hopeful indicators, including a mere five days ago when doctors told us they thought he would eventually recover, although it wouldn’t be quick. We were relieved to be told that, and passed on the news via Herman’s social media. And yet we also felt real concern about the fact that he never quite seemed to get to the point where the doctors could advance him to the recovery phase.

The announcement is weird because Cain's been "tweeting" as if nothing was wrong throughout his stay in hospital, a ghoulish and unsettling exercise in social media management that continued until two hours ago.

Review / Logitech MX Keys

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Kevin McCarthy accidentally calls Louie Gohmert "Congressman COVID" pic.twitter.com/UcQcvHtEU9

— The Recount (@therecount) July 29, 2020

In this footage, house minority leader Kevin McCarthy calls his GOP colleague Louie Gohmert, freshly diagnosed with the virus, "Congressman COVID." Harsh, but true. Read the rest

The president is floating the idea of delaying the election.

Yes, this is real. Read the rest

Good luck, Maine. Read the rest

Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) is among those who made a culture war of coronavirus on Capitol Hill, forcing other lawmakers and staff in congress to deal with him unmasked. Today he was diagnosed with Covid..

Rep. Louie Gohmert -- a Texas Republican who has been walking around the Capitol without a mask -- has tested positive for the coronavirus, according to multiple sources.

Gohmert was scheduled to fly to Texas on Wednesday morning with President Donald Trump and tested positive in a pre-screen at the White House. The eighth-term Republican told CNN last month that he was not wearing a mask because he was being tested regularly for the coronavirus.

He says he'll now wear a mask, but he's been infecting his colleagues and everyone around him for days. Read the rest

US government officials told the Associated Press today that three different English-language websites are spreading disinformation about the novel coronavirus directly from Russia. Read the rest

WATCH: During Bill Barr's hearing on Capitol Hill today, Rep. Pramila Jayapal tore him a new one. Read the rest

At a hearing on Capitol Hill today, Bill Barr, Trump's attorney general and acting Roy Cohn, said something that's sure to ruffle the boss's ego. Read the rest

The November election is 95 days away, as of today. Read the rest

Senator David Perdue (R-GA) posted a campaign ad featuring an image of his Jewish opponent, Jon Ossoff, digitally manipulated to have a larger nose. Once the timeworn antisemitic stereotype was noticed, he was forced to retract the ad, but Perdue is refusing to apologize for it. Matt Novak summarizes the imbroglio:

The photoshopped ad, first reported by Forward, featured photos of Ossoff along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who’s also Jewish, and included text that reads “Democrats are trying to buy Georgia!” along with “Schumer’s SUPER PAC is spending $3 million in Georgia for Jon Ossoff!”

The original unedited photo was taken for Reuters by photojournalist Chris Aluka Berry in 2017 after Ossoff lost an election for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. Perdue’s campaign denied that the edit had been intentional and sought to distance itself from the unnamed designer who made the ad.

https://twitter.com/ossoff/status/1287907702660829186

Purdue claims it was an "accident" caused by a filter, but was unable to explain exactly how that happened. Read the rest

Twitter removed two rule-breaking Trump tweets last night. One touted the conspiracy theory that hydroxychloroquine "cures" Covid19 and that Dr. Anthony Fauci suppressed it, whereas the other promoted a story that falsely claimed that a protestor shot dead at a BLM rally had fired the first shots.

Beyond the automated notifications at the top of Trump's Twitter feed, the company did not release a statement on the deletions: a new normal, perhaps, as their regularity increases. Read the rest

The president of the United States, folks. Read the rest

In an attack on the New York Times' 1619 project tracing slavery in America to its origins, Republican senator Tom Cotton described it as “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.

“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.” Cotton write.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her introductory essay to the 1619 Project, said ... “If chattel slavery – heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit – were a ‘necessary evil’ as Tom Cotton says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.

Cotton concedes a claim, often denied by conservatives, that slavery was central to the founding of the American republic. That said, Cotton now insists he was merely attributing the remark to the Founding Founders.

The text of his editorial, however, plainly poses him in agreement: "As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil."

Cotton attempted a similar "clarification" after his "Send in the Troops" op-ed was interpreted as a call for a general crackdown on rowdy protestors.

Once again, he set out to sound like a no-nonsense strongman of the right, poured cement around his own feet, didn't like how fast it set, and ended up bleating about "fake news" on Twitter. Read the rest

Impeached President Donald Trump was musing to Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, about how his life was better before he announced his presidential candidacy. Read the rest

The U.S Senate yesterday voted to rename bases currently bearing the names of Confederate officers, as part of a sweeping defence spending bill.

The renaming amendment was added by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and only a handful of senators opposed it, resulting in a veto-proof 86-14¹ "blowout", as The Washington Post put it.

The Senate passed its version of a $740 billion defense bill Thursday by a veto-proof majority, in the latest sign that Congress is undeterred by President Trump’s threat to reject legislation mandating that the Pentagon rename bases honoring Confederate generals.

The 86-to-14 Senate vote follows the House’s 295-to-125 vote earlier in the week on parallel legislation. Both bills instruct the Defense Department to come up with new names for the problematic bases; the Senate gives the Pentagon three years to make the changes, while the House bill instructs officials to finish the process within one year.

The White House objected to the inclusion of any mandate earlier in the week in a 13-page memorandum threatening that Trump would veto the House bill if it passed in its current form. The House and Senate will have to negotiate a compromise between the two versions of the defense bill before sending it to the president’s desk.

1. Psalm 86:14: "O God, the proud are risen against me, and the assemblies of violent men have sought after my soul; and have not set thee before them." Read the rest