'Comedian' Patton Oswalt Fantasizes About Trump Fans Dying of Coronavirus Infection
Take a sketchy, unsubstantiated news story.
Add an over-inflated headline.
Top it off with a C-list celebrity with a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome and access to social media.
And you just might end up with a Twitter post like the one published by actor-comedian Patton Oswalt on Monday, gleefully fantasizing about supporters of President Donald Trump dying painfully of a coronavirus infection while complaining about the mainstream media.
MAGAt dying from COVID-19: “Why did the *cough* media treat Trump so *cough cough* unfairly…” https://t.co/kWdATsCY3K
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 10, 2020
Oswalt is probably best known for playing the lovable loser Spence Olchin on “King of Queens” in the late ’90s and early to mid-2000s. (Fans of the show probably would never have guessed what a mean-spirited louse was under that perennially put-upon exterior.)
These days, he apparently follows a flaming liberal news site called PoliticusUSA and was responding to a report there headlined “Trump Demands Barr Investigate The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage.”
The article was based on a single quote, from an anonymous source, in a Vanity Fair story published Monday purporting to show Trump’s reaction to the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
“‘He wants Justice to open investigations of the media for market manipulation,’ a source close to the White House told me,” special correspondent Gabriel Sherman wrote.
Even assuming that sentence is true, and even assuming the “source” Sherman spoke to had some special knowledge of Trump’s thinking that isn’t available to the voluble president’s millions of Twitter followers, that quote is a long, long way from the PoliticusUSA headline that portrayed the president as personally demanding Attorney General William Barr launch some sort of investigation in the mainstream media.
In other words, this is the epitome of what’s become known these days as “fake news.”
But that, of course, just meant dedicated liberals like Oswalt were even more intent to pass it on, along with his own mental image of a Trump supporter about to expire from a coronavirus infection.
And it didn’t stop Patton’s benighted followers from joining in:
If Trump was the Jaws mayor, he’d keep the beaches open even after the last big attack and 40% of Amity would not only keep swimming but would yell FAKE NEWS as the shark ate them.
— Michael Clear (@MichaelClear) March 10, 2020
He asked the AG to investigate the press? That’s not despotic at all. Totally normal. ?
— Nick (@NicksOpinions) March 10, 2020
Again, that’s not at all what Sherman’s sketchy report suggested. It’s how a liberal website chose to wildly inflate what’s an otherwise largely substance-free report from Vanity Fair about how the coronavirus is allegedly affecting the White House.
But the worst thing about Oswalt’s tweet is not simply that it passes along what is almost certainly a lie — that Trump demanded Barr investigate the media for coronavirus coverage.
What’s worse is that it pretended that there was no reason for Trump and his supporters to assume that the mainstream media is against him.
What’s worse yet that it pretends there’s no reason to suspect the mainstream media and the Democrats it supports are, in fact, cheering on the damage the outbreak is causing as a means of hurting the man in the White House.
The sad facts of the matter are:
- That Trump’s opponents are shamelessly using the coronavirus as a political weapon;
- That liberals in the media doing their best to support the effort (a late February column in The New York Times was headlined “Let’s Call It ‘Trumpvirus’”);
- And that the current volatility on Wall Street stemming from the coronavirus outbreak (Monday’s shattering losses followed by Tuesday’s recovery, for instance) is one of the rare pieces of economic news liberals will be able to use against a president who has otherwise overseen an astounding three-year run of low unemployment and rising wages.
Another reality is that even Democratic governors who otherwise despise the Trump administration have acknowledged that the president has performed admirably in the face of the crisis.
But the success of the United States is not the standard for liberals, defeating Trump is.
And if that means taking the inflated lies of a digital liberal rag and amplifying them on social media to hordes of followers, then they forge ahead “by any means necessary.”
For liberals like Patton, the coronavirus is a weapon to be used against the politicians and people they perceive as their enemies.
They shouldn’t be surprised when that perception goes both ways.
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