PARTY FOUL

BY RHUARIDH MARR

A GAY TRUMP SUPPORTER and Alt-Right figure threw a party to try and spread the COVID-19 coronavirus. The New York Post reports that Lucian Wintrich, 31, held a “Corona Potluck” party in his New York City apartment earlier this month to try and spread the virus and build herd immunity.

Wintrich — who created “Twinks4Trump” in 2016 to try and encourage gay people to support Donald Trump — is a former White House-credentialed journalist who wrote for far-right website Gateway Pundit until he was fired in 2018 after appearing on a white nationalist podcast.

An invitation for the party distributed to his friends contained an image of a fork impaled in a coronavirus spore, and implored: “‘They can’t diagnose us all!’ Dont [sic] wash your hands, bring your fav dish!”

Wintrich seemed to believe that attendees would be absolutely fine if they did contract the virus, ignoring the fact that, while older people are more vulnerable to the effects of COVID-19, people of all ages can die if they become infected.

“The majority of folks I invited, if they got it, would recover fairly quickly and build up an immunity to the present form of COVID19,” he told the Post. “It was relatively inspired by the chickenpox parties that were all the rage in the 90s.”

The party took place on March 14, after Broadway had already been shut down because of concerns over the spread of COVID-19, and only hours before New York implemented social distancing measures to try and slow the spread of the virus.

Twenty people reportedly attended the party. One attendee opted — perhaps wisely — to speak anonymously to the Post, invoking World War II to justify their recklessness.

“When Britain was being bombed by Nazi Germany during the blitz, they kept the fucking stores open. People went about their lives,” the party-goer said. “We get a flu… and we shut everything down…. We have completely handed over our civil liberties…and anyone who wants to go out and live a normal life is semi-ostracized.”

Despite Wintrich’s invitation and the party’s intentions, he claimed that attendees wouldn’t deliberately infect vulnerable people. “The quarantine, itself, is serious to a degree,” he said. “I wouldn’t hang around folks over the age of 50 and risk infecting the more vulnerable.”

As of press time, New York State has over 65,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and has recorded more than 1,200 deaths due to the virus.

After losing his job with Gateway Pundit, Wintrich is now a professional troll who peddles far-right and racist views for attention — akin to Milo Yiannopoulos, the gay altright figure and Trump supporter — LGBTQ Nation reports. He was arrested in 2017 for allegedly assaulting a woman at a speech he gave at UConn titled “It’s Ok to Be White,” where he made a series of racist comments and decried “illegal immigrant tranny migrants.” The charges against him were later dropped.

Prior to being fired from Gateway Pundit, Wintrich boasted of his connections to the Trump White House, including claiming that he was on an email chain with Ivanka Trump in an interview with NBC News in 2017. He also suggested fears that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions might rescind Obama-era protections for transgender students were unfounded.

“With Betsy DeVos and with Sessions, I haven’t seen them propose any anti-gay policies, I haven’t seen them do anything within the administration to hamper LGBTQ rights, so I think these are completely unfounded worries,” he said.

A few days after that interview was published, DeVos and Sessions rescinded the protections — something DeVos later admitted she knew would harm trans youth.