‘Morning Joe’ Trashes Fox News Host for Allowing Navarro’s Unhinged Fauci Rant: ‘That’s Fireable’
The hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe tore into Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy on Wednesday for not challenging former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s crazed tirade against Dr. Anthony Fauci, blasting Campos-Duffy’s interview as a “fireable” offense and saying Fox needs “to be called out.”
During an appearance on Fox News Primetime on Tuesday night, Navarro launched into a conspiratorial rant that more resembled a WWE-style promo video. Calling the top doctor a “sociopath and a liar” for criticizing former President Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Navarro then went on an unhinged screed, baselessly accusing Fauci of being “the father of the actual virus” and bankrolling the genetic engineering of COVID-19 at a Wuhan lab.
“If he wants to be the father of something, he’s the father of the virus that’s killed over a half a million Americans,” Navarro shouted while parroting a conspiracy theory that’s been popular among the far right.
Noting that Campos-Duffy offered no pushback at all of Navarro’s claims and instead nodded along and smiled, Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough railed against the former Real World star and her network for allowing Navarro’s tirade to go unchallenged.
“Oh my god, it’s something I would have expected to be up on Facebook and then be taken down. I’m really shocked what that guy got away with saying,” Scarborough exclaimed. “The same guy who, by the way, had written a memo back in January correctly saying that half-a-million people could die from this pandemic if Donald Trump did nothing. Yeah, guess what, Donald Trump did next to nothing."
Scarborough’s co-host and wife Mika Brzezinski agreed, essentially accusing Campos-Duffy of malfeasance for letting Navarro peddle his conspiracies on-air.
“If you’re a news operation, that’s fireable,” she declared. “And it goes on and on. We see it all the time on certain news networks.”
After airing the clip of Navarro’s rant, Scarborough said it was “sickening that we had to play that” while denouncing it as “garbage,” all while Brzezinski viscerally reacted.
“That was so offensive, deeply offensive, that they just need to be called out,” he seethed. “The fact that they allowed somebody, without any pushback, call Anthony Fauci ‘the father of the virus,’ talking about the communist Chinese and genetically this and that and the other from a lab that Anthony Fauci funded is just so deeply offensive!”
Scarborough added: “Again, the sort of thing that would be taken down from Facebook—who has the lowest standards for truth regarding this pandemic. And yet, they run this on a national network. Now we’re going to be hearing idiots running around repeating that in Congress.”
Co-host Willie Geist would then weigh in, criticizing Campos-Duffy for offering “no pushback” and just sitting there with a “smile” on her face while Navarro went off on a “lunatic” tirade. He also took aim at Fox News for knowingly giving a platform to this “kind of complete, utter, conspiratorial nonsense.”
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