Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy unleashes profane rant over coronavirus lockdown
Barstool Sports founder David Portnoy delivered a profanity-laced rant lashing out at the indefinite coronavirus lockdowns — saying he’d “rather die of corona” than lose his business during the outbreak.
Portnoy, known by fans as “El Presidente,” railed for almost four minutes in what he called “Emergency Press Conference – When Did Flattening The Curve Turn Into Finding The Cure.”
“What the f— is going on?” the 43-year-old owner of the offbeat and controversial sports website said in his lengthy diatribe. “When did this become ‘flatten the curve,’ ‘flatten the curve,’ ‘flatten the curve’ to ‘we have to find a cure’ or everyone’s going to die?”
Portnoy singled out White House task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci, calling him a “nice enough dude who looks like he could be the grandfather in ‘Wedding Crashers.’”
“He gets in front of the Senate, he’s like, ‘We reopen the country, it’s a quick everyone’s dead’! Where’d that come from?” he continued.
“And the LA mayor, ‘We’re not opening the city until we find a cure’? What?? Find a cure? Who says we’re gonna find a cure? We haven’t found a cure to cancer. It took AIDS 20 years — do we even have a cure? So the economy is just shut down?”
He warned about the effect of the lockdowns on Americans and their livelihoods.
“If you told me because of corona I lost Barstool, I had to get a 9-to-5 and start f— over? I’d rather die of corona, seriously, or at least take my chances,” he said.
“You can’t just make everybody stay inside and basically start over. It’s insane! What the f— do they think is gonna happen? … There are no great options, but you can’t decimate the entire economy! How the f— is that gonna work?”
He added: “We’re American! You have to take risk!”
Portnoy’s video received over 3.8 million views on Twitter, 53,000 retweets — and over 158,000 likes, as of Thursday afternoon.
Founded in 2003, Barstool has garnered a reputation for unfiltered sports blogging popular with millennials and Gen X-ers.
The site says it has about 66 million monthly unique visitors and generated nearly $100 million in revenue last year.