Why do so many people think Robert Pattinson died?

If you’ve logged onto Twitter in the last hour or so and also left your reading glasses on the dining room table, you may have begun panicking over mumblings that Robert Pattinson, of Twilight fame, had bitten the dust.

Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate; Pattinson isn’t dead, and that’s not even the best news to have come out of this whole ordeal.

Indeed, it’s not the talented Tenet star that met his demise today, but rather media mogul Pat Robertson. If you’re not familiar with the name, let’s just say that if you listen very closely, there’s a good to fair chance you’ll be able to hear the Munchkins from Oz singing a certain musical number right now.

Listing Robertson’s heinous contributions to birthing what we effectively understand as the alt-right would be perhaps the most Herculean task in history, but to sum up exactly the sort of rhetoric this man peddled in his time, he suggested that Hurricane Katrina, which killed nearly 2,000 people in 2005, was God’s punishment for America’s then-progressive abortion policy. He also tried to convince everyone that “the lesbians” had a hand in the September 11 attacks, which would be a hilarious statement if there was no one on Earth who took him seriously.

The moral of the story is that Robertson’s death is an overwhelming win for humanity everywhere, so instead of seething over the many toxins spilled by this blight on our species over his life, let’s instead celebrate that Robert Pattinson is still alive and well; why dwell on the evils of a logic-challenged dinosaur when we can be happy that Edward is still with us?

That’s just a romantic sentiment, of course; decades from now, high school history books should absolutely have a chapter on people like Robertson, outlining just how far-reaching and debilitating his rhetoric was on the political integrity of the United States and the rest of the world. But for now, there’s no harm in basking in the good news.

As for Pattinson, his next, non-posthumous appearance will be in Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi film Mickey 17, which is due to release on March 29, 2024