Right-wing provocateur and conspiracy-theory booster Mike Cernovich took to Periscope Monday to tell his viewers that the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus “failed the stress test,” before bemoaning not being able to get tested for the coronavirus.
But before he discussed the coronavirus in depth, Cernovich spent a portion of the livestream attacking “MAGA conservatives,” telling them to “go away.”
“If your whole life is Daddy Trump, you’re so not needed,” he said, before going on a rant about people criticizing his “splotchy” face, which he said only looked that way because of bad lighting. He then addressed the spread of the coronavirus.
“We were not ready. We failed the stress test. That’s the singular lesson,” Cernovich said. “The lesson here of the coronavirus is we failed the stress test.”
“We learned our infrastructure cannot handle what we face,” Cernovich continued. “We have learned the media will incite mass hysteria to stop Trump … We failed the national IQ test. We, the United States of America, we still can’t get testing. We still can’t get mass testing.”
Cernovich hosted an event on the sidelines Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, D.C., where an attendee, a major Republican donor who rubbed elbows with speakers, later tested positive for the virus. Reps. Doug Collins of Georgia, Matt Gaetz of Florida, and Paul Gosar of Arizona and Sen. Ted Cruz, attended the conference and are currently self-quarantining.
Although Cernovich claimed on Periscope that he was at CPAC, Politico reported that Cernovich did not attend the conference and that person who tested positive did not go to his sideline event. Cernovich told Politico that “members of the group the man attended the conference with did.”
“CPAC had somebody sick, and they haven’t even informed everybody affected,” he said, with his daughter, who walked into his office during the livestream, on his lap.
“The lesson here, because I like to keep the energy positive, is we failed the stress test, we failed it at every level, we failed the stress test at the Trump level, we failed the stress test at the city level.”
“I would love to get tested for coronavirus. I can’t!” Cernovich said, suggesting later he had swollen lymph nodes. “Hell yeah, it makes me angry.”
The criticism of the Trump administration’s handling of the spread of the coronavirus did not prevent Cernovich from promoting a conspiracy theory circulating in Trump and right-wing circles that the virus came out of a biolab in Wuhan, China, in a tweet on Sunday.
