LFC

From this weekend's Real Time with Bill Maher

As Fox News attempts to figure out its place in a post-Trump media landscape, the network has claimed it is moving “center-right.” A laughable claim, critics say—one that is easily disproved by Fox’s far-right primetime screeds but also by the tonal shift of a key noon-hour talk show.

Outnumbered, which first debuted in 2014 as a female-led panel show (with a gimmicky “one lucky guy” slotted as the sole male panelist), has always straddled Fox’s increasingly blurred line dividing its “hard news” and opinion wings. But the show has long winked at its “fair and balanced” credentials by featuring a lone liberal pundit among its rotating panel.

However, in recent months, and as Fox grappled with a ratings plunge—at least in part due to MAGA diehards ditching the network after its news desk made accurate election-night calls for Joe Biden—the noon talk show appears to have benched two key liberal regulars in Marie Harf and Jessica Tarlov.

And instead, Outnumbered has taken a noticeably rightward shift, stacking its panels with conservative voices and giving more prominent placement to fiery provocateurs like Tomi Lahren. The resulting show is one that, like much of Fox’s programming, now seems laser-focused on hyping the conservative culture-war grievances of the day.

“Ratings went down the tank and they want more right-wing voices,” one current Fox News staffer told The Daily Beast in assessing the noon show’s new tone, especially in light of the network overhauling much of its lineup to add more hours of right-wing opinion commentary.

Some came forward during his campaign to share their experiences with Cawthorn on social media and in private. Last August, World magazine published the accounts of three women who said the young conservative sexually harassed and verbally assaulted them. One of these women was among those who spoke to BuzzFeed News for this story. Cawthorn has unequivocally denied the accusations, telling the Daily Caller the story was a “mix of half-truths, untruths and potentially fabricated allegations.”

Then, in October, more than 160 members of the Patrick Henry community signed an open letter detailing “gross misconduct towards our female peers, public misrepresentation of his past, disorderly conduct that was against the school’s student honor code, and self-admitted academic failings,” including that Cawthorn “established a reputation of predatory behavior.” After the letter was published, Cawthorn told ABC 13 that it was based on rumors, and his campaign wrote in a Facebook post that he had the endorsement of a “significant number of PHC alumni and former students who knew him well.” The post was signed by just six people. Two worked for the campaign and a third was one of their relatives.

While Cawthorn has painted women’s accounts of sexual misconduct and predatory behavior as politically motivated lies, this new investigation into his time at Patrick Henry College provides an in-depth examination of the allegations against the North Carolina representative and uncovers previously unreported details. More than 20 former Patrick Henry students told BuzzFeed News that Cawthorn harassed his women classmates. The students either said they experienced his sexually inappropriate behavior firsthand, comforted friends after a traumatizing incident, or were warned about his conduct by their dorm leaders. Although Cawthorn was only at the school for just over one semester, students said he quickly developed a reputation as someone who took advantage of and mistreated women.

A former high school football player and avid athlete — his Instagram feed is peppered with videos in which he claimed he was training for the 2020 Paralympic Games, which wasn’t true — Cawthorn exuded a jock persona at school, classmates said.

Charismatic and active on Twitter and Telegram, the new lawmaker, like the former president and his allies, has worked to build an image of himself as a “true patriot” whose mission is to drain the swamp and protect his supporters from the radical left while standing up for members of the military — despite the fact that he lied about his future at the Naval Academy. He was invited to speak at the Republican National Convention last summer, and in recent months, he’s gained notoriety for being at the forefront of the effort to overturn the results of the presidential election, brazenly perpetuating lies about voter fraud, many of which he’s since walked back after a backlash.

A former close friend of right-wing Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) told The Washington Post the lawmaker lied about a car wreck that partially paralyzed him.

Cawthorn’s account of the 2014 wreck — which he presented publicly in the chapel of his Christian college in Virginia three years later — was that a close friend had crashed the car in which he was a passenger, leaving him to die “in a fiery tomb,” the Post reported over the weekend.

But the friend, Bradley Ledford, told the newspaper in his first public comments about the crash that he pulled Cawthorn from the wreckage.

“It hurt very badly that he would say something as false as that,” Ledford told the paper. “That is not at all what happened. I pulled him out of the car the second that I was able to get out of the car.”

That was just one element of a story rich with lies, the Post reported. Cawthorn claimed he was “declared dead” after the wreck. He wasn’t. The police report noted he was “incapacitated.” Cawthorn said he was preparing before the crash to start studies at the U.S. Naval Academy ― a boast that he eventually turned into a campaign ad. But the news outlet AVL Watchdog reported in August that Cawthorn had been rejected by the Naval Academy before the crash.

Cawthorn, now 25, exploited his tale of his crash at age 18 for his successful 2020 House campaign. He’s now the youngest House representative.

An analysis of recent state Department of Health data shows that Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties had received, from the start of distribution through Wednesday, many fewer doses of vaccine by population than counties much, much smaller. This is an economic engine of communities that are home to a combined one million more people than Philadelphia. The situation is alarming.

The data of received doses per 100,000 people, analyzed by The Inquirer based on vaccine actually delivered to 66 counties in the state, are staggering and confounding. Philadelphia was excluded from the analysis.

• Delaware County, population 566,747, had received just 9,113 doses per 100,000 people as of Wednesday. That’s two-thirds less vaccine than in tiny Bradford County, with 60,323 people on the New York border. And yet, both counties have nearly identical infection rates (7,181 coronavirus cases per 100,000 in Delco, 7,226 in Bradford.) Just how bad is this? Delco was ranked 53rd in the rate of doses received out of the 66 counties. And this in a place where one out of 10 people was living in poverty pre-pandemic.
  
• Chester County, population 524,989 and sixth largest in the state, had received only 14,748 doses per 100,000 residents, while Elk County and its 29,910 residents in the state’s northwestern quadrant were ranked second in doses statewide. Elk got the equivalent of 45,721 doses per 100,000 people.
  
• Bucks County, fourth largest in Pennsylvania with 628,270 people, had gotten 13,103 doses per 100,000 residents, while Mifflin County, 46th largest with a population of just 46,138 northwest of Harrisburg, ranked third in doses.
  
• Montgomery County, one of the three most populous with 830,915 residents, ranked 20th in doses — 17,667 per 100,000 residents. No. 1 statewide: Montour County, 61st in population with just 18,230 residents north of Harrisburg. It received 164,153 doses per 100,000 people.

Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci hit back at South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s harsh criticism of him on Sunday, saying her comments about him at this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) were “not very helpful” and “unfortunate.”

Noem, who has received praise from conservatives for largely ignoring coronavirus restrictions and guidelines, got a standing ovation from the CPAC crowd when she boasted about ignoring the medical advice of experts and called out Fauci for supposedly being “wrong.” Appearing on CBS News’ Face the Nation, Fauci was asked if that sentiment was an impediment to the nation’s recovery.

“It’s unfortunate but it’s not really helpful because sometimes you think things are going well and just take a look at the numbers, they don’t lie,” he said. During an interview with Noem on the same program, anchor Margaret Brennan grilled the Republican governor and potential 2024 presidential candidate on her state’s poor performance with the deadly virus.

“So for your state, you have, if you look at starting in July, which was after that spring peak, you have the highest death rate in cumulative COVID deaths per million in the country,” Brennan said, adding: “I know you’re conservative and you care about the sanctity of life. So how can you justify making decisions that put the health of your constituents at risk?”

Noem, meanwhile, brushed off the question, instead telling Brennan that “those are questions that you should be asking every other governor in this country as well.”