Morning Joe Calls Rachel Campos-Duffy Interview With Peter Navarro ‘Fireable’

Morning Joe ripped into former White House trade advisor Peter Navarro for his “garbage” tirade pronouncing Dr. Anthony Fauci the “father” of the coronavirus.

During a discussion on Wednesday about the anti-vaccine rhetoric coming from the Republican Party, Joe Scarborough bashed Facebook for not doing enough to police conspiracy theories and misinformation about the pandemic. This prompted Scarborough to bring up Navarro’s Tuesday night interview in which Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy offered no challenge to Navarro as he went on an enraged, fact-free, conspiratorial tear pronouncing Fauci “a sociopath and a liar.”

“I’m really shocked what that guy got away with saying,” Scarborough said. “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. Guess what? Donald Trump did next to nothing.”

Mika Brzezinski agreed, saying “if you’re a news operation, that’s fireable.” Scarborough kept the takedown going though after airing Navarro’s screed and denouncing it as “garbage”:

That was so offensive, deeply offensive, that they just need to be called out…Again, its 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, and now we’re going to be hearing idiots running around repeating that in Congress.

Willie Geist followed up by calling out Campos-Duffy for smiling instead of doing anything to scrutinize Navarro’s “lunatic” rant. He further criticized Fox, as a news network, for giving a platform to this kind of “complete, utter conspiratorial nonsense” when it sets back America’s efforts to get out of the pandemic.

And The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg suggested that Fauci might want to consider legal action against Navarro for his comments.

I don’t usually like to see overuse of defamation statutes, which can chill speech and legitimate criticism, but one thing I think we saw with the Dominion lawsuits against some of these purveyors of pernicious disinformation about the integrity of the election, is that people who are sort of not going to be bound by patriotism or responsibility or ethics or truth will maybe back off a little bit in the face of a gargantuan lawsuit filed by the targets of their lies.

Watch above, via MSNBC.