Whitney Cummings Just Released a Bizarre Racist Rant about Covid
"Our enemy made a virus on purpose that killed tons of people, broke our economy, broke our brains, let's be honest, then culminated in all of us posting on social media to stop Asian hate. You can't underestimate this level of genius."
A few days ago Whitney Cummings published an episode of her podcast featuring a long, disturbing Sinophobic rant essentially claiming that China engineered Covid as a bioweapon to establish dominance over the US, and also that China manufactures toys designed to undermine children’s education and even poison them.
I’m going to share the full monologue below. It’s quite lengthy, and it comes in the context of Cummings’ attempt to process the recent death of her friend from cancer, which she suggests may have been caused by the Covid vaccine, which she calls the “Maxine” in order to avoid algorithmic penalties. I am not wont to criticize how other people deal with grief, but I think the moral calculus changes somewhat when the person in question is a celebrity conspiracy theorist with millions of followers. I also believe, as a rule, that it is a matter of public concern when influential people say really racist and dangerous shit, and there is quite a bit of racist and dangerous shit in this podcast episode.
Seth Simons
Perhaps most disturbing to me is the way Cummings does not seem to remember the Covid pandemic as a period of horrific mass death. With a few exceptions late in the rant, she describes it as a period in which people got a benign—her word—flu-like virus that made them sleepy and stay home for a bit. This strikes me as illustrative of the way many comedians in her shoes metabolized the pandemic: not as a natural disaster that killed millions of people, but as an inconvenience to which Democratic state and local governments launched an overblown response.
The monologue is below, with light commentary throughout.
