The late, great Rush Limbaugh often made a point of refuting the liberal-elite notion that his listeners were "mind-numbed robots" who took all of their political marching orders from El Rushbo. He insisted "You may learn some things, but in terms of your core beliefs you had ’em long before I came along. You’re just now having them reinforced."
On today's Morning Joe, George Conway of the disgraced Lincoln Project echoed that robotic line as he commented on Tucker Carlson's abrupt departure from Fox News. Said Conway:
That's the appeal of him to the MAGA base. Because they want to, they want to make things simpler for themselves. They don't want to think for themselves.
Democracy is complicated. Democracy is messy. Democracy is diversity. We don't like that, these people who watch Fox News. And Tucker appeals to that.
Not just the authoritarian streak, but also, you know, the great replacement theory. He wants to gin up, gin up the right, you know, with racism.
It's true that Carlson has been a critic of Biden's Ukraine position. But Conway overstated things in saying Carlson believes that it is up to Putin to define the situation there. On the first anniversary of Russia's invasion, Carlson wrote that limited objectives were reasonable:
"To push Russia back to where it was a year ago before it invaded Ukraine . . . seemed like a reasonable and measurable objective."
Today, Scarborough sounded like the Biden campaign announcement, that the Democrats were for freedom and democracy, while Tucker and Trump were autocrats who liked Putin.
SCARBOROUGH: There's a straight line in the support for autocrats, or people with autocratic urges who actually despise western democracy. Despise freedom. Despise the rule of law. Despise a free press. And they're always attacking it.
It's Donald Trump in the United States. Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. And those three. And that's sort of, I guess that's sort of the, the, the, the line that goes straight across, the through line .
And Tucker Carlson, in, in the opinion of me and in the opinion of a lot of people who actually have long been defenders of western democracy, was on the wrong side of every one of those -- the debate surrounding those leaders. And seemed to embrace the autocrats, and, and constantly mock the institutions that uphold western democracy.
CONWAY: That's absolutely right. I mean, remember, Tucker, Tucker's the guy who went to Budapest to hang out with Orban. And he's always been, you know, he's always been supportive, essentially, of Putin's position in the Ukraine war. Which is that we have no business, the United States has no business, defending democracy there. And it's really a business of Russia's, and that Ukraine really is part of Russia, or at least The Crimea is.
If ever there were a viewership that slavishly follows the pronouncements of TV hosts, it's that of MSNBC, where Conway is a regular. The likes of Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, Joy Reid, et. al, set the agenda for liberal groupthink. Heck, many viewers apparently even take Joe Scarborough seriously! But not all: on Twitter, Scarborough was trending last night when when lefties were mad that Chris Hayes was replaced by a Scarborough softball interview with Bill Clinton.
On Morning Joe, George Conway claiming that Tucker Carlson's MAGA viewers "don't want to think for themselves," was sponsored in part by Abbott, maker of Glucerna, Consumer Cellular, Subway, and GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Nucala.
