A lot of things are dividing the American people right now: fear, politics, a giant, hypothetical, and very stupid wall. So it’s in the hope that we can all find a little common ground and shared joy that we spread the news that professional bloviator—and certified Celebrity Apprentice—Piers Morgan has been spending the last 24 hours or so getting dunked on in the public sphere.
Morgan’s most recent trip to the burn ward started with an appearance on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, in which he forcefully asserted that Donald Trump’s recent executive order stopping immigration and entry to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries was not “a Muslim ban.” That raised the ire of Australian comedian Jim Jefferies, who proceeded to overtalk Morgan decisively, earning cheers from the watching crowd. “Oh, fuck off,” Jefferies began, before adding, “Give him a fucking chance, mate! Hitler didn’t kill the Jews on the first day, he worked up to it.” When Morgan shot back with calls that Jefferies was being hysterical, the comic replied, “You just like that you won the Apprentice, and you’ve got a famous friend. That’s all you fucking like.”
And while Jefferies has earned his own critics on the left in the past, thanks to a stand-up career that’s often centered on material making light of rape, people are apparently at the point where they’ll take what they can get in terms of people shouting down the resident Trump proxies in their lives. Clips of Jefferies’ performance have been making the rounds online, to the point that even Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling got in on the fun. Rowling—whose internet burn game has been on point lately—got into a heated Twitter exchange with Morgan after she retweeted the clip, noting how “satisfying” it was to see Morgan get told to “fuck off.”
Morgan fired back with his typical angry dismissiveness, but Rowling didn’t back down.
Then she posted a picture from several years ago of the sixth Harry Potter novel trouncing Morgan’s autobiography at the British Book Awards, because J.K. Rowling is savage as fuck.
UPDATE: Realizing that people were attempting to have a high-profile fight on Twitter without him, Patton Oswalt has now also gotten in on the Morgan-feuding fun, picking up where Rowling left off:
Bizarrely, Oswalt seems to have actually offended Morgan, not through political rhetoric, but with a swipe at the Buckingham Palace corgis:
For his part, Morgan is clearly enjoying today’s attention, responding to celebrities like Don Cheadle and Kumail Nanjiani for making fun of him, and posting a picture of himself smiling with Trump as his current Twitter profile pic. But he didn’t seem to have a good reply to Oswalt’s final comment on the matter, a reference to his alleged connection to the U.K. press phone hacking scandal from a few years back: