Comedian Adam Carolla told The Atlantic to “f*ck off” and “eat sh*t” over its call for a pandemic “amnesty.”

“Of course all the people who wanted everyone drawn and quartered for not getting vaccinated or wearing a mask want a f*cking amnesty,” Carolla says, according to the account’s transcript. “Suck my dick, f*ck off, Atlantic, and eat sh*t, because you guys all deserve whatever the f*ck you’re getting.“

Then the punchline: “But the main thing you’re getting is no one’s going to listen to you ever again.”

The essay he is answering is four years old. Brown University economist Emily Oster’s “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty” ran in The Atlantic on Oct. 31, 2022, under the subheadline “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.” Neither the clip nor the post says when Carolla recorded his answer.

Oster’s case rested on “we didn’t know.” She urged readers to “acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty,” Fox News reported at the time. The magazine’s own post promoting the essay quoted her line: “We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty.”

Carolla’s clip answers with the magazine’s earlier headlines, put up on screen: “The Anti-Vaccine Right Brought Human Sacrifice to America,” “Unvaccinated People Need to Bear the Burden,” “Vaccine Refusers Don’t Get to Dictate Terms Anymore” and “Some Americans No Longer Believe in the Common Good.”

The first was Kurt Andersen’s essay from January 2022, nine months before the amnesty pitch, arguing that the conservative campaign against vaccination had cost thousands of lives (a reprint is still up).

The amnesty idea drew the same anger when it ran, and we covered the backlash. “Forgiveness usually comes after an apology,” commentator Lauren Chen wrote, adding, “I see no apology in this piece,” per Fox.

The Vigilant Fox, which posted Carolla’s clip, made the same point in its write-up: “First of all, forgiveness comes AFTER you apologize.”

Carolla has mocked pandemic rules for years. His 2021 Daily Wire comedy special, Truth Yeller, opened with jokes about COVID travel rules, the Spectator noted: “Do you think anyone has died because they snacked on an airplane? What would their obituary read?”

h/t modernity.news